Fresh off the PAX AUS floor, the Alpha 6 of Adaptory is live! You can download your copy on itch.io now.

If you find any bugs, issues, balance problems or suggestions, please let us know on Discord or by email so we can keep improving the game! 🙂 I’m really proud of all the work that we’ve managed to pull together for this release, and I’m excited to hear your feedback.

New game screen

At the start of the game, you will now be presented with your team, and you can reshuffle them using a random seed. You can also re-use the same seed from a previous game to keep your previous team.

If you’ve received one of our exclusive team postcards, you can enter in this code here too!

New art and tutorial

There is a lot of new art in the game! We’ve redone all of the solid elements (dirt, rock, ice, coal, etc.) and cleaned up the element edges tileset. We have also completely redesigned your crashed ship at the start of the game, with beautiful new art and a new base entrance.

Finally, I’ve also added a new simple seven-step tutorial to the game, to help new players get started. You can turn the tutorials on/off in the Options screen. I’d like to know if this tutorial is helpful or not – please let me know.

Conversations

Pawns now have a “social” level, and talk with each other when their social levels are low. These appear as little speech bubbles in-game, and the text (and replies) are based on their personality types, their traits and buffs, and what’s been happening in game. Cass is going to be adding a lot more content!

Space exposure and background parallax

There is now a new “space exposure” attribute on tiles in space – gases and liquids exposed to these tiles will gradually lose mass. (Previously this would only occur at the edges of the game world.)

We’ve also used this to add a new space background with parallax that is gorgeous 🥰

And a lot more

• Fog of war for unexplored areas
• Added an inline feedback message when the player is unable to perform an action
• “Dig-and-build”: you can now place build errands over solid tiles, and pawns will automatically dig them out first
• Pawns no longer stand around idle in doorways
• Pawns should no longer be spawned on the top of your crashed ship
• Pawn pathfinding fixes
• Trees now consider the light levels across all of their cells, not just their base, when calculating aliveness
• Heaps of bug fixes and performance improvements

Full patch notes below.

What’s next?

• Save & load game
• Configurable pawn priorities
• Resource counters
• Tools for streamers
• Oxygen generators, plants, and food systems
• And some new content

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Release notes for Adaptory 0.8 (Alpha 6)

New Features

• Added a simple seven-step tutorial to the game; you can turn the tutorials on/off in Options
• Added a brand new “New game” screen, where you can see the traits of your team before setting off
  • You can also enter in pawn seeds to get the same team each time
• Added inline feedback messages when the player is unable to perform an action
• New dialog art for reading diary entries
• Pawns now write their diary entries using different fonts
• Replaced all solid element art with new hand-drawn textures
• Replaced the art and layout of the crashed ship at the start of the game
• New “tile” tileset
• Pawns now have a “social” meter, and talk with each other when their social levels get too low
• Added a new space background with parallax 🥰
• Added “space exposure” property to space tiles, not just the edge of worlds – gas and liquids exposed to these tiles will gradually lose mass over time
• You can now place build errands over solid tiles, and pawns will automatically dig them out first
• Added fog of war to unexplored areas of the world

Simulation

• Pawns no longer jam their heads into ship tiles when trying to access a build errand on the other side
• Pawns no longer stand idle in a doorway – they will move to the nearest non-doorway accessible position
• Trees now use the light level across all of their cells, not just their base, when calculating aliveness

Balance

• World generation can no longer replace dirt tiles inside the crashed ship with coal
• Pawns should no longer spawn in the vacuum of space at game start
• Increased battery storage from 100 W to 500 W

Internal

• Minimum window size is now 800x600 at startup
• Improved quality of text rendering when against a transparent background (e.g. FPS counter)
• Restyled debug console
• More textures are now filtered, increasing render quality
• Generated pawns now face in random directions at the start of the game
• Added Return to Main Menu button in escape menu
• Added close dialog buttons to all selected object panels
• Improved the performance when trying to place many building errands at once

Fixes

• Fixed checkbox labels in options dialog word-wrapping too soon
• Fixed windowed mode resetting to default dimensions after applying new options
• Fixed crash if the game was paused while the viewport was very small (<= 240px)
• Fixed crash on Windows Alt-Tab if the game was full-screen
• Fixed a crash that could occur when a sad investigator pawn wrote a diary entry
• Fixed console and sandbox panels hiding behind select pawn panel
• Fixed a very rare crash at startup when loading YAML assets
• Fixed a crash that could occur if a new game was started while another event was already happening
• Fixed a rare bug where some interactive elements sometimes wouldn’t respond to clicks
• Fixed pawns thinking they could access errands on the other side of solid tiles
• Fixed a crash if you told a pawn to move outside the world bounds