The most noticeable addition in this update is the procedurally generated plant clusters. They are purely decorative but together with one new large tentacle plant type, they add much needed visual variation to the mission sites.

I have made some improvements to the site generation too. For example, it is now guaranteed to place at least some elements with dynamic lights in every site. This avoids generating bland-looking sites with no dynamic lights at all.

Another  significant change is that the explosive plants no longer harm the player at all and their damage radius has been increased considerably. This makes them a lot more useful.

After long consideration, I decided to add an all-time high score table for the unique random game runs too. To make the maximum possible score less dependent on the procedural generation I set the total number of enemy waves constant. The waves are randomly spread over 6-8 missions. In practice, this shortens the average game run length a little.

If things go according to the plan, Phobos Down will be in Early Access on Steam early next year. Now would be a great time to go wishlist it!

Here is the full change log since version 0.0.10:

• Added a bit more details to walker leg models.
• Enabled debanding post processing filter.
• Show a warning pop-up when the game can't fetch challenges from the server.
• Fixed showing high scores for challenges incompatible with current game version.
• Added all-time high score challenge game type.
• Improved site obstacle placement logic.
• Added tentacle plant variant.
• Increased explosive plant damage range.
• Prevented explosive plants from damaging the player.
• Fixed connected gamepad causing jerky movement in keyboard controls.
• Improved right stick deadzone handling for smoother aiming.
• Added three types of clustered plants as terrain decorations.
• Made sure that every mission site has some obstacles with dynamic lights.
• Made total number enemy waves independent of the mission count.
• Shortened average game run a little.
• Fixed hidden mouse cursor in high score name entry.
• Made fast crawling enemies only a little bit faster than the player.
• Allow menu navigation using gamepad left trigger too.
• Only deliver GodotSteam libraries with the Steam version of the game.
• Show blinking health bar already at 50% health.

You can download the game here on Itch.io  or wishlist it on Steam.  If you do try it, please let me know what you think!