Biweekly Update 07 - Polishing Time

AMAZING NEWS!

Pathogenic just passed 60,000 parasites/wishlists! A massive milestone for our tiny pathogens, thanks to your support! We really appreciate all of you for helping us shape the evolution of our microscopic roguelike project. Every piece of encouragement and feedback helps make our pathogens deadlier AND a lot more fun to play with.

Currently, Matt and Roberto are polishing and consolidating existing content to make sure Pathogenic has a solid foundation before building new content on it. Particularly, this biweekly update’s focus is on refining the intestine level and improving the quality of player experience.

Polishing the Intestine

We've received a lot of valuable feedback since the introduction of the intestine, and changes have been made to address some of those issues. Some of the rooms and enemies in the new area have been rebalanced and reworked to give everyone an easier time before diving into the higher levels.

At the same time, more content is being added. A new enemy has joined the battle: the Heavy Worm, a resilient adversary that attacks with bursts of energy. Try to keep your distance when fighting this menace.

You might also notice the Intestine sounds a bit different. That's because the Intestine OST has been added as well, though it still needs a little bit more work. Now you can fight all the new enemies while giving yourself a hidden boost with our music (literally, with the help of the sinoatrial node organelle).

Gameplay Improvements

Need a break in the middle of your run? We got you -- you can now exit a run and return to menu or desktop with the game saving your progress! Simply hit "CONTINUE" on the menu screen to hop right back into where you left!

To help your pathogen traverse the human body even faster, the Pathogen can now enter a "sprinting" state with increased movement speed by holding down dodge and sacrifice the ability to attack. Along with other QoL changes and fixes, hopefully your invasion on the human host will be a lot smoother in this new patch.

Lore Intro Video

There's now an introductory cutscene to give you more insight on why a random pathogen shows up in the human body. A dangerous experiment, a careless mistake, an unfortunate coincidence, everything sealing the fate of the doomed host. Starring our programmer and music composer Matt as the Scientist, you can also find new visuals for the menu screen.

Steam post image....though seems like Steam's image compression is not happy about the grainy CCTV footage

Teaser Time!

Before we go into the full patch notes, here's a blurry preview on what Matt and Roberto are making after the Intestine level. It's still a long way before we can say anything else about it, and it might even change drastically over time. Regardless, we'd love to hear your guesses!

Steam post image What kind of organ do you think this might be?

Full Patch Notes

For the full list of changes, please see below:

Main changes

• Intestine soundtrack, still WIP

• Lore intro video added

• New enemy: the Heavy Worm

• Save system, you can exit the game and continue from the last finished room

• Start rooms in each organ to connect them more visually

• Improved stability, game should be crashing less now

• Chaining system should be clearer now with arrows pointing which organelles affect which ones and better tooltips

• Improved UI

Other Improvements

• Rooms are now exclusive to each level to make each level more unique

• Ability to reassign individual plasmids, reassignment is now free

• Ability to sprint by holding the dodge button

• Weapons on cooldown are now darkened

• Improved diatom handling

• Added option for disabling controller vibration

• Added option for borderless fullscreen

• Damage dealt in the last room by each organelle added to the expanded tooltip

• MacOS ARM build available

Balance Changes

• Rebalanced some intestine enemies

• Reworked some intestine rooms, added a couple of smaller rooms

• Mitotic Nidus now doesn't share cooldowns with the player, has lower attack speed instead

• Auto-firing from Photoreceptor doesn't take stamina anymore, has lower attack speed instead

• Vacuole doesn't get charged while discharging

• Increased Recuperative Mitochondria energy generation on higher rarities

• Improved some Helminth evolutions