The "Tentacle Slap" update

Hello!

This week, we finally released our demo for the first time. Many of you took the time to dive into the seas of Tethys. Almost two thousand players !

Seeing all of you diving and experiencing our world for the first time has been incredible, and we can't wait for our game to grow alongside this amazing community.

We've already released a couple hotfixes, but we wanted to we're not done yet !

We hear your feedback, and are absolutely aware of all the hard work that needs to be done. Whether that's unit pathing, UI, or content variety... we're hard at work on making sure we address as much as possible, as fast as the two of us can!

On that note - we have a fun one for you today! We're naming this "the tentacle slap" update, as we're adding a fun change, now allowing tentacles to interact more with their environment, including...Mines! "Squishy matter" will also now interact with a variety of creatures and enemies.

Our goal with Tides of Tethys, is that the world should feel like a sandbox, with systems intertwined to create emergent gameplay and stories. We're hoping that these small change will make the demo a little bit more dynamic :)

Thanks again for checking out the Tides of Tethys Demo, and please don't hesitate to continue submitting all the bugs and feedback you have! We're actively reading everything, and trying to join in as many streams as possible, and also watching all gameplay videos so we can hear your feedback and fix everything we can.

Our discord is the best place to chat and submit feedback and bugs : https://discord.gg/2dkRRFffUA But if Discord's not your thing, you can also post on our steam discussion board : https://steamcommunity.com/app/1570840/discussions/

Hope you have a fantastic weekend!

Here's all the changes and fixes made in the last few days :

Big changes and fixes : -Tentacles and bounce pads can now interact with mines and play volleyball with them

-Global navigation fix on Knights, to allow for better pathing and avoid slowing down against walls. Definitely not a "full" fix on all our pathing issues, but this hopefully should help a decent amount.

Balance/ bug fix changes:

-Nerfed resource cost for "Great One" event -Rebalance on "Hungry Creature" event, to more often give the crab mount -Tweaked artifact max distance, to avoid having to go all the way across the map in some cases at depth 2 -Renamed "invert camera x/y axis" to "invert camera horizontal/vertical rotations" -Added camera speed and camera speed shift boost settings, in control settings. -Formatting tweaks in "New Expedition" menu, to avoid title clipping for 16x9 formats, as well as house buttons scale changes. -Formatting "Resource ward" title to not get clipped by the resource panel for 16x9 formats -Fix for Bike interaction distance (Knights would sometimes get too far from it) -Scaled up "defender" gear grab, and small crabs from the "Lost Container" event -Made skin reward events more obvious and disappear after you've gotten the reward -Added some more visuals for "Lost Container" event, as well as made it disappear once you got the reward. -Tweaked "Large organics" so they're not blocking paths as much -Moved "Lost Soul" icon up to make way for better visibility -Rework on "Great One" event to hopefully avoid freeze, as well as adding more consequences to ignoring it (Beware! :)) -Fix for tentacle rotation to be more aligned with where their target is -Tweak for skin rewards to show visual at the end to better know you're done with it, and can also now trigger on cinematic skip. -Lowered maximum fish particle spawn count, which in some cases was causing perf drop. -Reworked gear equip system, to avoid bugs where in rare cases cooldowns would be miss read and shared between gear. Also accounts for multiple other issues, including some cases where having the right gear for an interaction, but as a non-first slot item, would not count for the interaction. -Multiple nav collision fixes around all region one tiles -Fix for reward spawns from "Great One" sometimes not spawning correctly -Fix for plankton color - was not the intended value, which made it not readable when current direction changed. -Fix for some text being gendered when it should be neutral. -Fix for breakable rocks not being able to be interacted with -Changed organization name for the knights, now called "The Order" of knights. -Added second expedition tutorial to better explain that 2nd expedition is "Real" compared to tutorial -Fix for nest not being attackable -fix for squishy matter collision, making it so Knights that'd land back on it would land on a flat collision they couldn't walk off of. -Fix for unit attack damage not showing colors when non-default value -Added a safety net so harmful creatures can't spawn right next to the core at the very start -Added new tutorial for the first time a Knight has low oxygen to better teach about tethers -Fix so when a unit is given an order to go do something that requires specific gear, if they don't have that gear, stay idle instead of still going there -Some minor UI recoloring here and there (resource numbers, task icons etc) to not be too "neon" -Changed spawning method when spawning things like knights for "Lost Soul" to avoid getting stuck -Fix for delay at the end of the scoreboard that was not accounting for game speed, and would accidentaly last for what felt like forever by accident in some cases, looking like a freeze.