We’ve gotten a lot of feedback on our game from the community these last couple of weeks and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. We recently hit the 5K download milestone over at GameJolt, which is something we weren’t expecting to hit this early in sharing our demo. As a thank you to you guys for the support, we added a new level to try featuring more of the destructible environments we want to incorporate in to the game.

Those who have already played our demo and explored what each map has may have discovered the statue you can shoot on the midway mission on the Outland orbiting Venus. Doing so not only dropped a giant statue on your enemies for massive damage, but it also created a spot for your squad members to take cover.

Expanding upon this concept, we’ve added a level to the missions on the Outland orbiting Mercury. This time thought, you destruction of the environments can change the terrain of the entire battlefield. All it takes is one shot to a precariously placed pile of explosive canisters.

This adds a different set of tactics involving how you want to take advantage of the environment. Do you cause as much destruction as possible to soften up your enemies and risk losing valuable cover in the area? Environments will provide their own unique challenges in the game and test how you can best use the range you have on each map.

Along with positive feedback we got a lot of valuable critique from players and YouTubers who featured our demo. One of the big things we got back was that the limited actions you squad members could do, resulting in only being able to move OR shoot/use an ability during that members turn.

To address this, we boosted the levels of a few of your squad members, making more actions available to them. You’ll still have to choose whether to move or fire your weapon as a main action, but now you can also use abilities or get into cover with reduced AP cost. Now you can move to a new space and get straight into cover or hop into cover and start firing immediately.

We’ve also added more abilities and upgrades to the perk tree, including a crowd control ability for one of your squad members, the Knockback Bomb! An improvised concussive explosive, this weapon doesn’t do too much damage but it packs enough punch to push back enemies that may be closing in on you.

The ability has a cool down so you can’t use it every turn, but you can give yourself an early advantage by knocking back enemies with a low accuracy weapon to farther distances, making it harder for them to hit you or forcing them to spend their turn getting back into better range.

You can also hit your own allies with this ability, which could potentially knock them out of harms way if they’re surrounded by a lot of close range enemies.

Other small changes we did to make improvements to the game is a redone GUI for the perk tree. Now you can clearly see the slots available to level up and customize your squad with awesome new abilities and upgrades.

Thanks again to everyone who has submitted feedback, check out the new levels and abilities on our demo here on GameJolt. If you enjoy the game, please consider supporting our upcoming Kickstarter here on Thunderclap and spread the word when it launches April 13th.

‘Till then, stay awesome Outlanders.

Grant, Community Management Monkey