Greetings Space Citizens!

June heralds the onset of Summer, but also - Quality of Life improvements! We've implemented a whole bunch of much requested tweaks and little additions. Also, notably, some terrifying bugs have been properly smashed. Huzzah!

Some of these changes required pretty deep rewrites of the engine. For example, you can now deselect an item by clicking it again! It's a pretty basic feature in most games, and in our case - only meant fundamentally changing how shops handle inventory items. No biggie, right? 😅

There are also a lot of under-the-hood changes that happened the job system, the UI, and some dialogue pathing. This is in preparation for the introduction of job miniquests, and also to give the player a lot more specific direction on what to do and where to go. We were going to introduce a full tutorial mode this patch, but unfortunately the dev for that has been under the weather so we'll be rolling it out in the next patch instead. 

We've been heavily focused on improving the engine and gameplay of SNB for the last number of patches. This has largely been due to community feedback letting us know that this needs to be a priority. We also want to make sure the basic SNB experience is as polished as possible before we release on (spoiler!) in a few months! Because of this, the rollout for the start of Act II will now coincide with that mega-event. It's gonna be huge, so look forward to it! 🎈

As always, be sure to let us know what you think on Discord! We'd love to see you there!

Wishing you lots of great treats for these hot summer months, 🍘🍚🍜

-The SNB Team

June Patch Notes

Additions

• Added 'Data Pad' character and assets. This will be used next patch when we roll out the tutorial mode.
• Added system for random dream events. For now there's 10 short placeholders. This will be expanded later.

Tweaks

• Niobe will now explicitly tell the Speaker during the intro that the goal is to gain control of the ship.
• Changed how work pay is calculated. It is now based on a combination of stats and your job rank.
• Changed buy/sell awareness in the shop UI. Buttons will now only be active when you have an item selected.
• When clicking a previously selected item in a shop, it will now deselect.
• Charmenu section titles have been updated. 'I.D.' is now 'Career', 'Links' is now 'Reputation' and 'Events' is now 'Journal'.
• Charmenu tooltips have been changed to more explicitly talk about gameplay systems and give directions.
• Area control names adjusted to better fit the UI space.
• Job titles changed to better fit the display, along with some UI adjustments.
• Stat descriptions have been changed to be more interesting and relevant.
• Niobe's bust has been moved a smidge to the left so it won't overlap dialogue.
• Removed a number of 'inhuman' references for Niobe that were considered to be too soon.
• Significantly reduced the amount of mandatory debt that can be accumulated in the game.
• Removed credit bonus Niobe gives you during the intro.
• Minquests from explore should now be entirely randomized without concurrent repeats.
• Removed the two instances of 4th wall breaking that happened in the PC's room.
• Shops no longer display the PC's custom name, but instead use 'Your Mods' and 'Your Stash'.
• Slight reduction in combat encounter chance for most areas of the ship.
• Numerous minor text adjustments for quests.
• Increased email UI space so some emails won't be cut off.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that allowed the PC to bypass the last stage of the intro. (this was kind of a big deal 😅)
• PC should no longer be listed as unemployed after the initial work session.
• Added missing rumble sound effect to the intro.
• Missing box image for the cursed cat has been added back in.
• Removed a very large number of redundant scenes in the code that were causing a lot of issues.