Clone life seems pretty good. You’ve got a nice desk job, you’re happy filing soup invoices. Then the boss sends you to a strange alien planet with orders to “MAKE SOUP!!” So we’ve been tuning the balance between player and environment lately, keeping in mind your Robo Exec enforced soup labour (I may have said too much. Hope he isn’t listening).

Navigating around the map has become more critical to survival and the controls are reflecting that. Finding and choosing a starting spot rich in resources for your base is an actual adventure. The control decisions you make about jumping a sinkhole, dropping down ladders into a chasm, fleeing or staying to fight some wildlife, have now become life & death decisions (as they should be).

Even with the tighter controls though, we were struggling to make informed decisions about getting around the immediate environment. So it’s about time we added some extra animations to the player character to help!

The character now teeters on higher ledges that could be dangerous. If you’re rushing, you’ll still miss these though so, spelunk safely! There’s also a fall damage animation after high drops! Previously, fall damage wasn’t obvious so after a few drops, you’d suddenly die, then say “oh, I was taking fall damage that whole time?”.

Lastly, we’re trying out letting the player eat soup ingredients to get some health back (eating takes a few seconds though so do it somewhere safe!). Don’t eat all your stock or there’ll be nothing left to export. :)