Hmm did everything just taste green there for a moment? news

I have two pieces of awesome news to share with you all today.

Firstly and most importantly, last night I came home to an email with the subject line "Congratulations, Isomer has been Greenlit!" ! Hurrah!!

Thank you so much to everyone who has voted and left such amazing feedback on the Greenlight campaign page. I have been bowled over and humbled by your kind words and enthusiasm.

I have started the process to get Isomer onto Steam and will update when it is available. Anyone who has already participated in the alphafunding drive either via Humble or Desura can request a free Steam key as I promised before. I'm not exactly certain how this system will work, bear with me I will figure this out while I go through the process with Valve.

Secondly, a new Isomer build is available today. I uploaded update 18 (0.8.7.1) this morning!

The biggest new feature is the addition of alarms to enemy facilities. At strategic points now throughout enemy structures, there are sensor strips positioned to detect alien intruders. If any of your units walk over these, it will immediately trigger an alarm in the building (lots of red flashing lights and general disruption to tea and biscuit time) leading to immediate reinforcements beaming in at all the spawn points in the building (that's bad ).

There is a new craftable structure too - the Time Orb. It's built on a mini powercore as with other structures and changes based on the time of the day. Fully white during the day, becoming darker as night approaches and completely dark at night. There was a player request to be able to tell the world time more easily and this Orb allows you to do just that. Decorate your bases with high tech alien clocks!

Isomer now keeps track of statistics from each play through which are shown on the Game Over screen. Anything from the number of enemies you kill, the length of time you survive on the world to the number of supply ships trades you have made is now shown.

Aside from these additions, the focus of this build is pretty much the same as the last build - polish and snazz. There is a reworked Game Over sequence, if enemy units manage to break through your base and take out the power core, the world will disappear in the face of a series of large explosions.

The camera switches from position to position it moves from one point to another rather than just snapping to the new position auto-magically. A small change, but it really helps to orientate you in the world when you know in what rough direction everything is.

Here's the full change log:

• New: Added five new enemy buildings and updated every existing structure to use new human blocks.
• New: Added animated scrolling to title, loading and saving screen backgrounds.
• New: Added smooth camera motion.
• New: Added alarms to enemy bases. Bases now have sensors which if triggered will sound alarms causing reinforcements to spawn immediately.
• New: Added new structure - Alien Time Orb. Shows the current part of the day/night cycle.
• New: Added tracking of game stats through new PlayerStats module.

• Improvement: Reduced the number of resources dropped by portable power cores.
• Improvement: Pressing ESC will now return a paused game in the title screen to the in-game screen.
• Improvement: Pressing ESC will back out of modal screens in game (functioning like right click).
• Improvement: Improved transition from game over screen to menu (game now prompts and waits for player input).
• Improvement: Greatly enhanced game over sequence and screen.
• Improvement: Added better handling of critical errors resulting from partition mismatches. Game will now save and shutdown rather than terminate.

• Bugfix: Fixed bug preventing deregistration of enemy (and friendly) spawn points when the position is destroyed.
• Bugfix: Fixed bug where disabled enemy spawn point sprites would still cause a superfluous lookup in the gamelogic on destruction.
• Bugfix: Fixed bugs in pathfinding code relating to transporter use.

As with before, the new build can be updated from inside the Isomer launcher supplied with the Isomer Alpha.