Steam Marines v0.8.0a has arrived with Stats, Skills, Laser weapons, and more! news

Hello, everyone!

If you enjoy Steam Marines please do head over to Steam Greenlight and vote for it!

Lots of changes this build. The big ticket items are marine stat and skill points making a revamped return, laser weapons, and fancy pants UI, explosion animations, plastic explosives, and some quality of life UI stuff!

Stronger, Faster, More Hard-Headed

Each time a marine is promoted a talent may be chosen at the new rank and one stat and one skill point are granted. There are three stats - Power, Speed, and Strength. There are also three skills - Smasher, Bomb Tech, and Precision. Each has cumulative effects with each point invested. Some don't have any discernible effect until a threshold is reached. Some cap out at 4 points total. Spread them around or stack them up - it's up to you.

Pew Pew Pew!

Placeholder laser beam graphics?!? Oh well. They'll be vamped up soon, along with plasma and beam tech entering the fray in the late game. But for now once you get past the Command Deck you'll have the chance to find red chests that contain higher tech weaponry. Upgrade from ballistics and you might stay alive longer!

Kaboom

Plastic explosives can spawn on doors now. Alien tech or automated ship defenses? Either way marines with enough Bomb Tech skill may be able to diffuse and re-arm these in more tactical locations. Robots aren't that smart, right? Beware of friendly fire!

No, really. KABOOM!

Explosion animations got a revamp with 100% more pixel art oomph. Say good-bye to the particle effect nonsense. Players with low end computers can thank me later.

You can't keep a good bot down

But you can reduce his variants to a pile of steaming rubble. Deck boss units may come back as slightly less powerful variants on later levels. Don't worry, you can't teach an old bot new tricks, right?

That doesn't look so hard to clear...

The Ship UI is here. As you finish each deck you'll be prompted to choose the next deck to clear. The game only has three decks in total right now, but more will be coming. There may or may not be benefits to clearing harder decks sooner! Do the machines learn? Do the aliens retool and change their tactics? Hey, what's that sound?

As usual you can download the alpha builds for Windows or Mac from the official Steam Marines website or the official forum. Below is the v0.8.0a changelog.

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New/Changed Features
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• The Ship Overview is back. Upon clearing a deck the player is taken to a screen to choose the next deck to assault. The alpha builds are currently restricted to three decks; Command, Engineering, and Medical.
• Added color coded mouse cursors depending on the tile.
• Marines can now fire through outer space tiles.
• Crates now always contain non-weapon/armor items.
• Crate spawn chance reduced since they now always have items.
• Treasure chests are now color coded. Red chests contain weapons, blue chests contain armor, and brown chests contain a random non-weapon/armor item.
• Brown chests can contain almost every time in the game.
• A max of 3 treasure chests can spawn per level, excluding secret treasure rooms.
• Re-implemented marine stats and skills. On promotion/rank up a marine gets to choose a new talent and gains 1 stat and 1 skill point to distribute.
• The Power stat grants +1 AP when damage is taken. This AP gain ignores the marine's max action points. Getting smacked on the enemy turn can be beneficial!
• The Speed stat grants +0.25 action points and +0.25 sight range.
• The Strength stat grants 2 health per point.
• The Smasher skill grants +1 melee damage and +10% chance to bash obstacles.
• The Bomb Tech skill grants a 25% chance to diffuse traps per point.
• The Precision skill grants +1 firearm damage and +3% firearm accuracy.
• Updated the Squad Creation screen with more appropriate class descriptions.
• Added plastic explosives that can spawn on doors. Can be taken down with Demolitions skill and (re)placed on closed doors. Triggerable by both player marines and enemy units.
• Added enemy corpses.
• Animated wall lights.
• Base wall smash chance reduced from 70% to 60%.
• Added current score to the level end victory screen.
• Added laser weapons. Decks influence the chance for laser weapons to drop. Laser weapons get an inherent boost to damage, range, and accuracy.
• The Lasershot item uses the new laser weapon animation.
• Deck Bosses have a chance to spawn as weaker, non-boss variants in later levels.
• The Repair armor stat returns. Restores health to the marine that kills a robotic unit.
• Added Hourglass item. Restores all squad AP but all enemies gain 1 AP for the next turn.
• Added wall paintings that can be taken down and used for various effects.
• Dispensers can now be used from any direction.
• Moving into a dispenser that has not been used automatically uses it instead of smashing it. Moving into a dispenser that has been used still smashes it.
• Moving on top of an item automatically picks it up at no AP cost.
• Moving onto a chest automatically opens it at no AP cost.
• Being south of an unused console and moving north automatically uses the console. This costs the normal amount of AP.
• Changed mouse cursor animation.
• Lowered experience curve to gain promotions.
• Cut AP to fire/reload from weapon stats. All weapons now cost 1 AP to fire and reloading takes all remaining AP.
• Made the squad info screen consistent with the rest of the game's UI.
• Added some fancy pants tweening/camera shake to UI actions.
• Increased wall pipe spawning chance.
• Added more wall environment art.
• Added some new action sound effects.
• Added new aoe explosion animation.
• Grenadier class weapons now properly explode on wall tiles and can destroy nearby tiles.
• Weapon stat screen shows projectile type (ballistic, laser, et cetera).
• Fixed Grenadier talent "Smart Bombs" not dealing aoe damage to enemies.

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Bug Fixes
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• Fixed the Defeat screen being pushed multiple times upon squad death.
• Fixed the main menu music and HUD popping up after idling too long on the High Score screen.
• Fixed context sensitive UI buttons resetting on all grab/drop item actions.
• Stopped mouse cursor from flickering when mousing over squad members.
• Fixed gui profiles with the squad info screen.
• Stripped talent points from the Promotion screen.
• The elevator tile properly shows after loading a save game that had discovered the elevator.
• Fixed the elevator not always powering on when the Revenant dies.
• Fixed wall pipes not persisting properly through multiple save/load cycles.
• AI will (mostly) stop opening doors then aborting moving through the doorway when it spots marines.
• Added sound effect to main menu Scores button.
• Fixed weapon capacities displaying incorrect values on the weapon swap screen.
• Fixed improper level generation flags that could cause levels to generate multiple times unnecessarily on New Game Plus.
• Fixed some walls being able to be seen through.
• Guard Modeproperly gets cleared when the player ends the turn with no enemies left on the level.
• Environmental damage should update health overlay values faster.
• Fixed weapons fire not always working on the turn after using Guard Mode.