I apologize, as I forgot to add a news item for the update that was made available last night – 0.5.2.0. As such, I will include it’s release notes below.
The game is really approaching the play style and difficulty that I was originally aiming for. Up until now you could basically win just by boosting everyone’s immune system over and over – keep it high enough and they won’t become infected and their sleep levels didn’t drop quickly enough to get dangerously low (most of the time.) To counteract this, we’ve overhauled a large portion of the inner workings and tried to iron things out (make actions more worthwhile, increased degradation of the immune system and sleep levels.)
Another major change in version 0.5.3.0 is the removal of the flush system. The initial idea was that the sleep levels would be higher throughout the playthrough and you might accidentally give the wrong pod a shot of sleep medication. This is what originally caused the overdose status, so you would need to respond by ‘flushing their system’ to lower their sleep level (or you could use it to kill off a patient.) Since this is the opposite of how the game plays now, we’re removing it.
There is a major addition in this version as well: high scores. At the end of the game you’ll be given the option to enter your name and it’ll store your time, your final score and the number of surviving patients.
One final note: the game now requires OpenAL to run (in the process of adding sound effects); the installer is included in the download file (run oalinst.exe when you’ve extracted the download file.)
You can download the new version here: Keep Them Sleeping version 0.5.3.0. Here is the full list of changes, pulled from the ReadMe.txt file:
Version 0.5.3.0 – (Released April 18th 2014)
- Bars now change colors at certain intervals (red at 0-25, orange at 26-50, yellow at 51-75 and green at 76+) instead of linearly blending from red to green as it goes down
- Added shading to UI skin
- Added High Scores screen
- Added Credits screen
- Reshaded the uncolored icons
- Changed ‘Diseased’ icon so that is more than a recolor of the ‘Infected’ icon
- Fixed handling of high scores
- Added click sound effect
- Fixed emergency tooltip
- Fixed emergency bar (it now correctly stays active until both hull and oxygen are restored.)
- Both stabilizers now display messages, informing you of their actions.
- Removed the flush system as it is useless (if a patient’s sleep level went over 100 you’d flush their system to lower it, but the chances of that happening are about 0.)
- Doubled immune system and sleep degradation rates.
- Increased initial Cure Disease to 3 (up from 1), Booster Shots to 10 (up from 6) and Sleep Shots to 10 (up from 6.)
- Adjusted score calculation – all items are worth less, you gain more points for curing disease, you lose more points for overdosing a patient.
- You now gain points for every item produced in addition to the the inventory score that is calculated based on your remaining inventory at the end of the game.
- Adjusted production times: sleep shots and booster shots now take 4 seconds to produce (down from 5.)
- Removed repair bot from inventory since it no longer changes.
- Requires OpenAL (included; run oalinst.exe to install it.)
Version 0.5.2.0 – (Released April 17th 2014)
- Fixed bugs in the Immune System Stabilizer
- Adjusted immune system booster so that it will inject patients as long as there is one (instead of requiring that you have 3 or more.)
- Increased pod repair success chance (was 85%, now 90%.)
- Fixed pixel offset between titles and bodies for windows
- Added ‘Repair Bots’ bar
- Split ‘System Status’ window into ‘Ship Status’ and ‘Programs & Processes’ window
- Removed option to create repair bots (it didn’t quite make sense nor was it beneficial to produce extra bots.)
- Added pause menu (replaces “Do you want to quit?” popup; help screen coming soon.)
- Corrected chance calculations.
- Fixed notifications show they actually show.
- Fixed pod windows so that all of the controls fade out when a patient dies.
- Removed ‘Dead’ icon as it didn’t really serve a purpose and seemed out of place.
- Added high score system