Hi everyone,
Thanks to everyone who's played the first PSYKO Playtest and given feedback. I've pushed a new build. A brief of what's changed:

• Better medkit loss feedback

• New levels and current levels made harder

• Short time-based 'Trial' levels

• Level Graph

• Art is improved, more head/tail lights on vehicles.

• Weapon/Bike skins + reticle colors

• New enemies: Sniper, Jetpack dude, Shielded cars.

Difficulty and Metagame

Overall, gameplay should be much more difficult. Each level has a number of Medkits that you start with. Some levels offer the ability to pick up more of them, or make a choice between extending your clip and taking an extra Medkit. I'm expecting that this playtest may go more poorly than the last, only because now it won't be so easy, and some of the lack of polish might become more apparent. There's no way around this though. I'll work out these frustrations over the next few builds.

Note: Saves are reset

I've made too many changes to saving to be able to safely migrate old saves without breaking things. If you've already played the first playtest, you'll still need to play through the first levels to gain access to the rest of the graph, unfortunately. It's worth noting that over the course of the next few playtests, this may happen a few times until the game stabilizes. As I'm writing this, I realize it may be wise to make a temporary button in playtest builds to 'unlock' all the levels.

Level Menu

There's a level graph now. The idea here was to be able to have odd, interesting challenges that might be a little harder, or deviate from the main type of gameplay. Since the graph is like a tree, some levels end up being optional to progressing down the main path. They still have ranks associated with them. For example, the level 'Bumper Bikes' tasks the player with getting 10 collisions kills, but not doing this level doesn't prevent you from progressing to the 'Hari Coptu' boss level.

Level Ranks

Each level now has a set of ranks that can be achieved. Some are scored based, some are time based. There's also a newer type of level which are called Trials. A trial is a set of 3 sequences. Kill all enemies in the sequence to progress to the next. You're ranked on how quickly you can complete it. The current trial levels are simple for now, but they'll be quite a few more, and they'll get a lot more interesting as I learn how to use my traffic and enemy pieces.

Unlockables

I've added weapon and bike skins to the game. You'll find them on the left hand side in the menu truck. There are only a few right now, and the ways of unlocking them are by collision kills, headshots, kills, etc. I will come up with more interesting challenges for these. I'm going to avoid having things feel like you have to grind. The challenges will be more along the lines of making you do cool, interesting things.

New enemies

Sniper

They work like most FPS games; stay out of their line of sight. This feels fresh in a traffic scenario where you're having to move yourself in between the traffic, and plays to one of the pillars of 'Using traffic as cover'. We'll see how this goes. They can be frustrating, and I think they can use louder feedback when taking their shot.

Jetpack dude

For now, the enemies in the jetpacks are the same as all the others. They fire their pistol, albeit they can fly over traffic and can put more pressure than the more passive enemies in cars. I might have them deal damage on their explosion when they hit the ground. That could be an interesting mechanic, we'll see.

Shielded Cars

While simple, this concept has potential. Since the shield blocks the front line of sight, you need to pass on the sides of the vehicle to kill them. This idea needs more fleshing out. I had wanted them to accelerate with you, so that to kill them you need to drive quite fast and this increases danger (risk vs reward). Having cars change speed though was confusing visually. You need visual and sfx feedback to communicate changes in speed in traffic, otherwise you cannot perceive it with everything going on, so I've procrastinated on this.

If you've played the first playtest, there isn't a LARGE amount of new playable content; that will be coming over the next month or so, but I wanted to give an update.