Expansion Core update for 28 August 2022

First of all, thank you again to the few of you who joined the Discord channel. Your support has boosted my drive to work on Expansion Core even during one of the busiest times of my life. Luckily all of that is winding down, so I should have much more time to develop the game moving forward. That being said, the Demo is coming to a close soon. I will however be starting to do occasional Open Betas. At first I wanted to just close out the Demo and go heads down focused into development, but it's kind of fun to have people play and give suggestions. My reasoning for moving to this format is purely because it's really really tough to both work on experimental features while making sure the version of the game that's live is stable and non-buggy.

Major Features:

• Added a new system for equipping and unequipping Upgrades to Cores. You can now freely equip and unequip individual upgrades, making everything in the game much more customizable if wanted.
• Added the ability to upgrade Core's slots. Simply hold a Core in your hand and interact with any Beacon that has successfully summoned a HUB. There will be a new window on the left side where you can purchase Core slot upgrades to increase the maximum slots a Core has for Upgrades.

New Features:

• Behind the scenes I had to make some major changes to all of the structs that were used for storing Upgrade data. This meant doing a load of fixes to old code and updating all of my saving stuff to handle it. Upgrades now should retain their value when equipped and unequipped (didn't have to worry about that before this update).
• When looking at a Core on the ground, you can now tell at a glance how many slots it has in total and how many are being used.
• I added a tiny little broken down cabin in the forest area. Just a little pile of scrap. I think it's a nice little looting spot near spawn though.
• Updated the enemy AI for attacking the Trade Pod in order to have enemies target the allies/player first before attacking the pod. If they do reach the pod without being aggroed, then they will stick to attacking the pod until they are hit.
• Added sounds for equipping and ejecting Cores

Bug Fixes:

• There were probably some bugs fixed... I seriously didn't write anything down this time around... Oops.

Thank you all again for playing the Demo and wishlisting Expansion Core!

• Jason (Candlebird)