Hi everyone,
We know, we know. We haven't released a patch since last May.
Most of the work we've been picking away at has been finishing the later stages of the game because

ATRIO LAUNCHES JANUARY 10!

That's right. Atrio has an official launch date, and it's coming up quick. Tell your friends, tell your family, and wishlist if you haven't already. But before 1.0, we've decided to release one last patch, with a TON of new stuff in it, so buckle up.

1. The Battle System

One of the biggest issues we had with the game was the ability to capture creatures. Going out and "trapping" was quite boring. Finding creatures in the wild was boring. And having creatures randomly attack your base was frustrating. None of these options worked (and we tried them all).

We wanted the players to choose when they wanted to enter combat, and so, we found a solution - the underground supply pod.

1.1 What is the Underground Supply Pod?

Scattered throughout the world are pods for you to find. As the name suggests, they are supply pods that deliver you items upon request. And it's free! It costs absolutely nothing. All packages requested from an Employee of Company 3123 are free of charge. No catches. None. Zip. Zilch.
(except for the fact that the supply pods attract wild creatures but surely that's not important).

1.2 How does it work?

Once you place a request for a package, you'll have to stay within the "order zone". If you leave, your order will be cancelled. Of course, creatures may try to kill you while you're in the zone, but again, a minor detail.

1.3 New Battle Items

Since the underground supply pod has a tendency to attract dangerous and potentially lethal creatures, we've introduced some new tools to help you stay alive.

The Stun Turret

Fueled by blood-ingot, this turret does stun damage to a single target once every second. You can manually deposit blood ingot, but it only has capacity to hold a single blood-ingot, so if you're in the middle of combat, it really doesn't work well. This is intentional.

We want to force the player to automate their defenses (since we are an automation game), and having the stun-turrets automatically intake items from an assembly line incentivizes automation.

The Wall Healer

Walls and gates play a vital part of staying alive in the dark, so what better way to protect yourself than with walls? The wall healer works the same as the stun turret, except that it heals walls.

1.4 The supply pod takes damage

Oh, did we forget to mention, the supply pod has health…. Sorry! If you don't protect your supply pod, the order will be cancelled and you'll have to start again. Our initial playtests had players running around in circles as a dodging strategy and not actively focusing on the automation portion of combat. Not only was this soul-sucking to watch as a game designer, but the players weren't having fun. The health on the supply pod was our sneaky solution.

1.5 Health Packs

It wouldn't be much combat without health packs. We have 3 varieties (small, medium, Large). Fairly self explanatory, but I'm quite happy with how the design turned out!

2. The Buff System

As the game starts to close in on 1.0, we're having internal playtests of the later parts of the game, and noticed that players were simply skipping large parts of the game.
As such, we introduced a way to gate players from exploring parts of the game too early - with the idea of buffs and environmental damage.
For example, if you step on water, your largely electronic (and cheaply made) body will short circuit.
You can't explore the water until later on in the game, when you get access to buffs.

2.1 What are buffs?

You can only get buffs when you consume batteries. Each battery gives you a unique buff status. Without spoiling too much, purple batteries heal you over time, and red buffs give you water resistance.

You can upgrade their effects in the research module, and can only have one buff active at a time, so be wary of how you use them.

2.2 New death animation

Players found it frustrating instantly dying from stepping on water, so we've introduced a warning system (particles and sounds). You have 3 seconds of stepping on water before you're shown a brand new death animation

3. Controller support

As we are doing a dual 1.0 Launch on Steam, Xbox and Epic Games, we're hard at work adding controller support. Plug in a controller and It will auto detect input and dynamically change to support controller.

We've introduced a new flow for placing that's controller specific, and your toolbar at the bottom will automatically change to a different style of toolbar that's much better suited for controller.
(I personally like battling with the controller). We've put a lot of love, thought, and hard work into making controller feel good, so please give it a try! We still have work to do on controller support before 1.0, but we think this is a great start.

3.1 Steam deck support

That's right you can play Atrio on the steam deck! Since we have built in controller support, it should just work right out of the box (Including cloud saves, so you can play on your pc and then move to your steam deck when you're on the go)

4. Research

With the introduction of supply pods, we wanted some special rewards for players completing supply pods.
We've moved the Research Upgrade Chips to be exclusively rewarded when you "beat" all levels of a supply pod.

In addition, we've changed how research is done. Previously, we had research boosters that increased the research rate over a long period of time. If you had for example, research juice 1 "cooking" in a research booster, you would be researching at 2x speed.
We found players didn't utilize this system as it was slightly obtuse and hard to understand. In addition, all of the "juices" were crafted, and we really need more items to find out in the dark.

5.1 Research Packs

We've changed the research juices into research packs.

When you deposit a research pack, time is instantly deducted from the research time. We found that this has really helped increase the understandability of the research system, and players are more motivated to go out and find research packs. We hope you agree and paln to keep a close eye on the system to see how players receive this new change,

5.2 New Research paths

Other notable changes

We've added the rest of the giants, but they'll be available in 1.0! The vlog has some spoilers if you want to see more about what's coming.

Optimization

I wrote an entire blog post detailing our optimization journey, but if you have a slower pc, you're going to notice a huge difference from the previous patch to the this point

Notable changes include:
- Optimized code (+20fps while testing on lower end PCs)
- Faster loading times


This has been a massive patch, and much of the work we've done isn't even included (for spoiler reasons). We can't wait for you all to play the official 1.0 version of Atrio: The Dark Wild

-Stephen & The Isto Inc. Team