Only a day since the last post, but the day was a full one. The main menu stopped being a picture, the mercs found their voices, and one key now lets you look straight through the walls. Here is what is new.

A main menu with someone in it

The logo and the buttons have moved to the right edge of the screen. Behind them is now a small live 3D scene, drawn in the game’s pixel look: a squat against a brick wall, with a worn red sofa, a lamp on a side table, a fan turning in the wall, stacked crates, oil drums and a fire burning in a barrel. On the sofa sits one of the squad, picked at random each time the menu opens. All eight available mercs have their own seat and pose there, and the ouroboros button in the corner calls in the next one.

And you can shoot the place up. Hold the right mouse button and the merc raises a pistol and aims wherever the cursor points; the left button fires. The room is full of things to hit:

• Rats run across the floor. A hit leaves a corpse, or, with some luck, a lot of small pieces and blood that stays on the floor.
• The ceiling fan loses its rotor after three hits.
• The lamp flickers out and falls.
• Toxic barrels break exactly as they do in a mission and spill their glowing puddle.
• A beer bottle shatters, boxes get shoved around by the bullets, and every shot leaves its hole.

A quiet evening in the squat. The red smear on the floor in front of the sofa used to be a rat.

The menu tells you about the pistol once; after that it is up to you how long you stay before pressing New Game.

The mercs talk

Until now the squad only grunted, and several mercs shared the same grunts. Now all eight playable mercs have their own voice and a handful of lines in four situations:

• when you select them,
• when you order them to move,
• when they take a hit and live,
• when an enemy bullet only just misses them.

Every merc sounds like themselves. Nowak is cold and curt (“Speak.”), Simi does not appreciate fire near her hair, Garcia swears in Spanish, Protocol answers flat and clinical through a gas mask, Robot reports hull damage like a machine should, Batyr says little and in thick Glaswegian, Oslizlo mostly worries about his tweed, and Cornelius takes every bullet as a breach of manners (“Poor shooting, sir!”). Lines never repeat until the whole set has played, a merc never talks over their own line, and the voice comes from where the merc stands and follows them as they walk. Only your own orders get an answer: the AI, the start of a turn and the camera’s automatic focus stay quiet.

Hide the walls

Press Space and the walls around the fight drop to their base, capped like a cutaway model, and every building on the map lowers to its plinth. Press it again and they come back. Level designers can now mark any piece of a scene to be cut this way, even a metal sheet hanging in mid-air. It is only a view: a hidden wall still stops bullets and still gives cover. The key can be rebound, and the training instructor’s “next line” moves from Space to Enter.

Before: the walls and the building hide who is standing behind them.

After pressing Space: the walls drop to their base and you can see the whole rooftop.

A night at the cinema

Mission 4 got an open-air cinema: a big screen over a skyscraper rooftop full of old sofas, playing a looping film, brightest in the middle and fading to the corners the way a projected picture does. Tonight’s programme is a burlesque show, and the audience is armed. Worth a look between two fights.

Smaller things

• Shotgun pellets no longer clump by chance. Each blast spreads its pellets evenly over the cone out to the rim, with just enough scatter to keep every shot a little different.
• Enemies stopped shooting at corpses. When two enemies had planned to fire at the same merc and the first one killed them, the second used to fire at the empty spot anyway. Now it picks something else to do.
• The killcam’s replayed bullet no longer shows up in the normal view as a slow “ghost bullet” after every kill; only the TitBoy’s CRT draws it.
• The killcam and the loading screen got their pixel look back after a tuning change had quietly turned it off.
• A floor lying on top of a wall could lose a strip of walkable ground and leave part of a room unreachable. Fixed.
• Litter on the streets now lies the way litter does: cans, bottles and boxes are knocked over instead of all standing upright.

What’s next

The voices and the wall toggle are going through play-testing right now. The guided training mission is still in the works, and it will get a proper post of its own.