itch.io

so neither of those seem to have worked. do i perhaps need to download some kind of unity engine software?

sure thing, ill try them out later today or tomorrow.

I'm just going to give up and play in the browser only, i cant find anything called "player data" and using the search phrases just brings up an error message. maybe creating a feature that automatically pulls it up from the options menu would help make it easier to send you guys player data?

Ok so i looked around and im lost. i don't know where to go beyond this point. could you give me a turn-by-turn on where the player log is on this?

This species, which i have endearingly dubbed "the leech" until I can discover it's species name, makes up the next boss, Leech Lord, who currently has me pretty much stumped on how to advance. The part forward of the main body is it's mouth, and has a stun attack that can debilitate weapons and parts for a few seconds, effectively rending you neutral. the parts connected immediately right and left of the main body are it's connectors (obviously) which have a regeneration function, which the two times i had them were a godsend, allowing me to rest up and heal before trying to gain nutrients, allowing me to use nutrients exclusively for buying parts. the parts farthest left and right are it's movers, which only move in the directions their "hands" point. And finally it's combat parts, the forward pointing spiked tongues projecting forward from the connecters. These hellish french ticklers latch onto enemies (I.E. you) and slowly damage their target while staying firmly locked onto their target, and possibly (i'm not 100% sure on this though) healing the leech. The boss version of these guys is completely unlike the other two, he's fixed in place, but spawns minions who won't attack him or each other, instead working together to pin you and grind you into sad mush. i fought against hime 8 times in a row before i had to step away from my computer and do something relaxing before i returned to attempt subsequent (and as yet unsuccessful) attacks on this hellish nightmare. When asked, the devs stated that the game is set to a hard mode, and that this boss is an experiment. I imagine somebody has beat this abomination, and in fact it's why i've started this thread, in hopes somebody will come along and help me and all of us continue forward in an expedient way.

Boss #2

Buginis

Codename: Queen of Corrosion

(image courtesy of TH3_3RR0R)

The Queen of corrosion is deserving of her name and a bit tougher than the previous boss. Towards her front, her mouths produce poison mines, and at her posterior she has a deadly battery of flak throwers that can really punish you if you're not on your toes. when you first spawn in she sits in her spawn area, spinning and creating a deadly mine field to prevent a reckless charge with Advena's spike, so if your using the alien invader, you'll need to resort to the poison spewer. It's worth noting that poison using species are not immune to other species' poison attacks. The Corrosion Queen has the same flaw as Azure Scissors: get within sight of her main body (that blurry bit) and she'll immediatly flip around to present her flak guns and charge, firing on all cylinders. the strategy here is virtually the same as the last boss: back-peddle and spit poison at her to wear her down. like Azure Scissors she'll back off after taking a certain amount of punishment. her area is a little less straight forward however, so mind your control scheme and mouse to keep from backing yourself against a rock. I did this a couple of times and it was an immediate death sentence. once you take out the flak throwers she'll pursue you head on with her mine launching mouths, which move a bit differently. If she manages to land some damage on you her stage has algae clumps at the top past the current and down low past some spiky rocks, which could regenerate any lost parts in a pinch. however, the stage after The Queen of Corrosion is the last area i know of before you stop seeing Buginis, so while you may not want to, consider dying to the queen a couple times to gain buginis DNA, as the species' Flak throwers and toxic mines are a MUST in the upcoming fights against a species i haven't even managed to unlock yet at the time of writing, which make up the next boss: Leech Lord.

OK, so I figured it might be prudent to help players advance by sharing boss strategies! Feel free to add you own startegies that have proven helpful or effective in defeating enemies.

BE AWARE THAT THIS THREAD, BY NATURE, CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! 

So don't look if you want a "pure", unspoiled experience.

Boss #1

Saenus Beefuarus Boss

Codename: Azure Scissors

Azure scissors is an aggressive but easy(-ish) boss who capitalizes on the Saenus Beefuarus species combat zooid, thankfully not doubling up on his species' mouth parts abilities to stick victims in a loop of being blown into pincers. it's ONLY weapons are those nasty pincers. assuming you are starting with Advena, The mouth part is your best friend with it's poison vomit attack. Get Azure Scissors to charge you by entering his line of sight and back-peddle down through the corridor you spawned in as you continuously belch poison, switching with dash if he manages to start closing and putting you in pinching range. position your mouths to launch poison in a V arc, in order to knock out Azure's scissors quickly. Once he's been (literally) disarmed, you need only fight the force of his mouth pusher zooids to get in close and poison his main part to kill him, or swap out one of your mouths for a spike if you want to give him a good shanking, although you will need that second mouth, and a third, for the next boss!

if i may make a suggestion, maybe make the central connectors (the ones in front of the head) slightly weaker in front, and stagger the minion spawning a bit, in order to give the player enough time to chew through the first line of defence before the minions spawn. then the boss has a chance to re-spawn some of the connecter armor while the players have to deal with the minions. also, maybe use the connectors from a different species in front of the head? like buginis? while i can understand the desire to make this dark souls level tough, after the 16th. time getting torn apart by minions while the boss watches on is incredibly frustrating. I assume the nerve bundle regen factor stacks, and that boss has allot of those, making any progress negligible. at least with a frailer armor on the core you have more of a chance to break through, but it just feels like it's a crap shoot, more than skill, to beat that boss. unless of course there's a particular strategy i just haven't thought of to kill it.

in my play-throughs i've focused on playing as buginis to avoid getting in close and using the flak thrower with overlapping arcs to shred the first two bosses, and i got agonizingly close to beating this boss with that strategy before the minions dragged me back kicking and screaming. next go-round i'm planning on putting flack throwers radiating outward to damage minion assailants.

Also, how do you make those awesome creatures? is there a more open mode after you beat the third boss or something?

also i realize the 2nd skeleton dude (the one that doesnt have the nerve bundle part) is actually in the game gallery's second screen cap, although it's not the clearest.The head shape on this last guy ^

is giving me trouble, that raised brow makes him look angry. I'll need to get good to draw the crab looking guy. Also i messed up the skeletal guy's connector (not leech, the one o've called osteod

thanks for sharing! yeah, the tan-blue guy image i have is older. i also found an old concept art for adena, still pretty modern though. i actually used allot of youtube thumbnail images to recreate the the other two species im missing, the army green/orange horseshoe crab style guy and the bone species that isn't leech as i've been calling him (the leech boss is giving me grief, currently)

thanks for posting those! i'll definitely revise my current reference drawings thanks to these. gimme a minute and i'll post the old ref sheet i drew up. I know non-leech bony guy's mouth is wrong as well as one of leech's parts.

something else that would be cool would be the ability to have a multiplayer mode where the players were bundled onto the same sipho and had to work together to build a powerful colony, maybe each controlls a different type of part (mover and combat parts, mostly. Probably wouldn't be fun to play as mouth zooids unless there was some kind of active play involved). It would be allot more like playing as a colony organism.

hey can somebody post images of the species after purple guy, with one each of their parts? I wanna draw them and need references on the parts to help.

I know they are not the best i took them with my phone camera. I cant seem to get past boney-boss for all his minion spam f***ery. I dont need the blue-tan guy because i found this image:

If you could do thait it'd be awesome thanks!

did anybody find a fix for the blacked-out screen for downloaded linux version? i really want to play the not-in-browser version! if anybody knows could you reply a step-by-step to this comment plz?

finally beat 2nd boss! It took a combo of poison belching feeders, and a pair of nerve fibers! Also i see i was mistaken about how many of a given part you can have.

one more thing, allowing the palyer to keep more than two new gained parts, but limiting them to two per level, would allow for a level of tactical thought that would be interesting. To facilitate this it would be good to have an in-between loadout menu, in which you have the full catalog of parts you've collected, but you can only take 2 of any given part type into the next level to build with (like how it is set up now, but you chose from what you have). Another good idea would be to have a suggestion marker on parts the player would want to have, based on the upcoming boss. You don't have to go into detail as to why the part is reccomended, just have a little iconover and to the right of the suggested part, like an arrow or claw mark. I understand though that with the game as far along as it is this kind of feature may be difficult to implement.

Hi! Love the game, i've been playing for a couple days (it's actually the reason i made an account here on site!)

So first suggestion, i think a creature gallery would be really cool, the designs for your game are just awesome and i would love to just look at the different parts of the zooids, maybe even adding an in game camera so that people can share images of ther builds without having to use their computer screen cap  function while avoiding enemy sipho guys. Maybe bind it to an out of the way key like C, at first. It would be cool to look at a player gallery of different siphonophore creatures.

My second suggestion would be a sand-box, "test" mode, kind of like a larger, multi area version of the species select screen. The reason for having this would be to get a good understanding of the movement mechanics as you add mover parts and more bulk, as well as maneuvering through spiky rocks. It would give you infinite energy to build up the zooid so you could play around with configurations, and maybe allow for a selection of enemy arrangements to test combat part configurations. It would have been good to know, for example, that if i arrange spikes on an intersecting path, that they would short each other out as though they had hit a rock wall.

My last suggestion would be to nerf the second boss a touch. I dont know if it's as strong as it is because this is alpha or because you want to limit play until you guys can make a finished game and charge for more gradual skill level play, but the second, purple boss with the poison mines and the array of flak throwers is kind of super difficult, because even with perfect timing on the player's part it manages to shove the player around effprtlessly, move them into position and then blast them into the stone age, assuming they can get past the purple poison mines. The only way i was even able to get close to beating that boss is using flak throwers myself to blast away the mines, only to get shredded by a wall of flak throwers myself. To remedy this, i would actually just cut the number of combat parts that boss has in half, and bunch up it's mid section in order to maintain it's defense of it's head part. It wouldn't completely remove that boss's combat power but it would allow the player to have a better chance to get in there and have a chance to hit it in a meaningful way. Another option is to choose one weapon or the other and replace the one not chosen with the chosen combat part, and then knock a third of the parts off and spread those parts on the boss to keep it from just being instant death. The players will still get pushed around allot because the thing will still have obscene mass, but if the player carefully maneuvers they would be able to suceed and it wouldn't feel like such a screw-job. I haven't even seen the other bosses so i don't know if they get even more over powered, but judging from the fact that on of the threads here are "screw the third boss"...

On an aside, I'm still trying to fix my downloaded version and have been playing in-browser for the last couple days. I know the problem (it's mentioned in the bug section by another user, black screen but the menus work and are visible, some part of code is getting deleted instead of integrated, i just need to figure out how to access it.) and i'll see if i cant fix it on my own, but it would be nice if an update could fix that problem so a player didn't have to.

The game looks great though, i really dig the way it looks and plays! The concept is super cool too, i like the whole idea of playing as a colony organism. Your doing great, don't give up on improving!