itch.io

Unless specifically noted game updates should not break save files. However, a game version update will make your save out of date.

Editing your Save.bum file to change the SaveVersion line (the second line of the save file) to the currently installed version of Steam Marines 2 should allow the game to load the file correctly, for example SaveVersion v0.7.0a to SaveVersion v0.7.1a

The Save.bum file, as well as other config files, can be located at the following locations:

Windows: "\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Worthless Bums\Steam Marines 2\"

Mac: "~/Library/Application Support/Worthless Bums/Steam Marines 2/"

Linux: "~/home/<User>/.config/Worthless Bums/Steam Marines 2/"

v0.8.3.4a Changelog (will break old save files)

• Post-game: The player can now jump to random systems from the space map screen and continue playing with their assembled squad of marines. This option will only unlock once you have successfully taken back the Space Station. Known bugs: the game currently does not track the specific level type of these generated worlds, so a save/load cycle will randomly regenerate. Also this means the tileset will not always match the generated world.
• Traits: Randomized traits have been added to marines for flavor and gameplay effects. They can be viewed on the squad roster screen as well as listed on the marine tooltips in the tactical field scene. You can re-roll traits at no cost on the Commander Creation screen, but other starting marines and those you recruit playing the game will come with randomized traits. Some traits exist simply for flavor, or generate new pools of dialogue for marines upon taking certain actions or undergoind certain events. Others will have small, but not game-breaking, effects on gameplay.
• The post-game and traits have been added as part of integrated systems regarding the ship hangar in the future to extend playtime with squads the players really like.
• The Commander Creator screen from the main menu will now automatically fill all name fields in from the randomized pools when first initialized. Sorry, I don't know why it just never did that for so long.
• Minor tweaks to the corrupt save file detector so false flags don't get thrown. Hopefully you will never encounter it. Some of you like to edit your games to do weird stuff. You know who you are.
• Streamlined sections of UI, particularly pertaining to marine tooltips and the commendations section of marine info on the squad screen.
• Added new dialogue emotes.
• Optimized marine tool tips on tactical scene because why are we always messing with so many strings.
• Bugfix: Nullcheck for when players spam targets while spamming cycling through marines so the UI doesn't destroy itself.
• Bugfix: Disabled certain main menu screen effects that might lag lower end computers. No one pays attention to that stuff anyway.
• Bugfix: Grenadier marines can no longer crash the game sometimes when killing themselves and a fellow marine in one action.
• Bugfix: Shader errors that could crash certain gpus.
• Bugfix: Commander marine shield effect not always displaying correctly on... integrated Intel graphics.
• Bugfix: Potential infinite loop when loading into some levels.
• Bugfix: Potential crash when trying to save to main menu from the ship interior scene.
• Bugfix: Certain UI elements resized to accommodate potential overflow.

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steammarines

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steam-marines-2

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steammarines

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steam-marines-2

Thanks for the bug report! Got a similar one a while ago and have been trying to chase it down, this might help me narrow down some possibilities.

Thanks for the report I'll look into this.

Hi, Keron.

no overwatch/guarding system like in the first Steam Marines, so if an enemy was spotted around a corner with not quite enough action points to reach and deal damage to it on any significant level, there is nothing you could do but flee or sit still, and maybe guard if you have four APs left.

SM2 is designed quite a bit differently from SM1, which is why there is no Guard mode similar to the first game. Guard mode confers a defensive bonus in SM2 instead because of how marine skills, the levels generated, and how enemies will approach the player differ from the first game.

no way I could see to turn your soldiers without taking a step forward, so you literally can't turn them around to face the other way if you have two APs left.

nothing that told you that reloading is done automatically between turns.

I'm not precisely sure what this means but marines don't reload their weapons. There are enemies that will have random events that can include them taking the turn off to reload their weapons, though.

Marines' inability to shoot an enemy is the exact same set of speech bubbles, regardless of whether they are out of ammo or whether the enemy is out of range, so you could never actually tell how far their range is.

I'll need to double check this but this shouldn't happen because only older versions of SM2 prevented marines from firing when the ammo counter hits 0, or you don't have enough ammo to fire that marine's particular weapon. In later versions having low ammo simply confers a hit chance penalty. It could be that there is an out of ammo message in a wrong dialogue pool, but it shouldn't show in a dialogue popup since there are no dialogue popups for enemies you can't actually target. I could be misunderstanding your comment.

no list of keyboard shortcuts anywhere, whether in the game, a manual, or on the websiite

From the main menu: Setup > Keybinding. A lot of tooltips also have keybinds in them. If you're turning off the overlays then you won't see them.

"Toggle Overlays" keeps reenabling itself after every turn, even if you turned them off due to visibility hindrance.

I thought I killed this bug but maybe I didn't. I'll look into it again.

Right-clicking on tiles and doors is finicky and inconsistent with the mouse.

I don't think I've had reports of hotspot issues but for floor tiles specifically they will change color when the cursor is detected over them. If overlays are on you will also see tooltips for floor tiles and doors that will indicate if you can actually interact with them at that cursor position.

Could you send your output_log.txt file to yjseow@worthlessbums.com, it should be located here:

"\Users\<User>\AppData\LocalLow\Worthless Bums\Steam Marines 2\output_log.txt"

In Windows save files are located in "\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Worthless Bums\Steam Marines 2\"

The save file validator should have automatically reloaded your last backup and overwritten the offending file. I'll look into the popup blocking the main menu buttons.

Ahhh currently not. I'll see what I can do.

(Edit: Game updated - https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steam-marines-2/devlog/153987/steam-marines-v0831a... )

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steammarines

https://worthlessbums.itch.io/steam-marines-2

Oh, are you referring to the door tooltips? Is your Commander marine Support class? I thought you were referring to floor tiles and space strikes when controlling the Commander.

There's currently no way to visually see how far marines can fire. I'm not saying this won't be implemented, but there are a few edge cases where this might not be desirable, like if firing range exceeds sight range - complicated because these two are measured differently. I'll think on this, though, thanks for bringing it up.

As a general sort of notion marine class weapons have ranges that approximate their relative real life counterparts, e.g. shotguns will have less range than long rifles.

Hey, Liam.

Yeah that's a known issue and it comes up a bit with the nested/modal UI menus. I'm working on a systemic fix for that, it's unfortunately not as easy as it might seem on its face.

I haven't been able to reproduce the overlays coming back up after switching units - I'll take a closer look. This is on the Linux build, right?

Do you mean the tile tooltip, specifically for the Commander marine? It is a bit large. I might shunt it into a corner or screen edge, or make it toggleable like the overlays.

All units do have a sight range that can exceed their maximum targeting range and that's intended.

When an enemy is already targeted, the rotate camera hotkeys (Q and E by default) switch between subtargets.

Battery charging station concept art by Daniel Allen.

Honestly not sure! My instinct is that it will suffer from the problems you mention, but also I've never liked subtitles - I think they give the impression of something lesser. I feel like that might exacerbate the issue since if you're turned off by a 3, you're almost certainly going to be turned off by an X:Y.

It probably doesn't help that the subtitles that come to my mind do the opposite of splitting from a main series, instead denoting some sort of continuance, like Mount & Blade: Warband, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within. The "lesser" feel is much reduced with these because they're both established, well-known franchises.

But the game is still in pre-production so who knows. Could go in any direction as we move along xD If I get flooded with "do I have to play SM1&2 to enjoy this?" questions, yeah, that would probably encourage me to do something differently.

Hello, everyone.

It is with a heavy heart that I've decided to pull Steam Marines 2 support for MacOS moving forward. I'd like to take the time to explain my thoughts.

What's Mac to me?

I grew up as a Mac kid. My earliest memories were of playing games on my dad's Mac Classic, stuff like Crystal Quest, The Ancient Art of War, Dark Castle.

I used Macs pretty much all the way through high school. The Spiderweb software games like the Exile series, Escape Velocity, the Marathon trilogy, and Blizzard games. Blizzard holds a special place in my heart since they always released Mac versions of their games.

This is why I've supported Mac through all of my games: Ignition Impulse, Steam Marines 1, and up until now Steam Marines 2. I also had plans to support Mac for Steam Marines 3 which is still in pre-production:

Mac support has never been a good financial bet (for me and most indies) and neither has Linux: I've talked about this openly on Twitter, which then got picked up by GamingOnLinux (link to my first comment in a series on that article).

What's Changed?

Starting in 10.15 Apple will require notarization for all software by default.

Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way right now: Is this a particularly onerous condition to continuing to support Mac, from any of a time, effort, or money aspect? No. Is it extra money and work? Yes. I've gone through (most) of the process to see what it entails.

The problem is that Apple has been moving toward a vision of controlling all software on MacOS for years now. I don't need to call Microsoft for permission to release Windows software. I don't have to email Linus for his blessing to release software for any Linux distribution. I now have to pay an annual fee to Apple to be able to properly deploy software on their platform, jump through several hoops every single time I issue a build, I have absolutely no control or voice about what they decide to notarize or not, and their behavior does not instill any confidence in me that this is not going to get even worse in the future.

At the core this is not about me having to jump through hoops. I've jumped through a lot of hoops over the last decade making and selling games, and if i can understand and commiserate with the reasons why someone is making me do A Thing, and it's not going to sink me, I feel that I can be reasonable about most things.

I am now in the position of being near my Steam Marines 2 launch window on Steam Early Access and I literally do not know if something might roadblock me in the future. What happens if I go ahead and release with Mac support and Apple does something that is actually onerous?

Absolutely no offense to Itch, I love this platform and wish it nothing but the best of luck, but the number of times people have downloaded the Mac build of Steam Marines 2 on here is SIX (6). Not owners - this is six downloads of any of the Mac builds I've pushed so far.

What Happens Now?

I'm changing the information on the Steam and Itch pages of Steam Marines 2 to indicate that I am only supporting Windows and Linux. 

If you have purchased Steam Marines 2 on or prior to the date of this post because you wished to play on Mac, or really any other reason - you don't like me, you don't like this post, you don't like my reasoning, you don't like my face, please feel free to contact me at yjseow@worthlessbums.com for a refund. As far as I know you can also contact Itch support to initiate some sort of refund process but I would be happy to personally refund your money, including any extra tip if you graciously had tipped me at the point of purchase, and you can maintain your purchase through Itch in the event you wish to continue playing on Windows or Linux.

I won't completely rule out Mac builds for Steam Marines 2 or 3 or my other games in the future, but this would be contingent on Apple changing course. Should I reverse my stance on Mac support, I will not require anyone to repurchase Steam Marines 2 if you received a refund.

Thanks for reading,

Bums

Rifle/pneumatic fist melee animation testing by Daniel Allen.

Hello, all.

If you've been wondering what I've been up to, this is it: getting Steam Marines 2 ready for Steam Early Access.

To go over the more likely questions:

1) If you purchase on Itch you will receive a Steam key.

2) Itch and Steam will both receive the same game updates.

3) Steam Marines 2 has not had a discount to date, and it's not likely to get one anytime soon.

4) It will continue to be for Windows, Mac, and Linux. No plans for any other platforms at this time.

I am told that Steam wishlisting is valuable to gain visibility via the Steam algorithm so if you do wish to support me please wishlist it over there!

If you have any questions please feel free to ask them below!

Bums

Apartment detailing by Daniel Allen:

Playing with light and particle effects and shaders in the horror/geomorph sections:

Working on the horror/derelict spaceship sections of the game.

Roughing out apartments for the Hub, by Daniel Allen.

Working on overhauling the tactical field UI and adding more marine skills. Don't worry, not abandoned :P

Early human face creation work by Edward del Villar.

Human hub/starting area.

UI and geomorph work by Daniel Allen.

Thanks for the report. I haven't seen this on my Ubuntu machine, but I'll try and dig up an old laptop this weekend and install Mint and see if I run into any new issues.

Probably another week or two: I ran into some issues with the new targeting UI that took more time to hammer out than anticipated.

Hi, Dploorrt.

I'll try and go through your list and give you some answers and the general direction SM2 is going in.

There should be an option to downsize the UI in the settings. The galaxy map is implemented the way it is to accommadate specific gameplay features that are not yet implemented.

You can customize most of the marines that is not the Commander/player, excluding stats like Aggression. You can still change the name, portrait, and gear of each marine (according to their class).

You have a few questions about the gameplay that make me unsure how to answer you. You can play 95% of the game purely with the mouse, I believe the only functionalities that requires the keyboard is entering marine names, panning the camera, and issuing Delhi space strikes. Panning the camera can mostly be accomplished via cycling between marines and the camera orbit buttons on the bottom right, although that's clearly not the exact same functionality.

Three active skills is a game design constraint because there are other options each marine has that they didn't have in SM1, specifically door opening triggers and a larger pool of abilities each marine can acquire. Between class weapon effects, head/body targeting, and the potential pool of abilities, there are far more options a SM2 marine has than a SM1 marine did.

Quite a few people have expressed a desire for the full squad portrait on the tactical field and is something I am reworking at the moment.

---

I am not sure if there is an issue with your download/install, because there are quite a few tooltips implemented, including how to open doors (of you mouse over them), so possibly you should reinstall the game?

Probably a week or two, currently hammering out a new targeting UI.

Hi, Tchey.

Thanks for all the feedback! I don't think I can address all of that individually, but I will speak about some of them more specifically, and I'd like to make a few comments on the overall design of the game to inform that.

Steam Marines 2 is intended to be a permadeath game. The systems are balanced around the player not reloading saves just because something goes wrong. This is unlikely to change.

I agree the user interface needs a lot of work: it's my main focus at the moment! A note: by default the action cam should be enabled, not sure why yours was not, but it does make the (default) targeting much more clear. I'm not sure why the tooltip is showing under your icons, or why the door tooltip is displaying an incorrect keybind - I'll look into that.

There are issues with stacking unit portraits on the tactical field the way you have depicted, specifically health, armor, and attack values are displayed as pips and can, as the game progresses, get large which means they run more to the right and would overlap the other portraits. I could stack them vertically (this is what I did in Steam Marines 1) but my main issue was that many players complained because 1) they found duplicated information on screen, and 2) they found themselves looking between the portraits and tactical field double checking.

Creating a full squad at the start of the game was something I wrestled with in Steam Marines 1 as well. The main problems were that you could make the early game pretty degenerate, and this also tended to flood new players with too much information.

I'm not telling this to suggest you're wrong - a lot of this will be subjective from player to player. I'm just supplying my reasoning and past experience trying other things :P

I am very glad you gave me so much feedback about your user interface/experience impressions and I will definitely take that into account moving forward!

This should be resolved: in the Itch app right click Steam Marines 2 and select check for updates and it should install the correct build now.

It seems that Itch believes the Mac build is the Linux build. I'll see what's going on but you may wish to try manually downloading the Linux build for now, sorry about that.

There should be an SM2.x86 and SM2.x86_64, both runnable. I did just update all Win/Mac/Lin builds so possibly there was a hiccup just now?

I'll be sure to push full camera rebindings soon!

Is it continually hanging on black screen? I assume you got past at least once to reach the tactical field camera controls.

Ah, most keybinds should be in Setup > Keybindings, but yes, not all camera controls are in yet - they're on the todo list!

Every purchase of Steam Marines 2 on Itch.io will come with one Steam key when the game releases on Steam.

Testing some AI pathfinding on procedurally generated geomorphs, navmesh baking at runtime, etc etc.

Unless specifically noted game updates should not break save files. However, a game version update will make your save out of date.

Editing your Save.bum file to change the SaveVersion line (the second line of the save file) to the currently installed version of Steam Marines 2 should allow the game to load the file correctly, for example SaveVersion v0.7.0a to SaveVersion v0.7.1a

The Save.bum file, as well as other config files, can be located at the following locations:

Windows: "\Users\<User>\AppData\Roaming\Worthless Bums\Steam Marines 2\"

Mac: "~/Library/Application Support/Worthless Bums/Steam Marines 2/"

Lin: "~/home/<User>/.config/Worthless Bums/Steam Marines 2/"

v0.8.3.3a Changelog

• Added framework for the ship hangar (accessible via the ship interior/roster screen). Currently no gameplay effects hooked up yet, will be forthcoming in a future patch. That patch will most likely not be backwards save-compatible.
• Added a new difficulty mode: Death. Renamed/described other difficulty modes to better communicate the relative difficulty of each.
• Implemented more marines abilities and added them to the random pool, such as the Torberry Reserve, Robo Lube, Nanite Slurry, and Jozhee's Handbook.
• Rebalanced marine promotion tree abilities to account for the newer Death difficulty mode, the majority being buffs.
• The tactical field now has a toggle tooltips button on the right side of the screen.
• Bugfix: Atomport should not correctly work with all camera modes.
• Bugfix: Marines should no longer be able to get duplicate serial numbers and therefore relationships will not be mixed up.
• Bugfix: Some difficulty settings not correctly instantiating on new campaign.
• Bugfix: Incorrect game mode loading if the user set an out of bounds game mode in the save file.
• Bugfix: Some marine promotion description typos.
• Bugfix: Marines losing their heads in the roster screen if you cycled through the marines too quickly or recruited too many marines too quickly.
• Bugfix: Memory leak that could occur over long play sessions.

v0.8.3.2a Changelog

• More verbose developer console output on code hot paths for easier release build debugging. Player in-game accessible with the tilde (~) key.
•  Added guardrails for trying to recruit too many marines too fast from the ship interior scene.
• The corrupt save file detector now checks if the backup has already  been tried before (compares the files to see if they're the same) and aborts and renames both files if so. It will only keep the latest set of files flagged this way, any future catches overwrite these files.
• Bugfix: Fixed an internal naming error confusing armorCallsign and armorIndex in SaveManager tool checker which could also produce inaccurate debug info in log and console.
• Bugfix: Preloading the Universe scene fshould no longer overwrite marine weapons/armor with default Commander class values.
• Bugfix: Armor prefab lists should load faster in the tactical field and on the marine roster scenes.
• Bugfix: TacticalFieldInit save file variable could crash the game when conflicting with the corrupt save mechanism to load different scenes at the same time.
• Bugfix: Verbose errors to developer console even with method calls with error tracing off.
• Bugfix: Level not always correctly resetting to 0 upon completing a planet/spaceship location.
• Bugfix: Fixed node tooltip not always being default toggled on at level load.
• Bugfix: The last recruited marine should now be selected after recruiting a new marine on the ship roster screen.
• Bugfix: MissionManager not always initializing save game file path on time causing a cascading series of delays for loading to/from the Galaxy map.
• Bugfix: Fixed invalid save + backup code path to delete invalid marked files before copying over on certain versions of Windows.
• Bugfix: UI clipping issues with various smaller/arbitrary resolutions (should have no effect if you're running at 1280x720 or higher).
• Bugfix: Various arbitrary widescreen UI issues on the tactical field.

v0.8.3.1a Changelog

This patch will invalidate the gameplay configuration file version so options for the action camera, enemy camera tracking, etc will be reverted to default values on game launch. But this update should be save game compatible.

• Added joystick enabling/disabling via gameplay configuration tab in the main menu. Steam Marines 2 does not have full controller support, and this targets joystick support for camera control in the tactical field and ship control movements in the galaxy/universe view.
• Bugfix: Potential crash on new tactical level when multiple marines might spawn and trigger the same pickup item

v0.8.2a:

• Increased chance to find tier 2 weapons in chests.
• Decreased chance to find tier 3 weapons in chests.
• More portraits.
• Player control returns faster at the start of turn after a rapid series of enemy attacks.
• Camera tracks targets more smoothly in some situations.
• Adjusted some tile node + highlight colors for better legibility.
• Made some button sound effects consistent with similar buttons.
• Bugfix: Galaxy screen not always showing the correct number of credits.
• Bugfix: Various potential false flags in the save game validator.
• Bugfix: Transparent/see-through shader not always rendering correctly on some enemy units with some geometry.
• Bugfix: Planet achievements might have been slow to trigger.

v0.8.1a Changelog

• Cleaner Steam API initialization on main menu.
• More performant file i/o on main menu when checking if a save file exists and is valid.
• Capped Load game button state checking to a finite amount of times.
• Auto-save in the tactical field happens faster.
• Action bar panel now does not block raycats from the cursor.
• Action bar skill icons do not block cursor raycats, only clicks from the mouse.
• Bugfix: Race condition when loading between galaxy and ship views that might change credits.
• Bugfix: Action bar panel not always reappearing after the enemy turn.
• Bugfix: Marine info panels on the side on on top of units now always refresh on new level load.
• Bugfix: Fixed floating black icons on marine unit tooltips when no promotions have been taken.
• Bugfix: Fixed overlays sometimes toggling back on after switching marines.

v0.8.0a Changelog

• Finished adding all marine class talent icons to the game.
• Added talent icons and text descriptions to unit tooltips in the tactical field.
• Torgon Snipers might be sneakier when taking turns without attacking.
• Miscellaneous UI/UX tweaks. Alignment and button outline anti-aliasing issues resolved.
• Performance: Decreased tooltip polling frequency. Wasn't necessary even with the new tooltip icons.
• Performance: Cached certain point-to-point routes for more efficient enemy pathfinding.
• Bugfix: Taking a class talent had a missing </color> tag in the message text.
• Bugfix: Erroneous detection of save file corruption which was not actually corrupted. Save file integrity good, but would force the player back to the main menu after completing a level.
• Bugfix: Penetrator and Brain Drain talent icons now correctly display in the promotions panel of the ship roster view.
• Bugfix: Linux shader bugs fixed. Zero outstanding Linux shader bugs. Amazing.

v0.7.9a Changelog

• Added side panels for the entire marine squad on the upper left side of the screen.
• Ability to change shoulder chasing camera position in the tactical field.
• Added more marine portraits.
• Added more marine class talent icons.
• Added more developer console commands, use "help" to bring up a short list.
• Added random turn events with a 30% chance to trigger at the start of the player turn.
• Backup save files will now use the .bumbackup extension rather than the .bum extension.
• Added visual effects to some of the marine skills.
• Move keybind can now be used to directly target/attack enemies on the tactical field.
• Level scores and other data added to debriefing screen.
• Decreased scaled size of unit info panels on the tactical field.
• Added more marine dialogue/barks.
• Hard and Brutal game modes now have efficient pathing AI on melee enemies.
• Bugfix: Nasty potential file i/o bug in the Save Manager.
• Bugfix: Sanitized all given names, surnames, and callsigns loaded from external files.
• Bugfix: Enemy armor not always saving/loading from file correctly.
• Bugfix: Run score file sometimes deleting prior to death screen, resulting in incorrect run scores being displayed (high scores unaffected).
• Performance: Various Mac and Linux shader improvements.

v0.7.8a Changelog

• Talent trees for each of the five marine classes.
• Game modes for difficulty options.
• More marine portraits.
• Added a confirmation menu for ordering a ship strafe.
• Changed some planet descriptions to have more consistent language.
• Various performance changes for Mac and Linux and low end Windows machines.
• Various gameplay progression andbalance tweaks due to the new game modes.
• Added an actually helpful "help" command to the developer console; most commands are now exposed to players in release builds.
• Changed Grenadier door opening trigger to +1 Attack for that Grenadier marine only.
• Changed Engineer door opening trigger to +1 Armor to all marines.
• Changed Guard mode to mitigate all incoming damage by 1 and no longer floors at 1 damage.
• Bugfix: Fixed a possible crash in the ship interior when trying to recruit a marine with credits.

v0.7.7a Changelog

• Implemented Boose Bomb ability: adds an additional space strike (if under max!)
• Implemented Leadership Whitepaper ability: grants +1 Empathy.
• Implemented Ma Peis Black Hole ability: a miniature black hole that devours units near it.
• Implemented Ammaal's Petal ability: has a mysterious effect.
• Implemented Marine Beacon ability: warps in a friendly marine unit if the roster is not full (current max of 6).
• Decreased Atomport skill cost from 5 Action to 4 Action.
• All starting skills for all marine classes are now 4 or less Action to use to improve the overall quality of abilities marines start with. Some abilities may still require 1 or more Attack.
• Added more marine lines of dialogue/barks.
• Bugfix: Ripsaw animations not always firing.
• Bugfix: Grenadier splash damage not always triggering when the primary target dies.
• Bugfix: Overlays not persisting correctly through marine attack states.
• Bugfix: Player/enemy turn text not always showing during the start of turns.
• Bugfix: Prevents a marine moving to a floor tile when in an angled camera orbit and a door node partially obscures that floor tile.
• Bugfix: Tooltip for Armor Plating skill says increases Armor by 1 even though it actually increases by 2.

v0.7.6a Changelog

• Player run scores now implemented, accessible via the main menu.
• Scores are now displayed between each level, and when the player loses and wins the game.
• Unit Info Panels will now obscure game world objects less, although there is no "smart" positioning.
• Unit Info Panels will now temporarily toggle off when entering targeting mode.
• Unit Info Panels will now retain the last mode the player manually set it to when leaving targeting mode.
• Improved performance of tile nodes, unit info panels, and tooltips for low end machines and Mac.
• Changed the "AlphaSquad" developer console command to also grant action and attack to all marines.
• Updated game win message with state of the game and score information.
• Bugfix: Ripsaw tooltips will now properly show when the cursor is moused over them on the tactical field.
• Bugfix: Player/Enemy end turn messages not always appearing in some cases.
• Bugfix: Action panel buttons should now always re-appear after the end of an enemy turn.
• Bugfix: Some event log messages were appearing out of order from the actual events.
• Bugfix: Engineer Tier 2 Helmet not always displaying correctly in the squad manager (stats were applied correctly).

v0.7.5a Changelog

• Unit info panels are now on by default.
• Overlay toggle button added to tactical field.
• New tactical field UI.
• Added new marine attack icons distinct per class.
• New resource icons.
• Fog of war is now less CPU intensive.
• Performance tweaks for low end machines and Mac users.
• Bugfix: Fixed Tier 2 Grenadier armor arms not always spawning in correct position until the marine moves.
• Bugfix: Fixed overlapping targeting UI elements on escape menu.
• Bugfix: Fixed possibly stutter until game restart on Linux when using grenades too quickly.
• Bugfix: Color coordinated side panel resource text colors and overlays.
• Bugfix: Armor rating updating more timely in the UI when using armor boosting skills.
• Bugfix: Fixed occasional shotgun sfx delay when a Leader class marine is firing into closely packed enemies.

v0.7.4a

• Implemented camera pan movement controls to setup > Keybindings.
• Fixed various UI elements possibly blocking other elements in certain resolutions.

v0.7.3a

• Exposed more developer console debug tools to players (documentation forthcoming).
• Added a message to screen when the game is saving in the combat scene.
• Added another tier of marine weapons that can be found in treasure chests.
• Added enemy unit camera tracking, enabled/disabled in Settings > Gameplay.
• Added more information to the marine targeting panel, such as marine class effects.
• Added more information and color coded enemy unit tooltips.
• Certain explanation text clarified, e.g. marine tooltip accuracy now specifies base accuracy.
• Changed the way certain sound effects were played so they were not dependent on player camera distance.
• Fog of war slightly tweaked to show doors more clearly when marines are in hallways with doors just within sight range.
• Reduced delay in UI scaling when running certain hardware setups and resolutions when first loading the tactical scene.
• Various performance tweaks for low to high end machines.
• Bugfix: Treasure chests and alien merchants sometimes spawning at incorrect height positions.
• Bugfix: Alien merchant colliders sometimes being too large and triggering off marines on far away tiles.
• Bugfix: Skill icons 4, 5, and 6 ordered correctly from left to right instead of right to left.
• Bugfix: Marine dialogue not always firing on picking up items.
• Bugfix: Linux and Mac builds should have resolution being saved correctly to file for wide screen windowed resolutions.

v0.7.2a

• Linux/Ubuntu 14.04 LTS support.
• The environment/move keybinds have been renamed to select/interact to clarify what those actually do. Additionally opening doors has been moved into the interact keybinding both for correctness and to prevent players from accidentally deselecting their marine(s).
• New event log in tactical field.
• Randomize names button in Commander creation screen.
• New targeting panel UI shader.
• Targeting panel UI bottom now clamps lower to prevent blocking target sight.
• Added armor rating to selected unit panel resource lines.
• Added the gameplay option UI Constant Size toggle.
• Added queuing system to unit dialogue boxes so getting spammed with dialogue will not almost instantly hide previous recent dialogue.
• Lowered the average damage per attack of enemy units across the board. Some units have had accuracy or crit values increased to compensate.
• Bugfix: Enemy units would not reset to idle animations after certain attack situations.
• Bugfix: Single click would sometimes open a door and move the marine onto the new floor space.
• Bugfix: Sometimes marine temporary attack effects would not wear off after attacking.
• Bugfix: Brainien firing through multiple walls, typically targeting the marine Commander.
• Bugfix: Some enemy melee attacks sometimes playing flamethrower sound effects.

v0.7.1a

• Fixed Guard  tooltip to correctly say the skill requires 4 Action.
• Renamed some grenade skills to bombs to better reflect their in-game use.

Hi, Deab.

Thanks for the feedback! I agree the UI/UX needs work and the Commander creation screen is far from ideal. I'll see what I can do about escape closing top level menus and adding some sort of randomized default names for the Commander.

Regarding grenades: One of the reasons I made them drop at the marine location instead of being thrown is I wanted more emphasis on marine positioning. I would like more feedback about this from other players, but generally realism is not a reason I find particularly persuasive, although if everyone is constantly confused by this I would take that as a sign!

The difficulty of each planet/derelict ship is not perfectly balanced. Each level has a set pool of enemies that can potentially be spawned (e.g. robot enemies tend to appear on robot ships, alien enemies tend to appear on alien ships), and so there is variance there. While it's not immediately clear to new players what those pools are, part of the information given is what armor upgrades are given at each planet. I felt that this coupled with random classes for your starting marine squad might help influence players.

The damage of ranged enemies could be lowered somewhat. As there are no difficulty levels/options in SM2 as of right now I was trying to reach a moderate level of difficulty but I probably missed that on my first shot. I am getting gameplay analytics so I'll be adjusting based on what I see!

Yes, the fog of war may be a bit overbearing on some wall/door sections, I'll take a look at that. I have plans to adjust bloom and such in a future update so players can decide on how much visual eye candy they want.

May I ask what platform (Win/Mac) and version you're on? First I've heard of the exit button not working!

Ah yes, the very first alpha bug report: the Guard skill has an incorrect tooltip stating it needs 1 Action instead of the actual requirement: 4 Action.