Thanks for playing!
Sorry for sub-par browser playing experience. We highly recommend playing downloaded versions. We now also will be including Linux and OS X versions, so everyone can enjoy the game.
We are aware of difficulty step in first level and we'll even it out in future builds. With recent versions it has slightly increased as we don't give that much food drops to slow the player down in levels. Little guys are just too fast for player to catch and snappy ones are too deadly.
Hi! That's really odd, could you tell us what were you doing before the issue? Were you in a normal level or in an arena with a single boss enemy? Do you remember how the enemies looked/which level was it? Did this happen after entering a whirlpool? Did this happen after you pressed "continue"?
We've only ever had this issue with loading a previously saved game, but that should be fixed. We haven't seen anything like this on our end, so any further information would help us a bunch :)
Hi! We'd love to fix the crash, but we need a bit more information in order to understand why the crash is happening. What operating system are you running on? What are your specs? Did you extract the archive before trying to run the game? Are there any crash dump files in the folder where the game executable is? Every bit of information helps!
Hi, thank you for feedback!
Did you play in browser or through downloaded executable? We haven't done a major performance optimization pass, however we would like to identify where to look at in the future. In what place did fps drop happen? Maybe you have a screenshot? Also what are your GPU and CPU models?
Hi, thanks for playing!
And thanks for reporting the issue. How often does it happen for you? On what OS do you play the game? How good is your performance, does the game seem to run well? We've had similar issue when outlines of Zooids would scale up to infinity due to wrong delta time with dynamic timescale.
This game is AMAZING.
1 (and a half) suggestion(s), though:
I know that in reality, a Siphonophore's zooids are basically only individuals by concept, and don't actually do whatever they want, (or maybe I read the wikipedia page wrong... oops...) but maybe it would be interesting if, once the main-control-zooid-thingy was killed, the other, remaining zooids would still struggle and kinda fight back (e.g., the claw randomly snipping, jets propelling), and maybe, if enough zooids survive long enough and/or somehow collect enough nutrients/health-orbs, a controller-zooid could even regrow?
And maybe it would look a bit nicer if, on the growth-mode tutorial, instead of always showing the "Shelly" structure zooid, it showed the currently selected parasite's control-zooid? (In the screenshot below, not sure if you can see it, but the parasite breed is Advena )
Love the GUI layout update btw, you're a legend 👍
sorry for making this unnecessarily long .__.
Hey, awesome post, thanks for playing our game!
Dead zooids could use some twitchy animations or struggle for a little bit, I think that would look cool, but they need to look dead, otherwise it might get confusing. We haven't planned giving the ability to regrow the main zooid, so it would require effort that is better spend on other things. But this idea is really cool, I'll make sure we got it logged down.
Nice catch with dialog icon, thanks.
Hi, thanks for playing!
That's some good amount of honest feedback. Did that enemy spawning happen in other than first 3 levels? In first levels we spawn a little guy to give some goal to the player. In later levels, the max distance could have been too low. We plan to tweak enemy spawning in the future, currently it's still too random.
As for variety for Zooids, we wanted to start with 4 balanced Zooids for each Breed and we might have some drop-only variations of less balanced ones. Thanks for suggestions
Rest of the points are valid as well. Looking forward to hearing comments from you on future updates.
Hey, thank you for playing Sipho!
We are working on forced whirlpool improvements, both mechanically and visually, so they would feel like the world is crumbling down and everything gets sucked into them. As for Sea breed boss - it should be easier to deal with same breed. We'll look into how can we solve that.
Those bosses will require lots of polish. We try to release updates as soon as we feel like game has significantly improved. Each update requires some additional polish to keep it playable to our standard. Looking at Development Logs, it seems that monthly updates is most comfortable pace for us.
Edit: Added link to Development Log
well after killing the bone boss and spike boss(?) I went on for about 3 more levels until my game experienced a massive amounts of lag, nearly crashing before spawning me into one single spike ball in the middle of what it seemed to be nothing, all my zooids like overlapped each other on the spike too which probably caused all the lag, having all my zooids die at the same time.
Hi,
Could you contact us through one of these sites:
https://twitter.com/sipho_game
Dominas#6068 on Discord
Or by email: sipho@allpartsconnected.com
Itch doesn't have private message functionality, so that's why I'm writing here.
Hi!
Current public version is in kind of hard mode and 3rd boss comes relatively stronger than player. This will surely be balanced in future versions. We've also polished level ending - we are leaning towards letting player finish collecting things in level and only forcing whirlpools when there's nothing left.
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, thank you for taking such enormous interest in our game! We are happy and humbled by the thought you put in our game.
That's a nice fitting idea with creature gallery. We base the game on creativity and that would encourage it even more. This could also tie nicely with some kind of sandbox mode you've also mentioned. So far, our plan is to release the game with campaign mode only.
The game is still in development and only the first boss is mostly going to stay the same. The rest are going to be tweaked to follow the right difficulty curve. We occasionally change balance of the game, trying to find the right spot for pacing. For now, the game is in "Harder Mode" for earlier levels. We'd like to push that difficulty up to higher levels.
Multiplayer is a big topic and a big undertaking for us and the game. We didn't plan it initially as it would require to already have a substantial playerbase and more time to develop. We would like to release the game with solid base mechanics and singleplayer mode first. After that - we will have to decide if future of the game would be better with more singleplayer content or a multiplayer mode. We can guarantee that the game is coming out with a campaign mode as seen in the demo.
Once again thank you for ideas. We appreciate players telling us what they like and want in the game because it allows us to focus our attention on the right things. Cheers!
Hey, thanks a lot for playing and sticking around with us for so long!
To clarify on your proposal, the game would work like this: Player has an "inventory" of parts which can either have parts stored or grown. If part gets killed it becomes lost. So player doesn't have a universal resource to grow new parts, but parts themselves be a resource.
We've thought about this before and it's a pretty neat and hardcore idea. It would enforce "roguelikeness" of the game, but work against player being able to choose what to grow, as it would only be able to grow what's left in inventory. So it's roguelikeness vs creative freedom. I think Such gameplay would encourage "safe play" in which player tries to minimize the risk. We are already punishing player for losing Zooids, but we preserve the creation which automatically re-grows once there is enough nutrition. If game worked by proposed rules, we couldn't preserve player's Sipho design. One game I know that works similar way is Captain Forever. I personally felt reluctant to engage in fights that may result in losses as then I wouldn't be able to easily redesign my ship back to the way it was.
It could work as a separate game mode we could consider adding after release and I'll make a note of it. Thanks!
Hey, thank you for the feedback! In terms of adding puzzles and exploration - some things just wouldn't fit in the current style of the game, since it's based on replayability whereas puzzles are only interesting the first time you solve them and become tedious afterwards. Surely, something could be done in this regard, especially to improve exploration, but it's not as simple as it might first seem.
As for being able to influence the parts you receive, this is something that could be addressed once we have a little bit more parts. We don't want players to get the perfect build every time, we'd rather you guys and gals work with what you've got and make creative use of your current situation. When more zooids become available we could allow to slightly influence the RNG in one way or another, but not too much. There is also the idea of adding a sandbox mode where people could just go nuts with whatever designs they could think of. The non-linear hub idea is interesting, but it would require us to tailor all of the levels to scale according to the players' progress. If the levels stay the same, the challenge would become a bit of a grind, though it does have the benefit of allowing everyone to advance at their own pace.
We're working really hard to get Sipho ready for release and we hope that with time we can make the game bigger and better. Thank you again for all the feedback and ideas :)
I can't give you any timeline as we're not sure when that mode is going to be up the quality we want. Currently we are working hard to polish Early Access build. After November 13th, we will start experimenting with Aquarium mode. Creative mode itself should work easily, but we want to provide good UX for setting up various scenarios to play around with.
BRO WHAT THE HELL 13.99!!!! FOR MONEY YOUR CRAZY IF YOU THINK WE ARE BUYING YOUR GAME!!!!!!
Here are some thoughts on the last update and game in its current condition:
Overall power balance moves in the right direction, although you over-nerfed claws a bit and over-buffed spikes (or is that just my perception tricking me? Spikes seem to be the new "claws" now in terms of power, while claws are something players want to get rid of as soon as they get something else). But overall it's okay, we understand that balancing is tricky.
Energy leech and sniper zooids are perfectly functional and balanced now, but muck isn't. I won't complain that it slows you down just as it slows enemies down - it seems to be designed not for a chase but for a disengage. But perhaps it shouldn't slow down projectiles like launched thorns, spikes and the muck blobs themselves? Kinda weird that muck helps to keep distance, but at the same time makes your ranged attacks useless.
Jet movement zooid seems to be inferior to rattler or turbine, or does it actually have more forward speed than these two? Perhaps it needs more forward speed to stay unique but viable.
Poison attack seems to be inferior to poison mine due to similar effects but advanced mechanics of mines. To make them more unique, and equally viable I would advice to make poison's poison more... poisonous, in relation to poison mine, while giving a mine some instant impact damage and reduce it's poison damage. In other words, make mines more about explosion damage on impact with little poisoning and let poison spewers be best at poisoning.
Leech combat zooid is weirdly balanced. This one is tought, though, because it is currently too weak to play with (relatively low damage, I would better kill an enemy fast and eat their dead body to heal than leech them slowly, potentially taking damage in process); but it's also hard to play against due to automatic latching on your zooids and the abundance of enemies that have it. Leech isn't good enough to use it over some melee weapons , but buff it and enemies based on leech will become too dangerous. Perhaps making it cost less energy would allow players to use it effectively in multi-weapon melee builds while not affecting enemy difficulty.
Harpoon. This one is fun but perhaps it could be more effective if it didn't release it's grip so soon (or maybe it should hold onto enemy and drag it to you as long as you hold attack button?). Great idea with a tiny flaw that makes it less useful.
Now, speaking of levels... Have I said that they look fantastic, including new ones and the ones that were retextured? I think I had, but I can say it again. Although, progression speed seems a bit too fast, as I clear a level in a minute or so. Some of the later levels get cleared after 1 or 2 kills, so I only have a few moments to look at level art and map design (yes, I also noticed that maps look more detailed now).
I wonder if there will be more levels with different themes. I understand you are currently working on other stuff like aquarium and tuning game mechanics, so it's not gonna be any time soon, but I honestly was curious how Nodev Facility would look like. I imagined it to be a mechanical-themed level, which would feel fresh, but it seems you decided to scrap this idea for the time being. I also assume that drawing all the sprites takes a lot of time and effort.
Speaking of more levels, what about Advena Crown of Thorns boss? Was it cut because there are not enough levels to fit all the bosses? I only see it occasionally on free roam level...
PS: 
- can't argue with that, but why is there even a choice if it can only be fantastic? :D
Heya,
We are alive and kicking! We are preparing for Aquarium update launch on March 26th.
Awesome, I just tested it out!
So, to start with, the sound, music and visual effects overhaul is great. Everything now makes distinctive sound and visual effect, such as healing zooid's skill, speed pickup effect etc. That's a nice touch. As for the aquarium mode itself, it has a lot of potential both in testing out different zooid patterns and creating player's own level.
I've noticed a few very minor bugs so far. First, whenever I finish the level and push the DIVE button with my mouse to get to the next one, it always triggers whatever skill I have assigned for left mouse button. I expect mouse button not to trigger assigned skill when I push the DIVE button (or any interface buttons). Similar things also happen when I use aquarium redactor interface and place things with my mouse - after I exit redactor mode it triggers my skills for all the buttons I pressed.
Another, really minor bug: I pick a thing in aquarium redactor and start placing it, but during rotation, while my left mouse button is down, I decide to cancel the placement and push right mouse button. Object placement is cancelled, but when I later pick another object in redactor menu, it is instantly placed on the level at the position I previously cancelled. I do not expect objects to be placed automatically in previously cancelled positions.
That's all I could catch for now since I didn't have much time.
As for recommendations: It would be nice to have background selection for aquarium level, so that if I decide to make my aquarium walls and decorations from "fleshy alien" things, I could pick a background that fits this theme. Or maybe there is such option and I missed it?
Another thing is that aquarium redactor interface isn't that self-explanatory as I wish it was. I spent 5 minutes trying to figure it out before I realized how to rotate objects (you do it by dragging the mouse while pressing left mouse button when you place the object). This interface still needs some love and polish :D
Finally, I have a rather tricky suggestion. Let's say I make a level in aquarium mode and I want to share it with community so that anyone could play that level. Will there ever be aquarium level manager that would allow players to browse their created aquarium levels and share them with each other, similar to how content was shared in Spore? I assume my aquarium is stored in a file somewhere in game directories, but I don't really know where and there's no in-game aquarium level manager yet. I know it would be really hard to make so I don't expect any clear answers on that, nor do we really need such manager right now since aquarium isn't developed yet for players to actually make levels worth sharing.
Thanks!
Thank you for getting your hands on Sipho! :D
Noted these issues: skills activating on Dive UI button press, cancelling object placement issues.
Aquarium backgrounds and environments are dependent on selected breed - if you start with Advena, you'll get alien stuff and if you start with Cra'than you will get their fleshy environment. Changing background is not something we have planned to do, but we could, having enough interest from players.
We'll be further working on Aquarium UX - one video I've seen was enough to show how confusing the UI can get. If there are more "gotchas" you find in it, please let us know - it's very useful.
Our current plan is to allow sharing Sipho creations with others and implement a better management UI for them. Aquarium level management is not something we have considered, but least we can do is to expose Aquarium files (in a better way - they can be accessed right now in saved game files). You're right, there is nothing much to use to create shareable levels right now. If we ever add more environmental content, like hurtful obstacles, currents and other things that can make custom levels more interesting, this could be a development vector we could follow. Survival scenarios with hand-placed enemies and fixed awards could be interesting. But that could only come after current Aquarium polish and Campaign improvements we want to do.
Thank you for your interesting thoughts and feedback, I am always happy to read them.
