The team loved writing Carl quests, in fact, Carl began his “life” within Swapmeat as a quest giver! But over time, all the fun quests were not feeling cohesive, and with all the new additions to the game recently, we knew it was time to address that.

The main questline is now the spine of player progression at Rangus Corp, framed as an employee career arc: you complete all your Probationary quests, you make it to Junior Associate. After that you get some Mid-Level Specialist Training which leads into even more responsibility as Senior Associate. After that, who knows? Maybe Carl will need more management someday…
The new system has three quest types:

• Mainlines - multi-step, sequential, gated unlocks and narrative driven storylines
  
• Sidequests - one-off R&D tasks Carl needs your help with
  
• Challenges - specific challenge goals like using a number of head abilities or defeating a number of enemies.

We really wanted quests to feel like you’re helping Carl out and learning more as you play! And avoiding designing things that feel too much like “fetch-quests” - if we ask you to do something we want to feel like you’re being rewarded by learning gameplay mechanics, and also that you’re not having to go super far out of your regular gameplay path in order to complete things.

We also wanted that sense of progression to come in small steps, which is why each quest in a mainline can be claimed individually for steady rewards. If you’re putting the time in, your job should pay you, right?

Rewards are intentionally varied and several quests feed directly into the employee rank / REP progression so the questline reinforces the meta-economy as well as the moment-to-moment loop.

Eventually we’re looking at introducing a logbook to your inspect screen so that you can always check what quests and challenges are in-progress without having to be in the lobby.

Love, OMG_DirigiblePlums [UX/UI Designer[/b]

Frank 2.0

Frank has gotten a large rework to his boss fight this go around. As a team, we felt that he needed to be more mechanically engaging to players, so that the end of solar system 1 had a proper capstone. The core mechanic of Frank has largely stayed intact -- hide behind a wall to avoid the laser and if you get the chance, clog his tentacle with a rock. To make the fight more dynamic, we separated Frank into 3 phases, each with their own little wrinkle to keep the player on their toes. We want the player to feel pressure and get them to move around the map to respond to the different dangers Frank now presents to the player.

It’s your boy, Brady (OMG_Brady)

Post-Game Summary

End of Stage rework is finally here! It’s been a long time coming to update the UI to match with our newer screens. One of the main things as we’ve added more and more content to the game, has been a lacking sense of awareness in the post game. You reach the end of a planet and wonder which resources you’ve gathered, or what you can do to increase your employee rank. Well, we’ve taken steps to fix that and hopefully the changes make it a little clearer!
This includes adding new stats like Accuracy, Weakpoint Hits, Damage Taken, Healing Received and Deaths.

We breakdown the Employee Rank in more detail and added more ways to earn Rangus Effort Points - tying them directly to the events and resources on each planet. The more effort you put in to consume the whole planet, the more points you get!

We also added a way to compare how much you’ve done on each planet during the run so you can see which planets you’re spending the time to fully conquer, and which ones need more exploration. Who knows, you may even find some hidden Rangus Files if you look hard enough!

Squishily yours, OMG_DirigiblePlums [UX/UI Designer\]