Heat Signature 
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New Patch: 2021.1.20.1Jan 27, 2021 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2021.1.20.1 Fix crash from Teleporter module removing Objective module during ship generation. Fix crash when reinforcements arrive while player is unconscious. Fix crash when guards try to recruit other guards that have just been removed from the ship. Fix rare crash when player or guard is skeletonized. Better error handling when failing to read files. If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong!13 moral lessons from PC gamesApr 25, 2020 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun One Off The List is our weekly list feature. Is there something you think doesn’t deserve to be on this list? Comment with your reasons why, and next week it may be struck off. When the historians of the future cast their cyber-eyes over the deluge of stupidity we encrusted upon the primitive internet, they will see that our fables, our moral storytelling, was mostly conducted with flashing colours and double-jumps. Yes, videogames have adopted the moralistic finger-wagging of fairytales and Victorian novels, for better or for worse. They have taught us a lot about ourselves and our place in the world. Here are 13 of the “best” moral lessons from PC games. Yes, you may take notes. (more…) Have You Played Heat Signature?Apr 9, 2020 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. Heat Signature is about plans going wrong. Oh, you were going to burst into that room, grab the hostage, activate your slipstream and leg it past the guards? Tough luck, you’ve dropped him. Now there’s a bullet heading for your sternum, and no time to do anything but pick the hostage back up and throw him in the way. Now you’ve been shot down anyway, mission scrubbed, tossed out of an airlock with your tail between your legs. Ah well. There are plenty more bounties in space. (more…) New Patch: 2019.10.25.1Nov 4, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2019.10.25.1 Fix dashing through walls when auto-pathing. Fix player interactions mistakenly being allowed while remote controlling pod. Fix guards instantly knowing where glitch sick players are. Only send guards who have recently seen player to fetch player's body. If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong!New Patch: 2019.8.8.1Aug 13, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2019.8.8.1 Daily Challenge practice counts towards the Week Streak achievement. Fixed a bug that could reset Daily Streak. Fixed crash when player is aboard a liberation ship when it arrives at station. If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong!Daily Deal - Heat Signature & Gunpoint, 66% OffJun 9, 2019 - AnnouncementToday's Deal: Save 66% on Heat Signature & Gunpoint!* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Tuesday at 10AM Pacific Time Tactical Breach Wizards defenestrates by the book in new footageMar 12, 2019 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunTactical Breach Wizards has come a long way since its early days as an in-joke turned prototype from Gunpoint dev Tom Francis and pals. Now it looks like a clever little tactical puzzler in the vein of Into The Breach, only instead of giant robots pushing aliens into volcanoes, it’s modern-day wizards pushing criminals out windows. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the game, with some great early art direction hiding many development sins, but today’s eleven minutes of new footage are absolutely worth a look. Check out how a Witch Cop upholds Witch Law in the video below. (more…) New Patch: 2019.1.10.1Jan 14, 2019 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2019.1.10.1 Fix guards unable to carry player's body to some airlocks. Fix Offworld Angel's shop description. Potential fix for getting stuck in mission end screen. 2019.1.4.1 Added player rank and count to Daily Challenge leaderboards. Fixed pilots with heat sensors not detecting player. Fixed guards knocked out by pod undocking not counting against totals. Fixed crash when teleporting an item immediately after exitting a ship. Fixed Restockable Breach Grenade Launchers losing the Restockable trait. (Doesn't fix items already affected.) If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong!Space Winter is back, there's a patch, and a sale!Dec 21, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsEach winter, until the 31st of Space December, the Voidmother encroaches on this dark corner of the galaxy, and we all stay close to home and swap random objects with our Steam friends via industrial gift chutes. We also have a new patch that'll help more folks get into the Daily Challenge, and experienced Challengers have a smoother time. And we're half-price! http://store.steampowered.com/app/268130/Heat_Signature/ Introducing Easy Sundays On Sundays, the daily challenge is easier. Normal daily challenges are Hard > Hard > Mistake. Easy Sundays are Medium > Hard > Hard. Perfect performances still get a time bonus, so for more experienced drifters this will be a test of your speedrunning skills. Rethinking Technophobe The Technophobe trait used to give gadgets a chance of breaking each time you used them. It's one of the harshest traits, and randomness played a big part in it, which wasn't great for Daily Challenges where you're all supposed to be on equal footing. So now, Technophobes never break gadgets - but they also can't recharge or self-charge them. However many uses they have, that's all you'll ever get. If you pass the item on as an heirloom or gift, it'll work fine for non-Technophobes. Rarest Items Less Rare Unique items are now more common in crates: was 1%, now 2%. Exceptional items are also more common in crates: was 2%, now 4%. Added a line to the Living Legends screen that reports how many unique items are owned by your active characters, and how many are still available to find. Catch Everyone You Care About Any time you have a mission- or vow-related reason to need guards alive, you can now catch them in your pod just like your target. We've also fixed some cases where guards (and you!) could get sucked into space by a window breach at a time that didn't make sense, so the situation should come up less! Space Winter details Drift Gifts! For the duration of Space Winter (21st to 31st of Space December), you can use the objective delivery chute and choose one item (per day) to give to your Steam friends. Equally, you may see a 'Gift!' annotation on your stash. Look for an item with pink text: it's a gift from a friend. If you don't have any friends, or your friends are allergic to space or fun, you'll still get a random present from the citizens of the Drift once a day. Stay Home! Space Winter is a season for friendship, giving, and staying home so the Voidmother can't take your mind. In Space Winter, those who stray too far into the cold... they come back, but they come back wrong. Spending some time at the bar may help. The Voidmother isn't real, of course, she's just a ridiculous story made up by people whose minds were taken by the Voidmother. Sorry About The Colours! Against vital safety protocols, independent stations have chosen to modify their long range beacon lights to emulate 'festive', or 'ugly' colours. Thousands will die in collisions caused by the reduced visibility. Other Patch Notes Sentry guns are now crashed by...New Patch: 2018.11.5.1Nov 8, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2018.11.5.1 Melee impact noise causes guards to look, but doesn't automatically make them sound the alarm. (They'll still sound the alarm when they see you.) Reduced radius of Concussion Hammer's melee impact noise. Fixed pods sometimes leaving behind contents when undocking from ships. If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong! Space Halloween Returns, Death Is CanceledOct 29, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsOnce again for the duration of Space Halloween - 28th of Space October to the 1st of Space November - life and death in the Drift will be a little different: Removed: Death Due to science, you cannot die during Space Halloween. Bleeding out, suffocating, or being incinerated in an exploding pod will permanently turn you into a living skeleton. Once Halloween is over, you’ll remain a skeleton but any lethal damage will finish you off. On the plus side, skeletons are undetectable by guard’s heat sensors, and can spacewalk indefinitely since they no longer need to breathe. Characters with the Dying trait will be rid of it if their time to live expires during Space Halloween. They will be a very fragile skeleton forever though, so swings and roundabouts. Actual Ghost Missions When taking a mission with the Ghost Clause, you are now an actual ghost. As with real-life ghosts, you can still be seen but all attacks pass through you. You’ll return to normal once the mission is over. Actual Skeleton Crew Ships running a Skeleton Crew are now literally running a crew of skeletons. The skeletons are functionally the same as normal guards except that they can no longer feel hope. Does That Mean I Could Potentially Become A Skeleton Ghost? That’s a ridiculous question. Of course you can become a skeleton ghost.New Patch: 2018.10.17.1Oct 17, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsWe've uploaded a new patch, here's what's changed: 2018.10.17.1 Support longer names in leaderboards. Improved text/messaging in Glory Leaderboard. 2018.10.16.1 Fixed Detonate Remote Grenades not selectable with gamepad. Fixed Shaky warning not appearing on Grenade Launchers. Added Glory Adjustment to Traits panel. Added View Scaling to Options > Technical Options. This can help if text is too small or too large for your screen. 2018.10.15.1 Break ties in Daily Leaderboard with Missions Completed and Time Spent. Added Glitch-Proof Hull to 3rd Daily Challenge Mission. Added Mission details to Glory Leaderboard. Gloria client tries to generate a mission awarding higher Glory than your character's current best. Reduced likelihood of random ships breaking Vows or Special Clauses. Fixed a bug making Warzone, Time Limits and Hijacks much rarer than previously. Fixed a bug where Reinforcement alarm responses would not increase the mission's pay in the intended way. Fixed a bug causing some Glory missions to reward a ridiculous number of Liberations. Fixed a bug where Liberate missions didn't kill crew when crashing into Station. Fixed a bug where A Good Day didn't unlock while re-playing the Daily Challenge. Added a new beta branch to let you play without the Space Birthday Update if you like: choose the 'prebirthday' branch in Steam. If you have problems with any patch, please fill our our Bug Report Form to let us know what went wrong! An update on The Space Birthday UpdateOct 7, 2018 - Community AnnouncementsWe've been patching a lot since the Space Birthday Update went live and we didn't want to spam you with announcements, so I'm writing this one to round up the changelist and highlight some things: The update is optional We heard from a few people who wanted to still be able to play without the update changes, so we've set up a permanent branch of the game without them. If that's you, right click Heat Signature, go to Properties > Betas and choose the 'prebirthday' beta. It's not actually a beta, it's the build of the game that was live for six months without needing a patch, so it's pretty solid! One thing to be aware of is that if you change your mind and come back to the update, the characters you bring with you won't see their Glory scores on the public Glory leaderboards. The way we check if a character is legit has changed, so time-travelling characters look suspect and we leave them off public leaderboards. You can still play as them just fine. An easier option, if you sometimes wanna dip into missions as they used to be, is the Old Timer. They're one of the Clients the Space Birthday Update added: at their station, the missions don't feature any of the new variables like Contractors, Autopilot, etc. It was a simpler time. If you're having any control trouble Launching in Compatibility Mode now lets you disable gamepad support and/or reset your control settings, which helps in some rare cases where things have gone awry. Gameplay tweaks Extreme Rapid Fire guns now fire on trigger release like other guns, instead of auto-firing as soon as you press. Auto-firing is how it's worked since launch, but watching folks play a certain Daily made it clear almost no-one expects this behaviour - and it leads to some awkward moments if you don't. When both the player and a capture or rescue target are floating in space, your pod's brake will now match to whichever is nearest rather than always matching to the player. Technophobe trait no longer affects Grenade Launchers. If you start the Daily Challenge but don't get as far as leaving the station, it doesn't count as played. Grenade Launcher pricing tweaked, self-chargers were wildly over-priced. Fixes Enabling gamepads no longer requires restarting game. Fixed messages about sending items to stash. Fixed some shotguns using pistol sprites. Fixed Daily Challenger sometimes marked completed after exiting game. Fixed incorrect submitted score appearing during Daily Challenger re-play. Fix for Daily Challenge Shop not always changing each day. Daily Challenge now correctly deducts 10pts per kill on No-Harm days. Noise radius indicator for guns is more accurate. Any inventory items in your pod are stashed when docking with an Inventory Lock ship. Fix crash when Daily Challengers use Practice mode. Added option to disable gamepads. Thanks! It's been so wonderful to hear from so many folks who are loving the update, and especially to see so many of you joining us in the Daily Challenge: making new kinds of te...The Space Birthday Update is out! Daily Challenge, Character Traits, 4 unique enemies, 20 features!Sep 27, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png Heat Signature is one Space Year old today! To celebrate, we've released a big free update we've been working on for five months, with over 20 features - including our own twist on a Daily Challenge. Click through for details on each: Character Traits 7 New Hazards Glory Missions & Clients Upgraded AI & Reworked Alarms Player Story Trading Cards Contractors: 4 Unique Enemy Types The Daily Challenge 10 Quality of Life Features The game is also 40% off this week, for the first time! The Daily Challenge and the new Glory leaderboards are best if you have some friends who play, so it's a good time to unfairly pressure everyone you know to buy it - or passive aggressively gift it to them. https://store.steampowered.com/app/268130/Heat_Signature/ Note This update is a one-off, we don't plan to do updates like this on a regular basis. You should only buy the game if you want it in its current state - we don't make promises about future content. This update was made by Tom Francis: design/code John Winder: code John Roberts: art Dedicated to John Francis We started this update in April this year, and my dad passed away in May. He was an electrical engineer, a software engineer and an inventor. He got me into computers at an early age, inspired me to be ambitious with his infinite faith in me, and protected me from the fear of failure by making me feel I could never disappoint him. I hope everyone reading this knows they deserve that kind of boost in life, whether you've been lucky enough to receive it or not. Dad was extremely excited when my games took off, making his own graphs and projections from the sales figures I sent him. All of you who bought Heat Signature or Gunpoint made him so happy and proud. I hope this update can say thank you for that.Heat Signature celebrates its birthday with a whopping updateSep 27, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunIt’s not fair. I only get a handful of presents when it’s my birthday, but Heat Signature gets more new features than I can squeeze into this intro. To celebrate one year of sneaking around spaceships, today’s update adds a daily challenge, playstyle-defining character traits, four special enemies and new mission types and hazards. The AI has been taught some new tricks, too. The update officially goes live at 6pm UK time alongside a 40% discount, but I’ve already been poking around in the beta branch. If you liked Heat Sig, it’s definitely worth revisiting. And if you didn’t. (more…) The Space Birthday Update: Quality of LifeSep 27, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. The Space Birthday Update goes live for everyone in 8 hours from this post, which is today at: UK: 6pm US Pacific: 10am US East: 1pm Your time: check here Lastly, we have 10 more changes that just make the game nicer to play, better balanced, or provide more options for those who want or need them. Gamepad controls We have these now! They're designed for Xbox pads but others may work. Much smoother ship collision Oh my God, I didn't know how much this was bothering me until it was fixed. When you bump your pod into a big ship, there used to be a little hitch as you rebounded. Turns out this was a bug, John found it, and now it's fixed and ship collisions are so much smoother and nicer. New item pricing We've re-written the formulae for how items are priced, so you should see fewer weird outliers. And if you do, we can fix them much more easily. New mission generation The whole mission generator has been rewritten to more reliably provide a range of difficulties, and is a lot more intelligent in how it figures out how much pay is fair. New shop interface and discounts When you use a shop, you can now browse all shops without having to walk over to them. The one you accessed is at the top so it's still easy to get to what you want that way if you prefer. Shops now also have one type of item that's discounted, and one that's more expensive than usual. This changes every 10 minutes, and when a station is liberated. You can now crash doors, forcefields, and regular guards Crash a door to lock it shut or keep it open for a while. Crash a forcefield to turn it off for a moment, sucking anyone in the room into space. Crashing any guard now leaves them unable to sound the alarm. The Offworld Angel now reduces blood loss instead of preventing it Making you immortal was probably a bit much. Guard heat sensors now trip the alarm Previously the guard would just run to you to investigate, which made them actually easier to deal with than guards with no sensors at all. Now they're a thing you actually need to think about and plan around. New options You can now turn off heirlooms if you like, which may be useful for speedrunners to give themselves an even playing field. You can also now adjust sound volume, not just music. Liberation missions In the last big update we added well equipped Liberator characters, to help out if liberations were going slowly. They served their purpose but some people felt this was too much of a helping hand, so we've replaced them with occasional Liberation missions - just a new objective type, the reward for doing the mission is liberating that station rather than any pay. These only show up if liberations are going slowly, and if you preferred the Liberator characters you can turn those back on in the options ...The Space Birthday Update: The Daily ChallengeSep 26, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. As of tomorrow, Heat Signature has a Daily Challenge! Each day there's a special character with 3 missions that are the same for all players, and leaderboards to see how you did compared to your friends. Compared to other games, Heat Signature's daily challenge is quicker to play: it only takes about 15 minutes. And we're doing a few other things differently too: The Daily Shop I wanted the daily challenge to be challenging for even the best players, but I also wanted players of all skill levels to be able to enjoy it. That's tricky, because the whole point is the missions are the same for everyone. But I think I've come up with a system where people can still choose their challenge level, by paying for it with their score. Every day, the Daily Shop contains a whole bunch of great items, including many you can't normally buy in shops, and you can have all of them. The trick is, the value of what you buy counts against your score. So you can absolutely kit yourself out with the best stuff and have fun, you just won't score as well as your pro friend who went in with nothing but a Longblade and a dream. Everything in the Daily Shop also gets 30% cheaper after each missions, since buying something later means you ultimately get less use out of it. So you're always betting on yourself: look at what the next mission entails, look at what you already have, and figure out what you really need, and if you really need it now. Scoring Each of the three missions has gets you an increasing number of points, and they also have a playstyle requirement - minimise kills, harm, sightings, alarms, or time taken. Unlike normal Clause missions, these are not all-or-nothing - if it's a no-kills mission, each kill docks you 10 points. So even if you break the rule, there's still an incentive to stick to it as best you can for the rest of the mission. If you manage to complete every mission, never break the playstyle requirement, and spend nothing in the Daily Shop, that's a perfect score. Normally it would come to exactly 500 points, but we didn't want all the best players to get exactly the same score. So whenever you get a perfect score, we also give you a time bonus. This is 0 if you took more than 30 minutes of game time (which is rare) and 100 if you somehow did the entire thing in under one second (which is rarer). The bonus scales proportionally for everything in between. Time ticks up when you're on or near the mission ship, so you're not penalised for travel time but you also can't entirely bypass it by dicking around outside the ship. Re-playing Only your first attempt at each day's challenge will be submitted to the leaderboards, but you're free to re-play it after that if you like. This is not an unusual feature, but it's unusual for H...The Space Birthday Update: ContractorsSep 25, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. Our philosophy with enemies in Heat Signature was to allow every combination possible, so a Glitch-Dash guard can also have Heat Sensors and can also have Shields and so on. It leads to a huge number of possible configurations, some of which have interesting consequences, but it sometimes lacks flavour. Contractors came about when trying to come up with enemies that would be a challenge even if you had the best kit in the galaxy, and we designed them with the opposite philosophy: there are just 4 types, and each one is completely different from the others. We want you to know exactly what each one does and not have to check a kit list each time. They each have a single specialty, but each one is something so formidable you'll need to rethink your usual strategies. You'll only encounter Contractors on harder missions, and only a few per ship. But when ships call in Reinforcements, it's these guys who show up on the telepad. In order of how much they should worry you: https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/c6b82d795ffe9ee2625933eb078cbecda7f6de1e.png The Defender A contractor who generates an impenetrable, uncrashable, unhackable shield for all guards near them. The only way to bring these shields down is to take out the Defender who, in one of nature's cruel ironies, only has a conventional shield. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a6e6a6709ce5e043246e24776dec0125043fb1cb.png The Jammer A contractor who moves through the ship installing jamming devices that prevent any of your gadgets from working while you're inside their square of effect. The field also scrambles incoming teleportation, so glitching into it is not advised. The jammers can be destroyed up close if you can get to them. Crashing a Jammer prevents them from placing any more jamming devices. Subverting them... does something else. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/af7e7bcc1bb26cbebaa09b23148be734bcae0d76.png The Tracker A contractor with specialised sensors that track your exact location on the ship at any range. They will hunt you relentlessly, their reactions are instantaneous, and their high velocity rifle is virtually impossible to dodge. Watch for the red tracks leading to you. Crashing a Tracker disables their sensors, subverting scrambles them. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/2c510b0241bd0d7ef60b0e081c3ebdd3690ee495.png The Predator The most lethal contractors in the galaxy. Step into their pulsing sensor range and they will instantly detect you, teleport to you, and kill you in the same move. Shields don't help, their blade is already in you when they glitch. Good luck. Crashing a Predator dis...The Space Birthday Update: Player Story Trading CardsSep 24, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. One Space Year ago, we said we'd do something different with our trading cards. We didn't want them to be about the game's story, we wanted them to be about player stories. But we needed you to play a bit first, and show us what you got up to. And then it also took a really long time to make them. But now, on its first Space Birthday, we celebrate eight players and their moments of brilliance, stupidity and panic. They supplied us with clips of their antics, linked below, I wrote up their story as part of the game's lore, and John Roberts recreated their characters and situations to produce these lovely glamour shots of their moments of glory and/or shame. The cards themselves will go live when the update launches on the 27th. Thank you so much to all our players, for playing our strange game in smarter, wilder and funnier ways than we ever predicted. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/4bad046cecf287d1e0c11fe2feb8e8164343faeb.jpg August 'Glitch Thief' Dust Player: Dan Gaffney Original video August's objective was in a locked room. He looked at his options. A Sidewinder teleporter can't get you through doors: it can only take you to places you have a clear path to. And a Swapper teleporter can't get you into an empty room: it needs someone to swap with. A guard with a keycard can certainly get you into a locked room, but you can't lure them in unless you're already there. But August had an idea. The guard didn't need to ever set foot in the room for this to work. He stood in front of the locked door, close enough for it to deny his credentials, then swapped with the guard. This solved one problem and created two more. The guard found themselves involuntarily right next to the door they had clearance to open, spinning around in confusion, and it opened for them. But now August was in a room full of the guard's friends, and the door would close again any second. But now there WAS a clear path. And with a Sidewinder, that's all you need. One click took him out of the death room before the guards could react, behind the baffled keycard guard, and into the security room with his objective. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/4dd4d031e72e6c75cd2d41b57a00410de5546eed.jpg Cascara 'Human Shield' Rotanev Player: Jediotty Original video Cascara's mission was to capture Cleone Forrest, alive. She was close. She'd taken out the captain, found her target, took aim, and fired. WAIT! NO! To say Cascara was a quick-thinker would perhaps be too generous. She had, after all, just shot at the person she was sent to take in alive. But she was a selective quick-thinker. In the limitless time she had to prepare and execute a plan for this mission, she didn't think to re...The Space Birthday Update: Upgraded AI & Reworked AlarmsSep 23, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/a26a952cd36b2f6f95512f6f2e0d76178c10628d.png This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details. Upgraded AI First up, our programmer John Winder has upgraded the guard AI with some new tricks: Errand buddies: if there are enough guards in a cluster, they'll take a buddy when they go off on errands. If the errand guard needs to check on a terminal, the other one watches their back while they do it. New patrol patterns: as well as visiting terminals, guards will sometimes now check on key rooms in their sector, including any locked up loot. Ship search: reinforcements that teleport in have a new search behaviour that lets them scour the ship for you. Back to work: guards who left their post to investigate your antics will now eventually return to their original posts, but stay on high alert. Lifelink: a new variable on some harder missions gives the guards in a sector an electronic link to each other - if any of them goes down, the others will sound the alarm and run to investigate. This prevents you thinning out a cluster by waiting for guards to wander off and taking them one by one (or two by two). Crashing a guard takes them off this network, subverting them crashes the whole network. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/21f1dd7898e35c89bd21fc3620e31df39b109541.gif New UI Usually when I die in Heat Sig I'm saying "oh god!" or laughing, but every now and then it felt unfair. I eventually traced these frustrating cases to a quirk of the UI. Guards show an alert bar that fills as they start to recognise you, and as soon as it's full they'll shoot. But if they're currently in the process of sounding the alarm, that indicator replaces the alert bar, so you're left with no sense of when they're going to fire. Dying to that sucks. So we've redone the UI so we can show both the guard's alert level and their alarm indicator at the same time, when we need to. We've also changed the alarm indicators themselves so guards now specify why they're sounding the alarm: a body? A gunshot? Or did they actually see you? If the alarm ever goes off unexpectedly, pause the game and zoom out - you should always be able to see who's sounding it and why they're spooked. https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/24196435/2d77638e2bb8b62d704655c3b844285a2536a4cb.gif Quiet Guns Alarms were also causing another subtle design problem I didn't put my finger on until after release. They often made the game feel... fragile. Guards take 0.5 seconds to recognise you as an intruder, and 1 more second after that to sound the alarm. It was meant to be tricky to take a group of guards out before any of them could fire, but easier to take them all out before they sounded the alarm. In practice, though, it didn't work that way: if anyone fired at you, even if you dodged it easily, someone in anot...
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