Chainmail Bikini Squadron [Ongoing] - Version: 0.4

What's New in Chainmail Bikini Squadron Version - 0.4?

The Gaol
A new environment joins the game and it pulls double duty. The Gaol is your gallery, a place to revisit and replay any scene you’ve unlocked across the entire game without needing to do a dungeon crawl. Quite a few new NPCs haunt its halls:

– Chorda – a lemurfolk sorceress with her own agenda.

– Vesper – a goth satyr huntress giving insight into the world and her and her sisters personal journey.

– François – a zombie, tax fraudster. A jailhouse lawyer though he doesn’t talk his rock Pierre has plenty to say and eventually you may acquire the tools to learn to speak to him.

– Elodie – the mysterious mime-ic has decided to spend her mornings teleporting to the gaol to cause mischief before taking a nap to pester the Chainmail Bikini Squadron in the evenings.

– The sprout – a very affectionate sprout of the Allarune who is about as handsy as the rest of the tentacle spawn of the dungeon.

most have their own dialogue tree in town that like all things will be expanded in future.

Town
– Cinnamon is no longer completely homeless now residing in her cart.

– Sister Marigold has arrived. A cursed nun packing something extra downstairs, she handles the new difficulty system and you can learn more about this strange woman. There’s more than meets the eye behind those glowing purple eyes. She’ll also explain what changes with each difficulty setting too so you know what you are getting into.

– The Twins Myrelia & Yorba. Now I can finally make jokes about adding incest to the game! Previously a secret addition for supporters, the twins are now part of the game for everyone. They don’t serve a gameplay purpose yet but they’re here, and the rest of the cast has dialogue for them.

Full Cast Dialogue Pass
All characters are now aware of the twins’ existence as well as Sister Marigold, and will comment on them, I have also cleaned up some of the more inconsistent dialogue from 0.3 so that hopefully the quality is a bit higher overall, these new NPC’s do not have scenes yet but in time will.

New Enemy – The Mime-ic (Elodie)
The chest that isn’t a chest. Elodie now spawns in the wild across all dungeon sizes, with a guaranteed spawn in the tutorial area so you can meet her on your own terms before she meets you on hers. Four scenes at launch, all available in the gallery too.

Think a chest could be a mimic? Give it a bonk! You can now reveal a hidden Mime-ic on contact with no need to rely on janky hitboxes. An audio cue will play too so you can tell if she is nearby.

No full dialogue pass for Elodie, Francois and Pierre yet, I am working on it, along with a quest to learn Eldritch (it’s French) as well as sign language.

Difficulty System
Four difficulty tiers, adjustable at any time through Sister Marigold:

– Novice – the chill run and ideal for those who want an easy experience or a more forgiving time.

– Penitent – the intended experience overall items are more scarce than 0.3 so I have been careful trying to keep the balance.

– Flagellant – less potions, rarer chests, harder-hitting enemies, and more Mime-ics.

– Martyr – suffer even more, earn more is the general idea, this is not the intended way to play and exists purely for people who want more of a challenge overall.

Higher difficulties reduce potion spawn rates, make chests rarer, and increase enemy damage. Any chest you do find is far more likely to be a Mime-ic. Silver payouts scale up to compensate to the point where hopefully on medium and large sized dungeons you will be making more silver overall.

Scenes & Gallery
– One new Barkus scene for each playable character.

– An alternate scene for Cinnamon and Thorne.

– All scenes are replayable through the Gaol’s gallery system so you don’t need to dungeon crawl every single time you want to view a scene.

Tinctures
Three new brews hit the shelves adding up to the six in the game now. Cinnamon will roll a random selection of three tinctures per run.

– Source-Style Physics – floaty movement with dramatically increased air control. Bunny hop your way to victory.

– Ironhide – significant damage resistance at a slight cost to movement speed.

– Glass Cannon – dramatically increased damage output, paid for in health.

Dungeon Overhaul
Generation

– Procedural generation reworked significantly – fewer winding hallways, fewer dead ends, more interesting layouts overall.

– Seeded generation – load a specific seed to replay or share a dungeon.

– Medium and large dungeon size options. Medium dungeons have been increased in size with room spawns retuned to match – layouts should feel denser and less like corridor tourism, a similar effect is in place for large sized dungeons.

– The old 0.1/0.2 playable space has been retuned into a tutorial zone you can run at your leisure.

– Rooms previously exclusive to large dungeons can now appear in medium dungeons thanks to the extra footprint.

New Rooms
– Multiple new rooms added to the generation pool.

– The Cistern – spawns in medium and large dungeons. A large, dangerous space with high-value rewards.

– The Underhalls – a half excavated wide space being held together with crystals, with a little bit of worldbuilding

-Four floor staircase – new staircase layout that spans multiple floors making traversal far easier, still using the same blue lights

– Certain rooms now have weighted spawns, making some rooms consistently more dangerous (and more rewarding) than others.

Safety Is No Longer Guaranteed
– Beckett’s room is no longer safe! Enemies can now pathfind into her room and all other rooms including lever rooms and the exit door.

Maps

– 2D Map – you now have the option of a flat 2D map in addition to the panoramic 3D map, it cost me a few days and a lot of sanity but the reward is great.

– Improved map zoom control, especially noticeable in larger dungeons.

– You can now purchase a map from Beckett for 1000 silver before going into the dungeon.

Room Fixes
– Collapsed room adjusted so enemies are less likely to get stuck. The floor is also now part of the floor.
– Fixed enemies getting permanently stuck searching for their keys in the lever rooms. pathfinding should automatically resolve them so they don’t get stuck.

Enemy Tuning
Satyr Huntress
– 100% chase acceleration buff – the satyr gals now reach top speed much faster.
– 30% movement speed increase. – I previously overcompensated the nerfs from 0.2 to 0.3, and now that the player is more mobile and has more tools to deal with enemies, satyrs can be brought back up to better fit their design role as oppressive pursuers. The new difficulty options also help keep this in check so if you feel overwhelmed you can lower the difficulty for the next run at no cost to you.

Zombies
– 20% increased movement speed. Similar story to the satyrs as they weren’t matching the fantasy of being “walls of meat” that box you in.
– Base stagger duration increased by 30% to compensate. When you’re getting backed into a bad situation, you now have a bit more breathing room to escape.

Tentacles
– Pathfinding in staircase rooms reworked to be significantly cheaper on your CPU, and significantly better at reaching you. Sorry.

Wandering Behaviour
Enemy wandering has been reworked across the board. This system hadn’t been touched much across prior versions and will likely see further iteration, but for now all wandering enemies have had their maximum wander distance increased significantly. The goal is more unpredictable encounters during gameplay.

– Zombies: Max wander distance 200 → 600. Max wander duration 40s → 60s. A zombie can now pick a point far away on the navmesh and shamble toward it for up to a full minute before choosing a new destination.

–Tentacles: Max wander distance 120 → 400. Max wander duration 2.5s → 20s. The original design was for tentacles to be ambush threats you’d stumble onto, but that doesn’t fit the current state of the game so they now wander much more like zombies did previously.

Economy
With silver sinks now in the game (maps from Beckett cost 1000 silver each), enemy rewards can afford to be more generous:
– All enemy silver drops increased by 70–140%.
– The Mime-ic drops a large silver bounty on defeat.

Character Balance
Genevieve
– Hitbox slightly reduced, making it easier to dodge in tight dungeon spaces.
– Sword hitbox slightly increased, improving reliability against enemies, particularly on stairs.
– Jump acceleration buffed by 5%. You still won’t be bunnyhopping like Thorne, but she’s a bit better at escaping sticky situations.

– Genevieve now starts with 140 Willpower and caps at 160. I want to further differentiate each character’s playstyle – Jen gets more health to lean into the tanky paladin fantasy. At the start of a run she won’t be at full health, but finding a potion to calm her raging libido pushes her to the 160 cap. I’ll be experimenting with this number further, especially as I explore more roguelike elements.

Maxim
– Affection gain rebalanced. Winning the cowgirl gunslinger’s heart is now a little less of an uphill battle.

Settings & UI
– Separate volume sliders for enemies, player sounds, music, and SFX.
– Resolution options for windowed mode.
– UI now scales more comfortably across different windowed resolutions. There are still a few things that may not scale 100% but this is pending a major rework.

Audio
– Sound effects added for Barkus sex scenes.
– General audio mixing improvements.

Visuals & Performance
– Lighting and FX on flashing objects like notes and other documents as well as interactable doors now more readable.
– Fixed a number of Z-fighting cases across the procedural rooms.
– General performance pass across the game, most noticeable in busier procedural layouts.

Fixes
– Fixed a bug where zombies could overlap and cause lag spikes by falling on top of each other and getting stuck trying to resolve physics
– Fixed a bug where if you set the volume slider all the way to the bottom you could not raise it back up due to the value becoming 0 which broke multipliers
– Fixed the Audio for Cinnamon’s sex scenes and her mixing has been changed to not be so forward in the mix
– Fixed some locations where trees and snow would poke into the dungeon
– Adjusted the collision shapes of tentacles to hopefully be more performance friendly, I don’t want to jinx it but I may have fixed tentacle lag.
– Fixed the secret Snake bossfight’s cardboard box stealth mechanic – previously he could hide inside any chest in the dungeon which caused a conflict with the Mime-ic system. Elodie was NOT happy about the living arrangements and would refuse to spawn. Snake has been told to find his own box.

Known issues
– Tentacle enemies have a bad habit of clustering and this can cause performance issues particularly on the new 4 level staircases, I am working on a fix for this
– There can be too many audio sources around the player which can cause the sound to be crackly on some hardware, will address when I know more about why it is happening.