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 Heat Signature, because until now there's never been a way to play exactly the same mission twice. Even Defector missions re-generated the ship each time you played. With the daily, the entire layout and the placement of every guard is the same each time, and it's a surprisingly novel experience to re-play a Heat Signature mission over and over until you figure out a way to do it exactly right. Entirely optional, of course!
This post is about a feature of the free Space Birthday Update, out now! See this post for the details.
