This build changes who you're fighting, gives you somewhere to drive before the next mission, and fixes 76 of the issues testers sent in.

CONCORD's frames

The synthetics have left the squad. Your sixth operative is now Signals, an augmented human with a headset and the Scan signature. The synthetic bodies went to the other side. They're CONCORD's frames now, and they're the enemy you'll see most.

There are five of them, and each is easy to tell apart at a glance:

• the warden, the standard frame;
• the lancer, quick and close;
• the surveyor, who holds a lane from long range;
• the bulwark, the heavy one, which still walks as the old guardian did;
• the overseer, in its long coat, which marks one of your squad for the others to shoot at.

Every frame moves as far in a turn as one of your squad.

They carry lasers: a carbine, a rifle and a lance. Lasers are CONCORD's alone, and they never fire through smoke.

The frames talk on their network. They call contact as a fight opens, mark targets, report hits and losses, and warn each other about grenades. Every line is voiced through a machine and a radio. Some groups will also say their piece before a fight, once, when they see you or when you get near them unseen.

The older machines are still around as CONCORD's auxiliaries: the drones, the outriders on their bikes and the recovery machine. A frame you've picked over for salvage is left bare, its gun gone and its shell's panels prised off down to the bars.

Side quests on the road south

You can now drive out of Bastion before mission two. The parked truck by the gate takes you onto Bastion Reach.

Two of Bastion's residents have work for you:

• Jory Taft needs the bypass valve opened at the Pump Annex.
• Nadia Osei wants a medical crate brought back from the Roadside Infirmary. You can also keep it for yourselves.

Each is a small place of its own. You drive there, get out, explore it on foot past whatever is guarding it, then go back to the truck. Rewards are credits and kit.

The new journal (O) keeps the main objectives and the side ones together.

Fights

• Grenades go off in a white flash and a ball of fire that cools through orange and red to soot. They throw dust, sparks and grit, and leave a scorch on the floor.
• Smoke is drawn as drifting wisps rather than round puffs.
• The lead's lamp: G turns it on and off while you explore. In the dark, machines see you from less far away, unless your light is on or its beam falls on them.
• Medkits heal more: 40 rather than 30. Since the frames got quicker, squads were arriving at the relay mast too worn to finish it. With the extra healing, more of them make it through.
• Shooting feels heavier. Muzzle flashes are bigger and stay on the muzzle, shots kick harder, and an operative keeps their gun up after a shot. The medic kneels to work with both hands.

From your reports

We closed 76 issues in this stretch. Among them: crate lids against a wall now swing clear of it, beards hang straight, and every on-screen tile reads whole. Ladders lean properly against raised ground, and the chase's bikes are now ridden by frames, who get thrown off when the truck hits them. The bug button in the top-right corner of the game is still the quickest way to send one.

This build changes the content version, so saves from earlier builds won't carry over.

Thank you for playing.

The demo used to stop at Bastion. Now Bastion is where the second mission starts.

Bastion Reach

When you set out from Bastion, the truck goes onto Bastion Reach, a map of the country around it that you can turn, tilt and zoom. You choose where to go, then travel a stretch of road at a time, or wait where you are. Time only passes while the truck drives or waits. The truck's scanner shows what's near, and places you've seen are marked with how long ago you saw them.

Morrow Junction

Hale sends the squad to Morrow Junction, an old rail junction with people still living in it. It has a platform, carriages, an engine shed, a walkway up to the offices, and a gate where the truck comes in. There are new people to meet: Tessa, the station's mechanic, Oren, its quartermaster in all but name, and PORTER, the station's old system, which goes about on an inspection trolley with a lamp. Four more residents live there too. Your first job is upstairs: find the dispatch office.

Cut scenes, and everyone speaks

The story is told in cut scenes now: the briefing in Bastion's rail office, the walk into Morrow, and every conversation. The camera cuts to whoever is talking, and people talk with their hands as they speak.

Everyone you can talk to has a voice: Hale, ORACLE, Tessa, Oren, PORTER (through a heavy machine filter), Bastion's residents and Morrow's, and your squad in all 21 of its voices. That's more than 500 recorded lines. Each line is checked by machine for clicks, words cut off at the end, stray words and questions that don't rise, and the ones that failed were recorded again. Anyone at Morrow can be talked to.

Fights

• Who joins a fight. A group of machines now joins only if it sees one of your squad or hears the fight. Walls muffle the noise, and a group that would have a long walk round to reach you doesn't come. Groups behind a wall are no longer pulled in from across the map.
• Leaning round corners. You lean out round a corner to shoot past it, and leaning draws overwatch fire.
• Range. Every weapon loses accuracy with distance in its own way, in metres.
• Patching yourself. Anyone carrying a medkit can treat their own wounds, in a fight or exploring.
• Wrecks. Machines you strip for salvage are left as a sagging heap of frame.

How the squad moves

Running looks like running. Ladders are climbed rung by rung with the rifle slung, ledges are climbed with the hands, a drop is a hop down, and stairs are walked. When exploring, the whole squad follows the lead up a ladder, however far ahead the lead has gone.

From your reports

We fixed more than a hundred of the issues testers sent in this stretch, from doors that were slabs of brick to a tree standing in the road behind Morrow's gate. The bug button in the top-right corner of the game is still the quickest way to send one.

This build changes the content version, so saves from earlier builds won't carry over.

Thank you for playing.

Two big additions since the last dev log: you make your own squad now, and the demo no longer ends at the relay. There's a short video of the first, Creating your squad, on YouTube.

Make your squad

New game now opens the squad creator. (Demo is gone from the title screen; New game is the way in.) You start from the built-in six and make each one your own, beginning with the leader:

• a name, and an origin: baseline human; augmented, with a bionic arm, leg or eye; or synthetic, in a white or metal finish;
• a background, which brings the role's signature ability, and points to spend on attributes and skills;
• a weapon: service rifle, marksman rifle, carbine or shotgun;
• how they look: twenty outfits, skin, hair colour and styles (dreadlocks, braids and ponytails among them), beards, helmets and face gear, on a live figure you can turn and zoom;
• and a voice: there are sixteen to choose from, ten of them new this week.

There are ten roles now. The four new ones each bring a new signature ability: the Demolitions expert's breaching charge, the Infiltrator's smoke, the Officer's rally and the Bodyguard's guard. We played every squad of six (no role more than twice) through the game's simulator, and tuned the signatures so no single role swings the odds by more than a few points.

The road out

The relay used to be the end. Now, once the all-clear is sent, the convoy's truck comes up onto the dam crest and parks. Everyone still standing has to get to it, and anyone who's down and not carried there is left behind for good.

Then the truck runs for it down the spillway road, with the squad aboard. Each round, you steer for Captain Hale first: pick a speed (slow, steady or fast), lay the path, swerve, and ram whatever's in the way. Then you fight from your places aboard: the back door, the passenger seat, the hatch and the roof gun, each with its own view and its own cover. Machines on bikes and drones come after you, and more join the longer the run takes. The truck can be patched up from inside, and it can be wrecked.

Nobody left behind

• Carrying. An operative can lift a downed or dead squadmate beside them. While carrying, they can only move or put them down.
• Stabilising. Anyone can now stabilise a casualty beside them: one action with medical training, two without.
• Medkits. Everyone carries one, and the Medic carries six. You can toss them to a squadmate nearby, take them from someone who's down, and find more in crates and cases along the way. Treating between fights uses them up. ## The fights, reworked

• The pump hall. The pump control is now up on a platform, reached by a ladder, and the water rises on the floor below each round you hold it. At full pressure the squad climbs up, the water is electrified, and every machine standing in it goes.
• The relay is harder: its terminal can be worked once a round, its machines start nearer the mast, and you have ten rounds.
• The camera centres on each machine as it acts, and the levels above you are drawn see-through.

Every gun is its own

Each weapon fires and sounds like itself now. The marksman rifle kicks the muzzle up and settles, the carbine snaps, and the shotgun shoves, then racks its pump with the hand riding the slide and throws a red hull. Brass flies with every shot, flashes are sized to the gun, and the machines have a cold discharge of their own.

The squad also moves better. Going down, lying wounded, climbing ladders and dropping a level have their own motions now, and hands hold their guns properly.

Music that follows the chase

The chase has its own score, and it follows the run. The tempo climbs as the truck gets further down the road, there's a hit for every machine you wreck, and a drop when you reach the end. Ramming something lands a heavy hit, and the rest of the music ducks under it.

From your reports

Dozens of the issues testers raised were closed in this stretch, from crates that now open their lids to captions that no longer run across ORACLE's screen. Keep them coming: the bug in the top-right corner of the game is the quickest way.

Thank you for playing.

The first testers have now played the demo end to end, and sent back what they found: their sessions from inside the game, notes, and one long written report with screenshots. We turned all of it into a list of issues and worked through it. Nearly everything below started as something a tester told us.

There's also something new to watch. The whole demo, played start to finish is up on YouTube: thirty-five minutes on release 262.

The last fight now explains itself

The clearest finding: two of the three runs that reached the Relay Mast lost it without ever touching the relay terminal. Both players fought every machine on the map, ran out the clock, and were told the squad had been defeated while all six were still standing.

Now the fight shows the rounds you have left, lights the terminal and the way out, and when you lose it tells you why. The relay also has a point in the story: working it sends the all-clear to Crossing Twelve, so the guns there stand down for the convoy. Then the squad gets back in the truck, and the truck drives off.

See what a move can reach before you make it

Several testers said they couldn't tell what they'd be able to shoot from where they were going, or how much cover they'd have when they got there. So now, when you point at a place to move, a ghost of the operative stands there and dotted lines run from its gun to every machine in reach. Each kind of action gets its own colour, with a legend, and each line shows the hit chance and damage. Hold Shift to see the lines from where the squad stands.

Around that:

• How far you can move is drawn as one rounded area on the deck, and the path as a solid line.
• The operative acting is outlined in blue, and whatever they're aiming at in red.
• Cover now comes from the objects beside you, and shows as shields in 3D.
• Everyone faces where they're looking now. Operatives turn the way they moved or towards what they shot, and machines turn towards the nearest threat. It's how the fight looks; it doesn't change what hits.

Balance, from the reports

• Mark was the strongest thing in the game, by a distance. It's now one mark at a time per Scout, and slightly weaker.
• Scan was spent even by a missed shot, which made it feel worthless. Now only a hit spends it, and it's stronger to begin with.
• Hack decided any fight that was down to two machines. Now each hack has a one-in-four chance that the machines share a patch, after which hacking is refused for the rest of the fight. A hacked Guardian also drops its shield.
• Patch draws on the Medic's supplies for the fight, instead of working once per person per round.
• Sprint is new: spend an action for half your movement again. And everyone moves further: 6, up from 4.
• Undo (Z) now takes back moves one after another, back to your last shot.

Controls

Keys can be rebound in Settings, and every hint in the game shows your binding. Right-click cancels an armed action. A single click moves you. Escape reaches the menu in one press, and Q and E turn the camera while exploring. The combat log is now a console in the corner that stays out of the way.

A squad with voices

The speech balloons are gone. In a fight the squad now speaks aloud, each in their own voice, and the lines are captioned at the foot of the board: contact, hits and misses, calls for help, the Medic at work, and "Clear?" when it's over. That's 321 recorded lines. The faces on the squad cards are the operatives' own models now, rendered live: they breathe, blink and look around.

The world between the fights

• The pump hall is built: four working pumps, and a flood that ends the hold by sweeping every machine still standing out of the hall.
• The truck drives the squad between places, and the gate lifts on camera.
• ORACLE's case now rides in the back of the truck. Go round the back and you can ask it questions, in any order and as often as you like.
• Treating the wounded happens on the map now (K). It costs time, and the machines don't wait for you.
• The radio log (L) keeps everything Captain Hale has said.

Smoother

The game used to freeze for a moment as some actions landed, sometimes for over a second. On our Windows test machine, the number of slow frames in a full playthrough went from 320 to 6.

For testers

• The bug button. There's a bug in the top-right corner of the screen now. Click it and you get the feedback panel with a screenshot of what you were looking at already attached. Give it a title and say what happened.
• Arena. On the title screen, Arena drops the squad into a single fight on a board built for cover, at one of four difficulties from easy to brutal. It's there so we can tune the balance; tell us what you think of it.

Thank you to everyone who played and wrote in. Keep it coming.

Hollow Protocol went out to its first closed testers last week. Their copies update themselves, so everything below is already in their hands. This is the dev log: what changed, roughly weekly, while the game gets built.

Your squad, your order

Turns used to walk you through the squad one operative at a time. Now you pick who acts, in any order. Choose an action, click the target, and it happens: there's no Confirm step any more. A misplaced move can be undone. When someone is finished, Done hands the turn to whoever still has something left, and Resume brings them back if you change your mind.

Aim is gone too. In its place are two shots, a quick shot and an aimed shot, and hovering over a machine now compares every shot you could take: the chance to hit, the damage, the average, and the chance of a kill.

Before the shooting starts

Every fight now opens with an approach. You move through the gatehouse while the machines patrol, and the world only moves when your squad does. Patrols show their sight cones on the floor and a radar keeps track of them, so you can pick the moment and the corner. Zoom with the wheel or a pinch, and drag to turn the camera.

The fights themselves have grown to 16 by 12 tiles, with a camera that follows the squad, a textured battlefield, and muzzle flashes that light the room.

People, not boxes

Until this week the squad was blocks on a skeleton. Now every person is a proper rigged model: the six operatives, the escort officer, and the girl and her mother (and her bear). They crouch behind cover, hold their rifles properly, sit, and cheer when a fight is won.

Operation Safe Passage

Pick Demo on the title screen and it now plays an opening before the briefing. It's pixel art at the board's own 480×270: painted scenes with the game's models rendered into them, voices, and a score written in the game's own music kit. The title screen got the same treatment, with the walker at the gate and a score of its own, and fights open on that heavy theme before the game's music takes over.

Fixed

• The game slowed down fight by fight. A panel was quietly leaving thousands of invisible pieces behind each time it redrew, about 4,500 by the third fight. That's fixed, and the automated test run now fails if it ever comes back.
• A long list of casualties bleeding out could push the squad strip off the screen. It fits now.

For testers

Press Esc → Send feedback to send a note and screenshots straight to us. F12 takes a screenshot anywhere and attaches it to your next note. After each update, What's new lists what changed.

That's week one. Next time: what the testers found.