Zigfrak, an independently developed third-person space shooter and RPG.

When the Xenoid threat was discovered, human society was thrust into an era of martial law. Security became top priority, at the cost of individual liberty. In the face of this growing oppression, many left their homeworlds in search of freedom. The Freerunners fled, to explore and settle the new frontier planets. When Enforcers from the homeworld pursued them in a military effort, the Freerunners were forced to defend themselves. This was the beginning of the great human civil war which continues to this day. In hope of defending your settlements against threats, both human and alien, you have enlisted as a pilot with the Freerunners.


Zigfrak 0.8.2 (Beta 8.2) Release Notes

August 13 2012

Tons of changes are not listed here. This was a huge release, and
I'm only mentioning the big stuff.

General

- Because of extensive changes to existing content, this beta build
forces a character reset. Returning players with an existing saved
game will receive a bank full of goodies and credits as compensation.
It is recommended that these goodies remain in your bank until all
mission tiers have been played through, in order to experience the
content as intended.

- Loss of inventory upon death has been removed. Death will incur
a durability loss to equipped weapons and engines. The death penalty
is still being tweaked, and is not yet finalized.

- The intermittent loading pauses in the middle of gameplay have been
removed! The game now uses a non-blocking spawner to keep the action
flowing.

- Re-organized shipyard screen, and added ability to change the
colors and names of your ships.

- Added ambient sounds, which are still a work in progress. Ambient
sound level may be controlled via the Options Menu.

- Added line-of-sight indicator to HUD nameplates.

- Toolbar now auto-hides by default. This can be disabled in the
Options Menu. Auto-hiding the toolbar may obscure some important
cooldowns; a solution for this is in the works. The toolbar was
not intended to be such a focal point of the game (and it takes
a lot of juice to render that thing!)

- "Upgraded" toolbar items (eg Mining Laser, Shield Disruptor) will
now re-use the old item's slot and keyboard shortcut.

- Tuned physics and rendering timing, which in turn has reduced or
eliminated jagged artifacts on trails. If your PC has the juice,
gameplay should feel much smoother overall.

- If your saved screen resolution is not detected to be supported
at startup (perhaps due to changing your display device), the
game will fall back to windowed mode with a default resolution.

- Repeated rapid failures to auto-set the screen resolution will
cause the game to stop trying to make the adjustment. There will
be an error message in the log to this effect, and a restart of
the game will be needed for further resolution changes. This was
done to try and avoid the non-stop screen flickering of death.

- Improved performance when accepting missions or adding items to
inventory. That momentary stutter should be gone, or barely
noticeable in the worst cases.

- Eliminated the periodic stuttering when units with auto-dock
behavior are present (eg Pirates and Fu’s bots)


Some Known Issues

- Random scenarios are feeling kind of dated, compared to the more
recently developed content. These will be improved upon.

- Several missions may not work right when repeated, and most
repeated missions currently have placeholder rewards.

- The very final tier of content is not yet available.

- Weapon placement on large ships has not yet been improved.

- Backup/Restore debug commands do not preserve your saved options.


Missions

- Added several hubs to the free demo content. Renumbered and
restructured the existing mission tiers, in order to accommodate
this new early content.

- Added a new tier of missions to the paid content; added and
expanded several missions across existing paid content tiers. One
more tier to go before release, and I really mean it this time!

- Added several challenging encounters which test the player's
combat skills (and the developer's programming skills). Many of
these new encounters will cause the player to automatically equip
powerful ammo, which are temporary items for the encounter at hand.
Player feedback is highly sought for these new encounters.
- Some encounters are straight up DPS fights, but others may
require a certain amount of hand/eye coordination, and/or awareness
of one's surroundings. As a general rule, keep your head on a
swivel, try not to be a stationary target, blow your cooldowns
early and often, and grab those pickups and powerups!
- If you find these to be way too difficult (or too easy), try
temporarily changing the game difficulty, located under Gameplay
Options in the Options Menu. Please let me know if you required
an adjustment (and definitely let me know if you are stuck
somewhere) -- coding these complex encounters is something that
I am new at, and I want to get things as playable as possible for
a wide spectrum of players.
- Encounter walkthroughs and hints will be appearing on the Zigfrak
Forum, as time permits.

- Added minigames, present in a small number of missions. If the
player's progress would be blocked by not being able to win a
particular minigame, they may opt to skip it in favor of a more
traditional shoot/loot mission.

- A small optional mission hub was added at Beta Station, a new location
nestled midway through Freerunner space. Players of very early Zigfrak
alpha builds may recognize some of it.


Items

- Added hundreds of new items, including many new item modifiers
and crafting templates. Many new items are only obtainable as loot.

- Added "Discombobulation", which is the ability to break down most
items into basic resources and crafting components. Multiple items
can be queued for discombobulation. To discombobulate an item,
select it from your inventory and choose "Discombobulate" under
Destructive Options. Doing so also grants a small amount of
experience.

- Craftable items with prerequisites will now automatically queue
the required components, or issue a warning if the prereqs are
missing. This can be disabled by un-checking "Auto-Queue Prereqs"
on the Template tab of your inventory, under "Crafting Options".

- Added post-Legendary item quality, "Opulent", used exclusively
for over-the-top ammo. Players may create Opulent quality ammo via
item modifiers. Opulent quality ammo may also spawn as random loot.

- Re-itemized crafted items; player-created items are now among the
highest quality items in the game... hopefully giving you a reason
to make them!

- Changed behavior of weapon powerups. For performance reasons,
shot multipliers (Doubleshot, Tripleshot) now apply an equivalent
damage multiplier, rather than create multiple projectiles.

- Added "Strange" damage school and "Nuclear" resource type.

- Added Guardian research. Current implementation is bare-bones,
but will be expanded on in the next release.

- Changes to Pulse and Ballistic projectiles, in order to better
differentiate these ammo types.

- Equippable Beam weapons (not those used directly from inventory,
such as the Mining Laser or Shield Disruptor) were redesigned.

- Many new harmful effects (debuffs)


For Hardcore Testers Only!

- For testing purposes, many shortcuts to the new encounters have
been added to the “Debug” section of the Commands Menu. It is
not recommended that you jump to these unless you’ve played
through already.

The Debug section is now hidden by default -- to enable, check
“Enable Debug Menu” in the Advanced Options section of the Options
Menu. You may wish to first back up your current saved game (Choose
“Backup to Disk” under Debug), before loading a premade saved game
for the encounter or mission tier which you are interested in
testing.