Formal Release of Protocol!

Hello again, I'm Chris the lead programmer for Protocol. Today, I am happy to announce the formal release of Protocol! 

I'm going to give a general overview of the patch notes for this release. In the near future, ill include a detailed write up about some of the more technical functions of several of these changes. We hope you enjoy this release of Protocol!

Patch Notes

• New Heroes have come to help fight Dr. Leuka's forces.
  • Dulcet, Zip, and Vein can now be found in encounters across the world space.
• Skill menu selection
  • Players can now choose skills from the hero tech trees. The menus display information about the skill types to so players can make informed choices about the type of skills they would like to use. 
• New Skill types
  • Beam Skills
  • Melee Skills
    • Melee skills have initial on hit effect and an animation, afterwards the particle effect lingers for a duration to deal bonus damage on follow up melee hits.
• Player HUD improvements
  • Mini map has been removed for now.
  • Health frames have been moved to the lower left hand corner and slightly increased in size
  • Active skills have been scaled down slightly and the selected skill object has been made larger for ease of identifying the currently selected skill effect
• Added the Construction Area
• Added Forge Blast Base & Construction Blast Base
  • Underground bunkers filled with Dr. Leuka's forces and parkour puzzles culminating in the first & second Dr. Leuka boss fights
• New boss battle!
  • Dr. Leuka's monstrous tank form
• New combat animations have been added to the player character
• Minor adjustment to the timing of some melee animations.
• Background music added to all playable areas
• Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause health packs to not heal all allies.
• Improvements to AI logic in Dr. Leuka's first boss fight
• Fixed issues with AI lingering after death
• Fixed issues with skill targeting causing camera to fly to target
• Adjusted colliders in open world areas to allow more buildings to be scaled
• Improve the aim IK for skill targeting
• Added recoil to some skill effects
• Adjusted the rate at which skills cooldown, in general these timers have been increased
• Skill cooldown system has been improved
  • Redundancy added to help prevent cooldowns from reaching a stuck state.
• Updated the sprites displayed in the skill menu and for the HUD
• Adjusted Lighting on all levels
• Fixed a bug that would cause the buddies to get stuck in place.
• Added names above portals to give players an idea of where they can travel to.
• Fixed a bug with the elemental system that was not applying bonus damage in certain instances.
• Numerous tweaks to AI functionality
  • Reduced the rate that the Mechs fire the ranged blast attack
  • Fixed a bug where Dr. Leuka's forces would sometime ignore infectors
  • Fixed a bug where the minions would attack without animating.
  • Adjustments to health and damage based on mob types
• Reworked the main menu to better showcase the heroes
• Fixed some spelling errors in the credits
• Added additional support for non xbox gamepads (This may still have issues, feedback welcome)