Delirium washed over me as I sank in and out of consciousness, my body mending even as my mind shattered further.  Had I seen what I thought I saw, or were they all fever-addled phantasms brought on by my wounds? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.  No one would speak in my presence, not the doctors nor the nurses who came to tend to me, and I had no visitors to ask, to beg, to tell me if it was true, if my visions were real.  I couldn’t bear to slip back into those dreams, to cross back over the dark chasm of wakefulness, and yet no matter how hard I struggled I would inevitably slip back over that great divide.  They stood sentinel as I crossed, damp and glistening, dripping white and mucosal as they peered into the depths of my mind. And everywhere, as I lay sweating and exhausted in those brief windows between nightmares, they seemed to me, swimming out of the dim corners of the room, more real than real.  Watching. Waiting.

-- The Dark and the Night, p. 103

Parasite v0.6 is out!

The main focus of this release is the addition of music and sounds into the game. It now includes four types of ambience along with many sound effects for things like attacks, deaths, confusion, alerts, and so on. There are four music tracks included for a start; expect more later on. I'm thinking of making a couple for each new release to slowly grow the pool of what's available. Due to the sounds being embedded into the web version, it's grown quite large; 7.2mb needs to be loaded before the game can even show its window. Let me know if the delay is too big for you and maybe I will cut out the music and ambience from the web release. I'm also hoping that HTTP compression helps with this.

The work on mouse support in the GUI continues and now all actions and menu items in the HUD are clickable. There are still actions in sub-windows that aren't, but they will have to wait for redesigns in future releases. Since a lot of people don't want to hear music or sounds, there's now an options window that allows adjusting the volume. It also exposes some of the configuration variables that were available before, like movement delay when using the mouse and the tilemap scale. The game also supports multiple font sizes; tell me if you need more. Another small addition is that the notification about a team member spawning in the area will also appear on the screen centered for a few seconds to help ensure its visibility, along with playing a particular sound effect.

And finally, onto the gameplay. There's a new growth for your habitat. It's called the Watcher and it can detect ambushes when they happen, notifying you when they occur. The ambushed habitat will also be marked with a red icon on the region map. When upgraded to level two, the Watcher will attract ambushes to its habitat. To grow the Watcher, the parasite needs to both learn about the group and have a habitat. Then the goal is added and the improvement is unlocked in the Evolution window. In a related change, when you previously selected the Easy group difficulty, you were automatically notified about ambushes. This notification has been removed. Another small addition is the police radio. Each officer now carries one and uses it to call for backup. If this radio is disabled or removed (currently you can only drop the radio from the inventory screen when the officer is a host), no backup will be called.

Full changes:

• Sound effects, sound ambience and music
• Options GUI window
  • Separate volumes for music, effects, and ambience
  • Movement delay on mouse clicks
  • Tilemap scale
  • Multiple font sizes
• Watcher habitat growth, evolution improvement, related goals and messages
• Easy group difficulty ambush notification removed
• Ambush is now spawned in a concrete habitat (was just in "the one you enter" before)
• Mouse support for HUD menus
• Added confirmation dialog for exiting the game
• Added "Enter sewers" goal into the tutorial
• Made smartphones more common to better match reality
• Police officers now carry radios and use them to call for backup; drop the radio and they can't
• Added another "wait a turn" shortcut (Z) that is also shown in the HUD
• Team member spawn notification now has red blinking text and sound

They said that it was dead, that I would never see it again, but now it’s all that I can see,  staring back at me even when I close my eyes, in the idle gaze of every civilian and soldier who glances my way.  Every bright shining pair just a part of the hundreds, still watching. Still waiting.

-- The Dark and the Night, p. 115