After spending so long fixing & tweaking, it's easy to lose sight of the fun factor after a while, but I just played through the shareware levels, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Some of the things that make it fun after playing it in one form or another for so long -
1) stable - no crashes or strange behavior.
2) only a couple of bugs that I noted to fix later. nothing major.
3) much better sounds - i added custom doppler & random pitch shifts which adds a lot of variety. also fixed the torch sounds this morning.
4) fixed a bug where NPC item lists weren't as random as advertised. This opened up the weapon mix for & against my char - much more enjoyable and varied
5) fixed a weapon damage per second display issue
6) better ai after several weeks of one or two small fixes and tweaks a week
I started as the main bald character - the only one to be available in the shareware version. I completed the digsite level without too much trouble, although this time Nejeb ( friendly npc ) died before the end, which is unusual.
The cavecity1 level was much more challenging once I aroused a bunch of Aakash lizard men. The 'boss' guy was dual wielding gauss pistols and took me down twice, despite me using a green power crysal to do more damage to him. Then I remembered that I had enough DNA to become an Aakash, so I did so and went to the 2nd part of cavecity, where I tousled with some Thoog bull creatures, which killed me once.
In between levels, I raised my skill levels in shield, cloning & weapons, and manufactured some more weapons as I needed them after death.
The bat creaturess at the end of cavecity1 had me completely pinned down with some area of effect weapons for over a minute, so I charged them, got one down while another was reloading, was able to take the bat's weapon, then retreat and get healed a bit before killing the 2nd guy. Next I heard the bats & lizards fighting one another, so I ran down and mopped up, including the 'boss' aakash I had snuck by earlier as a cloned Aakash!
Very fun.
