Happy Holidays, everyball!

We don't really have any special update for the occasion this year, but in case anyone didn't see it yet, there is still a matching seasonal quest hidden in CrossCode!


Enter the Bonus Code Holiday-Man at the title screen and give this particular NPC in Bergen Village a visit!


The NPC Contest has ended over a week ago and we got a total of exactly 100 entries! What a neat number! And there are quite a lot of great dialogs among them, too. Now we actually will need a bit more time to determine the winners, since we won't simply draw them randomly, but need to review all the dialogs (by several team members) to find the Top 5 and Top 20 of all submissions. Given that many team member will be busy over the holidays this will likely take a bit longer. We'll make sure to announce the results at the beginning of next year!


Yes, we're still working on CrossCode though admittedly work has been going somewhat slower as we got closer to the holidays. However, we plan to pick up the pace again next year and we'll start with another update in mid to end January that will feature a couple new quests including the finale of the A Promise is a Promise quest line! After that, we'll finally focus on the arena and the long promised New Game+ mode.

Anyway, that's all!
We wish everyone a good time, a nice celebration and all the best for the coming year!


And hopefully with plenty of great presents!

See you in 2019!

Hello everyball!

We have another quick update for you, since today we release a little DLC to the public and also we'd like to have a word about a Switch version.




The Ninja DLC is now available on Steam! Use it to give Lea a stealthy ninja outfit. You can see it when moving around, during battle, and even in the menu screen!


I mean, she already runs like a ninja, so it was obvious we had to add this skin eventually.

Some background: The Ninja skin was one of the rewards for our Indiegogo backers and has been available for them for a few months already. We decided to release it on Steam a bit later, to keep it exclusive for our backers at least for some time.


For quite some time now we've received a number of requests from people asking us to port CrossCode to one particular platform.

Everyday single day.



Yes, we heard you. You want to play CrossCode on your Switch.
We get where you're coming from. Our game has been inspired by so many Nintendo classics, so it would feel right at home on the Switch. And obviously, it would be amazing to play CrossCode on the go.

However, the reality is this: porting CrossCode to Switch is really difficult. As some of you might be aware, CrossCode is written in HTML5 which you cannot run natively on the Switch (just like most consoles). This means a LOT of things have to be reprogrammed/rewritten. And this is especially challenging on the Switch which doesn't provide the hardware capabilities of other current-gen consoles. That's why we still can't make any promise!

Now... We've given this answer many, many times. But who knows, maybe it's too technical and that's why people just won't stop asking so we'll simplify it a bit:

Sorry but CrossCode will be coming to Switch when Hedgehags learn to fly.

Anyway, this is now our answer to all those Switch requests for the time being!
You can keep asking if you want (and you probably will). The answer will be the same.

Anyway, that's all for now! Until next time!

Hello everyball!

The year 2018 is coming to a close, but before it ends we have a little competition for you! Also, we won an award!


You may have noticed that CrossCode is filled to the brim with NPCs! You may also have noticed that a lot of them... just stand there and don't even say anything. With this competition we plan to change this!

How to participate:

• Find a single NPC or a group of NPCs in the game that are missing dialog
• Write a fitting dialog in English! Make sure to specify if it's a Regular Dialog or Xeno Dialog (more: read below)
• Send the dialog + a screenshot of the NPC(s) to http://mailto:contest@radicalfishgames.com
• Each participant can only submit one dialog!

Deadline: December 16 11:59pm PST


What to win:



The 5 best submissions will win a physical CrossCode Soundtrack sponsored by First Press Games!
The 20 best submissions will be implemented into the game with an optional credits entry!

Dialog Types



There are two ways to write dialogs:
Regular Dialog: The player needs to explicitly interact with the NPC to start the conversation. This fits best for single NPCs

Xeno Dialogs: Speech bubbles will appear over the NPCs when you move close to them. Those work best for group of NPCs that talk with each other independent of the player.

Optionally, you can also switch from a "Xeno Dialog" to a "Regular Dialog". This usually happens, when Lea wants to comment on something the NPCs are talking about. This usually happens during one specific sentence of the Xeno dialog, so make sure to mention which one it is!

How Dialogs are evaluated



There are a lot of criteria we will judge dialogs by.
Apart from the more abstract "we just like it", here are a few of them you should definitely consider:

• Does the dialog fit into the setting of CrossCode?
• Are known character involved in the conversation (e.g. Lea or Emilie) acting in-character?
• Is it entertaining or otherwise interesting to read?
• Is it original and not redundant with another dialog already in the game?
• Does it have a proper length? NPCs dialogs should not be too long. About 10 sentences at most. Try to keep it short!
• Does it have proper spelling and grammar? (Small mistakes are fine, we make them ourselves all the time as well)
• When it includes references to other games, shows, characters outside of CrossCode, are those references subtle enough so we don't get into trouble?
• Is it safe-for-work? I mean yeah... it's just text. But you never know!

Some other rules

By submitting your dialog, you give us permission to use your dialog, as submitted or in a modified form as well as translated versions of your dialog, in future versions of CrossCode without further compensation.

...this should all be pretty obvious, but just to be sure!


In addition to the NPC Dialog Contest there is also another "CrossCode Giveaway" raffle, held by our very generous community member streetclaw!
You can win CrossCode Game + Soundtrack Keys for Steam and even a complete Foil Cards Set!

You participate by retweeting this here tweet
More Details here: https://streetclaw.de/cccg18/


And last but not least, we attended this year's German Developer Awards and...



CrossCode won the Best Indie Game award!

We feel very honored especially considering that this year's competition was very strong with games such as Far: Lone Sails participating.

In addition, we've been nominated in 5 more categories:

Best Game Design
Best Story
Best PC/Console Game
Best German Game
Best Studio (for Radical Fish Games)




This is just a little reminder that we're still holding regular gamedev streams! In fact, the next one will be today!

When: 20:00 CET, 11am PST
What: We'll work on a new quest for one of our Indiegogo backers! In fact, we'll start working on a new mini boss fight!
Where: https://twitch.tv/radicalfishgames

And that's all! There will be another update post still this year (before Christmas) where we talk about ongoing development again.

Until next time!

...time to dig up that old image again! Today we release CrossCode version 1.0.2 adding support for Steam Achievements and Trading Cards + a few smaller content additions.


Finally they're here! Steam Achievements have been added and will be automatically synchronized with your trophies once you start the updated game. That means you'll likely get a lot of achievements at once.



Note that only trophies marked with this symbol give you achievements!




Next we also finally added Steam Trading cards! There are a total of 7 Cards as well as 9 emoticons and 3 backgrounds! Happy collecting!




Apart from all these Steam related features, we also added the usual bunch of bug fixes and also a few content additions!

• The plaza of the Last Minute Heroes HQ can be entered and it includes the first few statues! The interior is still closed off, but it will open up with the next update.
• There are a few more NPCs in CrossWorlds including a new cameo guest role somewhere in Bergen village.
• The new stat "Time played with Assist Mode" was added to the Statistics menu.

And that's all for now! Meanwhile, we're already working on new quests as well as the arena of Rhombus Square. Expect more updates in the following months!

Until next time!

Hello everyball!

CrossCode reached version 1.0 about one month ago. During the last month we've been mostly busy with the aftermath of the release. That means we fixed bugs. A lot of them. Now, 10 Hotfix releases later, we finally have the time to focus on new content and features again. And today we release the first bunch of them with version 1.0.1!


CrossCode is a game designed with challenge in mind for both combat and puzzles. However, not all players appreciate this higher difficulty and for some the game becomes downright inaccessible because of it.



That's why version 1.0.1 introduces the Assist Mode that allows you to tweak the difficulty of the game in a detailed manner. If combat is too fast and enemies too hard hitting for you, you can downscale attack frequency and received damage respectively. And if the timed puzzled are too annoying for you to solve, you can downscale the speed / increase the duration of puzzle elements to simplify the execution.

Apart from this, version 1.0.1 also comes with the following features:

• The "Screen shake" option is now properly applied on all screen shake effects of the game
• A new guest role character showed up in Rhombus Square! There might be more in the future
• The new Ninja Skin has been properly implemented. For now the skin is only available to some of our Indiegogo backers (it was a special Perk), but we plan to also release it as a small DLC for everyone later this year
• And in case you missed it: you can now view your progress for each trophy in the trophy menu

We released CrossCode 1.0 using the new NW.js version, but as a lot of players experienced crash issues we quickly downgraded to the old version again, offering the new version through the nwjs_new beta branch. Through a number of Hotfixes we managed to reduce the amount of crashes, which is why we decided to now use the new NW.js version by default as it runs better for most players. Instead, we now offer the nwjs_old BETA branch to switch back to the old version in case the new one still doesn't run well for you.


Next we will finally focus on properly implementing Steam Achievements which will be directly connected to your Trophies. That means if you already collected all your Trophies they will be automatically synchronized with Steam Achievements once you start up the game. That's at least the plan.

Another feature we want to look at soon will be Steam Trading Cards. We're still figuring out how to get the right artworks.

And beyond that, there is still the list of promised End Game content:

• The final "A Promise is a Promise Quest"
• More Parkour Quests, also featuring new mechanics
• The Arena in Rhombus Square that will come with more combat challenges and a "Boss Rush" mode
• Several new NPCs, Quests and Enemies that we will design together with our Indiegogo backers
• The Last-Minute Hero Guild
• A New Game+ Mode

All of this content will be released with free updates over the next few months. We will try to get a good part of it done this year, but it's possible that some of these features may have to wait until early 2019.


Those of you that already finished the game might be aware that we hinted to a potential extension of the story. Originally, we planned to end the game at this point. However, since CrossCode has been pretty successful for quite a while already and there is still an abundance of stupid ideas™, it'd be honestly weird to just end things like this.

That's why we plan to start working on the Post Game Episode after we have finished all the End Game content. We hope to released it as a DLC sometime in 2019!

And that's all for now, until next time!

Full game just came out! If you've enjoyed the music of the game, we have great news for you:

CrossCode's soundtrack, which was made by our composer Deniz Akbulut, is available for purchase on many platforms including Bandcamp, iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and Steam thanks to Materia Collective. We're also very excited to announce that the soundtrack can be pre-ordered as a Limited Edition CD album now, which will be handled by the fine folks at First Press Games.

It will come with 2 CDs, a high quality clear jewel case, 12-page booklet and it will even include an obi/spine which is typical for a Japanese soundtrack release. The CD album will ship around November 15th. You're able to pre-order the album on Bandcamp (US shipping) and directly from First Press Games (Europe shipping).



Deniz is of course also very thrilled about having his debut soundtrack be released on CD! He is always very thankful to anyone who has supported him and bought the soundtrack.


Since the initial full release we went through several hotfix updates and the game finally reached a (somewhat) stable state.

Crashes might still happen though. This is mostly when you use the new NW.js version for CrossCode (which is default on most platforms and when using the nwjs_new branch on Steam) together with a high sample rate of over 100kHz in your audio output device settings, since it makes NW.js (the "Web Audio API" in particular) extremely wasteful with memory.

We now did two things to hopefully reduce the amount of crashes.

• Create a 64bit application for Windows that has access to more memory. It should automatically update on Steam accordingly if you have a 64bit OS
• Optimize music loading in general, since the crashes usually happen on maps where a lot of music is loaded at once (this also has the positive side-effect that certain maps will load a lot faster)

Hopefully this will reduce the amount of crashes. If you are a Steam user currently on the default branch, you can try to switch to the nwjs_new beta branch to check if crashes still happen or not. Feedback would be highly appreciated!

And that's all for now.
Maybe now we can actually afford to take a little break~


A couple more hotfixes have been added over the last week.

New Features:

• An option to keep the game running when the window is out of focus
  
• Trophy Tracking! You can see status bars for your trophies.
  
• Warnings to notify you about potential performance problems right at the title screen.

And of course a lot more smaller fixes, text corrections and other things.

Game is just out and we already encountered quite a few critical issues.

This is why we now release Hotfix version 1.0.0-1 hoping to fix things.


We downgraded NW.js (the "engine" of CrossCode) again by default.

We were forced to do this since too many player experienced game-crashing issues with the new NW.js version.

The downside of this is, that the game might run slower for other players.

For those players we now added the following option:


There is a new beta branch available called nwjs_new. By switching to this branch you get CrossCode again with the new NW.js version.

You switch to the branch like this:

• Rightclick CrossCode in your library
  
• Select Properties
  
• Select the BETAS tab
  
• In the top select box, choose nwjs_new
  
• Verify game files or reinstall

Instead of talking about technical stuff lets go through the most common user experiences here:

Case 1: The game was running fine with 1.0.0 but with 1.0.0-1 it's worse

=> Switch to the nwjs_new branch

Case 2: The game was crashing with 1.0.0 and you fixed it by downgrading NW.js

=> Nothing you need to do. The new version has the downgraded NW.js by default.

Case 3: The game was crashing with 1.0.0 and you fixed it without downgrading NW.js

=> If the new version runs worse for you, you can also switch to nwjs_new



For more detailed troubleshooting, please visit this thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/368340/discussions/1/1733213724900972605/

Sorry for all the trouble to those player experience the crash issues! We're hard at work to find a good solution that works for as many players as possible!


Version 1.0.0-2:

• You can enter the Grabby Cave again
  
• Fixes issue where you could't get credits anymore
  
• Tucos pathfinding issue fixed (hopefully)

Version 1.0.0-3:

• Fixing a WORSE Credits bug
  
• You now can't teleport anymore after select to "continue the story"

Version 1.0.0-4:

• Fixed crash in last tab of Statistics menu
  
• Fixed crashes for certain boss fights.

Version 1.0.0-5:

• Fixed crash issues for the last few boss fights

Version 1.0.0-6:

• No crash when using lvl2 cold throw arts at element shield orbs
  
• Lots of smaller fixes

Version 1.0.0-7

• Windows now changed to 64bit application for nwjs_new branch
  
• Lot of loading optimizations for certain maps, loading time should be greatly reduced and less likely to crash
  
• Text updates for all localizations, fixing several small issues
  
• You now have 99 stamps per area
  
• Lots of smaller bugfixes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkk_omvFSOU

It's here. The day has come. After 7 years of development, half of which were in Early Access, CrossCode 1.0 finally releases!

Well, what can we say? What a crazy long journey it was. When we started out with CrossCode we've been a small team of inexperienced indie developers. So obviously, we decided to create a fully-featured RPG. Which was stupid ambitious. Yet still... we somehow did it.

And that's because of you! All you amazing people that backed us on Indiegogo or bought the Early Access version, supported us through the years with feedback, suggestions, tons... TONS of typo fixes or just by cheering us on over all this time. You made it possible for us to not only develop all the content we originally planned, but also to improve the game even further, suggesting features and improvements we never originally thought of.

We want you to know that this means a lot to us. It's really hard to describe how we feel right now. Especially since we had to write this text 3 days in advance. It's probably a mixture of extreme happiness and total exhaustion.

We would also like to thank all of our publishers who greatly helped us getting the word out all across the world.

And now the game is out. So it's up to you to play and hopefully enjoy this game of ours. Let us know what you think!



Just because CrossCode hit full release, doesn't mean it's complete...!

Well, we already warned you that we might not make it in time and that's pretty much what happened. Steam Achievements and Trading Cards are unfortunately not available yet. However, we'll work on this right away and hopefully add those features within the following weeks.

Note that the game already keeps tracks of achievements internally, so there is no need to replay the game after Steam Achievements have been added - you will automatically get all the achievements you already collected once you boot the game.

Other things, that are still missing and will be added in following updates:

• NPCs, quests, enemies, and food items that we need to implement for our Indiegogo Backers
• A New Game+ Mode
• The Last Minute Hero Guild
• More Quests and proper NPCs for Rhombus Square
• The Arena in Rhombus Square with more combat challenges
• A Ninja Skin for Lea that we promised some of our Indiegogo backers is still in development. It will become available within a few weeks!

We'll also have another post in the upcoming weeks to talk more about our Post-Game content plans.


If you feel like sharing your experience of the game with other players, here's just another reminder that you can join our official Discord server:
http://discord.gg/crosscode

Again, thanks so much for all your support. Now go play the game already!

Meanwhile, we'll try to squeeze in a little break to recover from the crunch.

Unless there are too many bugs.


Please... no more bugs...

Until next time!

Your CrossCode Team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuN-5yxwogU

The new release trailer is out, once again made by MultiMedia AMDG and featuring Animations by VanAnimation (Instagram,
Facebook, DeviantArt)!

It includes a few clips of new content but we made sure not to spoil the big surprises!




We've been doing gamedev streams now for over 3 years resulting in over 100 Stream drawings!

That's why we thought it would be appropriate to have a very special live stream on September 20 when we release the game!

The big difference: we will meet up in Frankfurt, visit our Publisher Deck13 and stream live from their office! Most RFG developers will be there and guests as well!

Get ready for some talking about behind the scenes stuff, reflecting on the overall development and of course... Anime talk. Probably. A little bit.

You might also be able to win some stuff! Please gief view!

You'll be able to watch the whole thing on our Twitch channel.


With this post we also release a small update for the game! And it's entirely content-free!

... That means this update doesn't add any new content. Or fixes. Or any other changes to the game, really.

Instead, we finally updated the version of NW.js, the software we use to run CrossCode! From our experience so far, this hopefully means that the game will run faster and more stable for most of you. If instead you have troubles with the new version, please let us know in the forum or via E-Mail ( contact@radicalfishgames.com )!


If the new version doesn't work for you at all, you have the option to manually downgrade NW.js back to the old version using one of the following instructions:

For Windows and Linux

• Open the installation folder of CrossCode (e.g. within Steam Apps)
• Delete all files and folders except for the asset folder
• Download the alternative files ( Windows | Linux 32 | Linux 64 ) and extract them into the installation folder.

For Mac

• Open the CrossCode.app folder (e.g. within Steam Apps) and backup the assets folder found in Contents/Resources/app.nw/
• Replace the CrossCode.app folder with this one
• Copy the asset folder back into Contents/Resources/app.nw/

Note: Whenever CrossCode is updated by Steam (or other platforms) it automatically updates NW.js again, so you will have to repeat those steps after each update. Sorry!


Since we're so close to release, we thought it's okay to skip the To Do List update for August. Those are actually quite a bit of work. In any case, the short version is: most content has been completed.

Until very soon!

(Note: this artwork is still work-in-progress)

It's official now!

After almost 7 years of development
and over 3 years of Early Access,
CrossCode will finally hit Version 1.0 on September 20, 2018!!

Which by the way is still totally in Summer!


The full release will be huge and by far the biggest update the game has had so far.

Here is a list of things you can expect from CrossCode 1.0:

• The complete main story with at least twice the amount of cutscenes
• Awesome and dramatic plot moments™
• A complete new area + dungeon + several extensions in existing areas
• Rhombus Square - the largest city of the game
• New party members!
• Over 9 new enemy types + more variations
• Over 13 new boss fight and other major battles
• About 12 new quests
• Several menu improvements and QoL additions
• A complete German translation
• Countless other small improvements/changes

Also hopefully less buggy than previous major releases, since we do some internal testing this time!

Other features that we still hope to finish but are not 100% certain yet:

• Steam Achievements
• Steam Trading Cards

We will try our best to implement these in time for the 1.0 release. If we won't make it, however, you can expect these features to be added very soon in a follow-up update. Don't worry about achievements, the game already tracks all achievements internally, so you will still get all the Steam achievements you already collected before the update.



CrossCode 1.0 will also come with over 20 new music tracks! With this, the complete soundtrack will include a total of 64 tracks. And of course you will be able to buy that one, too!

(Album artwork by Nemuri)

The Original Soundtrack of CrossCode will be released together with version 1.0! Available on Steam and Bandcamp!

If you like the music of CrossCode and would like to support our composer Deniz 'Intero' Akbulut, you can already preorder the soundtrack on Bandcamp today!


Development on CrossCode won't stop right at the 1.0 release. There are several feature and content we promised and we plan to keep that promise.

Most of the following content will be released as a free update after the 1.0 release:

• A New Game+ mode that allows you to restart the game in a special manner (details still open)
• Several additional NPCs, quests, and enemies that we promised to our Indiegogo backers
• The Last Minute Hero Guild that (ironically) we decided not to implement in the last minute.
• More maps for Rhombus Square and a few more quests that didn't quite make it for version 1.0
• The Arena in Rhombus Square! The least you can expect is a boss rush mode among other things!

Beyond that, we have a long, long list of stupid ideas and other content we'd love to add to the game, most likely as a DLC of sorts. But this of course depends on how the release will work out. So no promises on that yet!

...And that's pretty much it!
Now it's time for the final phase of development!

Until next time!