Click here for help on accessing the Unstable branch!

Just in time for Christmas, I've just finished the next unstable build for you guys. This one introduces a few optimizations, bug fixes, miscellaneous tweaks and most importantly, an upgradable Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery! This is also the first patch to officially introduce the new game title, Rise to Ruins! :)

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• Added the new upgrades for the Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery.
  
• When upgraded, the Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery increase their respected worker counts, storage space and work speeds.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Removed the 1 worker per building refining cap.
  
• Doubled the refining and manufacturing production time. (To offset allowing multiple workers to work at once)
  
• Workers can now store resources in buildings while they're mid-upgrade.
  
• Screenshake can now be disabled in the settings menu.
  
• Weather is no longer enabled on the main menu.
  
• Game officially renamed to "Rise to Ruins".
  
• Fixed a bunch of typos in the help system.
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause the game to try to "draw" roads on void tiles.
  
• Improved the AI performance of harvesting tasks. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Optimized the particle rendering system. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Updated the tutorial link. (Was also included in InDev 23c)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug when trying to draw on the accent layer before ever loading the bottom layer into memory.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented the "harvest crystals" hotkey from working when the camp/castle was under construction. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• The grab building, pause building and dismantle building hotkeys now work correctly in play mode. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause wind particles to not decay if they collided with the topography. (Was also included in InDev 23c)

Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• A new Village Efficiency system has been added, several buildings will provide boosts to the entire village's work speed, either as soon as they are built, or later as you upgrade them. These bonuses do stack, up to a maximum of +90%.
  
• The Lumber Shack, Mining Facility and Crystal Harvestry can now all be upgraded. Each upgrade increases storage, worker limits and increases your village's harvesting speeds for their respected resources.
  
• The Camp will now provide an increase to all work speeds and an additional bonus increase to all building speeds incrementally as it is upgraded into a Castle.
  
• Each Ancillary now offers a slight increase to all work speeds, as well as an additional increase to building speeds.
  
• Wind, rain and snow will now reduce all work speeds by 20%
  
• A new "Village Efficiency" tab has been added to the game, next to he Music button on the top right of the GUI. It will show you the total breakdown of all work speed bonuses your village provides.
  
• Specific work speed bonuses for individual buildings can be seen by clicking on the building and looking at their pop out GUI panel on the right hand side.
  
• Mob stats now play a much greater role in work speed, offering ((STR+DEX+INT)*0.05)% boost to all work speeds up to a maximum of 50%. For example, if a villager had 150 STR, 100 DEX and 50 INT, they would have a work speed boost of 15%.

Bug Fixes

• Monster spawn points that get in range of the village no longer count towards the village's building count.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Harvesting buildings have had their initial build costs reduced.
  
• New song, Sunset, as been added!
  
• Rebalanced Nomads slightly. They are less willing to appear if your village is overpopulated (not enough housing), and more willing when you have excess housing available.
  
• Updated the Kitchen's description.
  
• Small "Work Progress" bars now float above villager's heads when they are working.
  
• The mob overlay (Progress bars, health bars, etc) are now rendered on top of the work selection overlay.
  
• Farms will now emit smoke or frozen particles if they are too hot or cold to grow.
  
• A warning message is now displayed over farms when the farm is not growing any food due to extreme temperatures.

• None!

Click here for help on accessing the Unstable branch!

Just in time for Christmas, I've just finished the next unstable build for you guys. This one introduces a few optimizations, bug fixes, miscellaneous tweaks and most importantly, an upgradable Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery! This is also the first patch to officially introduce the new game title, Rise to Ruins! :)

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• Added the new upgrades for the Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery.
  
• When upgraded, the Lumber Mill, Crystillery and Stone Cuttery increase their respected worker counts, storage space and work speeds.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Removed the 1 worker per building refining cap.
  
• Doubled the refining and manufacturing production time. (To offset allowing multiple workers to work at once)
  
• Workers can now store resources in buildings while they're mid-upgrade.
  
• Screenshake can now be disabled in the settings menu.
  
• Weather is no longer enabled on the main menu.
  
• Game officially renamed to "Rise to Ruins".
  
• Fixed a bunch of typos in the help system.
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause the game to try to "draw" roads on void tiles.
  
• Improved the AI performance of harvesting tasks. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Optimized the particle rendering system. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Updated the tutorial link. (Was also included in InDev 23c)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug when trying to draw on the accent layer before ever loading the bottom layer into memory.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented the "harvest crystals" hotkey from working when the camp/castle was under construction. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• The grab building, pause building and dismantle building hotkeys now work correctly in play mode. (Was also included in InDev 23c)
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause wind particles to not decay if they collided with the topography. (Was also included in InDev 23c)

Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• A new Village Efficiency system has been added, several buildings will provide boosts to the entire village's work speed, either as soon as they are built, or later as you upgrade them. These bonuses do stack, up to a maximum of +90%.
  
• The Lumber Shack, Mining Facility and Crystal Harvestry can now all be upgraded. Each upgrade increases storage, worker limits and increases your village's harvesting speeds for their respected resources.
  
• The Camp will now provide an increase to all work speeds and an additional bonus increase to all building speeds incrementally as it is upgraded into a Castle.
  
• Each Ancillary now offers a slight increase to all work speeds, as well as an additional increase to building speeds.
  
• Wind, rain and snow will now reduce all work speeds by 20%
  
• A new "Village Efficiency" tab has been added to the game, next to he Music button on the top right of the GUI. It will show you the total breakdown of all work speed bonuses your village provides.
  
• Specific work speed bonuses for individual buildings can be seen by clicking on the building and looking at their pop out GUI panel on the right hand side.
  
• Mob stats now play a much greater role in work speed, offering ((STR+DEX+INT)*0.05)% boost to all work speeds up to a maximum of 50%. For example, if a villager had 150 STR, 100 DEX and 50 INT, they would have a work speed boost of 15%.

Bug Fixes

• Monster spawn points that get in range of the village no longer count towards the village's building count.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Harvesting buildings have had their initial build costs reduced.
  
• New song, Sunset, as been added!
  
• Rebalanced Nomads slightly. They are less willing to appear if your village is overpopulated (not enough housing), and more willing when you have excess housing available.
  
• Updated the Kitchen's description.
  
• Small "Work Progress" bars now float above villager's heads when they are working.
  
• The mob overlay (Progress bars, health bars, etc) are now rendered on top of the work selection overlay.
  
• Farms will now emit smoke or frozen particles if they are too hot or cold to grow.
  
• A warning message is now displayed over farms when the farm is not growing any food due to extreme temperatures.

• None!

Greetings fellow players,

For quite some time, I've been pondering over a very large and somewhat risky change to our beloved game, renaming Retro-Pixel Castles to something that is more suitable to what the game represents.

The decision is not something I have taken lightly. Renaming a game that's over 2 years old in a lot of ways can be considered marketing suicide, as you will always lose a decent amount of name recognition all over the internet. Some people will have no idea what this "new" game is, and others will wonder what happened to the old one.

But as I'm sure a large majority of you agree, Retro-Pixel Castles is a downright silly name for a godlike village simulator.

The game hasn't been retro for over a year since the graphics overhaul, and while the game does indeed have castles now, castles aren't the focus of the game play mechanics. I suppose the game technically still has pixel art, but usually games tend to stray away from being called "pixel art" games once the artwork is rendered directly in 1:1 resolution, as much of RPC's is now.

I've also gotten several reports that its "silly name" was probably hurting it in the long run anyway, simply because it's not the kind of name gamers take very seriously, subconsciously putting in the same category as keyword-filled shovelware before even clicking on the game's store page.

So, I finally decided to take the risk about 2 weeks ago, and started thinking up a new name. I posted many polls on twitter, asking for people to pick names they liked, and after about 2 days of spamming back and forth, a good friend and fellow developer of mine suggested "Rise to Ruins", since the idea of the game is to survive as long as possible (Rise) to eventually end up dying as the world eventually overtakes you (Ruins) and you have to try again.

So I put it up for a vote, and it was the highest rated of all of my previous selections (Apparently I suck at naming things!).

The games new official name is now "Rise to Ruins", as soon as InDev 24 is completed, you will see the Steam official store page, the official website, and the game in your Steam library all start transitioning over. For a few patches, I will have the old name subtitled to lessen the confusion.

If you're a content creator out there reading this and you cover my game, please help me out and spread the word after InDev 24 is released! :)

Greetings fellow players,

For quite some time, I've been pondering over a very large and somewhat risky change to our beloved game, renaming Retro-Pixel Castles to something that is more suitable to what the game represents.

The decision is not something I have taken lightly. Renaming a game that's over 2 years old in a lot of ways can be considered marketing suicide, as you will always lose a decent amount of name recognition all over the internet. Some people will have no idea what this "new" game is, and others will wonder what happened to the old one.

But as I'm sure a large majority of you agree, Retro-Pixel Castles is a downright silly name for a godlike village simulator.

The game hasn't been retro for over a year since the graphics overhaul, and while the game does indeed have castles now, castles aren't the focus of the game play mechanics. I suppose the game technically still has pixel art, but usually games tend to stray away from being called "pixel art" games once the artwork is rendered directly in 1:1 resolution, as much of RPC's is now.

I've also gotten several reports that its "silly name" was probably hurting it in the long run anyway, simply because it's not the kind of name gamers take very seriously, subconsciously putting in the same category as keyword-filled shovelware before even clicking on the game's store page.

So, I finally decided to take the risk about 2 weeks ago, and started thinking up a new name. I posted many polls on twitter, asking for people to pick names they liked, and after about 2 days of spamming back and forth, a good friend and fellow developer of mine suggested "Rise to Ruins", since the idea of the game is to survive as long as possible (Rise) to eventually end up dying as the world eventually overtakes you (Ruins) and you have to try again.

So I put it up for a vote, and it was the highest rated of all of my previous selections (Apparently I suck at naming things!).

The games new official name is now "Rise to Ruins", as soon as InDev 24 is completed, you will see the Steam official store page, the official website, and the game in your Steam library all start transitioning over. For a few patches, I will have the old name subtitled to lessen the confusion.

If you're a content creator out there reading this and you cover my game, please help me out and spread the word after InDev 24 is released! :)

InDev 23b is a minor update that introduces a new updated tutorial video for InDev 23 created by The FallenShogun, and throws in a few code optimizations that should help a bit late-game.

Unstable users, please note the changes below have not yet been implemented in the unstable branch, but they will be included in InDev 24 Unstable 2.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


New Tutorial Video

• A brand new, updated tutorial video has been added, recorded by The FallenShogun (Give him a sub as a thank you for his hard work!)

Optimizes

• Harvesting AI has been heavily optimized, greatly reducing overhead late game caused by too much work being selected by your ever-growing population.
  
• On multicore processors the particles rendering speeds have been improved roughly 20-30% in most conditions, and over 400% in a few very specific conditions.

InDev 23b is a minor update that introduces a new updated tutorial video for InDev 23 created by The FallenShogun, and throws in a few code optimizations that should help a bit late-game.

Unstable users, please note the changes below have not yet been implemented in the unstable branch, but they will be included in InDev 24 Unstable 2.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


New Tutorial Video

• A brand new, updated tutorial video has been added, recorded by The FallenShogun (Give him a sub as a thank you for his hard work!)

Optimizes

• Harvesting AI has been heavily optimized, greatly reducing overhead late game caused by too much work being selected by your ever-growing population.
  
• On multicore processors the particles rendering speeds have been improved roughly 20-30% in most conditions, and over 400% in a few very specific conditions.

Click here for help on accessing the Unstable branch!

The first in quite a few InDev 24 Unstable builds is here! This one adds building upgrades for the harvesting buildings, as well as adds a new worker efficiency system! Check out the change logs for more details.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• A new Village Efficiency system has been added, several buildings will provide boosts to the entire village's work speed, either as soon as they are built, or later as you upgrade them. These bonuses do stack, up to a maximum of +90%.
  
• The Lumber Shack, Mining Facility and Crystal Harvestry can now all be upgraded. Each upgrade increases storage, worker limits and increases your village's harvesting speeds for their respected resources.
  
• The Camp will now provide an increase to all work speeds and an additional bonus increase to all building speeds incrementally as it is upgraded into a Castle.
  
• Each Ancillary now offers a slight increase to all work speeds, as well as an additional increase to building speeds.
  
• Wind, rain and snow will now reduce all work speeds by 20%
  
• A new "Village Efficiency" tab has been added to the game, next to he Music button on the top right of the GUI. It will show you the total breakdown of all work speed bonuses your village provides.
  
• Specific work speed bonuses for individual buildings can be seen by clicking on the building and looking at their pop out GUI panel on the right hand side.
  
• Mob stats now play a much greater role in work speed, offering ((STR+DEX+INT)*0.05)% boost to all work speeds up to a maximum of 50%. For example, if a villager had 150 STR, 100 DEX and 50 INT, they would have a work speed boost of 15%.

Bug Fixes

• Monster spawn points that get in range of the village no longer count towards the village's building count.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Harvesting buildings have had their initial build costs reduced.
  
• New song, Sunset, as been added!
  
• Rebalanced Nomads slightly. They are less willing to appear if your village is overpopulated (not enough housing), and more willing when you have excess housing available.
  
• Updated the Kitchen's description.
  
• Small "Work Progress" bars now float above villager's heads when they are working.
  
• The mob overlay (Progress bars, health bars, etc) are now rendered on top of the work selection overlay.
  
• Farms will now emit smoke or frozen particles if they are too hot or cold to grow.
  
• A warning message is now displayed over farms when the farm is not growing any food due to extreme temperatures.

• None!

Click here for help on accessing the Unstable branch!

The first in quite a few InDev 24 Unstable builds is here! This one adds building upgrades for the harvesting buildings, as well as adds a new worker efficiency system! Check out the change logs for more details.

You can report bugs over at the official website's Support and Bugs Forum, or on the Steam Discussion Board. :)


Upgrade and Village Efficiency System

• A new Village Efficiency system has been added, several buildings will provide boosts to the entire village's work speed, either as soon as they are built, or later as you upgrade them. These bonuses do stack, up to a maximum of +90%.
  
• The Lumber Shack, Mining Facility and Crystal Harvestry can now all be upgraded. Each upgrade increases storage, worker limits and increases your village's harvesting speeds for their respected resources.
  
• The Camp will now provide an increase to all work speeds and an additional bonus increase to all building speeds incrementally as it is upgraded into a Castle.
  
• Each Ancillary now offers a slight increase to all work speeds, as well as an additional increase to building speeds.
  
• Wind, rain and snow will now reduce all work speeds by 20%
  
• A new "Village Efficiency" tab has been added to the game, next to he Music button on the top right of the GUI. It will show you the total breakdown of all work speed bonuses your village provides.
  
• Specific work speed bonuses for individual buildings can be seen by clicking on the building and looking at their pop out GUI panel on the right hand side.
  
• Mob stats now play a much greater role in work speed, offering ((STR+DEX+INT)*0.05)% boost to all work speeds up to a maximum of 50%. For example, if a villager had 150 STR, 100 DEX and 50 INT, they would have a work speed boost of 15%.

Bug Fixes

• Monster spawn points that get in range of the village no longer count towards the village's building count.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Harvesting buildings have had their initial build costs reduced.
  
• New song, Sunset, as been added!
  
• Rebalanced Nomads slightly. They are less willing to appear if your village is overpopulated (not enough housing), and more willing when you have excess housing available.
  
• Updated the Kitchen's description.
  
• Small "Work Progress" bars now float above villager's heads when they are working.
  
• The mob overlay (Progress bars, health bars, etc) are now rendered on top of the work selection overlay.
  
• Farms will now emit smoke or frozen particles if they are too hot or cold to grow.
  
• A warning message is now displayed over farms when the farm is not growing any food due to extreme temperatures.

• None!

Yes, you read the wacky title correctly. ;)

InDev 24 will primarily be focused on fleshing out the new upgrade system introduced in InDev 23, adding upgraded phases for a large amount of the existing buildings, including all of the harvesting, manufacturing and refining buildings.

The change log for this one will look pretty straight forward, as no new mechanics are planned for this patch (Drawing all these new building phases takes a ton of time time!) but I will be doing a few balance adjustments, optimizing and minor game play tweaks as per usual. Looking forward to seeing your feedback once the first Unstable build is released. :)



Fleshing Out The Upgrade System

• 2 upgrade phases will be added to each harvesting, manufacturing and refining building (The Crystal Harvestry, Lumber Shack, Mining Facility, Armormsmithy, Bowyer, Toolsmithy, Tumbler, Way Maker Shack, Crystillery, Stone Cuttery and Lumber Mill)
  
• Most of the initial buildings may be nerfed a bit, but also cheaper to build. So you'll be able to get job types available faster, and upgrade the buildings later as you need more workers.
  
• Time permitting, the Kitchen, Clinic and some other buildings may also get 2 upgrade phases.

Yes, you read the wacky title correctly. ;)

InDev 24 will primarily be focused on fleshing out the new upgrade system introduced in InDev 23, adding upgraded phases for a large amount of the existing buildings, including all of the harvesting, manufacturing and refining buildings.

The change log for this one will look pretty straight forward, as no new mechanics are planned for this patch (Drawing all these new building phases takes a ton of time time!) but I will be doing a few balance adjustments, optimizing and minor game play tweaks as per usual. Looking forward to seeing your feedback once the first Unstable build is released. :)



Fleshing Out The Upgrade System

• 2 upgrade phases will be added to each harvesting, manufacturing and refining building (The Crystal Harvestry, Lumber Shack, Mining Facility, Armormsmithy, Bowyer, Toolsmithy, Tumbler, Way Maker Shack, Crystillery, Stone Cuttery and Lumber Mill)
  
• Most of the initial buildings may be nerfed a bit, but also cheaper to build. So you'll be able to get job types available faster, and upgrade the buildings later as you need more workers.
  
• Time permitting, the Kitchen, Clinic and some other buildings may also get 2 upgrade phases.