Hey guys, we spent a bit of time playing the game and sent a video on reddit to get feedback, and had quite a bit of advices from one or two commentators. This update is therefore brought to you by u/Frump.
Players can now smash from the ground. This will send the ball higher than a regular smash, a bit like smash services
Raised the ball when serving, allowing for even more spectacular spiked services
Add camera zooming and panning on particularly beautiful spikes
Sped up squids by 20%. This will allow for players to follow the ball then smash just after a bump, but this requires some skills and good timing to achieve.
Improve fast falling (hitting down while in the air to fall faster) by 300%
Games are now in 10 points
Ball now has a minimum speed while in the air, this will prevent waiting too long on the ball to fall but it will still allow time to think or execute complex moves
Our resident musician, Michael, has been providing the atmospheric synth-wave tracks for The Grip of Madness. But, we love all the music that came from the 80s which is why we’re so excited about our next character preview: The Frontman.
Fear of the satanic panic has whipped pearl-clutching parents into a frenzy, and the hair metal Frontman is a perfect embodiment of those fears. But he’s not here to raise hell… he’s here to keep its doors closed!
Used to playing in front of an audience, the Frontman will be the go-to choice for crowd control powers. With a strum from his mighty axe, he’ll have the power to knock back monsters or stun them. If the team needs a bit of breathing room, the Frontman will be ready for his solo.
The Frontman is also louder than the rest of the team. His voice with the proximity voice chat will carry farther than the rest. This will make them indispensable in relaying critical information to your teammates and coordinating everyone’s actions when they’re working together on our next batch of diabolical rituals… But we’ll leave that for a future Friday Update.
Join us for Madness Mondays!
The Grip of Madness team will be hosting Madness Mondays every other Monday. Our next Madness Monday is July 11th at 7pm EST. We’ll be hanging out on our Discord server to play Grip of Madness and chat with everyone. If you haven’t had a chance to play the demo yet, this will be a perfect time! Looking to join the community? Hop on our Discord server. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the game!
- New map: t_castle - Made shotgun reload time match animation duration - Changed default round time to 150 seconds - Changed game icon - Fixed third person shotgun animation not matching first person animation - Fixed an issue when spectators would be forced to play an Annihilation round - A bunch of sound changes - Changed ammo entities - Karma and rating penalty and reward values were moved into console commands (t_karma_ and t_rating_) - Added a special sound when you search a body of your teammate that you killed - Re-enabled tracers - Voice commands; reset your controls settings and press Z to use them! - Added pseudo names for players - Fixed incorrect crosshair target nickname when you spectate someone - Lots of minor changes and fixes
We're happy to announce that the Somier Plush campaign will begin July 15th on the Makeship website. We'll be announcing it here and on our mailing list as soon as it starts.
New Playable character: "The Second" from Clan Basarab.
New Mechanic to Fame: The ability to learn from fame trees how to seduce, fear, or bribe a hunter wave and render them useless without lifting a finger.
Rivals Mechanic: At Nights 7 and 10, other vampire lords will start challenging you. It is up to you to accept and have a very challenging fight to gain great rewards, or flat out decline them.
New traps
New Boss: Terrifying new Foe, paving the way for things to come in Act3.
3 New Radiance levels.
4 New General Heritage choices.
Bug Fixes:
Clan Vorody's Morale damage dealing physical damage talent caused problems with frost mage armor. Changed so they they no longer interact.
Fixed an issue where some level 3 room rewards kept providing their buffs even after being demolished.
Fixed an issue where if a silenced skill is silenced again it would cause problems.
Fixed an issue where Act 1 Bosses sometimes did not drop any reward.
Fixed various issues caused by Blood Link skill interacting with other skills.
Max Fame can no longer surpass 81. (We initially thought we fixed this but apparently the bug kept happening when a new night started, should be fixed now.)
[h4]UI[/h4]
Fixed not being able to see tooltips when hovering on some trinkets, skill slots and perks
Balance Changes:
We changed how the movement on the invasion screen works. - Before this change, the mechanic worked like this : After you finished a combat encounter with your Vampire Lord, your turn was over and it was the enemies' turn to move/plunder/attack. - After this patch is implemented it will work like this : Your Vampire Lord can continue to move/attack after the battle is over if you have enough movement points.
[h4]Blood[/h4]
Pericyte Barrier: Empowered now gives 1 constitution instead of 2. Recast regen increased from 1 for 3 crits done to 1 for 5 crits done.
Pale Plasma: No longer provides 1 initial block.(Now only gives 1 block for every 40 blood in current blood pool) Increased cooldown by 1.
Haste: We changed how this buff stacks, before it would stack number of buff duration on lord. Now it stacks the multicast chance gained, duration remains same.
[h4]Ferocity[/h4]
Blood for Blood: Now deals 3 extra damage per weak stacks on target (was 1).
Claw: Now gains 2 additional damage from finesse instead of 1.
Get ready for more adventures!🐪🌴 Enter the tomb of the pharaoh!⚰️ This 5-player Push or Fold with 30M buy-in Saloon can bring your glory and a Sapphire Ticket if your reach the top of its Leaderboard!🏆🎟️ Find it in the Featured Tab!✨
When we first put Betrayer into Early Access we did so hoping that it would renew some of the interest in the title and help us find a further audience that wanted to explore the world of The Spine and play a rich 2D style game. Unfortunately last year, the game went vastly over budget and we had to make some significant cuts to keep our company running and to continue to support our first release. We never forgot about Betrayer though, and we want to come back to this game in a big way and finish strong. The only way forward at this point is going to be complete transparency on our part and keeping a line open for communication moving forward. We have a roadmap in mind for things that we would like to add to the game, and we know how much money we would need to make those additions a reality. At this point we're going to do everything that we can to ensure this game has a bright future.
But realistically none of that means much without us being in a position to financially support the game. At present we're exploring some options to continue funding the development of Betrayer. Unless we suddenly shift about 2,500 copies of this game on Steam out of nowhere this is where we're gonna be for a little while. I promise that your patience will be rewarded.
We haven`t written to you for a long time but from now on we'll regularly show the progress of our work on the game, our intention is to share with you 1-3 devlogs per month.
Also, we would like to announce that we will be participating in the Steam Next Fest: October 2022! Read our new devlog for more information.
MORE ABOUT POLY GANG
Poly Gangs is a sandbox world action game in which we play the role of a young boy from the blocks. We discover its history during the game. The player can count on a lot of humorous actions, choices in the game (Different endings of the game, depending on the path of development chosen by the player), and a lot of fun - he will be able to move around the city. The game world is full of places and situations with which we can interact.
In the upcoming devlogs, the main character will appear who will take over the devlog narrative!
ROADMAP
Soon, many events await us - check out our Roadmap for more information!
At the turn of July and August, you will see a new trailer showing the effects of the last months of work on Poly Gangs.
A new Trailer and Kickstarter - Along with the trailer, we will launch a Kickstarter fundraiser, thanks to which you will be able to buy a game with interesting bonuses (we are preparing a few surprises for you) and you will really help us create an even more interesting game for you!
October 2022 - You will be able to check out our game for yourself at the Steam Next Fest! We are already looking forward to your comments - they will be invaluable to us because, in the end, we create the game for you. :)
Q1 2023 - We will ask you for help in playtests - then there will also be an opportunity to discover our game.
Q2 2023 - You will learn the whole story that we are writing for you and we hope that you will enjoy playing Poly Gangs.
We would like to invite you to the world with a good dose of humor, and street music. Enjoy the atmosphere and emotions of the good old days! Be prepared for the unexpected twists and collaboration, which will surprise no one player from both the younger and the slightly older generation!
What famous buildings and cars would you like to see in the game? Send us your suggestions!
Be sure to follow our discord channel for more PolyVersum content!
I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me, but you're not that lucky! Believe it or not, I've been hard at work behind the scenes since the release of episode 1. I decided to frontload the work on the story cutscenes and episodes 3-7 are all roughly 95% done (some minor tweaks and voice acting are still needed). This means the majority of the work left to do is on the level design for the 5 remaining songs.
My current release schedule is to have 1 story episode released every month and launch out of early access with v1.0 December 2022! This has been a long time coming, but I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! I can't guarantee I will be able to make this deadline (I know last update I gave an estimate of end of 2021...), but I can promise that I will continue to work hard on this behind the scenes. My full time job still keeps me very busy but I'm back to just working one job now (for the most part). I believe that I have frontloaded enough of the work already that I will be able to keep to this schedule.
Content Updates
Episode 2 of story mode is here, featuring Avoid Direct Sunlight by the amazing Halc
Bug Fixes
I made some changes to the way the button preview icons on obstacles are loaded during gameplay. As a result, performance has been improved across the board. This does also result in it taking a few seconds for them to update if you switch control schemes mid level, but I felt this trade off was worth the performance increase.
That's all for now! Thanks again for sticking with me and I hope to see you all again in August with the release of Episode 3
