Sep 30

Brigador Killers - dudeglove

In the previous two posts you saw beauty renders of some ammo boxes in the inventory screen and got a look at a few of the firearms you can use. Now it's time to see how those things will appear on the ground. Here's Dave strutting past some sprite renders of various weapons and ammo boxes in a GIF.

Mousing over any gun or ammo drop on the ground will highlight the item and display an information box. Please note that this UI is still a work in progress.

Reading the box from top to bottom you first see the item type, which is "GUN". Next to that is the number 5 in blue, which will be explained in a moment. After that is the silhouette of the weapon to make it easily identifiable at a glance, followed by the gun class (SMG), name (Heino9!) and what ammo type it uses (9mm). Below that you can see how much ammo is in the weapon, which in this case is "0/34 9mm FMJ", and lastly the prompt to pick up the weapon.

Remember the blue number? That value is the "capacity" the gun will take up in the player's inventory. "Capacity" in this context is an abstracted combination of both the weight and its overall size. Compare it for example with the Kriel rifle, which has a capacity of 12.

If this number is blue and the pickup prompt is visible, it means there is enough space in the player's inventory to carry the weapon. If the number is red, however…

…Then this means the player's inventory is full and does not have the capacity to pick this item up. The player can access the inventory by pressing Tab, and on the left hand side of the screen they will see what gun weapon slots are occupied and what capacity space is available.

In Dave's case you can see that his Battledress Backpack has a capacity of 25, and his Chest Rig has an additional capacity of 5. Notice also how the gun slots Main-1, Main-2 and Sidearm have capacity values of 15, 15 and 5 respectively. This means Dave can, in addition to whatever is stored in his backpack or rig, wield weapons up to these capacity values in those gun slots. Weapons that exceed these capacity values cannot be wielded by Dave in his current state, meaning Dave will need to upgrade to something like a carmine suit.

After suiting Dave up in a carmine, his chest rig capacity has doubled to 50, and the gun slot values have also increased. This allows Dave to wield the Cut Fifty heavy machine gun, which has a capacity of 30.

Ammo boxes have a similar mouseover information box to weapons with some slight differences.

The blue capacity number on the 9mm ammo box is 0 but this is because the mouseover does not display decimal values. Much like with the weapons, items like this ammo box have different capacity values. Refer to the image below to see different capacity values for the RPG rounds, the jerry can and so on.

In addition, the 9mm FMJ box has a COUNT of 40, which means the box contains 40 rounds. This number can be changed via the map making tool Stellar Jockeys uses to make levels, which is called Tiled.

In Tiled it's possible to set custom properties for placed objects like ammo pickups. The quantity (highlighted with a red box) of a specific pickup can be changed to whatever is required, so for instance a separate box with twice as much ammo can be placed.

This is useful for the level designers who may want to put specific amounts of ammunition within a level depending on the design goal.

One big difference in the appearance of weapon and ammo pickups is the sprites for ammo pickups are only rendered from one angle. In other words, the ammo boxes will always face the front so that they are clearly identifiable.

Since firearms are wielded by the player, they are rendered out at the full 128 sprite rotations, meaning they can appear on the ground pointing any available direction.

This also means that when a group of enemies are eliminated and drop their firearms, those weapons won't all drop in the same direction and look a bit odd as a result.

This concludes the trio of posts looking at Brigador Killers' inventory. In next month's news post we will take a look at some of the vehicles available to the player.

A note about the October Steam Next Fest

Back in April we wrote that we were planning to be in October's Steam Next Fest. Unfortunately, Brigador Killers will not appear in that Next Fest. Our priority is updating the build on Itch first and, if we are satisfied with it, then a demo will appear on Steam sometime after. We very much appreciate your enthusiasm and your patience for Brigador Killers.

If you want to be among the first to know when a BK demo is coming then please sign up for our newsletter.

The archive of previous newsletters stretches back all the way to 2019, long before news updates for Brigador Killers were posted here.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/903930/

Sep 30

Dice Dice Baby Demo 1.2

Dice Dice Baby - Nugget Games Studio

Hello everyone,

Once again, thank you all for the precious and very encouraging feedback you gave me on the Dice Dice Baby demo. It has been a real pleasure to exchange with the players and to keep learning and improve the game as much as possible to prepare for the full release :)

Thanks to all these feedbacks and suggestions, I managed to identify several areas of improvement on the current demo build and I decided to keep updating the demo for as long as possible instead of keeping these improvements for the full game release.

As always, I really hope you enjoy these new features and changes. Please let us know your thoughts in the community page or by leaving a review on the demo page <3

Full patch note:

Feature:

New feature: House Rules
- Identified issue: There seems to be a lack of run variety, chaos, and short term objectives for the player. Players' only objective is to reach the last round, with no intermediary steps toward that objective.
- To solve this issue, I've added a new event panel that will appear every 5 rounds.
- The event panel will propose 2 special effects or run modifiers that will be applied immediately or change the rules for the next round.
- These events are designed to be punishing and run-breaking, but only if you play with certain combos and strategies. The goal of this mechanic is to challenge the player to identify and select the option that has the least impact on their current strategy.
- Completing a round with a special objective gives a bonus coin reward.
- As I didn't want this feature to be too RNG driven, in case you have a very bad roll and both options are run-ending, you can reroll the proposed objectives.
- However, rerolling the objectives is a resource limited per run, with more or less of it depending on the difficulty level you play. This should add a bit of resource management to the run strategy, as using your objective rerolls on an early game objective could mean sealing your fate later down the road.

Balancing:

Round reward has been reduced to compensate with the new special objective round reward. This means players will have less money in the rounds between special objectives but get a money burst every 5 rounds, for more interesting and strategic spending.
General difficulty of the normal mode round targets has been increased, as it seemed a bit too easy to complete runs without a proper strategy.
Dice level is now limited to 99.
Increased the mult. given by "5 of a kind" and higher, to better reward longer combos.

UX:

Synergy tooltip panel overlay has been reworked for better information hierarchy.
Overkill feedbacks have been improved to feel more powerful and celebratory.
Victory/defeat panel has been improved to feel more celebratory.
New high scores are now displayed in the victory/defeat screen.
Reworded many description texts which felt unclear.

Bugs:

Fixed an exploit where spamming the reward button gave infinite money.

Sep 30

Devlog #2 Ver 0.8.0 Update and future of Cross The World.

Cross The World - redbeehives

This devlog explains details of an update 0.8.x which has replaced 0.7.3 update.

Why 0.8?

Hi, initially the update was only going to cover the contents discussed in previous devlog Cross The World - Devlog #1 Bodyparts, New Equipments, New Perks and more. - Steam News, however during the development process I realized I had to make an important decision, that is to scrap the current game world and create a much larger world.

The current game world is too small and cramped for proper exploration, you don't really have the notion of "Oh from here I can go all directions and discover new points of interest". The directions in which players could or are encouraged to move is very linear and mostly up and down, between north and south. This hurt the essence of what it means to play an Open World game and having the true freedom of being able to go just anywhere.

New map in 0.8 has tripled in its size in terms of effective land mass. There are going to be new factions, new NPCs, new places, pretty much an overhaul. With more hints provided of where to visit next for the exploration on top of the update from devlog #1 for 0.7.3 update.

Regions

The world is split into 12 regions as seen above, each getting respective regional simulator in the later versions that manage entity count, events and environment. It will take time to update this world in its full from the initial 0.8.0 update to the later versions to 0.8.9 and onwards. I hope to finish this by December.

The coastline in the west with Human Freehold, Westreach Isles, Dwarven Kingdom and Stonepass are where the players will start and cities with most of population are located.

Central zone is home to the native Elves and Grey Elves habiting the Steelmane Steppe and J'erekhi Desert. Elves in the southern plain live nomadic and peaceful life but do not tolerate outlanders whilst the Grey Elves in the desert actively trade with Humans and Dwarves.

East hosts the dangerous, end-game areas with dungeons and fearsome monsters. You do not want to step into this part of world until you are well-equipped.

In the later version of the 0.8 updates, sometimes there will be seasonal visitor NPCs from outside the map by the world's borders, with unique opportunities for items, quests and trades. This will strengthen the notion of the game's open world being part of the greater fantasy setting, extending outwards into what you cannot see.

Guilds

To me the game previously felt little detached from player to the world you play in. There were several interactions you can take, but the feeling of progress and involvement from the old school RPGs were missing in the game. In the 0.8 versions there are going to be two guilds players can join and get promoted.

They are Hunter's Guild in the Human Freehold, Adventurer's Guild in the Dwarven Kingdom. The two guilds will serve as an easy in-game goal and progress target to follow for the beginners. From thereon players can get used to how the game's different mechanics work and not fall for the easy trap of "Now what? what should I do next?" in open-ended sandbox RPGs.

And not just serving the role of providing the content to the player, the guilds will take active part in how the world is shaped among the NPCs who live in this world. There are going to be not just you but NPC adventurers and hunters as well who go outside into the world and do their own exploration which are fully simulated and you can encounter them as well. This is part of the 'Emergent Global Simulation' Cross The World is trying to simulate, which I will further explain below in this post.

Enchants and Moonstone

(Moonstone Shard, Moonstone, Red Moonstone are newly added to the game.)

I noticed that the enchant system in the game has been unfriendly to work with. There were so many different materials needed for enchanting your equipment and the whole mechanics felt very clunky.

Now the Enchant System has changed to:

The three moonstones are the only enchant materials required to enchant your equipment. You can acquire them from various ways in the game like quests, loots, purchase, etc.
Enchant chance to fail has been removed from the game.
When enchanting your equipment, previously the new enchant used to be fully random and you could not predict the power progression from enchant system. Now the new enchants improve the existing stats of the equipment, providing clear direction of where your new enchants will take you.

Buildings - experimental

Now the buildings are objects you enter and exit. This is experimental and subject to change. I've felt that the buildings previously based on floor and wall tiles only like many other tile-based sandbox games can naturally lead to lacking the element of exploring the building and interiors, involving mechanics like long corridors, many rooms and floors to explore, windows to jump off from second floor, hidden chambers, etc.

I hope this approach, a more traditional way to interact with buildings and its interiors (like you would in Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc) can greatly improve the gameplay and player experience.

Emergent Global Simulation, and future of Cross The World

The ultimate end-goal of Cross The World is to make a game world that is persistently simulated as written in the game's store page as well. However what I've always aimed at, wasn't restricted to the environmental simulation only, I plan to create a game where everything, that includes NPCs truly live in the world in accordance to their surroundings.

Traditionally in RPGs it used to be that NPCs were passive entities. They will usually just stand there waiting for players to talk to them, provide some dialogue and quests, and that's about it. To me they never felt like "living in a real world". They won't go outside chop down the tree, or hunt animal, gather fruits themselves, they stand still until the end of the world.

I want to change this mechanics, but not by too much where NPCs are overly active and reshape the world excessively where the player can feel left behind. Plus this level of persistent calculations for all NPCs in the game world can lag any high-end PC out there, I don't want that either.

What I want to pursuit is less of Characters moving and acting constantly 24/7 like that of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, but rather it'd be something I've not seen other games achieve well yet, It is going to be calendar and goal oriented NPC simulation scheduler working alongside the region simulator written above.

Rather than NPCs doing something constantly and eating up computer's horsepower, they take more slow-paced routine, much more relaxed. Sometimes, a farmer living in a farmstead NPC will travel to go to nearby town to visit a friend. In winter NPCs will mostly stay inside. An adventurer NPC after a great quest, can waste his time drinking at the tavern. NPCs are going to be simulated for all of this and more, walking every tile for this, not teleported to the designated coordinate for hard-coded events that can feel fake.

These simulations are going to be genuinely simulated with NPC's own need and stat and most importantly an RNG, a dice roll. So what you are going to see in the world are not going to be fully predictable, an NPC travelling a long distance can totally end up being raided by a bandit or a wild monster and fall down. This can trigger the guard NPCs to scout and rescue said NPC.

Throughout these NPC simulations and their own actions being taken, plus the player interactions with them, the world will be reshaped as the calendar-time progresses into the future. For example that wizard NPC you decided to help with on her magic research, by procuring a rare material, can end up a botched questline by discovering that she had died from her winter exploration into the forest while you were away.

This level of scope, depth and the world simulation can often feel harsh, unfriendly and very clunky at times as a game and a player and I'm aware that this is not an easy goal to achieve either. However I believe this will be what makes Cross The World truly a unique gameplay experience and stand out among others.

How long is this going to take?

The first 0.8.0 update will arrive at some time this month, I do not wish to have players wait too long and feel tired. It will take several updates until end of this year to finish what's written here and it will come gradually between multiple patches.

For more info or an inquiry, please visit the discord server(Click to Join Discord) and talk to me, or leave a comment in this devlog post please.

Thank you for reading this lengthy devlog ; ) Love you.

Sep 30

MEET the "Cybister japonicus"!

Home Wars - Insane Dreamers

Hello, Generals!

Hoping you'll enjoy it, I'm sharing the news just released about my new co-op multiplayer FPS game "Home Wars: Battlefield" in development (ADD it to your WISHLIST):

"Hello, my brothers!

For today's MEET, we return to the world of insects and introduce you to the robust "Cybister japonicus"!

The Cybister japonicus is an aquatic beetle, primarily found in Japan, but also in parts of East Asia.

Like almost all aquatic insects, it lives in ponds and rivers, far from the salty waters of the sea.

Its behavior is extremely voracious, as it can consume an amount of food almost equal to its own body weight per day!

Its strong mandibles allow it to easily penetrate the exoskeleton of its prey, injecting enzymes that begin "digesting" the victim's internal organs while it's still alive... we're very lucky not to be insects!

In the game, the Cybister japonicus has robust armor, but also remarkable speed.

Of course, it can only move in water, where it will be a very dangerous enemy.

Its attacks will primarily revolve around its strong jaws, but it will likely also have a defensive ability (which it actually uses) that will allow it to secrete an irritant to deter predators.

Do you have any questions about this insect or the Insect faction?

THE ONLY GOOD BUG IS A DEAD BUG!"

This is the link to the new game, add it to your WISHLIST:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3279330?snr=1_2108_9__2107[/url][dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/3279330/Home_Wars_Battlefield/"][/dynamiclink][/p][p][img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45266570/7b95c1d1e980483ce30cdad67462a28b17f7bb49.png"][/img][/p][p][img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45266570/2a8b5fdaafea2199567a87c9840fb00324a86d9c.png"][/img][/p][p][img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45266570/6750b07f35522f23efee9788061ca112425a2613.png"][/img][/p][p][img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45266570/45fb0dee8116523c759151242fe97f6f47f1fad6.png"][/img][/p][p][img src="{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45266570/40ef3c8c16ba21ff4dd803ddb7c43ace85df52e5.png"][/img][/phttps://store.steampowered.com/app/3279330/Home_Wars_Battlefield/