Mar 28, 2024

Broad Sword - Refractal

In order to make an omelet you need to crack a few eggs. Over the last few months we've made a lot of upgrades to core systems and under the hood features, but since these updates touched a lot of core systems much of the content in the game was broken and needed to be rebuilt. As of today the game is stable enough to share the build, but some features still need tweaking and polish. Here's a summary of the major updates made:

Core system refactor - Much of the code has been cleaned up and refined to remove bugs, improve performance and to make it easier to modify going forward.
Visual update - This improved performance allowed for graphical improvements while maintaining performance benchmarks. Unit shading is improved, the maps have been revamped to use Unity's terrain system, and dead units ragdoll.
Gameplay updates - Unit AI has been differentiated to allow different unit types to have their own logic as needed, projectile attacks now have an arcing trajectory, and melee units will engage enemies attacking them without needing player input. Capture mechanics have been improved including easier to capture spawns as contesting points delay troops spawning in.
UI - The UI has been revamped and the respawn screen has been reworked to allow more variety of loadouts.

Known issues:

many of the sound FX are missing
Unit types and factions temporarily have the same stats. The stat variations will be added back as the light and heavy armor units are added in.
Some UI navigation issues when in split screen multiplayer

The path forward:

The immediate future will focus adding missing content including filling out the unit loadouts, adding unique stats, and making another pass at the sound FX, which will then be followed by giving factions their unique unit types including things like Giants, Mages, Crossbowmen, etc.
The next major update would be to include a wave survival "Siege" mode where you can either by yourself or cooperatively with a friend hold out against increasingly deadly waves of units.
The last mode to be added before the 1.0 release would involve a conquest campaign with a turn based overworld leading to individual battles.

Be sure to try out the new update and let me know your thoughts on our brand spanking new discord here.

Mar 28, 2024

[Devlog] Abaddon - March updates

Abaddon - nicetomeetst

Hello everyone! My name is Yob, I’m the lead developer here at Nice to meet Studios, and I’ll be walking you through this first of many to come monthly devlogs. We have been working, iterating, reworking and developing this game since 2020, and this final, ambitious version of the game has been in development since 2022, so we’re very happy to finally share the fruits of our labor with you! In these devlogs you’ll get all updates as for what we’re working on at the moment, what we are planning to do next, exclusive behind the scenes and early look into parts of the game you won’t see anywhere else before playing the game. You… do know what the game is going to be, right?

What’s an Abaddon?

In case you don’t know who we are and what we’re doing here, we are a small indie studio working on a psychological horror game called Abaddon. This game will focus on dreadful atmosphere, challenging gameplay and the story of Jimmy, a young man looking for his missing brother, finding himself trapped in a labyrinth with a hulking remnant of a man and his own haunting past. Now with that out of the way, let’s go to the updates!

Good news everyone!

First of all and most important, we are extremely excited to announce that Abaddon PT (Playable Teaser) will drop on Steam in the upcoming NextFest, on June 9th. This small but delicious taste of the Abaddon experience will give you the first playable look into the atmosphere, world, and sheer terror we have in store for the full game. You’ll get the first view into your player character, Jimmy, and the sadness of his family, as well as a look into the dreaded maze, and maybe even a glimpse of the two who will be… keeping you company along your way.

Where the hell are we?

Let me catch you up on where we are now. Currently we have the Alpha version of the game running in small playtesting groups. We have been working on this alpha since August of 2022. Through us and all of our team working at our jobs and developing with as much free time we could muster, we have managed to create something we are truly proud of .This Alpha goes far beyond the limits of the PT. It has the first full floor of the maze (out of 3) and all the most important mechanics, most centric of them being our monster AI, which roams around the maze looking to cut your head clean off. There is no fighting it, so you’ll have to run, sneak, distract and hide your way around it. You know it’s close by when you hear the scrapping of metal on stone…

Believe me I wish we could tell you guys more but we don’t want to spoil the surprise! There’s much to see and much more for us to do, so we will have to grind our teeth and keep it to ourselves until release day comes. Although, if you REALLY want to see more, and are just a little bit lucky, you may be able to get an early look, but more on that next month, we need to finish this Devlog! So let’s move on to

What is next

So where are we going from here? Our first and most obvious waypoint is the PT release in June. We are putting everything we have toward making sure this PT is as terrifying and polished as we can. We have developed over the last month whole new systems to include in the more linear sections of the game, and as of the time of me writing this, the PT is in playable state. Over the following weeks we will be finishing the visual aspect of it, as well as busting out our nets and going hunting for bugs. I won’t reveal too much but I will give you this one screenshot I will not be elaborating on. Give us your theories as for what you’re looking at here

That’s all for us here at Nice to meet studios. Like I said, we will deliver you with monthly Devlogs right here, so make sure you wishlist the game and follow to get notified, but for all official announcements, check out our Twitter! My partner Oasis is posting updates constantly over there. You could get gifs, screenshots, the occasional clip, and maybe one day even a chance to play the game in close Beta. Who knows? ;)

We will see you all back here at the end of April for another Devlog.
Stay tuned!

Mar 28, 2024

Experimental Branch Patch (0.18.7)

Going Medieval - SeVerin

Greetings players! The newest patch (0.18.7) is now live on all platforms on the experimental branch. Please save your progress and restart your game client to update. You should be able to load normally and continue playing. If you have any problems, please let us know.

Bugs and Fixes

Fixed several crash occurrences.

New camera navigation system

Some players found old camera movement jarring as the camera was tied to the ground level and once you reach different ground levels, the camera would jump accordingly and adjust. You can learn why this happened and how we tried to approach the solution in our last Medieval Monday Talk. It will give you insight into our development process, but also show how some problems might appear as easily solvable, when they are anything but. Anyways…

To “Unlock” this new camera system, go to the Options and select “Camera settings”. This will open another window that looks like this:

Camera sensitivity and Screen-edge mouse scroll are options from before and pretty self explanatory.

Legacy Mode represents the current (old) camera navigation mode. Turning that off will enable the rest of the options.

Camera target visuals toggles visuals that represent the camera’s target, the screen’s centre. These visuals will appear only while the camera is moving/zooming/orbiting.

Camera target visual duration represents the time that camera target visuals will linger on screen after the camera stops moving. The maximum length is 2 seconds combined with coyote time.

Coyote time represents the amount of time that the camera will remain in place before readjusting itself according to the terrain layout. If camera target visuals are enabled this is represented by a white line from the target visuals to the next layer the camera target will move to. The maximum length can be 3 seconds when the camera is not moving.

Camera offset by buildings represents the camera’s ability to take walls and floors into camera adjustment. Up until now the game’s camera was offset only by ground and water.

Let us know in the comment how the new camera feels. Hope you like it!

DISCLAIMERS:
⚠️ We decided to keep Dev version of the game on the experimental branch, and that means that a Dev log with red text will appear from time to time. This will help us get more info from your side when crashes and bug reports occur.
⚠️ Also, at the moment, the experimental and the main branch are very different. You will not be able to play saves from the experimental branch on the main one as the experimental has the new save system - please avoid doing this.

As always, use F10 and/or the experimental bug subforum for reporting experimental issues. Thank you!

Foxy Voxel

Mar 28, 2024

What will you do with Thirza's Knife?

BOOK OF HOURS - Arabella Dusk

Spoilers ahead. Skip to the food pictures if you don't want spoilers...

HOUSE OF LIGHT is a good-sized expansion with an unusual congeries of different features, which I've been assiduously altering from a congeries into a constellation, and I'll talk about that, but UP FRONT let me say that absolutely nothing here is 100% confirmed or promised, everything may change up until release day, and if I get any grouchy emails complaining there are 'only' seventy cooking recipes then I'll... well I'll sigh, mark them spam and get on with my day. It's not much of a threat.

The foot bone's connected to the leg bone...

I really wanted cooking in the launch version of BOOK OF HOURS, but it was one of the half-dozen things that didn't make the cut (a very casual way of describing the late-development triage process, which fails to evoke all the weeping forlornly at spreadsheets and bank statements). This makes it hard to connect meaningfully to the skill system. The risk with ancillary systems added later is that they can be disconnected from anything meaningful, so they just roll around under the surface of the game like one of those horrible oil globules under a steroid user's skin.

Fortunately we have a natural use for them: salons! Which is to say, picnics, elevenses, supper, etc, where you invite visitors to chat about the invisible arts. Of course that basic outline immediately poses half a dozen questions, each of which has a couple of misleading answers before you get to a workable one, and then where the workable ones create further questions.

The leg bone's connected to the knee bone...

For example: how many slots do you need in a Salon verb? Ooh probably about ten, we need to revamp the verb window no that becomes wildly impractical, so instead let's allow the Salon to respond to food placed in the room. This feels much more immersive for the Librarian, but also means reworking (a) some quite central code and (b) some of the room art - all those neatly placed chairs on the viewer side of the table made it impossible to arrange food on the table. (When I was testing the refectory I had to stack food on the mantelpiece.)

Okay then, how do food Aspects tie into the Salon process? Obviously if you want a good conversation about Resurgences & Emergences you stack the salon with as many Grail and Moth dishes this doesn't work because much of the reason for the slot system back as far as Cultist was to make it impossible just to stack up twenty identical objects to power through an Aspect requirement. And we don't want people maxing out Grail numbers by filling the room with cake:

This is no longer a viable strategy.

So currently, instead, individual guests have some basic dietary requirements - usually based on their traditional interests (Arthur likes a food item present with Lantern in it) but with some variations (al-Adim doesn't drink, Yvette isn't fussy). This immediately throws up some silly preferences (Dagmar won't eat much besides Aglaophotis Soufflé, Agdistis will eat basically anything because most foods contain Heart) which will entail a final brow-furrowed tuning session and probably some post-beta tweaks, but much of which will stand because it's basically a game and because the alternative - hand-assigning a hundred-plus food preferences to twenty-plus guests with no particular mnemonic structure is no fun for anyone, least of all me.

So you set up your Salon in one of the five or six rooms where you can hold it (it's nice to make more use of the Hall of Voices), you invite your guests and.. wait invite guests? Visitors show up once a season. We need to do something about that, too. So in HOUSE OF LIGHT (and this feature may migrate back to the vanilla game) you can get someone's address once you've helped them out at least once (though Hokobald, paranoid as ever, will basically only give you the general location of a manhole behind a pub where he might sometimes check for correspondence). You can then write 'em an invite, send it via the Postmistress, and they turn up. If you like you can write a number of invitations in advance for your big do. Or you can actually summon them so you can push through the Visitor stories to get to the new late-game Visitor Further Stories (all the systems connect! more on this anon).

And this brings us to the winnowing phase of design, after answering a lot of these questions:

al-Adim travels a lot, do we worry about him turning up after sixty seconds while Yvette who lives in London also turns up after sixty seconds? No. It adds nothing and it makes people think too hard about exactly where everyone is; anyway a lot of our visitors have Uncanny Means of travelling. (Travelling at Night, even.)

What if you keep spamming invitations? do people stop turning up? No. This would be hassle to code, hassle to signal, and punish people who accidentally invite the wrong guests. There is a rationale ('when the Librarian asks, the invisible world listens') and there is a nod to the requirement to put some effort into invitations (there's a low-ish Aspect requirement that you can satisfy with Soul cards and the right ink, and of course Hokobald will only turn up if he gets an invitation written in Orpiment Exultant). But as with the order forms there is a hazy line between making the invitations feel like some business, so you're not just clicking buttons on a spreadsheet, and making players jump through hoops, which for some people we're already on the wrong side of.

Do you get unique Salon responses from guests for relevant food and drink? Now we're really in the meat of it (olol). I would like visitors to have unique lines because other visitors are present. I would like people to comment on the wine. I would like people to comment on paintings hanging in the room. I would like people to have conversations that reference ongoing stories. But that right there is a requirement for - well the maths depends on how you work it, but we can easily get up to ten or twenty thousand unique lines. Or a madlibs approach like the CK3 feast system - which is fine for what it is, I like CK3, but it's a lot of work and it's the opposite of the handcrafted Hush House feel. And we're not even at the headline feature for HOUSE OF LIGHT story content - the Further Stories for Visitors / Lighthouse Institute stuff - and I'd quite like to get the expansion out this year.

I haven't even talked about how the cooking system works. Or Thirza's Knife. OK so briefly: making food is much more like a traditional crafting system, though you get a little bit of potential input from Spices & Savours. Milk plus flour with a mixing bowl (CAKE TIME) is dough, dough plus eggs is cake batter, cake batter plus honey is Cornish Honey Cake (never, never to be confused with Devonshire Honey Cake). Some of the recipes require knives. We don't actually have a kitchen knife in the game, so if you want to chop onions you might need to bring down Sebastian's swords from the Hall of Division. Or find Thirza's Knife, which has probably never been used to cut anything lamentable, probably.

The knee bone's connected to the thigh bone...

Wait AK what are salons for? apart from 'deciding not to invite Hokobald'? And what's the difference between elevenses and a picnic? and why can you only hold salons once a season? For that you'll have to wait until my wife wrestles me back to the blog to write another update. Right now I have aspects to assign to cake.

★☾★

Did somebody say cake? LB here, and I have been made very hungry over the last week as I drew all the delectably 1930s dainties that AK's requested so far for HOUSE OF LIGHT. It requires quite a bit of research - what is the history of Pyrex? What the hell is fish 'Monte Carlo' style? - but I hope the consistency will really create an unusual, European historical sense of reality and you can all enjoy making prune whip for people you don't like. The below isn't exhaustive - I already have a host of new food to draw, from mushrooms on toast to something alarmingly called 'Walls-of-Ys' - but you can already pick a pretty nice meal for yourself from what we have!

(Right-click + 'Open image in new tab' for a larger version.)

You can see in the header image of this post how rich, joyful and tasty a full spread of food looks, and how much life it adds to Hush House. AK's mentioned we had to adjust some rooms to facilitate soirées, but the end result can have surprisingly sweet outcomes. The Refectory looks warm and inviting, like a welcome-home banquet for a long-travelled friend - but how suitably melancholy and sweet is a tea-party in winter in the Physic Garden? I feel like Valentine Dewulf would have been much the better for one of these.

In other news of things that hopefully brighten your life, we have another MERCH LAUNCH to announce - our limited edition Hours notebooks, now available in the shop. I tried to make them classy and BOOK OF HOURS-y, and I'm delighted with how they've turned out. If you have need of a gently occult notebook in your life - to write your hopes, your dreams, reminders of BoH recipes, etc - these guys are for you.

Finally, we're moving offices next month so are running a major 40% off sale off almost everything else in the shop (the one other exception is the newly-restocked Wisdom Tree pendants, which I've just relisted. People selfishly bought them all, but other people also wanted them and were sad, and we can't have that). So along with the new notebooks, go nuts on our biggest ever merch sale, and help us save our ancient backs by not having to lug 10,000 Lady Afterwards up some stairs.