Finally, I'm done-ish with nobles and slaves and tons of suggestions and bugs!

I've put it in the unstable branch for now. There is a lot of new stuff and changes that requires a lot of testing, and while I'll be testing myself, it will speed things a lot if those willing will help.

Here's how to check out the unstable branch:



Now on to the goodies!

• Version log in launcher!
  
• Nobles!
  
• Slaves
  
• Ability to enslave Krull's men.
  
• Emigration
  
• New top panel
  
• New bottom build panel
  
• New room - chambers. The finest of sleep services.
  
• New Room - flats an upgrade from dormitories.
  
• Dormitory reworked and job-less.
  
• Dorms and flats modable. You can add your own versions.
  
• Sleepy subjects will find sleep facilities in the order they like them. Then find a place indoors to sleep.
  
• Reputation now Happiness. Complete rework.
  
• 2 new songs + music changes with battles/stops at night.
  
• All panels have been reworked slightly
  
• Subjects get clean in baths and by skinny-dipping. They get dirty over time, visiting the lavatory and spending time in industries and mines.
  
• Added harmony and Dread influence to work the same as awe. Added ability for roads to emit different kinds of influence. Specific monuments for harmony and dread will come
  
• Added a bunch of new statistics and some happiness tied to them.
  
• Added extensive modability to races.
  
• Retirement mechanics added
  
• Service room access reworked
  
• Kickstarter names for subjects added
  
• Building preference added. Races like to stay in different buildings.
  
• Reworked room placement UI
  
• Added walls and doorways when placing rooms.
  
• Added colors for battlegear upgrades
  
• Minimap boxes for resources and wild edibles.
  
• Work priorities added
  
• Secondary work priority added per race
  
• Races have different skills and different preferences when it comes to work
  
• Added light & awe coverage to right click explore.
  
• New font for launcher

• Might now correspond at a 1:1 ratio with your population. For claiming regions 1500 might is required for each of them
  
• Added email in error messages.
  
• Possibly trade depot bugs fixed.
  
• Added manual steam-fetch mods button in launcher.
  
• Export/import setting is set to 50%
  
• Fixed a bunch of placability issues.
  
• Woodcutters stopped from chopping invisible trees.
  
• Rooms can now be built on top of degrading roads.
  
• When placing monuments, you can delete mistakes by holding shift.
  
• Collision with domesticated animals removed.
  
• Available services changed to a "usage" percentage. Can be sorted in menus.
  
• Flowers no longer grows on fences.
  
• When you're building a room, Right Clicking or opening another panel will construct the room (if it's constructible). This also applies when Refurnishing a room
  
• Krull increases his tribute as you yield.
  
• You are warned where Krull is likely to strike.
  
• camera pans to where Krull attacks
  
• Adjusted working schedules, so that there will be more activity in the day.
  
• Graveyard items fixed
  
• Might have fixed world map lights
  
• Subjects will return equippables to stockpiles if there is storage for it before they drop it on the ground. Inc. Battlegear.
  
• Delta generation fixed.
  
• Fixed Stockpile UI.
  
• Light, awe and road access now only updates when a subject is outside of a room.
  
• Main menu: rearranged buttons a bit, removed others.
  
• Mouse scrolling now opens the minimap.
  
• Fixed some rendering bugs with growables.
  
• Adjusted Animal spawn rates, eating behavior.
  
• Adjusted light colors somewhat.
  
• Fixed subjects clothes color.
  
• Fixed minimap colors for rooms working as intended, no need to load save
  
• Fixed a visual bug with degraded floors/roads
  
• Errored jobs show what resource is missing.
  
• Changed a little trade thing with imports. The game would import resources in order depleting your treasury on the first ones, never getting to the last ones. Now changed to prioritize resources based on incoming/storage capacity.
  
• Mushrooms now placable in caves.
  
• Monument no longer removes cave roof when removed.
  
• Fixed some stat and cost values for room items.
  
• Added support for non 16:9 screens (no more stretching).
  
• NOTE: some drivers might report faulty resolutions, casing crashes.
  
• Hopefully fixed the game from going into low FPS when Vsync is enabled.
  
• Defeated divisions un-musters
  
• Accepting Message prompt about Krull's tribute closes the message UI
  
• Soldiers move from their current division to ones with more experience if experience is gained. Fixed a few training bugs
  
• Animals no longer run away from hunters
  
• Animals drop a lot more resources
  
• Hunting fixed in general
  
• Animals in water rendering fix.
  
• Entities saved differently, shaving off a few MB of savegame size
  
• Sorted the order of resources.
  
• Flimsy placement of walls/ceilings fixed.
  
• Graveyard desecration values reworked. (Avoid penalty by deactivating it and let the graves disappear)
  
• Max room size now can't be exceeded.",
  
• Dormitory knickknacks different costs",
  
• Library and knowledge fixed, it was a disaster.",
  
• Slayed enemies now says that they were slayed by you.",
  
• Outposts such as fisheries always finds fish, even if once depleted",
  
• Double click for save/load in menu

• Fixed CTD when undoing items in room construction.
  
• Fixed continue button in menu when saves were deleted.
  
• Fixed a CTD when restarting from the main menu a couple of times.
  
• Fixed CTD when trying to delete non existent save
  
• kitchen had a nasty bug, hopefully fixed.
  
• Rare corpses stay active fix
  
• Fleeing Krull messes everything up fixed.

• Doors are no longer intended to use with rooms. They're going to be changed to gatehouses, but I leave them in for now.
  
• Some things are coded in the blind. I only have a 16:9 display for instance, so, wide displays may/may not work, please let me know if you have one...",
  
• I seem to get crashes when choosing certain full screen displays. I hope this is because I bought a cheap display :). Let me know if you get any of that.
  

There is no tutorial in the unstable version. I will fix it once it stable.

P.S.

Some day V53 is going to be the new demo. If you have a city you're proud of, please send me the save, and I'll add it to the example cities.

Hello!

I felt the time was right for me to show you that you're getting a return on your investment.

I've been refactoring like crazy, basically ripping out part of the old AI and inserting a new one that allows for extensive moddability for races and more flexible code for me to flesh out.




Now, all resources can be made "equippable" and you can define what boosts they give to a subject. You can also define traits with similar properties and chance of occurring. Reputation is now called standing and is also fully modifiable per race. You can also define what trades your race likes, making it more important with trade or race diversity in your city.

Thanks to some feedback, I've also been experimenting with a new UI layout, especially to improve trading and other aspects.



I want to get rid of the full screen ones in general and trying to figure out ways to convey a lot of information in a simple way. I really like the standing main panel. Not only is it clean, it also allows me to crop the main game somewhat, which saves a few % in performance.

I've also tried to fix the most pressing bugs in the current release. the rest will have to wait for V54.

Currently the main challenge is not to starve from waves of immigration. I plan on tipping this over. You'll have a toggle to allow immigration and Instead we'll have emigration when your standing is low, and "retirement", meaning that it should be more of a challenge as your city grows and not the other way around.

Then there will of course be the nobles and slaves, which I hope to get to next week. Other from that, lots of QOL, bugfixes and tweaks for a better experience. Hope you'll like it.

Hi everyone. I'm very happy you guys are playing and keep sending me bugs!

I have spent most of the time since launch trying to calm my nerves and fixing some of the bugs that makes sense right now. the problem is that I've already started on the next update (54) and it gets very complicated when fixing the same bug in two different places.

so, I'm postponing a few bugs to be fixed in v54, just so you know.

So, what progress is being made?

New face generator. A bigger face in general with many billions of possible variations.



Here's how it's done:



I'm also more or less rebuilding the reputation mechanics and improving on the AI in general.




And what's really cool is that is mostly all modifiable. You can add items to equip, traits and new services, and you can change how each race feels about them.

The big thing to come though is the nobility class and slaves, even though this will be a bit barebones in the beginning.

I also have a list of hundreds of bugs and minor suggestions that I hope to address before launch.

I probably shouldn't give you an ETA, but I'm hoping for 6 weeks. Pray for me :)

/Jake

I will put this in the launcher for next version, but putting it down here for now...

UNSTABLE means the version is in the unstable branch on steam. In your steam client, right click songs of syx -> properties -> betas -> select "unstable"

53.51
- fixed tribute from claimed regions
- fixed forgetting knowledge from affecting all techs.

53.52
- fixed a CTD that occurred when building baths that I introduced in 53.51 :)

53.53
- Fixed baths, now you can build big basins
- Fixed some CTDs (Crash to desktop)
- Set up a new build pipeline, so that the game updates to all platforms instantly. I've tested this on mac, but not linux. Would be very grateful if someone on Linux could test it out.

53.54
- Added a little more info to the launcher info screen to help debug mac users.

53.55
- hopefully fixed the full screen visuals for mac users. I still recommend playing in windowed more, or at lower resolutions. That retina display is a tricky beast)
- adjusted mouse wheel to better fit mac.

53.56
- Fixed crashes related to computers being set to other languages than English.

53.57
- Fixed a CTD on load

53.58
- fixed a CTD when looking at the minimap
- fixed a CTD due to big, big rooms.
- fixed a CTD when trying to add animals through modding.

53.59
- fixed a CTD that wasn't really fixed.

53.60
- finally found a bug where deleting a room under construction would delete parts of neighboring rooms and cause a lot of bugs as a result. Also increased max addable fortifications to 8.

53.61
- removed the confusing tool policy
- fixed a bug where subjects wouldn't fetch tools unless the clothes policy was > 0

53.63
- fixed a krull spawning CTD

53.64
- fixed trade depots. They would become useless in time and workers would stop fetching goods.
- fixed steam integrations from crashing the game at startup

53.67
- made some smaller specific fixes. Tried to get the steam integrations to work.

The game has sold beyond my expectations. With 1000 copies in less than 12 hours. Please excuse me if this post makes no sense, as you can imagine, I haven't slept much.

So, a big thank you to all who have supported me this far. If you weren't aware, Songs of Syx was kickstarted 4 months ago, found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/songsofsyx/songs-of-syx With those funds, and the ones I'll receive now, another year of development is firmly secured.

Also big thanks to the volunteers in the community and its managers! You are really taking a load off my shoulders! Thanks to Superwutz, who is now part of the development team.

First off, some bug fixes:

• The damned message panel can now be closed. (it could be closed with right click, but now also through clicking the 'x').
  
• Crashes when pressing the wiki button is gone. Instead no wiki will be opened, because there isn't one yet for all room types.
  
• Steam screenshots should now work. Unfortunately the in-game screenshots made by clicking buttons /pressing prtsc are not connected to steam yet, but will be in the next major update.
  
• Mac unplayability: When playing on mac, the steam overlay goes rabid and completely takes over. I have no control over this. The only fix now is to disable it. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9394-yofv-0014 Long term fixes is Steam fixing it, or me dropping Mac support, if it's not acceptable.
  
• Crashes when clicking play. This seems to be conflicts with other software running on your PC. I've had Bandicam as a culprit for example. try turning those off.

A lot of criticism is based on the lack of polish and lack of user-friendliness really and that is fair and expected.

But please keep in mind, I'm a solo developer and just an ordinary homo sapiens, not a AAA studio. I've also tried to make it clear that despite having in development now for 7 years, it is still rough. I don't spend much time on polish and balancing yet, simply because that gets in the way and constitutes extra work as I continue to add new features and mechanics.

That's how it's going to be, but the reason I'm launching on steam now, is that I believe a threshold has been reached, where enough foundation work has been built to allow me to focus more on making it all, well, fun and intuitive to play.

So the game ATM is aimed at people who want this kind of game hard enough to live with hiccups, bugs and other bumps along the way.

In the end I hope to make a great game for the mainstream audience, but it is not there yet and not for the vast majority of people at it's current state. I expect this to change within 3 years. And I don't expect to release 1.0 for another 5 years.

This is an ongoing process. I think the current one is better than the demo, but I've heard it still isn't... perfect. I'll continue to work on it, but I'd love to hear more concise suggestions on how you'd like the UI to be in the future, where to move buttons, how to group functionality and so forth, so please let me know if you're up to that.

A lot have asked if there will be multiplayer, especially since I have a button for it :). The button will be removed. It won't have multiplayer in any foreseeable future. the closest thing to it will be a mechanic, where you can optionally upload your cities to a server and let other players raid and conquer them. But this is pretty far off.

Apart from that, you guys seem to enjoy it, which gladdens me. I've already started on the next update. It will focus on your subjects. I'm making races more modifiable and adding slaves and nobles, although they'll be primitive at first. ETA: 6 weeks. After that, I'm going to revisit the production mechanics, and make some new rooms and try to solidify that. Meanwhile I'm hoping the modding community picks up and that they donate a feature or two to the main game :)

You can see what I'm doing here: https://trello.com/b/wF5RYqdF/songs-of-syx

The primary goal for the next 1-2 years is fleshing out the base-building aspect of the game. This includes adding religion, heath care, alcohol and many other features. The foundation for empire management and battles are there, but they'll have to wait a bit until this is done, so that the game can be enjoyed in some aspect for the mainstream audience. Fear not though, battles will be spectacular with ranged units and artillery and you'll spend most of late game conquering and enslaving the world.

All right, thanks for playing and don't forget to communicate your feedback.

AND DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE A REVIEW!

/Jake

The time is nigh, even closer as in the last announcement. A new age is upon us! Songs of Syx is releasing on steam September 21st (more or less exactly at 4 pm UTC)!
Finally you will be able to play the full game in its current state here on Steam and enjoy all the little benefits we have implemented from Steam so far (Workshop, Rich Presence, Achievements).




To properly celebrate our launch into Steam EA we will host a little live Stream in which two of us (Jake! and Superwutz) will play the game and talk along. We will talk a bit about how the development went so far and what to expect in the future.
Also you will be able to live witness the moment we press the release button in Steam Backend (yeah Steam has no timed auto-release function!?).


We will stream directly here on Steam. The stream should be visible on the Songs of Syx store page as soon as it starts! We plan to start streaming one hour before release, so at 3 pm UTC.


During the stream we will try to watch the streams chat and also we will have a designated Q&A textchannel on our Discord during the stream. We will be happy to answer some of your questions about the game during the stream!


We are no professional streamers and this will be besides some tests our first time. While trying to make it as pleasant to watch as possible, please forgive us any mistakes/issues we might have during the stream!

Hi guys!
We are closing in for our EA release in Steam which will happen in less than a month!
For those of you eager to try out the game before buying:
We just released our free prototype as a demo on steam!
You can download it on the store page.

Note:
This is the same free prototype which has been available on itch.io since our kickstarter. The demo will not receive any content updates and the game in its current state has already progressed quite a bit compared to it. Anyhow it shows the basics of your gameplay and is good enough to already give you an idea on how it plays.

For those who already know the demo:
Nothing changed except for some small fixes. But hey now you can play it on Steam!


I can´t say this often enough, but you can have a direct impact on how the game shapes!
We are loving all the discussions, suggestions and feedback we get on our Discord server. Feel free to join!

The time is nigh. A new age is upon us! Songs of Syx is releasing on steam September 21st and all efforts in regards to this update has been focused on eliminating some of the annoyances fresh and veteran players might have encountered. For some reason, which I've forgotten, I've also increased modifiability by a lot, tried to squash bugs and implemented a few minor suggestions.

The following is now open to modding:

• Resources
  
• Many room types
  
• Technologies
  
• Sounds
  
• Structures (fences, walls, ceilings, fortifications)
  
• Floors & Roads (they look better too)
  
• Animals

The character set has now been expanded to cover many Latin alphabets. This can also be modified to accommodate any language not using thousands of characters and read left to right.

There has also been a lot of improvements and fixes around mods to make a modders day a bit better.

A guide on how to mod a few basic things will come soon.




New placement tools for basically everything. Should help you to build even more beautiful and organic-looking cities.

Completely new room placement and building mechanics. You no longer need to build structures first, these are built automatically.



The farthest zoomed out level of the map can now me used just as the other zoom levels, which will give you a greater overview when doing your thing.



Hotspots can now be named and show on the minimap, so you can name your various districts.



A bit bigger in general and more intuitive is the idea. A lot of improvements here and there.



I managed to increase performance by roughly 10%, allowing for even bigger settlements.

We also made the first foundations for various integrations we want to have in the game. Mainly thoose are Rich Presence, achievements for Steam and Discord and also the integration of famous Steam Workshop. So lets explain a bit what we want to do with thoose things:

Rich presence, as you might now, is the little flavour text which is shown besides your player name in Steam friendslist or Discord. We think it is a good way of sharing your progress in game and in generating general interest in what the game is and what people are doing while playing it.



Our Rich Presence implementation is divided into an information part we call state. This one includes some basic stats of your current playsession. For now we decided that your current population, your reputation and the year since founding of your colony are interesting values to see. Anyhow on a later point of development, as the worldmap and also your city empire becomes bigger there might be other important values.

The second part is called detail and basically adds the flavour to the whole thing by telling people what you are currently doing. For now just to test the integration is just says "Ruling over [your city]" but later we will add much more texts, reacting to the stuff and events that happen in game. Here are a few examples:

"Fighting off Krull"

"Conquering XX"

"Surviving winter!"

"Building lavatories"

Rich Presence in steam looks basically the same, sadly without fancy images. We are very open for any ideas and suggestions for flavour texts!



Also we started working on Steam (and also Discord) Achievements! We know from many other games that there are people looking for the 100% achievement hunting challenge so we just had to put some into the game. For now we kept the achievements very simple so they are like "Kill 1000 enemy soldiers", "Farm 10000 mushrooms", "Have a total population of 1000", or "Fell every tree on the map". Most number related achievements will come in tiers. For now we have iron, silver, gold and platin, so you can track your progression with little rewards on the way.

Again as the game development proceeds we will have more challenging and also some hidden achievements for you to find and hunt!



Songs of Syx will support Steam Cloud Saving on release. So wherever you enjoy the game, may it be at home, in the train with your laptop or at work (dont let your boss see it), savegames will be automatically synched between all your devices via Steam.



As this update is mostly about modding we also started thinking about how to distribute and share all your beautiful mods. Thats why we layed the code wise foundation for Steam Workshop to natively interact with the game. We intend of making Steam Workshop the main platform for SoS mods. For thoose of you which dont like or use steam, we have created an official moddb site as a platform for all non-steam users: https://www.moddb.com/games/songs-of-syx

Credits for this goes to Superwutz on the discord. BTW, join the discord! https://discord.gg/eacfCuE

Meet King Crom. One of the great kings of old. He will henceforth be the mascot of Songs of Syx. Congratulations Crom! Credits goes to https://conartist23.tumblr.com/



Next up is the nobility. The goal is to have a unique building for them, a “quarters” with servants. You will elevate your nobility yourself and appoint them to govern parts of your city. They will produce a boost to their responsibilities, but since they require servants and doesn't work traditionally, they're only beneficial in mid-late game. I'm also going to look into modifiability for races and refine the management of your population. After that, there's going to be a production overhaul, where production is going to be straightened out and polished and rooms such as hunters and mines are going to be proper rooms. I'm also going to look further into maintenance and see if it can be made to play a much bigger role in the city management. Now, lets all cross our fingers for me and the steam release. Feel free to write a review when the time comes.

The world map has been redone visually and is now generated better. Check out those mountain ranges!



Regions The map is now divided into regions. You start with one. Regions can produce resources if you tax them. You can see the potential of each region for each resource.


To tax a region, you'll need honour and that is the same as reputation ATM. You set a general tax on the region and then distribute that tax over the resources. It's better to focus on one resource than several.



Every other day, a shipment will be created, that will make its way into your city and deliver its goods in your import depots.
You can claim other regions as you reputation increases.


I've also added landmarks to the world map. Landmarks have no function ATM, but they're in and those generous souls who opted for that reward have their name and description tied to them.



A fully dynamic trading system, based on supply and demand is now yours to exploit with the other NPC factions. In the resource manage screen you can see prices and adjust your trading. You start with 0 credits, so if you want to get into the game, you'll have to export something first. There's no benefit to hoard credits, you should use them to import stuff.



A small toll is paid with each purchase. This goes to to caravans. The caravans will distribute this toll along the path they take. In other words, being between to trading factions will earn you credits.



This is where you export your goods. It has workers that function just like your stockpile deliverymen. You set how much to export in the for of a %, that represents your stockpile's current load. You can for instance set export when over 70% and your traders will fetch when your stockpiles are above this level.



This room has no workers and can accept only one resource. Place them where needed. They are needed to accept any form of resources from the outside world, be it deliveries from your regions, or imports.



Here is a little video explaining and showcasing the trade features:


Sadly I need to do a bit of boring stuff for the coming future. I'll spend the day up to steam release working on bugs, a few suggestions, re-factoring the code base and polishing the UI. I hope to make something clever with room construction and simplify the process. I also intend to add support for more languages and modding. I'm also going to commission Jasinka and have her make some more music. After steam release I'll start on nobility and slaves.

We are loving all the discussions, suggestions and feedback we get on our Discord server. Feel free to join!

Introducing Krull, who will mercilessly raid your city. Krull was never loved as a child and is now haunting the lands with his bandits. To face him you must man your forges and train you little subjects in the art of war. Image by rancis O'Nell, tumblr: conartist23.





Train troops in the training grounds and equip them with battlegear to defend your city. Or take the fight to the open field, by loading up an included save game.



You can now expand rooms! In addition, the whole furnishing process has been reworked for a smoother experience.

Prettier roadsRendering optimizationsTool level now set for each roomZoom move with mousewheelCoziness implemented bonuses special items for other roomsInstant feedback when trying to place something where it doesn't belongRoom furnishing new item-sizes for all rooms with feedback when trying to place them.Night gamma settingScript loading/saving more robustBetter job prioritizing by the AI. It's not perfect, but betterNew technology screenGround is prettier gets wet in rainStart camp is now placed manually at the beginning of a gameJobs shows when there is a problemContinue in main menu loads latest saveDeleting graveyards will give huge penalty to reputationFine structures uses cut stoneHotspots - mark part of the map and navigate to it easilyGlobian eggs dropped by killed Globians

First of all you'll need a training grounds. These are built just like any other room. You then open up the army panel:


A division is a group of soldiers. You can have a total of 96 divisions and there can be a maximum of 150 soldiers in each. You set how many you want for each yourself. Subjects will now automatically assign themselves to the division, but before you can deploy them in battle they need at least level 1 in training and until then they'll be considered recruits.
It takes roughly 4 days for a rookie to level up. And the higher the level, the faster they loose their training skills. A level 1 soldier is good for 10 years, but a level 15 soldier will drop down to level 14 in just two days.
In addition you set the amount on battlegear each soldier of your division will equip themselves with. This boosts defence and attack even more so than training. The soldiers will equip themselves when you muster a division. Race and Experience should be left alone for now, but as soldiers fight, they have a chance to gain experience.
At the bottom panel there is a shield and pressing it should bring you to the battle view. It should be pretty self-explanatory, especially if you've played a "total war" game before, as it's "inspired" from those games.

Combat is pretty straight forward. Fight until someone routs. There is still a lot of work to do in this department, but it works as a prototype for now.


As much as I've enjoyed having almost 10k play my game over at itch.io, it ain't putting food of the table. That is why future updates of SoS will cost money. Head over to the KICKSTARTER and get a copy for ~$20. Hope to see you there!

Also, I made a little guide for new players to get started here: