Hey everyone!

The Rogue-Bike update is here! We've revamped most of the existing systems (rep system, world map) and we're introducing a big new feature: the build crew. Let's dive into the changes right away:

Changes:

• World Map overhaul:
  - Randomized start/finish line and level placement.
  - Added more special nodes to the map. (Medic, First person, Danger zone, and more??)
  - Day/night cycle. A new environment starts in the morning and playing a level advances the day. Reach the end of the world map before you run out of daylight.
  
• Rep system overhaul:
  - Rep can no longer be lost. The risk of losing reputation made end-game players play very safe, this wasn't very fun to watch. In order to see more sick tricks we're introducing:
  - Flow (rep per minute). Flow is the reputation one earns per minute, making sure that the players who are on top of the flow leaderboards are actually the most entertaining to watch as they constantly have to do the sickest stunts.
  - New sessions start at 0 rep, the goal is to reach the end of the last environment with as much rep as possible. Session rep is added to your account rep after each session. Leaderboards will track 'best session rep', 'flow' (only on successfully completed runs), and 'overall account rep'.
  - Diminishing returns. Doing the same trick over and over will reward fewer rep each time.
  
• Build crew:
  - Build crew is a way to customize and tweak a session to the players liking.
  - At certain rep milestones during a session new crew members will be unlocked. The player will have to choose one out of four randomly generated crew members (modifiers). Crew members last until the end of a session and a fresh session starts with 0 crew members.
  - Crew members can be: wider paths when generating levels, higher bunny hops, decrease in off-road friction, generate fewer obstacles, always show the compass, and many others. Right now we've implemented 22 different build crew members and there are more to come! If you have ideas for other crew members, let us know!
  
• Removed the 'Practice' option when starting a new session. Practice session was a way to ride without consequences but after removing reputation losses this no longer feels needed.
  
• Removed dawn and night random visual modifiers. Storm can still randomly occur. Dusk now appears after having played 7 levels in the same environment. Night appears 2 levels after dusk. Completing a boss jump and entering a new environment resets the day timer.
  
• Mixer integration. Allows for interaction between viewers and streamers on the Mixer streaming platform.
  
• Speedrun timer. Enable in the gameplay settings to show a speedrun timer during your sessions. This timer ONLY pauses during loading screens.
  
• Added and tweaked a bunch of sound effects.
  
• Added a few new outfits, bikes, and accessories.
  
• Updated to a newer version of the Unity engine. This should improve the experience on lower end computers and macs.
  
• Performance upgrades across the board. We had to do a ton of performance upgrades when working on the Xbox version of Descenders. We took the ones that were applicable to PC/Mac/Linux and carried those over to the Steam version of Descenders.
  
• Updated the Steam plugin. This fixes the bug where some players have no leaderboards.
  
• Bugfix: pressing 'equip now' in the game over screen now actually equips the newly unlocked items.

Reputation reset
With the new rep system and the new leaderboards we're resetting everyone's reputation. Based on your current rep we've handed out a few legacy items. Everyone who scored at least 1 reputation has received an accessory item. If you obtained 50.000 rep you've received another legacy item. And if you managed to obtain an impressive 250.000 rep you've gotten a third item on top of that.

Community
If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Much love,
RageSquid & No More Robots

Hey everyone!

We're here today to give you some pretty exciting news.

A couple of months ago, the RageSquid team came up with a massive idea for Descenders that would make the game even more exciting and fulfilling, while fixing some of the issues people were having with the roguelike elements and the Rep system.

And now we're finally ready to unveil what we're calling The Rogue-Bike Update -- and it's coming on May 15th.

Here's what you can expect:


Currently, you play through the Career Mode world by world, and move from left to right on the world map. Other than picking what the new level will roughly contain in terms of steepness, stunts and curves, there isn't much to it. Until now.

With the Rogue-Bike Update, you'll now be tasked with exploring a randomized world map, filled with special nodes to discover. Your goal is still to reach the boss jump and clear it to move on to the next world, but you might want to ride around a little first and see what the world has to offer...

But don't ride around for *too* long. If you spend too much time exploring, the sun will begin to set, and you'll be plunged into darkness, making completing the boss jump a whole lot trickier.




The current Rep system is fine, but we've found that it stops the best players from wanting to take risks. All this will change with the Rogue-Bike Update.

From May 15th, each new run that you do will set your Session Rep back to zero, and you'll only earn Rep, rather than losing it. You'll also now be judged based on your Flow -- that is, your Rep per minute.

In other words, the better you ride and the more tricks you do, the better your Flow. And when you finish a Session, your Session Rep will be added to your Total Rep. Easy!




Right now, once you've unlocked Canyon or Peaks, you might as well keep restarting from those worlds to reach the final boss. With the Rogue-Bike Update, we introduce Crew Members, who give you a reason to start from Highlands each time.

Every time you earn a certain amount of Rep on a run, you'll unlock a new Crew Member. These Crew Members will give you special mutators, such as softening all your landing impacts, or adding extra steepness or stunts to every level.

These mutators allow you to play the game your own way, and pick the abilities that matter to you. You can, of course, still start runs from later worlds, but you won't earn as many mutators that way.




On May 15th, we will reset all Rep scores. However, we will be giving special items to each and every Descenders player based on how much Rep they've earned before then:

• If you've bought and played the game before May 15th, you'll earn a legacy item to show that you played before the Rogue-Bike Update
  
• If you've earned more than 50,000 Rep by May 15th, you'll also earn an extra special legacy item
  
• If you've earned more than 250,000 Rep by May 15th, you'll earn both of these items, and an extra, extra special legacy item

We'll be showing off the Rogue-Bike Update for the first time live on http://mixer.com/nomorerobots next Tuesday, May 8th, at 8am PT / 5pm CEST.

EXCITING TIMES!
Love Mike + RageSquid

Hey everyone!

We know you've been enjoying Descenders, but we also know you've been wishing for something a little more... uphill. We've been experimenting with new ways to play Descenders, and we've come up with something we're sure is a great way to reach new heights!

We hope you like our new game, Ascenders!

You can play for free right now! To play you'll need to be on Windows, go to Descenders properties in your Steam library, go to the BETAS tab, enter "AscendersTheGame" as the password, and click CHECK CODE. You can now select Ascenders in the dropdown menu.

Be careful whlie you're enjoying this new game, because Rep is carried over to your regular Descenders progress. But so are any unlocks you may get ;)

Have fun <3

Hey everyone!

We know you've been enjoying Descenders, but we also know you've been wishing for something a little more... uphill. We've been experimenting with new ways to play Descenders, and we've come up with something we're sure is a great way to reach new heights!

We hope you like our new game, Ascenders!

You can play for free right now! To play you'll need to be on Windows, go to Descenders properties in your Steam library, go to the BETAS tab, enter "AscendersTheGame" as the password, and click CHECK CODE. You can now select Ascenders in the dropdown menu.

Be careful whlie you're enjoying this new game, because Rep is carried over to your regular Descenders progress. But so are any unlocks you may get ;)

Have fun <3

(Windows only at the moment. Mac&Linux coming soon!)


Hey all!

Last week's update gave the game a few new sound effects. Unfortunately some of these effects weren't properly categorized so the volume sliders had no effect on them. Because this is quite intrusive we wanted to get this hotfixed instead of waiting for a next bigger update, so here we are!
In addition to the sfx fixes we are happy to announce that we've partnered up with German mountain biker and youtuber Fabio Schäfer. His brand of gear, #SCRAPE, is now unlockable! #SCRAPE gear is the first brand we're collaborating with this is something we want to do more often, so tell your favourite youtuber/biker to get in touch with us and we'll try to work something out to get their brand in the game!

Changes:

• Added #SCRAPE gear by Fabio Schäfer to the gear pool.
  
• #SCRAPE items include 3 new goggles, 2 long sleeve jerseys, 1 short sleeve jersey. The items are of uncommon, rare, and extraordinary rarities.
  
• Bugfix: categorized sound effects so that volume sliders affect them.
  
• Minor CPU performance improvement.

Mixer integration
The idea was to enable Mixer integration in this hotfix but after we publicly tested it in yesterday's stream we decided that it's too easy to abuse it in its current state. We'd like some more time to tweak it to make sure that it's solid. We'll release this when we get back from event season that's starting next week (PAX/EGX Rezzed).

Community
If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Much love,
RageSquid

(Windows only at the moment. Mac&Linux coming soon!)


Hey all!

Last week's update gave the game a few new sound effects. Unfortunately some of these effects weren't properly categorized so the volume sliders had no effect on them. Because this is quite intrusive we wanted to get this hotfixed instead of waiting for a next bigger update, so here we are!
In addition to the sfx fixes we are happy to announce that we've partnered up with German mountain biker and youtuber Fabio Schäfer. His brand of gear, #SCRAPE, is now unlockable! #SCRAPE gear is the first brand we're collaborating with this is something we want to do more often, so tell your favourite youtuber/biker to get in touch with us and we'll try to work something out to get their brand in the game!

Changes:

• Added #SCRAPE gear by Fabio Schäfer to the gear pool.
  
• #SCRAPE items include 3 new goggles, 2 long sleeve jerseys, 1 short sleeve jersey. The items are of uncommon, rare, and extraordinary rarities.
  
• Bugfix: categorized sound effects so that volume sliders affect them.
  
• Minor CPU performance improvement.

Mixer integration
The idea was to enable Mixer integration in this hotfix but after we publicly tested it in yesterday's stream we decided that it's too easy to abuse it in its current state. We'd like some more time to tweak it to make sure that it's solid. We'll release this when we get back from event season that's starting next week (PAX/EGX Rezzed).

Community
If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Much love,
RageSquid

Hey all!

We're back again with a small update! We've heard your feedback on the rep system and world map and we agree with you, they really need some work. We're super eager to rework these things but that's going to be a big project. Before we can start on a major overhaul like this we wanted to get a few smaller things out of the way. One of the things in this update is the newsfeed. This way we can communicate more information to you without having to upload new builds. This is also a place where we can highlight community clips and images.
Apart from this we did a lot of small fixes and updates, which I'll list below.

Changes:

• Added multiple UI sound effects.
  
• Added new character voice sounds and removed the temporary voice effects from the rider (goodbye Cedar!).
  
• Added a newsfeed in the main menu. This is where we'll place information about the game, its updates, and community highlights.
  
• Physics raycasting update, this new method for wheel collision is about 16x faster and should even be more precise as well.
  
• Mixer integration. Streamers who stream on Mixer.com can now enable interactivity in the gameplay options menu. In career and practice mode the viewers can influence level generation and hand out extra reputation when the streamer performs sweet tricks. In freeride mode the viewers can submit level seeds for the streamer to play. We've had to disable this because of issues while building the executable. Expect this in a hotfix some time next week.
  
• Added a few more unlockable items ;)
  
• GPU performance improvements across the board. We mainly tried to pull the FPS in the forest environment more in line with the rest of the environments.
  
• Big CPU performance upgrades, should be most notable for people with low end CPUs.
  
• Bugfix: removed bonus objective UI from freeride mode.
  
• Bugfix: UI buttons would sometimes randomly scale up.
  
• Bugfix: Button navigation in game modes menu fixed.
  
• Bugfix: Couple of localization errors fixed.
  
• Bugfix: 1460 is now 1440 lol
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpetnUFQMA&t=0m35s

Next up:
As stated above we are super hyped to start working on the new world map and the new reputation system. We want to move away from a percentage based penalty system and towards a system which rewards taking risks and doing sick moves, rather than spending as much time as possible grinding levels in a safe manner. While we're working on this we're definitely going to keep you up to date through our social channels and on Discord. Do keep in mind that this next update could take a month or two, this is quite a big undertaking for the small team that we are.
Next to these big overhauls we're also going to be travelling a lot in the near future. There are several events we'll be going to and if you happen to go to any of these, please drop by our booth and say hi, we'd love to meet you all in person <3
You'll be able to find us here:
- GDC (Right now, San Francisco, USA) - Mike
- PAX East (April 5-8, Boston, USA) - Mike & Rosie
- EGX Rezzed (April 13-15, London, UK) - Mike (& Roel/Lex?)

If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Much love,
RageSquid

Hey all!

We're back again with a small update! We've heard your feedback on the rep system and world map and we agree with you, they really need some work. We're super eager to rework these things but that's going to be a big project. Before we can start on a major overhaul like this we wanted to get a few smaller things out of the way. One of the things in this update is the newsfeed. This way we can communicate more information to you without having to upload new builds. This is also a place where we can highlight community clips and images.
Apart from this we did a lot of small fixes and updates, which I'll list below.

Changes:

• Added multiple UI sound effects.
  
• Added new character voice sounds and removed the temporary voice effects from the rider (goodbye Cedar!).
  
• Added a newsfeed in the main menu. This is where we'll place information about the game, its updates, and community highlights.
  
• Physics raycasting update, this new method for wheel collision is about 16x faster and should even be more precise as well.
  
• Mixer integration. Streamers who stream on Mixer.com can now enable interactivity in the gameplay options menu. In career and practice mode the viewers can influence level generation and hand out extra reputation when the streamer performs sweet tricks. In freeride mode the viewers can submit level seeds for the streamer to play. We've had to disable this because of issues while building the executable. Expect this in a hotfix some time next week.
  
• Added a few more unlockable items ;)
  
• GPU performance improvements across the board. We mainly tried to pull the FPS in the forest environment more in line with the rest of the environments.
  
• Big CPU performance upgrades, should be most notable for people with low end CPUs.
  
• Bugfix: removed bonus objective UI from freeride mode.
  
• Bugfix: UI buttons would sometimes randomly scale up.
  
• Bugfix: Button navigation in game modes menu fixed.
  
• Bugfix: Couple of localization errors fixed.
  
• Bugfix: 1460 is now 1440 lol
  
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHpetnUFQMA&t=0m35s

Next up:
As stated above we are super hyped to start working on the new world map and the new reputation system. We want to move away from a percentage based penalty system and towards a system which rewards taking risks and doing sick moves, rather than spending as much time as possible grinding levels in a safe manner. While we're working on this we're definitely going to keep you up to date through our social channels and on Discord. Do keep in mind that this next update could take a month or two, this is quite a big undertaking for the small team that we are.
Next to these big overhauls we're also going to be travelling a lot in the near future. There are several events we'll be going to and if you happen to go to any of these, please drop by our booth and say hi, we'd love to meet you all in person <3
You'll be able to find us here:
- GDC (Right now, San Francisco, USA) - Mike
- PAX East (April 5-8, Boston, USA) - Mike & Rosie
- EGX Rezzed (April 13-15, London, UK) - Mike (& Roel/Lex?)

If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts!

Much love,
RageSquid

Hey everyone!

Unfortunately the previous update (Freeride mode update) shipped with a couple of bugs. Today we're pushing a small hotfix to resolve these issues. Please keep your feedback coming so we know about these bugs and we can keep fixing them as soon as possible!

Changes:

• Freeride levels can now be quit without having to stop riding. You can now also respawn while riding when you have health set to infinite.
  
• In Freeride mode, trying to select environments the player hasn't unlocked yet will now trigger a popup explaining why. The same goes for trying to select the Boss Jump physical modifier.
  
• Level seed now always shows on the bottom right of the screen in the post-game UI.
  
• Bugfix: Freeride UI labels now localize properly when selecting non-latin languages.
  
• Bugfix: achievements are no longer triggered in Freeride/Practice modes.
  
• Bugfix: post-game UI health bug fixed (1 HP bug).
  
• Bugfix: rep now properly displays after a Freeride level.
  
• Bugfix: Golden Run, Made it, and True Descender achievements now trigger again.

Known issues:

• macOS stability is a big problem, crashes occur more frequent than on other platforms and framerates are lower than we want them to be. We're aware of this and currently looking into getting external help to fix these problems.
  
• Steam leaderboards bug. Some players have no entry on the leaderboards and we're having a hard time reproducing the bug but we're still well aware of the bug and working on it.
  
• General performance levels are not yet where we want them to be. We're constantly looking at ways to improve this.

If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! We'd love to hear your thoughts!

<3
RageSquid & Friends

Hey everyone!

Unfortunately the previous update (Freeride mode update) shipped with a couple of bugs. Today we're pushing a small hotfix to resolve these issues. Please keep your feedback coming so we know about these bugs and we can keep fixing them as soon as possible!

Changes:

• Freeride levels can now be quit without having to stop riding. You can now also respawn while riding when you have health set to infinite.
  
• In Freeride mode, trying to select environments the player hasn't unlocked yet will now trigger a popup explaining why. The same goes for trying to select the Boss Jump physical modifier.
  
• Level seed now always shows on the bottom right of the screen in the post-game UI.
  
• Bugfix: Freeride UI labels now localize properly when selecting non-latin languages.
  
• Bugfix: achievements are no longer triggered in Freeride/Practice modes.
  
• Bugfix: post-game UI health bug fixed (1 HP bug).
  
• Bugfix: rep now properly displays after a Freeride level.
  
• Bugfix: Golden Run, Made it, and True Descender achievements now trigger again.

Known issues:

• macOS stability is a big problem, crashes occur more frequent than on other platforms and framerates are lower than we want them to be. We're aware of this and currently looking into getting external help to fix these problems.
  
• Steam leaderboards bug. Some players have no entry on the leaderboards and we're having a hard time reproducing the bug but we're still well aware of the bug and working on it.
  
• General performance levels are not yet where we want them to be. We're constantly looking at ways to improve this.

If you want to keep up to date with the known issues and our current plans, join our Discord, or have a look at the Roadmap! We'd love to hear your thoughts!

<3
RageSquid & Friends