Due to build changes, the January missions will be delayed slightly and will still need to be completed by January 31st. But don’t worry, we will be pro-rating the requirements for the events to accommodate the delay.

Here’s a preview of our monthly events in January:

Bring in the New Year with MORE GC! Get 60% bonus GC with all GC packages in a special 24-hour Happy Hour this New Year’s Eve!

Like the post if you are excited about picking up 60% more GC per pack, and comment below to let us know what you are going to pick up!

With the relatively short period between the content-rich November release of Patch 0.2.11 and the holidays, efforts were focused on improving gameplay and fixing bugs so that we could release the much improved 0.2.12 build in time for the festive break.

At the top of the community-requested improvements is Load/Save. While it's been available in game for several patches via the console, it wasn't functionally complete which rendered it unusable. Throughout December, Load/Save received much love, and in Patch 0.2.12 it is now stable. We've left it accessible via the console to allow for a period of both internal and community testing, so if you run into a problem please let us know, and submit your output_log.txt file (Player.log on OSX). Pending positive test results, we'll soon be moving forward with integrating Load/Save into the main UI.

The camera is now at a fixed angle, which becomes more shallow as you zoom in closer to the ground. There are numerous reasons for introducing this, the most important of which is maintaining frame rate. By angling down towards the ground in typical RTS fashion, we're able to reduce the amount of geometry in the camera frustum, which means lower frame rendering times and higher FPS. When we launched in Early Access we deliberately set the minimum specification quite high, with the intention of lowering them as development progressed. As optimizations continue to be added, its looking increasingly promising for being able to lower the minimum spec towards launch. We're now able to play a meaningful game at 25fps on an old Macbook pro with an Intel HD3000 graphics card. If you're not a fan of the new camera system, that's not a problem. You can disable camera locking under Settings and return to the previous camera setup.



Referring back to the Let's Play videos and streams we watched post-0.2.11, we noticed players weren't rotating their buildings as much as we expected due to convoluted controls. Revisiting the controls, we've opted for the more expected behaviour of placing rotation on the scroll wheel, overriding the normal zoom function when in construction mode. We also noticed some confusion over how close economy buildings had to be placed to resources. To address this, when placing buildings we added icons over nearby resources, setting them 100% opaque when they are within the building's boundary, and 50% opaque when they are outside but nearby (and therefore likely to be captured once the player unlocks the Expanded Boundary research).

Being able to watch play sessions is so incredibly useful to us in learning how players engage with the game, and where improvements are needed. It's one of the primary benefits of being in Early Access.

If you played Patch 0.2.11, you'll know that the Needs system we introduced expanded playability, but lead to some confusion because of a lack of information provided in the UI, and a likelihood that villagers would start leaving. Throughout December the team worked on improving the UI, adding quick-glance indicators to buildings so players can see if a building is missing workers, or how many workers out of the maximum are currently trained. Missing workers is the primary cause of not being able to meet villager needs later on, so knowing when there's a problem helps players address the issue before it starts affecting villager happiness. We also expanded the number of event notifications, and added advisor voice over to tell players when a worker had left or a building didn't have any workers (more on this later).



Digging deeper into the Building Dialog, the Workers tab received much needed attention, enabling players to recruit directly from the list of available Peasants (villagers without a profession), demote workers, and find them (thanks to the newly added camera panning system for event notifications). Auto-Recruit was enabled, easing micro-management demands for those wanting to simplify their tasks by automatically filling vacancies. This isn't quite perfect, and in the next patch we'll be adding checkboxes that appear allowing to you check which slots are to be auto-recruited; useful for early stages when you don't have enough villagers to be employing a full compliment of professions.



The Research tab in the Building Dialog became functional, especially for the Blacksmith buildings. You might recall the misleading "We don't have enough Iron Ingots" advisor line that would play when trying to unlock research. This was indicative of an increasing number of missing lines from the original tutorial; it was meant to be "We don't have enough research points." So this month we set about recording a new set of advisor lines scripted specifically for Sandbox, broadcast live in one of the Sunday Dev Hangouts. 7 hours of material recorded over two sessions was condensed into 70 minutes of candidate takes, from which 600 individual lines were then selected and dropped into game. These include lines for future features that will be coming online in the next several patches.



If you'd like to read all the improvements made in Patch 0.2.12, they are fairly self-explanatory in the Patch Notes.

Looking to the New Year, we have a number of short-term objectives:

- Sickness, death, and medicines - the Herbalist get their functional purpose, while the Monks will receive a second function (in addition to brewing Mead), to collect dead corpses and bury them in a new village Graveyard. Expect outbreaks of coughing and vomiting.

- The Needs system will be iterated and expanded, adding ranting behaviour leading to rebellion where some villagers run around setting fire to your buildings. Wells will become functional to help fire fighting.

- Clearing areas of Trees/Stone/Iron Ore deposits - we need more interaction with the environment. Being able to clear areas to make way for village expansion contributes to a feeling of progression and further investment in the ownership of what we as players are doing.

- Quest Designer - being able to trigger quests will allow handholding tutorial quests to ease new players into sandbox, as well as prototyping how the player will progress into the RPG side of the game. This eventually leads to portals, the hero party system, and the World Editor combining multiple location maps into a single playable experience.

- Monster Dens - these are a natural progression from the wave spawning system. On the Hard snow map especially, the wolf packs present a constant and frequent threat. It makes sense for such creatures to have a home/nest/den with health that can be attacked. Attacking a nest will cause any monsters inside to come out and fight, and destroying the nest will prevent future waves from attacking your village. Leaving a nest alone will result in a 'settler' monster spawning that goes looking for a site to establish a new nest.

- Enable the selling of Mead and Pumpkins.

- Implement the Crooked Cauldron, Stables, Jeweller's Shop and Marketplace with their associated professions.

- Enable building upgrades.

For a look further ahead, it's worth taking a look at the Development Roadmap.

That's it for 2014. From us all on the Folk Tale dev team, we hope you've all had a great holiday.

With the relatively short period between the content-rich November release of Patch 0.2.11 and the holidays, efforts were focused on improving gameplay and fixing bugs so that we could release the much improved 0.2.12 build in time for the festive break.

At the top of the community-requested improvements is Load/Save. While it's been available in game for several patches via the console, it wasn't functionally complete which rendered it unusable. Throughout December, Load/Save received much love, and in Patch 0.2.12 it is now stable. We've left it accessible via the console to allow for a period of both internal and community testing, so if you run into a problem please let us know, and submit your output_log.txt file (Player.log on OSX). Pending positive test results, we'll soon be moving forward with integrating Load/Save into the main UI.

The camera is now at a fixed angle, which becomes more shallow as you zoom in closer to the ground. There are numerous reasons for introducing this, the most important of which is maintaining frame rate. By angling down towards the ground in typical RTS fashion, we're able to reduce the amount of geometry in the camera frustum, which means lower frame rendering times and higher FPS. When we launched in Early Access we deliberately set the minimum specification quite high, with the intention of lowering them as development progressed. As optimizations continue to be added, its looking increasingly promising for being able to lower the minimum spec towards launch. We're now able to play a meaningful game at 25fps on an old Macbook pro with an Intel HD3000 graphics card. If you're not a fan of the new camera system, that's not a problem. You can disable camera locking under Settings and return to the previous camera setup.



Referring back to the Let's Play videos and streams we watched post-0.2.11, we noticed players weren't rotating their buildings as much as we expected due to convoluted controls. Revisiting the controls, we've opted for the more expected behaviour of placing rotation on the scroll wheel, overriding the normal zoom function when in construction mode. We also noticed some confusion over how close economy buildings had to be placed to resources. To address this, when placing buildings we added icons over nearby resources, setting them 100% opaque when they are within the building's boundary, and 50% opaque when they are outside but nearby (and therefore likely to be captured once the player unlocks the Expanded Boundary research).

Being able to watch play sessions is so incredibly useful to us in learning how players engage with the game, and where improvements are needed. It's one of the primary benefits of being in Early Access.

If you played Patch 0.2.11, you'll know that the Needs system we introduced expanded playability, but lead to some confusion because of a lack of information provided in the UI, and a likelihood that villagers would start leaving. Throughout December the team worked on improving the UI, adding quick-glance indicators to buildings so players can see if a building is missing workers, or how many workers out of the maximum are currently trained. Missing workers is the primary cause of not being able to meet villager needs later on, so knowing when there's a problem helps players address the issue before it starts affecting villager happiness. We also expanded the number of event notifications, and added advisor voice over to tell players when a worker had left or a building didn't have any workers (more on this later).



Digging deeper into the Building Dialog, the Workers tab received much needed attention, enabling players to recruit directly from the list of available Peasants (villagers without a profession), demote workers, and find them (thanks to the newly added camera panning system for event notifications). Auto-Recruit was enabled, easing micro-management demands for those wanting to simplify their tasks by automatically filling vacancies. This isn't quite perfect, and in the next patch we'll be adding checkboxes that appear allowing to you check which slots are to be auto-recruited; useful for early stages when you don't have enough villagers to be employing a full compliment of professions.



The Research tab in the Building Dialog became functional, especially for the Blacksmith buildings. You might recall the misleading "We don't have enough Iron Ingots" advisor line that would play when trying to unlock research. This was indicative of an increasing number of missing lines from the original tutorial; it was meant to be "We don't have enough research points." So this month we set about recording a new set of advisor lines scripted specifically for Sandbox, broadcast live in one of the Sunday Dev Hangouts. 7 hours of material recorded over two sessions was condensed into 70 minutes of candidate takes, from which 600 individual lines were then selected and dropped into game. These include lines for future features that will be coming online in the next several patches.



If you'd like to read all the improvements made in Patch 0.2.12, they are fairly self-explanatory in the Patch Notes.

Looking to the New Year, we have a number of short-term objectives:

- Sickness, death, and medicines - the Herbalist get their functional purpose, while the Monks will receive a second function (in addition to brewing Mead), to collect dead corpses and bury them in a new village Graveyard. Expect outbreaks of coughing and vomiting.

- The Needs system will be iterated and expanded, adding ranting behaviour leading to rebellion where some villagers run around setting fire to your buildings. Wells will become functional to help fire fighting.

- Clearing areas of Trees/Stone/Iron Ore deposits - we need more interaction with the environment. Being able to clear areas to make way for village expansion contributes to a feeling of progression and further investment in the ownership of what we as players are doing.

- Quest Designer - being able to trigger quests will allow handholding tutorial quests to ease new players into sandbox, as well as prototyping how the player will progress into the RPG side of the game. This eventually leads to portals, the hero party system, and the World Editor combining multiple location maps into a single playable experience.

- Monster Dens - these are a natural progression from the wave spawning system. On the Hard snow map especially, the wolf packs present a constant and frequent threat. It makes sense for such creatures to have a home/nest/den with health that can be attacked. Attacking a nest will cause any monsters inside to come out and fight, and destroying the nest will prevent future waves from attacking your village. Leaving a nest alone will result in a 'settler' monster spawning that goes looking for a site to establish a new nest.

- Enable the selling of Mead and Pumpkins.

- Implement the Crooked Cauldron, Stables, Jeweller's Shop and Marketplace with their associated professions.

- Enable building upgrades.

For a look further ahead, it's worth taking a look at the Development Roadmap.

That's it for 2014. From us all on the Folk Tale dev team, we hope you've all had a great holiday.

Howdy folks,

This weeks update adds the option to change the starting cutscene, you can pick the standard Jeep entrance or Static where Survivors will instantly spawn on start. You can also change the number of Survivors in the Gauntlet.

Added the ability to drag positions on the map, much easier than having to manually type everything.


You can now pick from 5 different button visuals and add Fire to your map that will damage anything that goes through it!

Happy New Year everyone!

---------

v0.08 - 30/12/14

* New Event_Action: HUD.Objective, sets an objective to be displayed on the HUD
* New Event_Action: Survivor.Portrait, show or hide Survivor portrait
* New Object: Fire, deals damage to anything that goes through it, can be Activated and Deactivated

* Changed Object: Buttons, added Visual drop down box, pick from 5 different visuals

* Added starting cutscene "Static", Survivors start at their position
* Added Inspector to Start so you can pick where each Survivor starts, camera position and start type
* Added draggable buttons to Inspector Positions, can be snapped with Shift
* Added drop down box to choose number of Survivors
* Added Survivor default View Distance 0
* Fixed Blood Splatter direction when being hit by Sentry Gun
* Fixed Acid pool depth
* Fixed Delete button being clickable while invisible
* Fixed Inspector tooltips not scrolling
* Fixed Credits buttons not scaling back

Howdy folks,

This weeks update adds the option to change the starting cutscene, you can pick the standard Jeep entrance or Static where Survivors will instantly spawn on start. You can also change the number of Survivors in the Gauntlet.

Added the ability to drag positions on the map, much easier than having to manually type everything.


You can now pick from 5 different button visuals and add Fire to your map that will damage anything that goes through it!

Happy New Year everyone!

---------

v0.08 - 30/12/14

* New Event_Action: HUD.Objective, sets an objective to be displayed on the HUD
* New Event_Action: Survivor.Portrait, show or hide Survivor portrait
* New Object: Fire, deals damage to anything that goes through it, can be Activated and Deactivated

* Changed Object: Buttons, added Visual drop down box, pick from 5 different visuals

* Added starting cutscene "Static", Survivors start at their position
* Added Inspector to Start so you can pick where each Survivor starts, camera position and start type
* Added draggable buttons to Inspector Positions, can be snapped with Shift
* Added drop down box to choose number of Survivors
* Added Survivor default View Distance 0
* Fixed Blood Splatter direction when being hit by Sentry Gun
* Fixed Acid pool depth
* Fixed Delete button being clickable while invisible
* Fixed Inspector tooltips not scrolling
* Fixed Credits buttons not scaling back

Today's Patch Notes BGM™ is Robeast, a track I was introduced to by a member of the SG community and ended up purchasing and listening to for about a week straight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvViQnjRk4

- Fix flashing round timer during things like EKG Flatliner in Versus. Now it is properly grey while time-out is disabled.
- Tags now autocorrect like all other special moves, the exiting character will face the correct direction before the incoming character starts their action. Nobody told me this was wrong for two years, hahahahaha.
- Fix assists teleporting before landing under certain specific conditions (facing backward and having them blocked for most of their descent). Thanks Weatherbee for finally having it happen on video AND for going to look it up in the archive!
- Bugfix: Sekhmet no longer gains meter when her attacks connect vs opponent pushblocking, Fortune's head, or armored moves/another Sekhmet. Thanks Arcana and others.

- Byebye modified superjumps, we hardly knew ye. I have never gotten so many negative responses to a change! I liked them, but this game isn't only for me, so out they go. I hope all you curmudgeons are satisfied. :^)
- Reversal window after hitstun/wakeup restored to the original 4f.
- Bugfix, crouching preblock (only crouching) will now happen vs air attacks, which changes nothing but removes a buggy instant-overhead setup. Thanks TheGamaniac.
- Add 1200 health to everyone's lifebar (at 1.0, multiplied by the normal ratios for solos/duos). Lets you live through one more hard hit, gives you a little bit more of a chance vs some optimized junk.
- Double-snap required distance to corner reduced by 1/3. After being snapped, assists must hit the wall within 10f. (Real Game distance is 15f.) Just enough to affect most round-start double snaps.

No more auto-healing: Solos will keep up to 1/3 a bar of red health vs a trio and 1/2 vs a duo (none in 1v1). Hitting the solo with a snapback removes all accumulated red health. The solo hitting with a snapback restores 2/3 red health if they hit a point character and 1/3 red health if they hit an assist. I'm not sure I like this, but experiments!

- Kanchou travels faster when she's going behind the opponent; s.HP->Kanchou now works on Big Band and Beowulf.
- j.D+MP has bigger vertical hitboxes while falling and longer opponent hitstop. Can hit more often and followup more easily.
- Cerecopter damage redistributed, base damage almost the same (-100 or so), fully scaled damage 721->520.
- Merry Go-Rilla no longer strike invincible during startup, still throw invincible on grab frames. Should maybe be invincible on the 1f before the grab but let's see.
- Redistribute damage on Khepri Sun. Fully scaled damage ~4100->~3700.
- Added 5f buffer window after L Osiris Spiral to more easily link normal attacks and continue.
- Updo assist comes out at the correct position relative to the point character instead of 100 pixels further forward than any other DP assist. Heh.
- Increase flight speed Forward by 0.5 pixels/frame, Back by 0.5 px/frame, Up by 1 px/frame, Down unchanged. Install no longer makes her fly faster.
- Pinion Dash returned to assist-only, updated faster Stunt Double (alpha counter) version still there. From Custom Action ye rose, to Custom Action shalt thou return.
- Can catch bursts with counter supers, but doing that now scales any followup combo to 50% for both versions. Countering other moves besides bursts does not scale the following combo.
- Air Bypass scales damage to 66% instead of 75%.
- Mortuary Drop forward movement distance increased by ~90 pixels to help it connect after pushblocks.
2nd update - Level 3 won't slide past the opponent, should greatly improve usability. No thanks whatsoever to Izzmo. :^)

- Bugfix: Moonsault will no longer trigger the cinematic when the third hit is an OTG.
- Tag in has correct blockstun, now -20 instead of -3. Thanks negus_eyoel!
- First test of Crowd Hype. "Hype" is somewhat overused but it's properly descriptive here. Holding down s.LP / dropping a mic from s.MP / taunting all build excitement. Confetti falls whenever the excitement level increases. Max level (Lv2) will make the ref come out from Splash like before. It'll do more stuff soon.
- Altered opponent's arc when released from a Headbutt/Knee for better juggles.
- Headbutts/Knees will not kill during a super as long as the opponent will still be grabbed after that attack.
- j.HK chair toss is now done by holding the button down instead of D+HK. See what you think, this way seems more intuitive to me.
- c.MK and chairless s.HP/j.HP will no longer grab dead characters.
- Dashing LP no longer goes over crouching Painwheel. Thanks someone or other.
- M chair toss releases the chair closer to Beowulf, should be more useful as an overhead setup and assist now.

Hey all, hope everyone is enjoying the holidays so far! First off, a massive thank you to everyone who has helped us with all the bug & crash reporting since the Experimental release.


At this point most of the random crashes have been fixed, except for the main, most frequent one that is the main source of the instability in the 0.70.x updates. (This is the crash that usually occurs randomly as a result of moving around the map or loading new towns).

The reason this pesky bugger isn’t getting fixed is because it happens in a Havok library, which is closed off to us. Meaning we can’t fix it directly and have to just experiment with different work-arounds and rely on Havok support for a fix. Havok are working hard on it for us, but until we get an update for this, it’s gonna keep crashing as much as it is.

But in the meantime we will carry on working on fixing all the other bugs and any other crash-fixes as usual. It just means that 0.70.x will stay in the “Experimental” branch for a while longer, ETA unknown at this point.

The forecast for the next month is mostly just going to be bug-fixing, although version 0.71 will have the new multiple squad management feature.


This month, Otto's been working a lot on new character designs, including improvements to the current human models.




Plus he's also begun work on new races, such as the Bone People:





We also have screenshots of some of Olly's progress with the new world map. This is still many many months from being complete and these biomes will eventually need filling with lots of content. (See http://lofigames.com/landscape/ for more images)






Wishing everyone a happy new year from Lo-Fi Games! :D

Hey all, hope everyone is enjoying the holidays so far! First off, a massive thank you to everyone who has helped us with all the bug & crash reporting since the Experimental release.


At this point most of the random crashes have been fixed, except for the main, most frequent one that is the main source of the instability in the 0.70.x updates. (This is the crash that usually occurs randomly as a result of moving around the map or loading new towns).

The reason this pesky bugger isn’t getting fixed is because it happens in a Havok library, which is closed off to us. Meaning we can’t fix it directly and have to just experiment with different work-arounds and rely on Havok support for a fix. Havok are working hard on it for us, but until we get an update for this, it’s gonna keep crashing as much as it is.

But in the meantime we will carry on working on fixing all the other bugs and any other crash-fixes as usual. It just means that 0.70.x will stay in the “Experimental” branch for a while longer, ETA unknown at this point.

The forecast for the next month is mostly just going to be bug-fixing, although version 0.71 will have the new multiple squad management feature.


This month, Otto's been working a lot on new character designs, including improvements to the current human models.




Plus he's also begun work on new races, such as the Bone People:





We also have screenshots of some of Olly's progress with the new world map. This is still many many months from being complete and these biomes will eventually need filling with lots of content. (See http://lofigames.com/landscape/ for more images)






Wishing everyone a happy new year from Lo-Fi Games! :D

In this update we decided to increase walking speed by 5% since we've had a few complaints about that. We also fixed the issue where a player's hitbox would spawn before the player was actually beamed in. And we fixed a little menu bug that was introduced in the last update.