We love the feedback from our Early Access players, and we’re testing important adjustments that affect the character unlocking system in response. Here’s what’s changed and what’s coming down the pipeline.


Here at Wavedash Games, we’re super happy to see Icons: Combat Arena finally out on Steam Early Access and very pleased about all of the thoughtful feedback we’ve received from players so far. We knew there were great expectations from the community regarding the game as a whole, and we are committed to holding ourselves to the highest standard during Early Access so that Icons is as fun and vibrant as possible when we go into the official release. Here’s a rundown of the changes we’ve made so far and a preview of a big update coming up in August.

First, after reading all of the comments about the game on Steam, Reddit, and other community spaces, we’ve concluded that the most pressing issue is the rate at which players can unlock and play characters without paying money. While it is important to make sure unlocking characters feels like a true achievement, it is also important for players to be able to try out all of the different playstyles to find the main that suits them the best. We are now developing and testing approaches to improve this part of the game as we try to see what works before the full release. The following changes are already live:

• All characters are now playable in Training Mode.
  
• All players receive 1,100 spectra (in-game currency) when they start the game, enough to immediately unlock an additional character.

While this is a good starting point, there are additional changes we are working on right now to improve economic balance and the player progression experience. Here’s what we have in store for the August update:

• Portal Packs will contain more spectra (this will roll out gradually as we adjust balance).
  
• Players will unlock new characters at a faster rate through Quick Match.
  
• The mechanics of player progression will be clearer and more visible.
  
• Players will be able to choose the characters they want to unlock using a new Character Unlock Token from Portal Packs earned via Quick Match gameplay.

Please note that these changes are not necessarily going to be in the game permanently, as Early Access is an important time for testing and iteration on fundamental systems in Icons. We’ll continue to read all of the reviews and comments our players are contributing, and there will be many more updates and announcements to come. We sincerely appreciate all of the encouragement and support from our community, and we can’t wait to continue this adventure with you all.

• Warrior
  • Heroic Leap
    • No longer deals damage.
    • Jump strength reduced by 20%.
    • Air control reduced from 90% to 50%.
  • Charge
    • Animation has been updated.
• Assassin
  • Class Bonus
    • Class bonus changed to +10% swap speed and 10% reload speed.
  • Ghost Walk
    • Duration changed from 2/3/4/5s to 3s at all ranks.
  • Sniper Rifle
    • Added projectile drop.
• Hunter
  • Class bonus
    • Class bonus changed to +10% movement speed.
  • Flare
    • Effect radius increased from 120/150/180/210 to 160/190/220/250.
  • Dodge Roll
    • Animation has been updated.
• Mage
  • Soar
    • Reduced grace period from 1s to 0.5s.
    • Attempting to fire a weapon will now interrupt Soar.
• Slug Rifle
  • Reduced damage from 580/640/690/750 to 565/610/655/710.
• Burst Rifle
  • Reduced damage from 220/240/260/280 to 200/220/240/260 per shot.

 

• We are coming to console in Closed Beta! Register now for more information on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
• Reduced the size of the first, fifth, sixth, and seventh fog circles.
  • 1st Circle - 11% reduction
  • 5th circle - 28% reduction
  • 6th circle - 35% reduction
  • 7th circle - 43% reduction
  • 8th circle - 44% reduction
• Added Quackers chicken skin to Battle Pass.
• Added Daily Quests.

 

• Underpass
  • Cave has been expanded for additional playability.
• Dragon Bones
  • Added two new Dragon Bones points of interest to the map.
• Updated minimap.

 

• Fixed an issue where some Ability Icons had duplicates on the Character Select Menu.
• Fixed several Environment issues.
• Fixed an issue where Legendary Armor visual FX wouldn't appear after reviving from being Chickened.
• Fixed a bug where Warrior’s Charge was not playing audio.
• Fixed a bug where Sniper scope overlay would get stuck on the screen.
• Fixed a bug where recovering from a chicken removed Engineer’s jetpack.
• Fixed bugs with missing textures in Old Manor.
• Fixed a bug with floating chests.
• Fixed a bug where players could carry multiple stone spears.
• Fixed a bug where panning the camera broke various emotes.
• Fixed a bug where players could crouch during Mage’s Ice Block.
• Fixed a bug where the Assassin’s Concussion Bomb passed through the Engineer’s Barricade.

-Made RoundTable calculation instant
-EQPR Ascend artifact has been reset for those that had a ton of points into it during class reset
-A new/old minigame has been added(might have some bugs)

Welcome to a round up of the week. Flashback Drafts start today, Merry Melee sleeve rotations start soon, and more!

Read on for full details.

We've released another free content update to Gunheart today. It's the usual mix of new features, quality bug fixes, some optimizations... and of course some more mods to play with! Check out the video for a summary from Hunter or dig into the bullet points below for the nitty-gritty.

https://youtu.be/dnMNl9XYxdU

• Local play! You now have the option on startup to play locally using the same shared profile as when you're playing online with others
  
• Golden skins have been added for players with waaaaay to much earned cash to spend
  
• Prestige system added which enabled further leveling past the level 25 cap with extra ways to distinguish your bounty hunter prowess in-game
  
• New mutator 'Mayhem': when available in missions will force equip players with akimbo chainguns
  
• Lone Wolf: extra life cannisters are now replaced with extra loot cannisters
  
• Addressed several issues with death discs that were causing them to have inconsistent ranges and behavior
  
• Players can no longer use foam hands to surf into the sky
  
• Death screen is now smarter about facing the player regardless of camera angle, and also handles being embedded in geometry better
  
• Clear the buzzbags objective sometimes weren't cancelling reinforcements, causing further rooms to not function correctly
  
• Infestation objectives reworked so that clearing the egg sacks is instrumental to completing the objective
  
• Numerous issues related to AI physics have been resolved, reducing the frequencies of AI snapping back or sliding after being launched/knocked over
  
• Solo score leaderboard added to the shooting range for players in addition to the existin group score leaderboard
  
• Dhinos have been updated to work more in-line with intended design and fix many of the sliding/popping issues commonly present before
  
• Anthromite cloaking ability has been fixed, expect to see them in weekly missions along with the end waves of Horde
  
• Several optimizations have been added to reduce the CPU overhead with large amounts of projectiles and enemies.

• Batter Up: Increase melee damage/knockback when using the bats with a small shield boost
  
• Retribution: Reflect a percentage of damage received back to the attackers
  
• Mad Bomber: Leave behind a prox mine upon teleport

• Bullet Refund: Landing a kill will return bullets directly back into your clip
  
• No Scope: Turn the sniper rifle into a classic rail gun
  
• Prox Mines: Minecaster mines now detonate based on proximity to enemies or after a fixed duration
  
• Money Clip: Chaingun now consumes money instead of ammo, and never overheats!
  
• Explosive Arrows: Equip the bow with explosive arrows to unleash some sweet AOE damage on groups of Anthrmoites

• Vision: Will now highlight buzzbags
  
• Vampire: Health/shield regen is now applied over time instead of instantly

• Invert mouse Y added for mouse+keyboard players
  
• (VR) Strafe speed slider added to reduce the default movement speed
  
• (VR/Vive) Option for turn on click instead of using swipe gestures added

Let us know in the comments what you'd like to see next for Gunheart or jump in our official discord to chat with use directly about it. Thanks everyone!

-Made RoundTable calculation instant
-EQPR Ascend artifact has been reset for those that had a ton of points into it during class reset
-A new/old minigame has been added(might have some bugs)

New demo coming July 30th

I've got big news to share! The next demo of Village Monsters - code name Summer Sherbet - is coming out on July 30th. And for the first time since last year this demo will be made available to everybody!

I've been working my butt off on this release since the end of spring, and it is by far the biggest and meatiest demo yet. I hope you look forward to visiting this little slice of village life at the end of July.

Onto the dev log!



It's one thing to write a bunch of words. It's quite another to actually implement them in the game.

The majority of the past two weeks has been spent adding dialogue to the game and making sure it looks and reads correctly. It's quite a bit of busy work, but it's also had benefits as it turns out some lines that seemed fine in my editor didn't have the same impact when spoken by the villager.

I've done as much editing as I have implementing, and I think that's a good thing.



Speaking of words: bookcases can now be interacted with! Have fun browsing hundreds of titles.



Foraging has been in the game for a long while now - in fact, it was one of the very first features I created - but it's always been a silly little placeholder system that wasn't very interesting. Until now.

Each season now brings its own thematically appropriate items to forage. Similarly, the items you can find in each part of the world are now different - you can find mushrooms in the forest, seashells on the beach, and vegetables at the farm.

Foraged items are also far less predictable in where and how often they grow, so you'll have to do some exploring if you want to make a hobby out of it.



I really, really hate dealing with camera issues. You're probably thinking, "It's a 2D game - what camera?", but when it comes to pixel art you need to make sure you can scale your display without any kind of distortion or weird looking pixels.

This past week I ran into a doozy of a problem with scaling the UI, but there was a silver lining: the fix ended up solving a whole crop of other bugs. If you've experienced UI issues with past releases (such as the dialogue box disappearing, or the clock display getting cut off), then you'll be happy to know these are now fixed.

There's also a very real chance I introduced a host of other camera bugs. I think I must have broken a cursed camera when I was a kid.



Unlike past demos, Summer Sherbet is not unlimited. You have just three days to get to know the village and its surroundings, so make 'em count!

There's at least one more dev log coming next week followed by a weighty patch list just prior to release. I'm so pumped for people to play this demo, so I'm going to stop writing these words immediately and get back to work.

Another week, another batch of robot hacks for Beta 7 :)



Pretty much every bot has at least some function relevant to their job, as you can see above with the map_earth hack. Same thing below in tiles mode.



As one might expect, there are quite a few hacks that target Operators, given their access to so many systems...



Almost any combat bot can be hacked to find emergency access doors over a pretty wide range.



In general I haven't been working on combat bot hacks yet--I'm mainly going straight down my internal list, on which non-combat hacks come first, but based on some code I was working on it was more efficient to jump ahead and do a few search-based hacks like this one at the same time.

Back to non-combat hacks, how about forcing Haulers to both drop their inventory and safely identify all the contents for you?



And normally a Mechanic's special inventory of backup parts can't be accessed/retrieved, but there's also a hack to decompress those if you really want to :P



Lastly, a fun still shot from a very WIP animation that's a bit more involved.



More on that one next week.

A lot of these robot hacks also tie into AI behavior in some way, so I've been messing around in that bit of the code and making occasional related updates.

For example you may have noticed that a group of Engineers repairing lots of walls in close proximity might end up getting stuck, and the cluster of Engineers can grow larger and larger as there are incomplete projects in the queue but they're all waiting for each other to get out of the way. I left it that way since it's not too common, not all that important, and kinda funny when it happens (stupid Unaware!), but an easy fix popped into my head with the new behavior update that probably won't happen anymore.

Here you can see a group of very eager Engineers, unperturbed even by an eventual Scatter Rocket Array :P




I didn't get quite as far along with robot hacks I would've liked this week, because an entire day's worth of work was spent switching the website over to HTTPS. For a basic website there are pretty simple ways of going about this, but my site includes a separate blog, wiki, and forums, all with content dating back years, so altogether it was a time-consuming operation.

There weren't any major hitches, it just took a while to go through all the different settings and required file updates to avoid "mixed content" warnings from browsers (where you are set up for HTTPS but still have bits of content that aren't secure).

In the end we're green across the board :D



The main mistake was forgetting that the game itself targets an HTTP address to upload scores, but that address no longer existed after the update, so until our Discord community pointed this out and I fixed it we lost a few leaderboard uploads--sorry about that xD

The r/Cogmind responses to the news this week were pretty amusing :)

Amphouse: Wow, I had no idea the "hacking update" would be this thorough. :P

The past few weeks there's been a new community activity among the active Discord players: Malthusis is hosting seeded speedruns (by turn count), with most everyone also playing at the same time and reporting their rate of progress to the surface. These have been a pretty fun challenge, and force you to approach the game quite differently.

The speedrunning match records so far, recording the number of turns for each player to reach their final depth (or win):



As you can see it takes around 2,000 turns to win, or closer to 1,000 if you really know what you're doing (and/or also get really lucky :P). This is more or less in line with the relevant achievements, Speedrunner and Expert Speedrunner at 2k and 1k, respectively.

I've only joined in twice so far, the first time practically oblivious to proper speedrunning strategy (as a combat player, to me wheels are "fast," haha) so I got trashed. But at least reached the surface on my second attempt. I did a full writeup with images on the forums. The matches will continue off and on in the future (there are more planned for this weekend), so stop by the Discord if you're interested.

In other community news, I've decided to stop weekly seeds for now. There's more about this in the forums announcement, though since it is relevant to game design, I'll copy some of the discussion here:

It's worth noting that Weekly Seeds are fun in a lot of roguelikes but I don't think the straight up "everyone play the same seed and do whatever you want" approach works very well for Cogmind.

Where in other seeded roguelike runs players will generally be up against a lot of the same opponents on the same small maps with the same set of tools at their disposal, Cogmind maps are huge, not to mention all the different routes one can take through the world, and access to completely different strategies, so instead of players being forced to compete on a fairly level playing field, what you come up against can vary greatly depending on a lot of factors. (And that's even before we start adding in the effects of a rising alert level!)

In that light, we can why weekly seeds won't have all that much appeal, and how Cogmind is more suited to special/focused challenges with greater restrictions. We'll have to keep that in mind when thinking about how to approach any future activities :)

ChromaticGray has put together a cool Cogmind wallpaper for Wallpaper Engine:



As shared on r/Cogmind:

I made it for a ultrawide 2560x1080 monitor, but it should work fine on 1080 also.

Background map moves in parallax with the mouse, the Cogmind flickers and the weapons lights up in color on mouse over (that's why you only see top right colored).

Pretty awesome! Wallpaper Engine users can get it here.

I'd really like to put together some more wallpapers myself, but despite all the ideas and potential resources to draw from, I just don't have the time right now. So many other higher priorities and it's just little old me doing everything xD. The current wallpaper set on the website is the same I introduced over three years ago with the first public alpha!

There may be other relevant discussion of this SITREP on the GSG forums.

This is going to be good. And big. And good. Did I wrote that already? That’s perfectly fine, because it deserves to be mentioned twice, as it’s not only one of the things you requested the most, but also one of the coolest additions and improvements to the game. Without further ado: Camps, Bannermen and Raids!

• All the races can now pitch Camps, where Heroes gather to form Banners. This way, you can create groups of your choosing and plan coordinated attacks - battles are easier to handle and, most of all, much more entertaining! That’s not all, as each race provides it’s Bannermen with different Camp Skills!
  
• Nature’s Gift (Wild Elves): All Bannermen will start Raids with the Nature’s restorative blessing!
  
• Big Bretta (Dwarves): Powerful Dwarven mortar will aid Bannermen during Raids, even at a great distances!
  
• Battle Brothers (Humans): Bannermen train together and share war stories, gaining experience even outside of battle!
  
• Rite of the Fallen (Dark Elves): Bannermen collect skulls of their enemies and become stronger through their Blood Magic!

• We added radial shape and smooth animations to the new Flag Menu, now including Pitch Camp and Raid Flags. The new menu works anywhere on the map, and after selecting one of the Flags, you will enter a new mode allowig you for easier placement of bigger number of it in the game and clearer indication of weather you are able to place it or not (and why) - easier, faster and more convenient!

• We added more available key shortcuts
  
• Bug fixes

First Campaign is entering an important phase of development, but we’ll have at least one more surprise for you before it’s released!

May your lands remain unshattered,
- Luke

Hello everyone! We have made some more small fixes to the game.

The most notable one is reducing the difficulty of mission 5. A lot of people have been struggling with winning this map as it is significantly more difficult than the previous maps. We agree, so we added 2 fertile tiles to player 1 and removed 2 fertile tiles to both player 2 and 3. This should still keep the map a bit challenging, but more fair so that the player can ease-in better to the rest of the game.


However, we don't want to reduce the difficulty of maps often and we'll only do so if there is a very good reason to. At the end of the day, this is a strategy game and if every map can be won by mindless brute force, then there would be no satisfaction playing the game.

Regardless, we hope you guys keep enjoying Radiis!

Changed

• Reduced the difficulty of mission 5.

Fixed

• Clarified text when exiting the game from the in-game menu.
  
• Fixed tile placement in mission 19.

We have more updates and fixes planned. Stay tuned!