Hi Everyone,

It's time for another big update! As we mentioned in our last development post, the AI rivals will need a lot of big tech changes and we’ll be rolling some of those out early as we finish them. The first early tech change we’re launching for this update is a big rework of the map generation.

If you've got questions, ideas, bug reports, come chat with us on discord: https://discord.gg/kingdomsandcastles, or email us at contact@lionshieldstudios.com.

Here's the details:


We've reworked map generation algorithm. Now distinct landmasses will be farther apart (no more landmasses separated by just 4 tiles). Additionally maps have a chance to spawn with shallow water rivers. Map island shapes should in general be more interesting. All landmasses are guaranteed to be above a certain tile count and wolves also won’t spawn on small landmasses. Finally, maps got a bit bigger! The number of build-able tiles increased by 20-30% per map size.


These will match up better with wooden walls, and are cheaper than stone gates.


These bridges fit together with stone roads and provide the same movement bonus. They are impassable by ship so be careful you don’t box in your transport ships. Viking ships can't pass through them or destroy them.


You can augment the automatic volunteer peasant firefighters with actual firefighters who hang out at the Fire Brigade building until needed. These professional firefighters run very quickly and put out fires much quicker than normal peasants. With the right Fire Brigade placement, you’ll now be able to put out fires that would have destroyed buildings when the peasant volunteers were too far away to arrive in time.


If you'd like, you can turn on streamer mode in the settings. A twitch icon will appear on the side of the screen, enter your username there, start streaming and viewers can vote on what befalls your kingdom: bonuses, disasters, and other events!


The tax rate used to go from 1 to 3. Now it can do half increments (so 0.5, 1, 1.5, etc). As a stylistic choice we’ve changed the display to show a percentage so if you had a tax rate set at 3, it’ll now show as 30%, but all the internal math will remain the same. This will allow you finer grain control over taxation vs. your kingdom’s happiness.

Windmill bonuses no longer stack with adjacent windmills and instead each does a flat +3 per tile. It turns out with overlapping bonuses a really strange formation of farms and windmills is optimal (long rows of windmills with a row of farms in between). We wanted to make it so you don't have pack windmills in a line to get optimal food output.

• For older mac users who weren’t able to see trees, you can now turn on ‘Mac Compatibility Mode’ in the settings to address that.
  
• Optimization pass
  
• Dragons are less punishing in terms of how many people they kill (especially large dragons)
  
• Stockpiles are treated as stone roads regarding peasant walk speed
  
• Added dirt under the stone roads so they match up with regular roads/gardens better
  
• Baker bakes faster (10s per bread from 15s)
  
• Right click now also deselects tower range UI
  
• Previously viking ships would phase through drawbridges, now the drawbridges go up when any ship comes through
  
• Display charcoal maker yearly output
  
• Reduced costs on castle blocks
  
• Tweak castle tower ballista/archer ranges
  
• Reservoirs can be built anywhere (ignores road territory)
  
• Fix issue where vikings spawned in creative mode wouldn’t always leave on their ships properly
  
• Fix mason not repairing walls
  
• Fix case where peasants could end up in deep water
  
• Fix case where doctors could end up in deep water/floating in air
  
• Fix garden not receiving adjaceny bonuses if under aqueduct
  
• Fix armies not able to stand in town squares
  
• Fix not being able to build castle blocks on top of a gate that had a garden underneath
  
• Fix issue where delivery workers could carry their goods with them if they switched jobs
  
• Other small fixes/tweaks

And of course, other updates will roll out new pieces of the tech we need to make rival kingdoms possible. Very excited to share what's in store!

-Pete & Michael

Game changes:

Random battle encounters removed:
-Monsters are now displayed by a dark entity and they will chase you down. The more you succeed in evading them, the faster they get over time.

-Exp gain nerfed by 20%
-Escape upgrade nerfed by 25%
-Running out of battle nerfed by 10%


Hookshot: You can't hook into invalid tiles anymore.

Spikey's Ship bugs:
-Map reset was causing a boulder to appear in the wrong place causing a scenario where it would be impossible to clear the level.
-Another grid was also bugged causing the player to get stuck if certain boulders were moved.

Warlord pendant bug:
-When the warlord gave you the pendant the goblin player animation wasn't updating.

Earth Lair bugs:
-Rock in lamp room deleting itself.

Animation issues:
-Defense buffs would cause the Icebolt animation to start.
-Flame Wheel animation was not triggering.
-Judgment animation was not triggering

Battle bugs:
Slime turns into slimes (removed)
Confusion damage was not showing any animations
Confusion damage not triggering surrender


Map loading is much faster.

Hey There Redwallers!
We recognize that the latest Woodlander Update introduced some new issues and bugs. But we've been working hard to crush the worst of these new bugs, as well as some previously reported, and are happy to announce the first in a series of fixes has gone live. Expect more updates every couple of days until we have the game ship-shape and working for you fine folks.

What's Changed?

-Major Improvements on finicky rat AI especially in regards to "the Pirates" level
-Major Improvements to the saving and checkpoint system
-Fixed the bugs that made the final level nigh impossible to beat
-General Changes to brighten the lighting across the entire game
-Improvements to squeeze-hole camera's (more still to come)
-Improved performance in "the Catacombs" level

What's Next?

-Continued polish of Hilltop Camp level and tutorial courses
-Further Improvements to lighting and post processing
-Further edits to rat AI for smarter and more interesting enemy interactions
-A new puzzle and route within the "Pirates" level to allow more fast paced and personalized game play

Thank you all for sticking with us and sorry for any inconvenience in game play. We invite you all to play again soon and see what changed. And as always, our lines are open for your feedback! We want to hear from you - what you like, what you didn't: together we will make this game the best it can be. On behalf of Soma Games, best wishes and a great day to you all.

A while back I mentioned I would remake Gabe land as it was a bit pointless. Today's the day, You now have an objective...to release HL3 to the world.

Two days ago we unveiled our brand new Buddy System. Unlike the typical buddy system that’s supposed to prevent you from drowning in a lake or whatever, ours lets you bring small creatures from Aether into action-packed battles! These buddies will primarily be used to support Rivals players and events throughout the 2019 competitive season.

Read on for a little more information about them as well as some additional bugfixes we’ve fit in with patch 1.4.7.



Buddies are now available in-game, with the first being the adorable Frostbear Cub. This new feature lets you choose creatures from Aether and beyond as companions during local and online matches. Buddies are cosmetic additions similar to skins in that they don’t affect gameplay, but instead each bring their own personality as they tag along.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQxfamFVKRc

Another thing to mention about most buddies (one of the best things in fact) is that funds raised go towards supporting Rivals players and events. More are planned for release throughout the year, so make sure to let us know in the comments which buddies you’d like to see.



You can pick and choose your buddies on the character select screen. They even have their own taunts. You can also optionally disable them online in the "stats and options" online menu.

A new Genesis 6 color palette has been added as the latest seasonal skins for all characters. Genesis 6, our Championship Series World Finals event, begins in just about 2 weeks.

Rep the event and make sure to tune in for the stream on ShowDown and VGBootCamp. Full viewing schedule to be announced soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC4H_G4oyH4

• The purple kill effect now functions correctly when below any stage floor.
  
• Etalus’ Down Special will no longer create the purple kill effect when freezing an opponent.
  
• Ori & Sein’s Down Special now ignores Eid (the guy in the window on Tower of Heaven).
  
• Sylvanos’ Upward-angled Bair now maintains grass the same as the other angles.
  
• Elliana’s steam can no longer create the purple kill effect.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that would cause Benchmark Playlist task to stop after 1st task is completed
  
• Fixed several collider issues on Countryside Freeplay that caused floating enemies, weird hitboxes, or enemies not being able to be hit
  
• Fixed bug that would cause UI to disappear when pressing ESC during results screen for some tasks

Hey!
There has been a lot going on lately in this month, such as hosting a mini-conference (not related to Lambda Wars) in a Russian high school and a tournament with a prize pool for players.

For now there's going to be a small patch, next will have an update including MrLazy's new map. For those of you who are curious, feel free to test it on the dev branch!

Changelog:
Balance:
- Changed the prices for control points on Lvl 1 and Lvl 2. Advanced/Professional players requested that the prices are changed for better competitive gameplay.

Misc:
- Added badges for tournament players who participated and those who received respective places.

I've also included loading screens from 2017 contest, but they currently don't work as Sandern hasn't had time to work on LW yet, so that will be done later.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time standing by the magazines section of our local grocery store reading gaming magazines like PCGamer. Its flashy cover and exciting news about upcoming games made these family trips to the store so much more bearable.

Imagine the look on my face when—last month—our VR puzzle game, Gadgeteer, was listed as one of the most anticipated VR games of 2019 by my childhood favorite magazine, PCGamer!

We're so honored to be part of this list, especially among impressive titles that we ourselves look forward to playing. Being perhaps the smallest studio to have made it in the list, we're going to work extra hard to meet our release date of April 2019.

Thank you PCGamer for supporting small VR studios like us!

In Crossroads there is a variety of long term goals to complete.

Lots of exciting things happening with Ashes of the Singularity. With Star Control: Origins released, we've been able to give Ashes some new attention and I wanted to use this post to update you on where we are.



Under the game is the game engine which in Ashes 1.0 was pure Nitrous. These days, we have taken the Nitrous engine and integrated all the cool stuff we've developed over the years (Game engine wise) to create a game-specific engine we call Cider. So right now, we're porting Cider to Linux with Ashes being our first test.

The good news is that we have Ashes kind of sort of working natively on Linux. The bad news is that the performance isn't quite there yet. Vulkan is the graphics platform we're targeting and it's still very young.

We are working on a new game in the Ashes of the Singularity universe that we will be announcing next month. Ashes founders will get it either for free or at a steep discount depending on what type of Founder they are.

So the short version is that we aren't going to be making new expansions for Ashes of the Singularity I. There might be more DLC but the changes we want to make are a little too radical to have as an expansion. My next post will be talking about what we have in mind for the sequel so you guys can opine on it. But if you liked SupCom or TA then you will really like where we want to take the sequel.

Stay tuned!