MageWorks is an experimental project that explored different ways to interact with spell casting systems using books, crafting systems using virtual workshops, and the various ways these two features could interact.
The narrative involves the player playing the role of a mage that is graduating wizard school, and needs to pay off their wizard student loans, while learning a trade skill in the process. Pokes fun at a topical issue these days.
Over time, the project scope expanded, but in the interest of wrapping up the study, i've focused the game primarily on the crafting system, and the spell casting system.
We were able to present this project at a variety of festivals, libraries, and meetups, and enjoyed how people played the game, and 3d-printed their staff creations.
Thanks for everyone's support throughout this process and feel free to reach out with any questions or comments.
This update features some minor graphical improvements, bug fixes, and one new cinematic at the end of the Goblin Tower, featuring Daemian and his P.V.E. guild mates. As always, report any bugs or problems you may find.
It's here, it's crawled out of the alpha dungeon, made it though the beta gauntlet and now it's here for you all to play, Rise of the Giant, our first free DLC has fiiiinally made it to you after a slightly longer than planned gestation period.
A brand new level for those who have finished the game at least once (remember we lowered the base difficulty significantly in update 11). This is a kind of cavern, a deep dark hole filled with traps and other nasty surprises.
A new Boss! Guess what it is... Go on, guess! If you said "it's the giant" then you're wrong! It's Kratos!!!!!!! We teamed up with Sony Santa Monica to bring everyb.... Nah it's the Giant. And guess where he's hidden!!! Go on, guess!
The next big thing we've got for yo is the Custom Mode that many have been clamouring for, is now available WITHOUT requiring you to beat the game. If that's not quite what you wanted, keep complaining, we're a little slow on the uptake, but we do listen, even it we're maybe a little deaf in the right ear...
A shiny new SKINNING SYSTEM, that's right, skin the creatures you find and wear them like it was Silence of the Lambs up in here! All for the very reasonable price of $19.99 per loot box where you've got 99% chance of getting absolutely nothing!!! Oh wait, what!? You just play the game and unlock them for free? BUT WHAT ABOUT OUR SHARE PRICE!?
Ok enough college sarcasm, next up we have 10 new enemies! Some of them will obviously be waiting for you in the new levels, though many of them have been spread out through the NG+ difficulty levels. They're waiting for you to roll up thinking you own the game...
3 new skills, including a flying pet thing with extra cuteness and 10 new weapons including the completely original Boi Axe! Now with extra BOI!
The Hunters Grenade door has been replacecd by the Spcicalist's Shop. Essentially a few knick knacks for those advanced players who know what's up, and some pweeeety skins for the rest of us.
Oh and there may be another bunch of hidden stuff yadi yadi yada floating around in the game. No biggy.
Alright that's it, i'm done. You can check out the rest of the gazillion changes you've helped us make over here in the patch notes.
Thank you!
I really cannot stress enough how important your continued feedback, contribution and support, each and every one of you, has been to bringing Dead Cells to where it is today.
We said that we were going to do this free DLC quite a while ago, something of a thank you present to the community, and we meant it. So thank you all! Ok enough mushiness and tears, this is NOT goodbye.
Roadmap(kind-lookin-thing):
Here's a little of what we're planning at the moment and where we're heading:
Right now we're working on building out the team a bit more, we'll have news on how that's coming along and how we're planning on doing things as we move forward soon.
We are however building some new monsters, some little guys that may or may not have leaked a little bit already *cough cough over here cough cough*
We're going to keep adding content to the game for as long as it makes sense to do so, that's to say, for as long as enough people keep buying and playing the game to support the development costs and make us some more money for our next game.
There WILL be a next game... If you didn't see the Redbull documentary that they did on us, check it out, because you'll learn that we're really just all about games, and we'll be doing it until the arthritis kicks in and we physically can't.
Before you ask...... NO, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE NEXT GAME WILL BE. We are going to go through a really fun period of building demos, iterating and arguing over why roguelites are so yesterday and therefore we should definitely do another. We'll keep you posted as soon as we have things to share, and maybe even before we should.
Super top secret non-existant co-op royal battle of the bush mode, with machine gun, and frying pan.
We'd like to try and figure out if we can build some insane modes for Dead Cells, we don't know how yet, but we're imagining a sort of Skunk-works team secluding themselves in a bubble for months on end without showering, with the aim of emerging with something incredible! That or a whole bunch of take-out boxes and a smell to put the Guillain's pile of rotting corpses to shame.
We've always tried to be open and honest and the success of Dead Cells will not change that one bit, so stay tuned.
Oh and since you all asked once or twice... a minute. The console releases will follow ASAP, I'd say around the end of the month early May, though as it's not 100% up to us (thank you certification period) we'll just do our best and officially say "soon". Also next time I'll jsut include this kind of useful information from the get go...
To finish up with this public safety announcement, here's some more community artwork:
Hi guys, the latest update is here. Here are the big hitters:
Additional staff orders
This month's update comes with two new features increasing the possibilities for staff management.
The first is the ability to disallow your staff from using certain items or tasks which 'require skill'. The most immediate use of this is prohibiting your less experienced staff members from taking on the tricky jobs such as 'high skill required' tasks and supplements.
You can find these new controls under the Advanced tab after selecting a staff member. You can also right-click on a staff portrait directly from the staff management window.
I'm looking forward to seeing what other uses players come up with for using this new feature!
Important tasks
The second new feature is the ability to mark a task as 'important' by clicking on its task bubble.
This will make staff prioritise this task over all others regardless of distance away. However, it will not overrule the role priority or zoning orders. Therefore, if a staff member has the feeding role set to a higher priority than the fixing role, they will still do all feeding tasks before fixing tasks, even if one of them has been flagged as important.
Auto-feeder change
The Auto-Feeder has undergone a significant change. It now refills automatically at the beginning of each day so it does not have to be filled by staff anymore.
To make up for this, they will break down from time to time and the associated fixing staff is 'very high skill required' so it will be awkward to use unless you have skilled fixing staff available.
In addition the Auto-Feeder can no longer feed animals which 'require skill' or feed Supplements to any animals. Both these types of feeding task still need to be done by hand.
I like this change quite a lot. The Auto-Feeder clearly works best to replace the role of low-level feeders. It can handle large quantities but struggles with higher level animals which 'require skill' and supplements.
At the same time it puts additional pressure on your skilled fixers so there'll be some interesting decisions to make here.
It also might add interesting curation decisions: will you design a tank that can be fed 100% by Auto-Feeders at the cost of leaving out that show-stopping fish?
Prestige tweaks
This update brings some tweaks to the prestige generation formulas which I believe bring it more in line with what you would expect from a real-life aquarium.
More information in the changelog below and also in the latest dev vlog.
Tweaked prestige generation rates so that larger animals have a greater success chance than small animals. In other words, you need less in a tank for them to be seen.
Likewise, larger decoration items have a higher chance to be seen, reducing the need for many large items in a single tank which could look less appealing. Groups of small items are still encouraged.
Tweaked the prestige generation rates so that you get diminishing returns, the more animals of the same type you add to a tank. This encourages more smaller groups of small fish in different tanks.
However for large animals a single group will continue to be sufficient.
Added a more detailed tooltip when you hover over the prestige icon on any animal so that it communicates the prestige generation mechanics better, allowing the player to make more informated decisions.
Added option for window to close when you click a second time, this is also now the default option but can be switched off in the settings.
Changed "requires skill" icon to military chevrons. Added this indicator to task bubbles so you can see the skill level of a task at a glance
Auto-feeder changes color depending on what food it is feeding.
Reduced some animal aquascaping requirements. Many of these were increased in the February update but I believe they threw the balance off especially for small animals which need to be kept in larger numbers to fulfil their prestige potential.
Added additional details to the task bubble tooltip so that it lists the skill level and a breakdown of the animals that need feeding in the tank (for feeding tasks only).
Added load game confirmation dialog if a game is already in progress.
Facilities apply their effects to guests instantly now, rather than over time.
Fixed paint glitch
Stopped guests dropping rubbish straight after looking at something
Added reset to default key bindings
Increased cave value for gaping cavern
Increased rock value for rubble and live rubble
Increased starting money for level 3. Elmshorn
Fixed so the search menu doesn't come up when you finish naming something.
In sandbox, all side objectives, trades and merchants appear on the way to rank 12. Before they continued to appear above Rank 12 but this led to some confusion and missing some events.
Sped up zooming with keys.
Fixed a pump UI error.
Refresh message count immediately when you delete group of messages.
Fixed 'running on spot' bug when auto saving and returning to menu.
Fixed bug where supplement feeding times were sometimes over-calculated.
Fixed ground dweller eating animation.
Shows skill numbers when you hover over skill bars in the manage tab.
Fixed the positions of the skills in manage tab so they are always in the same places.
Fixed bug where it would show "When fully grown" eat/damage information on animals even when no numbers change as they grow. For example, when an animal will damage Gorgonians or Stony Corals.
You can open the advanced tab by right clicking on the portraits in the staff manage tab.
Cursor texture only loaded once
Decreased some coral sizes (affects food consumed, bioload and prestige generation rate). Note: growing corals to full size now has large effect on prestige because size determines the prestige generation chance.
Added '=' as alternative to ':' in search box.
Added 'equipment' as a search criteria to differentiate to animals.
Fixed bug where end game credits could be interupted by pressing escape.
Fixed bug where end game credits would be in 'fast-forward' mode if you were at that speed when you completed the game.
Fixed bug to do with info/task bubble positioning on some objects.
Fixed coral food box which had the wrong icon on it.
Fixed Power Light so lights are in the correct position.
Dropdown menus go in front of other information windows.
Improved platform laying tool so it guesses the height your require more intelligently.
We are very excited to announce that Conan Unconquered can now be pre-ordered on Steam! We’re also finally ready to reveal that the game will launch on May 30th, 2019. Pre-order to get immediate access to the game at launch.
You can choose between a Standard Edition ($29.99) and a Deluxe Edition ($39.99) are available for pre-order through the game’s website or through the Steam Store. The Standard Edition comes with a digital comic book adaptation of Black Colossus, which Conan Unconquered is based on.
The Deluxe Edition includes the following goodies:
Exclusive content: Kalanthes, a spell-casting hero unit
Exclusive content: King Conan hero unit
Digital game soundtrack
Original Conan Unconquered eBook
Conan Unconquered is a fast-paced, real-time survival strategy game where players face wave after wave of enemies in ever-increasing numbers and difficulty. To withstand the savage hordes players must build an unconquerable stronghold and put up walls and other defensive measures to avoid utter destruction. While the game can be played in single-player, two players can also play together online to build a shared stronghold while fending off the enemy hordes allowing for a unique, cooperative multiplayer experience.