May 8, 2020

📢 A Speed Run Style Contest is in progress!

Bit Heroes Quest - Kong Community Staff

We are holding a speed run style contest in the game!

What is it?
A contest wherein you create an alt account and progress as much as you can before the new tier launches.

Why though?
Just for fun! And also for prizes!

What kind of prizes and how do I get them?
There are prizes for reaching the top 3 of specific goals as well as prizes for just participating, not competing! All prizes will be sent to both your main account and your new character.
More details @ https://kon.gg/BitHeroesSpeedRun

When will this be?
NOW! You can create your alt and start participating any time between now and May 28. The contest will end when the server goes down for weekly reset.

How will it work?
Any participating character cannot be created before the start date and it must be registered with the contest.

We should be able to provide a report of the current standings about halfway through the contest, maybe more. Aside from that, there will not be a live leaderboard.

At the end of the 3 week run, we will check all the stats and announce winners as soon as we can!

How do I register?

CLICK HERE to register in the contest and to see all the prize information!

May 8, 2020

Developer Diary #250 - Yak-9T Pictures!

IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad - 777 Studios

250

Happy Victory in Europe Day! May all nations live in peace and a global war such as the one we depict in our games never happens again!

Our work on the sim also continues - in 2 or 3 weeks we plan to release the next update 4.006. It will bring not only the new player controllable machines - Yak-9 and Yak-9T Collector Planes and SU-152 assault gun for Tank Crew - but also the fundamental changes in the graphics engine: the renderer will be switched to Deferred Shading. At the moment this update is already in the beta testing and our team is working on debugging and finalizing it. The changelist will be a long one once again, it already includes more than 50 changes in different areas of the sim. To illustrate what these renderer changes add to the visuals, we want to show you the in-game screenshots of Yak-9T, which is a good aircraft to display the new graphical capabilities:

Another pic we want to show you the WIP model of the early war German pilot which will be used in BoM, BoS and BoK timeframes. It's going to appear in the project a bit later, but it won't be a long wait:

Enjoy!

The Sturmovik Team

May 8, 2020

The inspiration behind Anne Droyd

WoMen in Science - ben

I thought that it could be fun to discuss how some characters and other parts of the game came to be. Let me know if you want me to write more about some aspects of the game or the work I do.

I love Stardew Valley, and the way ConcernedApe captured the very essence of Harvest Moon and other classics of the genre in his masterpiece, with great attention to details, is really inspiring. In 2017, having just finished a card game about female scientists (free print & play pdf), the idea to create a game “like Stardew Valley but with Science and Robots” came to me quite naturally.

At first, I wanted robots to help with farming. They would need to be recharged frequently, you could customize them with extra batteries or extra backpack space to transport items, and so on, so they could plant, harvest and water the crops. But in a game where you can plant and build anywhere, it can quickly become a pathfinding nightmare, and I decided to put that idea aside for a while and use flying drones instead.

The first version of the robot was a bit ... scary!

Another problem came from the choice of NPCs. Using real life scientists make it easy to add personality and fun facts in the dialogues, but it makes it much harder to have comic relief. I wanted humor to be an important part of the game, to balance the scientific content.

I could make fun of the scientists, but I could not make them completely ridiculous. But a robot was fair game. And that is how Anne Droyd was born.

Her humanoid look with a rotating hand and a clamp is in part inspired by … Ada, from Fallout 4! I made no secret that I’m a big fan of Bethesda, as you probably guessed during the first encounter with Alexa. Plus it totally makes sense, since the name of Fallout’s robot is inspired by Ada Lovelace, a famous Woman in Science.

Anne Droyd’s personality was inspired by reddit’s group r/totallynotrobots, a community of humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans (are you still following ?). The group is hilarious, and that was exactly the kind of robot I wanted. Later in game, Anne’s strange logic develops further in a quest inspired by the Antivax movement.

The current dialogues are far from complete, and I’m particularly impatient to further flesh out Anne’s personality. She will most probably join Albert “Totally not Einstein” - the lovable and surprisingly naive genius - , and Melon Husk (or is it Elon Musk ?) - a billionaire whose ambitious plans tend to fail spectacularly - in a comic trio.

May 8, 2020

Changing The Formula for Soda Dungeon 2

Soda Dungeon - anpShawn

As we approach final testing and the launch of Soda Dungeon 2, we thought it would be a good idea to cross-post these updates to the Soda Dungeon 1 page to make sure we don't miss anyone! I often receive messages asking when we plan to update the original game and many are surprised to learn that a sequel is on the way. You can wishlist it right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/946050/Soda_Dungeon_2/

Our goal has always been to maintain the feel of what made Soda Dungeon 1 enjoyable while adding to it and improving on it in any way possible. AKA "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

While this has been a guiding principle of ours, it also doesn't mean we wanted to copy Soda Dungeon 1 verbatim. We've talked before about brand new features and mechanics for the game like crafting, quests, and custom battle commands (Soda Script). But I also wanted to cover some of the smaller changes we've made to the mechanics moving forward into part 2.

You can hire six team members

There was always room for six, why not let players make use of it?

There is now a separate "Status Resist" stat

In SD1 you either had protection from status effects, or you didn't. Now there is a percentage chance depending what class you're using and what items you have equipped. We still have unique items to outright prevent certain effects on your character, but you can no longer "prevent all negative effects" like you could in SD1.

There is now a "Speed" stat

Some enemies can slow down your team's turn order, and some also have natural speed boosts that let them attack before you (or even twice in a row!). We tried not to get carried away here, because manipulation of the speed stat can result in wildly different outcomes at different dungeon levels.

There are no more "one use per battle" items

In SD1 special items (such as the heal stone) could be used once per battle, per character. This didn't seem incredibly intuitive, so now all abilities that your character has (whether granted innately or by an item) consume MP and can be used as long as MP remains. As an exception there are a couple of abilities that "exhaust" your character (instead of consuming MP) so the "cost" is that character losing their next turn.

Alternate "paths" have been replaced with portals and keys

SD1 would occasionally spawn paths that gave you a 50/50 shot of something good or bad. In SD2 they are now a set of three portals: One bad and two good, but one of the good ones is locked and tells you what is behind it. As you go through the dungeon there is a chance that minibosses and bosses will drop keys that can be used to unlock these portals.

Ambushes and "bad portals" can't be prevented (yet)

In SD1, the Knight prevented ambushes and bad paths. In SD2, the Huntress class can reduce their frequency but not completely prevent them. We tried to move away from "one size fits all" team compositions. This can also have a big impact on endgame, so we'll monitor the effect it has and see if we need to tweak it.

More ways to equip your character

Just to mix it up we tried out some new equipping mechanics: One class can equip two weapons but no shield, and another class can equip three items but no armor.

The Blacksmith now carries a dynamic inventory

In SD1 the Blacksmith always had a fixed set of items available to purchase. Now, after each run, he will feature an additional set of items that could have been found around the level you last ended at. There's even a small chance he could stock something rare, but it will cost a lot!

No more "Tavern Reputation"

One source of confusion from the original game was the "Tavern Reputation" stat. You could purchase a certain soda to attract a new class to the tavern, but it was possible they still wouldn't show up if you didn't have a high enough reputation. This didn't really seem to enhance the gameplay experience so we made it simple: If you buy a soda for a certain class, that class can now spawn. And instead of requiring you to purchase "decor" upgrades to boost your reputation, you can now just purchase individual cosmetics (new stools, tables, floor, etc) to customize the tavern to your liking.

Characters now have "Masteries"

Characters now accumulate XP while fighting in the dungeon, which translates into "Mastery" levels. Each level grants a small bonus, like +2 hp or +1 atk. Level 25 gives each character a new skill, and Level 50 gives each character a special "class relic" that you can use to boost their stats. We plan to expand mastery levels and bonuses in the future.

... and I think that covers it! There's probably a few extra things I could tack on but this already ended up longer than expected. Besides, some things have to be a surprise, right? Before I finish up I wanted to mention one last important thing: Soda Dungeon 2 Comes To Android Early Access In Late May! We're looking to consolidate our testing and feedback onto one platform during this final phase, which will benefit all platforms when we launch in full. For more information, please see our post on reddit. More big updates are coming down the pipeline soon!