Hello, dear community!

Know what? We've got a batch of great news incoming!

Last weekend we were part of Comic-Con@Home. We spoke about the gameplay mechanics that make the players feel like the world's greatest detective and why we give the player an option to fail a case and blame the wrong person. Check it out below!



Also, we have some original concept art to share from our upcoming Sherlock Holmes Chapter One.

This first bit below is the place and the moment our reveal trailer begins: uncanny, and even slightly preternatural cemetery near young Sherlock's family manor.



In a more lighter mood, the second concept bit we have today is the hustling and bustling Mediterranean streets of ... nope, can't share the name just yet (ツ)



If you've missed our Sherlock Holmes Chapter One being announced, go on ahead to its Steam page and check it out. We hope you're intrigued!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1137300/Sherlock_Holmes_Chapter_One/

To top it off, we're preparing several new videos in the coming months, as well as something very special for you at the end of August.

Stay safe everybody,
Frogwares team

We have fixed a whole host of issues that may have impacted users to ensure that your Fantasy General 2 experience remains nothing short of optimal!

• Mechanics: Routed units lose their ability to Break Charge, unless the terrain or artefact they're on has the ability to do so
• Vendors: Onslaught: All Onslaught heroes now have the Artefact Transmuter available in their inventory to dismantle unneeded artefacts.
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue causing crashes on some computers
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where the Unit Display would show the incorrect amount of health and xp after upgrading a unit
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where you could train units that already had the selected promotion
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where autosaves could overwrite Iron Maiden savegames
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where the AI wouldn't respawn if there were no enemies left that could capture locations
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue that caused Taurus Catapults and Hellhounds to activate their "on death" explode after upgrading them
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where the game would render random patterns when restarting a mission
• Bugfix: Fixed Tooltip for Summon Hunting Pack promotion
• Bugfix: Fixed Tooltip for Water Walk promotion
• Bugfix: Fixed several issues with Life Bond, like unlimited Range and the possibility to accumulate 100% damage reduction (it now actually reduces transmitted damage by 50% instead of granting the target 50% DR)
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue where an enemy Winged Maiden caused problems when using Winged Leap from a location not visible to the player
• Bugfix: Fixed that several stats could fall below 0
• Bugfix: Restore Unit Skill only works with locations you actually own
• Bugfix: Charging Boots now allow charging into Wall hexes as well
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue causing the wrong actor to appear in a dialogue in there and back again
• Bugfix: Fixed an issue with breakthrough like skills that caused incorrect unit positions.

Enjoy!

Hello, dear community!

Know what? We've got a batch of great news incoming!

Last weekend we were part of Comic-Con@Home. We spoke about the gameplay mechanics that make the players feel like the world's greatest detective and why we give the player an option to fail a case and blame the wrong person. Check it out below!



Also, we have some original concept art to share from our upcoming Sherlock Holmes Chapter One.

This first bit below is the place and the moment our reveal trailer begins: uncanny, and even slightly preternatural cemetery near young Sherlock's family manor.



In a more lighter mood, the second concept bit we have today is the hustling and bustling Mediterranean streets of ... nope, can't share the name just yet (ツ)



If you've missed our Sherlock Holmes Chapter One being announced, go on ahead to its Steam page and check it out. We hope you're intrigued!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1137300/Sherlock_Holmes_Chapter_One/

To top it off, we're preparing several new videos in the coming months, as well as something very special for you at the end of August.

Stay safe everybody,
Frogwares team

Just Ride Comprehensive Gameplay Upgrade!
We spent a few months to completely refurbish the bottom of the engine, and at the same time redo the original problematic vehicle system. This update may not have much sense of function, but the overall performance of the game The stability has been improved, and I hope everyone can support it.



Next

• Riding Combat
  
• Multiplayer Networking

Hello, dear community!

Know what? We've got a batch of great news incoming!

Last weekend we were part of Comic-Con@Home. We spoke about the gameplay mechanics that make the players feel like the world's greatest detective and why we give the player an option to fail a case and blame the wrong person. Check it out below!



Also, we have some original concept art to share from our upcoming Sherlock Holmes Chapter One.

This first bit below is the place and the moment our reveal trailer begins: uncanny, and even slightly preternatural cemetery near young Sherlock's family manor.



In a more lighter mood, the second concept bit we have today is the hustling and bustling Mediterranean streets of ... nope, can't share the name just yet (ツ)



If you've missed our Sherlock Holmes Chapter One being announced, go on ahead to its Steam page and check it out. We hope you're intrigued!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1137300/Sherlock_Holmes_Chapter_One/

To top it off, we're preparing several new videos in the coming months, as well as something very special for you at the end of August.

Stay safe everybody,
Frogwares team

Monday morning, Zun’s PC broke. It seemed that the motherboard was malfunctioning. It was a relatively old one, and buying a decent new one also involved buying a new CPU and RAM. And while he was overhauling the thing anyway, he also decided to purchase upgrades like a new case. All the parts should’ve been delivered on Tuesday, but one part suddenly went out of stock and thus the entire order was delivered Thursday afternoon. One benefit: Zun’s PC is a lot faster now :)

So there’s not much to talk about in regards to in-game changes, but we think there’s still plenty of relevant stuff to say. This week, we were having some pretty extensive internal discussions about “suggestions”. A common question that popped up again in #general is “where is the suggestions channel”. We don’t have one!

A channel for suggestions implies that it’s for suggestions only. But lists of isolated suggestions, especially for broad features like “NPC colonies” and “war”, aren’t very useful. What we need is more detailed information. How exactly would you implement it? Which new UI elements are needed? How much development time is it worth? What percentage of the community likes it, and how much do they like it? Would it make older savegames incompatible?

That’s why we’d generally like people to share their suggestions in #general. It invites discussion with the rest of the community, and that’s very useful to flesh out suggestions.

That doesn’t mean the current system is perfect though. We've got a bunch of goals that are hard to optimize for all at the same time:

• Individuals should be able to share their suggestions with us, the devs
  
• The community should be able to see suggestions made by others from the community
  
• The community should be able to see the plans we the devs are working on, and the things we’re planning to add later on
  
• All these plans and suggestions should have detailed explanations with pros and cons, without turning it into a TL;DR
  
• Players should be able to easily leave feedback; comments would be good, but quick “like/dislike” feedback is useful as well
  
• The list of plans and suggestions should be sortable / auto-sort based on feedback like that

We haven’t found the perfect system to accomplish that yet, but suggestions for suggestions-systems are welcome! ;)



There’s one very frequent suggestion we’d like to discuss in this blog, and it’s NPC colonies. We’ve thought about it a lot, and it’s a very complex topic. I’d like to start with linking back to Friday Blog 74 - Edge Cases. At the end, I quoted Von Clausewitz, and that neatly summarizes the blog in two lines: Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War..

Years ago, NPC colonies seemed very intuitive to me as well. We’ve got AI farmers, AI guards, AI miners and AI crafters. How hard could it be to spawn some buildings randomly in the world, and populate them with these AI colonists? You could even develop multiple stages of each colony, and make new buildings and colonists appear when things go well - and the opposite as well.

But having them merely as scenery that you can’t interact with is pretty boring. It should be connected to the main gameplay: you should be able to overwhelm their defenses with an army of your own, to break through their walls and plunder their stockpiles.

But implementing that is going to be very hard. It makes me fantasize about real life medieval sieges with trebuchets and armies scaling the walls, but it’s not going to look like that. Players have the ability to very quickly build walls and dig tunnels. And without gravity, structural integrity concerns and supply line considerations to limit their effectiveness, efficient assaults are going to look nothing like real life, because the world of Colony Survival is too far removed from real life.

So apart from adding the core features of NPC colonies existing, we’re also going to have to do a lot of work to add new features to make interacting with them fun and engaging. True warfare would be very difficult, but we’ve also thought of having NPC colonies with just some more abstract trading/diplomacy features. But that would turn the actual colony itself primarily into a fancy (and expensive in terms of development time) backdrop for a trading/diplomacy interface.

And if there’s one thing we’ve decided on, due to experiences with 0.7.0, and World of Warcraft, and VR, is that we don’t want to invest heavily into “UI features” anymore. Yes, UI is necessary, and the UI that we have should be streamlined and intuitive and as beautiful as we can manage. We’re working on that right now.

But the best gameplay has you acting in the “real” (in-game) world, creating similarly real consequences. Construct a building with your own hands, go to the “physical” place where you want a worker to be, place a job block, and watch a colonist actually move to that location in your own 3D world. Such actions are the core of what makes Colony Survival fun to play. We want to add features that augment and improve that, not add mostly separate stuff that in practice consists out of 90% clicking through UI menus.

So although we can imagine awesome sieges against NPC colonies (we love Total War games, especially the older ones!), implementing that properly is nearly impossible and very, very difficult. It’ll take years and we’d still have a sizable chance of not succeeding as well as we’d like. Instead of taking that risk for a “non-core feature”, we’d rather improve the current gameplay to its maximum potential, in smaller steps.

We hope that makes sense! We’d love to have your opinion. Is there any other common suggestion that you would like to hear our detailed opinion about?

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

Reddit // Twitter // YouTube // Website // Discord

Attention all survivors! Get ready for the particularly fierce battles this weekend - it’s bonus XP days in the Wastelands! During these days you will be able to become more powerful and gain any favour from the factions faster!

On August 1 and 2 the bonus to all reputation earned is 50%.

The event will be available from 13:00 GMT on July 31 until 00:00 GMT on August 3

For more information on Crossout, follow these channels:

Twitter – https://twitter.com/crossout_en

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crossoutofficial

Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzyC4di_FkW6aRCRxjL1KYQ

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/CROSSOUTgame

- Fixed online multiplayer connection issue for 4th player
- Fixed death loop in level 16
- Increased owly's potion-pickup radius in all levels
- Remember current map position after game-restart
- Decreased music and fx options volume step size to 5%
- Added loading screen after play button is pushed
- Minor balancing adjustments
- Fixed multiplayer replication bug with explosion potion
- Additional minor fixes

The Lunar New Year Lobby Competition is now closed. Thank you for your entries!

We've had an amazing time playing through the countless levels entered into our Workshop competitions so far - but we think it's time to mix things up a bit. Behold...




That's right! For our latest Workshop competition we're asking you to create your very own lobby for players to explore before entering their chosen level. We're looking for colourful, creative and surprising lobbies that take inspiration from the Lunar New Year - the beginning of a new calendar year for our millions of fans in China.

Thinking of entering? Follow these steps:

• Create an awesome new Lunar-themed lobby on Steam using the Unity tool
  
• Send us your entry via this form
  
• Cross your fingers!

Our winning lobby will not only receive $10,000 USD - but also see their hard work recreated as an official entry into the game on Steam.

New to the world of Workshop? Worry not! Human: Fall Flat superfan and creator of the competition-winning level 'Factory' Gotcha has shared a step-by-step guide to building your very own creation.

Check out the first instalment below and watch the full series here!


You have until 11pm GMT on 13th September to enter. Find our full terms and conditions here.

We can't wait to play through some Lunar New Year lobbies. Good luck, Humans!

Welcome Chefs!

Dash into your kitchen, whip up your favourite brew and get ready for our “Flavour Of The Month!” July Edition!



We are delighted to serve up another Dev Diary, with the flavour of the month being our Art Uplift! Our main course will focus on our new Art Uplift, followed by a side dish of new farm buildings with new animal teasers for refreshments!

Art Uplift

Establishing Epic Chef’s identity and bringing the game alive has been very important to us. We have made several art changes to achieve a more “toonish” and stylized look and feel to the game. Here is a comparison GIF showing off our “Old” and “New” art upgrades to Epic Chef.



Feast your eyes on these full sized screenshots showing off our new art style!


Previous In Game Style


New Art Uplift Style

We have also been working on a new “outline effect”. This has been added to increase detail in scenarios and for the characters to stand out. Below are a few examples that show our new outline effect and Art Uplift changes too.


Outline Effects On Characters


What a lovely view!


Colourful scenery from high above!

New Farm Buildings

We have been working on new additions for farming life! New buildings and objects can be built onto farm land, below is a teaser for our Windmill . Windmills are used to produce seeds for your farm.


Note: The orange hue of the building shows that an object is in “building mode” before it is placed.


Sweet and juicy! Tomatoes can be used in lots of recipes in Epic Chef! So make sure to plant plenty of Tomato seeds!

New Animals

New animals have been sighted in Ambrosia!


What a magnificent menagerie!

On the left is a Giant Turtle, with the most fabulous eyebrows we have ever seen, in the middle is a Pangun and on the right are 2 Unicorns! If you look closely, you can see some pink glittery “Unicorn Delights”, this is *ahem* “produced” by Unicorns, and makes for a fine ingredient in some recipes! Mmmm, delicious! Turtle Meat and Unicorn Meat are also ingredients used in cooking delectable dishes.



Here are the Inventory icons for Turtle Meat and Unicorn Meat!

That’s a wrap for this month’s tasty Dev Log! We will see you next month, Chefs!

Wishlist Epic Chef! Go on, you know you want to!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1312960/Epic_Chef/

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