As we wrap up finalized sounds to replace everything you currently hear in-game we wanted to announce the Warfork VA cast. Our talented VA's have recorded character specific voice commands, kill reactions, round start says, efforts, and more! If you're too impatient to hear them you can try to install the Warfork Testing DLC on Steam and take a peek. A special thanks goes to our Sound Engineer MaxCarnage for making them sound vibrant and Oizo for testing/providing direction to VA's for player effort sounds to achieve our desired result. With that said our VA cast is as follows:




Toni Jean Erasmus as "AI (Announcer)" -- https://www.facebook.com/ToniJeanErasmus

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Toni Jean Erasmus has extensive training and experience in theatre, musical theatre, film, television and voice over. She has been working in studios in South Africa doing dubbing, animation, gaming and corporate voice over for four years and in the last year has built her own home studio.





Cat Protano as "Amber" -- https://www.catprotano.com/

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Cat Protano is a Boston born and raised voice actress. Her warm and charming voice will bring life to any project, whether it's for commercials, video games, animation, e-learning, audio books, and more! She loves animation and video games and hopes to specialize in them.





Ty Anderson as "Buck" -- https://www.tythevoiceguy.com/

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Ty Anderson is a Voice Actor based in Houston,Texas. His voice acting career started in 2011 and his influences include Looney Tunes, Classic SNL, SCTV, Mel Blanc, Robin Williams and Billy West.

In Ty’s free time he enjoys hanging out with his family (believe it or not), watching movies, animation and Disc Golf.





Kevin Liberty as "Hamilton" -- https://www.kevinliberty.com/

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Kevin Liberty is a Dallas-based voice actor providing voices for animation, video games, commercials, eLearning material, and more!

When not in front of the microphone, you can probably find him playing video games, Dungeons & Dragons, or outside exploring nature and soaking up the sun!





James Holyoake as "Rufus" -- https://www.jameshvoices.com/

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James Holyoake is a UK based Voice Actor with a distinct received pronunciation English accent. This gives him a great jumping off point to create a multitude of accents, dialects, and character voices. James grew up as a child of the 80’s with such amazing voice acting inspirations as Peter Cullen (Transformers), Alan Oppenheimer (Masters of the Universe), and Frank Welker (Literally everything…. no, really!).





Su Ling as "Serena" -- https://sulingchan.carrd.co/

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Su Ling Chan is an American trained voice actress based in Malaysia. She specialises in voicing young children's voices, spunky teenagers, realistic fight scenes (she has a martial arts background), the Malaysia/Singapore accent, and sassy females who kick ass.

When Su isn’t in the sound booth, she’s busy training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, wrestling, and muay thai at the gym. Su has no aspirations to be a MMA fighter, though she does like to compete.





Matthew Archer as "Leon" -- https://matthewarchervoice.wixsite.com/matthewarcher/

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Matthew Archer has 14 years of acting experience and is now behind the microphone bringing characters to life. Professionally trained and making appearances from end bosses in video games to the high school best friend in animation, even audiobook narration. You dream, Archer shoots for the moon.

Greetings Fighters!

Starting on Tuesday, November 17, 2020 @ 18:00 PST, servers will undergo maintenance for approximately 1-3 hours. A notice will be made regarding a time extension if maintenance lasts longer than the allotted time.

Reason:

• Routine server checks

We'll update this post when the maintenance is complete, and servers are available. Additional Patch Notes including improvements and new features will be added after the maintenance.

Thank you for your patience during the maintenance.

=======================

Server Maintenance concluded at 19:00 PST.

=======================

The following patch notes contain information about the update.

Continuing Sales:

• Elite Soldier Package
  
• Stylish Boxer Black Set
  
• Hyper Scroll Box (1 day)
  
• Hyper ExoCore Box (1 day)
  
• Muscle Hero Package
  
• All Season Hero Package
  
• Typhoon Slayer Package (M/F)
  
• Noble Butler Costume Package/Stocking Maid Costume Package
  
• Halloween Succubus Costume Package
  
• Halloween Cutie Zombie Package (M/F)
  
• Halloween Cutie Witch Package (M/F)
  
• Cursed Vladimir Package
  
• Halloween Skeleton Package/Box

Events

• New Events:
  • Scheduled Login Event
    
    
  • <Light in the Darkness - Mini Enchantment Event>
    
    • Take advantage of the increased enchantment rates! Click the link above for more details!
• Boss Mode: Harlem Defense War
  

• Continuing Events:
  • 1 Hour Playtime Event - Complete 1 hour of play every day to receive a "Relic of Hercules" or "New Enigma Chest" in rotating order.
    • Day 1 "Relic of Hercules", Day 2 "New Enigma Chest", Day 3 "Relic of Hercules", etc.
      
    • Daily Login Event - Login every day to receive a "Relic of Hercules" Box or "Today's Protective Mask" in rotating order.
      
    • Day 1 "Relic of Hercules", Day 2 "Today's Protective Mask", Day 3 "Relic of Hercules", etc.
  • Boss Mode: Destroy Pirates
    
  • <Boss Mode Rush: Massacre>
    
  • <Fisticuffs>
    
  • <Workout Wednesdays>

• Enchantment success rate increased by 25%
  
  • Ends 12/1/2020

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Halloween events! The events are now over and our next holiday events to look forward to are the Winter Holidays 2020!

The new location for the Sea Store is now complete with new music and atmosphere. The new lighthouse interior was also completed in this update. These were mostly complete during Halloween events, but now they are fully finished.







Changes

• Removed Halloween 2020 events
  
• Plaza: Optimizations and visual improvements
  
• Accelerate: Optimized start line screen

Bug Fixes

• Virus: Fixed hit effects/damage notes not showing up if you headshot virus
  
• Virus: Smoothed view bob tilting
  
• Workshop thumbnail crash fixes
  
• Chat crash fix
  
• Other misc workshop crash fixes

Join our Discord for development updates and community fun!
https://discord.gg/pixeltail
We love awesome people like you!

We're also active on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/PixelTailGames

Follow our developments on our Trello in near real-time:
https://trello.com/b/6BwRMiPw/tower-unite-roadmap

Take a peek at what's being worked on every week in our weekly dev logs! There's bound to be something interesting every week!
http://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/devupdates/weekly-dev-logs

Please report bugs & submit suggestions on our forums. We're active everyday & here to help.
For bug reports: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/bug-report/18
For suggestions: https://forums.pixeltailgames.com/c/suggestions/7

<3 PixelTail Games

Patch 1.6.0

1. New Wolf model, animations, behavior. Better attacks. Hit reactions.

2. New Creatures! Creepy, crawly spiders have made their way in to the game. Beware of the various species that can spit webs to
slow you down.

3. Frogs are back! Need to find some easy food near the swamps?
Grab a bow and hunt some frogs, which are also useful for up coming craftable potions.

4. Crabs re-added to world.

5. Dangerous snakes added!

7. First quest giver added to starting cave. First quest soon to follow.

8. Animals can now interact with water surfaces.

9. River splash interaction completed but not yet implemented to map.

Hospital themed items have been added to prevent cold weather and cold.




Coin Shop Items

• Hospital Room Bed
  
• Medical ECG Monitor
  
• X-ray Film Illuminator
  
• Human Anatomy Dummy
  
• ENT Chair
  
• ENT Unit
  
• Operating Table
  
• Operating Room Lamp

You can buy it with coins or Ledits in the ‘Coin Shop’

Crafting item

• Caregiver Simple Bed
  
• Hospital Room Cabinet
  
• Stool Chair
  
• Medical Dressing Cart
  
• Lobby Chair
  
• Emergency Room Door
  
• Hospital Room Door

They can be crafted on a ‘Skillful Carpentry Table’

Coin Shop Items

• Neat Doctor Gown
  
• Neat Doctor Shoes
  
• Hospital Patient Clothes
  
• Leg Plaster Cast
  
• Arm Plaster Cast

You can buy it with coins or Ledits in the ‘Coin Shop’

Crafting item

• Surgical cap
  
• Reusable Surgical Gown
  
• Operating room shoes
  
• Neat Nurse Uniform
  
• Neat Nurse Shoes

They can be crafted on a loom.

Changes:

• Your dinosaur's forward direction is now equal to the direction the camera is facing.
  
  
• Dinosaurs and edible plants and trees no longer render when not within a certain distance of the player's dinosaur. This should improve the FPS of the game slightly.

No one likes talking about a game’s HUD.

Most of the time, players don’t even notice it unless it’s actively getting in the way of their gameplay experience. And yet, a tremendous amount of time and man-hours go into making them. Creating a HUD that manages to convey the tone and style of a game alongside all of the information a player needs, WITHOUT getting in the way of their experience takes a whole lot of time, patience, and creativity.

So let’s talk about it.

Depths of Sanity - our underwater, metroidvania nightmare - just entered Early Access after 3.5 years of development, and it took a whole lot of refinement to get there. One of the hardest components for our artist was the HUD, which went through many redesigns over the course of development.

Our game takes place entirely underwater, with the player character Abe piloting a submarine for the majority of the game (except for sequences that take place in a diver suit).

Bennett, our artist, wanted to use that unique concept to drive the look and feel of our HUD and all of its elements, while still conveying information to the player quickly and simply.

Here is how he approached it:

The first HUD I made was designed to look like an old green monochrome monitor, as if you were reading the information off of the sub's screen. The concept was to make it seem like a “cockpit” view of the submarine’s vitals, and it was something that we tried to maintain across versions as it evolved.




One of our earliest story concepts had the ship’s computer as a villain, so we kicked around the idea of messing with the player's HUD as part of it. This lo-fi, almost DOS-like version allowed us to mess with the player in a lot of ways, allowing the computer to send you messages in the text of the HUD and override any of the information you were seeing.

However, we ultimately moved away from that story concept, and by extension, this HUD, which was visually dull and stylistically harder-to-read than it should’ve been (particularly the map in the upper right). So I tried again, using a classic as inspiration.

The second major revision lifted heavily from Super Metroid as a guidepost. The current version still largely follows that format, which helped me to focus and clean up how we showed important information to the player.




One of the things I wanted to do was have a full HUD from the start, but with many of the indicators not working - i.e. the empty cartridge slots, closed switches, etc. I thought it would be a cool way to build anticipation for what kinds of weapons and abilities would fill it out over the course of the game.



This build of Depths also had an additional HUD at the bottom of the screen that indicated which primary weapon was currently equipped. Some of them even had special animations that would play when the weapon was being used.

While I definitely liked this HUD from a pure artistic perspective, we wound up moving away from it. The lower portion took up too much screen space and was quite busy, limiting the player’s field of view without providing need-to-know information. Also, it was kind of redundant with the weapon wheel.

Speaking of which...

The weapon wheel went through multiple visual iterations during the first version of the HUD. The original concept was a drop down menu system, like you were finding and running a DOS program on a computer. Admittedly, I liked it a lot stylistically, but it was way too cumbersome to actually use.


Sanity prevailed and we eventually swapped to a wheel format, but we were still using words to select the weapons, which was both unattractive and didn’t make sense with how the look of the ship was evolving.



Early versions of Abe’s ship had a gun on the side, and the gun would change based on the weapon selected. In this version, we used green silhouettes of those weapons instead of words for V3 of the weapon wheel ( you can see how this looked in the very first screenshot at the top of this page).

However, the look of the ship changed dramatically over development, eventually causing us to remove the visible weapon changes for a variety of reasons. The final change came our Early Access HUD.

This year, we wound up simplifying the HUD and the weapon wheel significantly. The wheel was paired down to simple icons to help you determine which weapon you were using (for instance, in the screenshot below, we use a “bouncing ball” icon for the Bounce Shot).

The overall HUD also got a lot of nips and tucks. The biggest was that we peeled away the bottom portion, freeing up space that we could use for different purposes as needed, such as revealing your oxygen gauge when you leave the ship, or giving more room for dialogue scenes.

Up top, we added a temperature gauge for the section of the game involving heat (previous players were confused about how the mechanic worked), expanded the edges for wider displays, and moved a few things around in order to better organize what remained.





I’m definitely pretty happy with this final compromise. This current HUD gives the game it’s own unique feel - keeping the idea of having a “cockpit” view of your vitals - while being much more useful and visually interesting.

Now we’re in Early Access, and while the team is happy with the design, we’re still adding tweaks as people play through the game and give us feedback. It’s been a pretty enlightening experience to have players finally being able to sink into the game for hours and help us tailor it for the eventual full release.

If you’d like to help us, you can get your Early Access copy here. Right now it contains the first 3 chapters of the game (out of 6), with Chapter 4 dropping in a few months.

Thanks for helping us, and we hope this gave you a bit of insight on how to arrive at a HUD that works for your indie game.

Changes/Additions

• Song time remaining countdown above stage portal added
  
• (Editor) Markers updated to support labels and a flag for use in upcoming practice mode
  
• (Editor) Map author field added (will display in-game in future update)
  
• (Editor) Key bindings disabled when input field is focused
  
• (Editor) Added ability to change playback speed

Bugs Fixed

• Pattern indicator disappears during last pattern in training
  
• First few bullets/targets may not spawn after song restart during first few seconds of song
  
• Stage actions that reference media should check if media reference can't be resolved

This small update adds a cheats menu that you can unlock with resources. You cannot earn resources while cheats are on! So far it has 2 cheats that we used in testing the game:

• Unlimited ally AI Ships in Survival. (limited by your CPU, I guess?)
  
• More Frequent Enemies. (meaning more powerups!)

Additionally we updated the Game Over screen to have the ability to either back out to the main menu or start fresh at the most recent wave.
Edit: There was a crash issue for some players on viewing the Cheats menu. This has been fixed in the latest build.

WGT will be down for server maintenance and updates tonight beginning at 9:00 PM PT.

Expected downtime is 3-hours.

We'll have you back on the course as quickly as possible.

Thanks,

-WGT Dev Team