The Winter event has ended but our offers in the Store won't leave anytime soon! We offer you epic demolition weapon RPG only for 1600 Credits, and the same price is available also on the two very popular weapons among our players - AKS74US and Groza!


The Double XP campaign has ended but the Double Credits offer is still available and that means that you get 4 Credits for every single kill!

Winter Mansion map stays in the game for at least another week so enjoy this map!

Other small visible changes might be in the main menu which is planned to be redesigned in the near future, settings are currently not available in the main menu (you can change settings directly in matches) as the current settings will be heavily upgraded in the future updates!

New features are on the way to be added to Last Mortem very soon so stay patient!

This is a small patch with some clean-up reported by some of you simply by playing! The Linux patch will be out soon, needs some additional testing (as always).

Also, in testing right now, there is a MacOS version as well. You could try it by switching to the 'mac_test' branch of the game. It is far from finished but you can give it a try. Please keep in mind that it might not work, it is a work in progress to port it properly.

Anyway, let's look at the patchnotes! By the way, if you like this game, please consider writing a nice review! Thank you!

• If you beat the game, your savegame will be deleted (sorry)
  
• Spells you already know will have their item names prefixed with "Known"
  
• It is no longer possible to deconstruct or throw red keys dropped by Champions (it will hinder progress)
  
• (21-1-21) Informational text in Deconstruct window now properly informs of the chance of item retrieval
  
• (21-1-21) Bone armor received a slight change in naming

• Fixed a weird bug where monsters will idle indefinitely after a basic attack under specific circumstances
  
• Fixed soundeffect spam when holding down delete button naming your character with controller
  
• Fixed button sequence for item generation altar now properly clears so you can try a different code if a previous code did not allow you to collect (e.g item too strong)
  
• Fixed an issue with casting blinding spells on monsters and getting stuck in an endless loop trying to update their field of view and re-rendering the map
  
• Fixed an issue if a spell ended up in a strange situation not actually having a target
  
• (21-1-21) In-game achievements should now track properly
  
• (21-1-21) Fixed proper floor label in Champion screen title

As always, if something's up, feel free to let me know in the community or Discord. If you come across a crash, check out the topic about bug reporting to get it to me as soon as possible.

Thanks! Enjoy!

-Lance

I wrote about my design philosophy regarding the creation of player abilities in the "End of 2020 status" newspost. I want to expand a bit on that and try to explain the fundamentals of my puzzle corner stones.
I'll name some other games as examples and in case of negative mentions I hope not to offend anyone. They are all great games but just have different design philosophies appealing to different players.


Is there a puzzle at all and if yes, how many?

Pretty much all puzzle games are separated into levels or the puzzles are conveniently separated from the rest of the world.
If you cut the story telling aspects out of Portal, it's basically just a linear progression of levels.
In Breath of the Wild there are lots of puzzle dungeons. What makes this uninteresting to me is that the game tells you "here is a puzzle and these are the parts of the puzzle". I totally try to avoid this by having the puzzles smoothly integrated into the world and also partly overlapping.

I like the ambiguity that you might not even know that there is a puzzle at all. And once you figured out there is a puzzle, you don't know which elements are part of it. The moment when people realize "oh I can use this too" is great. Like when they try to color the ring yellow but don't realize they can just take one of the many yellow crystal lamps everywhere.



And right after that, they know they need a red keycard. It is left unclear if they just need to find it, because that's what the game suggest. But the moment they realize they can use the same trick from the previous level to "cheat" always gives players a great feeling.



Talos Principle is also separated in levels with clearly defined puzzle elements. But the moments in which it shined for me were, when you combined elements from several levels (because they are in an open world). You could elevate an object from one level into the air and then use it for another one. These unexpected out-of-the-box moments feel fantastic. Mostly because the game does not tell you about it at all so it feels like a real achievement.
Similar thing in Portal 2, when you're in the old decayed facilities where the game introduces the different types of goos. In one section you did beat a "level" but from the next section you could still get a peak at one of the goo pipes from the level before. By placing a portal through that gap you could bring the goo from the previous level to the next. That was fantastic.

Not puzzle related, but another upside of an open structure instead of separated levels is that you can "live" in that world instead of it being dead levels. In The Witness and Talos Principle I enjoyed the places but I just could not feel them enough because you were the only being in there. I don't know if it's just me. So I wanted an open world like that but with more life, hence there are NPCs everywhere bringing the world to life.


Skipping steps and hiding hints

Everyone is smart enough to figure stuff out. I wish more games treated people as intelligent beings, that would make games much more fun again.

I'm intentionally skipping steps in the tutorialisation of puzzle mechanics.
If a game explains everything to you, there is never really a moment of pride of having figured something out. The AAA problem of being afraid people might get stuck. The downside being that you get channeled through the game without ever achieving anything.
They explain step 1, then step 2, then step 3. You don't figure out anything by yourself really.

I usually give you a strong hint for step 1 but then skip step 2 entirely. Then it feels great when you make it to step 3 by yourself. And on top of that there should be a secret twist that lets you go from step 3 to step D; some out of box thinking addition.

I'm trying to hint as little as possible but just as much as needed. Knowing what's needed comes from watching lots of people play the game. Then I know where they need just a tiny bit more support.

It's best done in a way that the player does not even realize they were hinted at all, maybe by forcing you to look at something that subconsciously plants an information in your mind. If you don't know you got hinted, you still get to have the feeling of "I figured it out all by myself".



For example this puzzle where you need to stop the moving platform in the middle under the wall by placing your cube in the way. People did not know this mechanism existed, so I needed to help more.



In the section before that, by the pumpkin farm, I added those large tree stumps with cubes on top of them. You can let a platform travel to you, but it will get stuck on those cubes that you have to shoot off first. This is supposed to subconsciously teach you that this is the effect the cube has on the platform.
After that was added, people would solve the following puzzle much more easily. They will feel like they did it all by themselves.
And that's really the goal of all of the puzzles: you should feel really clever solving them.


Shooting cubes would also subconsciously give you a better idea for this puzzle, where you need to shoot a cube from the top to the bottom button. Before the hints players would not know the blaster had an effect on the cube at all.


Not progressively getting more complex

Maybe you're the type that likes to grind through super hard puzzles. Not me. I like figuring out interesting ideas. Where games lose me is when they introduce a mechanism and then just keep making that mechanism progressively more complex and convoluted. I'm thinking of Talos Principle and Baba Is You. Baba overwhelms you with incredibly creative ideas at first but then it quickly turned into extremely complex and hard to crack nuts that were not really that creatively interesting to me anymore but just very complicated.
Portal 1/2 did it just right in my opinion. They introduce new mechanics and used them just a couple of times, and just before they could get boring they did something new. You never got tired of anything.

The Supraland puzzles are always based on one very simple idea and you just have to figure that one out. It might seem complex at first glance sometimes, but apart from one case (the one where you create the chain reaction in front of the blue castle) they are essentially very simple.



In Talos Principle you were still redirecting lasers after 10 hours, just as in the beginning, just in more convoluted ways. It felt like the designers thought of yet another way how to change the core mechanism a tiny little bit and made yet another level for it. It makes sense, but my approach would be to cut 75% of these and just keep in the ones that are significantly different from each other.


Idea over Execution

The most fun moment in Supraland's puzzle solving is precisely when the light bulb goes on in your head and you get the idea! This also made it hard to make a cool trailer, because the best moments are in your head and not something you can watch on the screen, so it's hard to pick interesting footage.
Getting the idea is the great moment, not so much executing the puzzle. Therefore I try to always make sure the execution is very painless and quick once you got the right idea.
I painfully learned this in Toki Tori 2. While being a very interesting game, a metroidvania where you get more knowledge instead of actual abilities, I spent so much time trying to solve puzzles long after I knew how to do them. It was often such a long process and if you made a little mistake you had to do it all over again.

I tweaked tons of puzzles to make their handling easy. You might have noticed all those points where the cube snaps into a perfect position. Previously it would be pretty messy and you would need to replace it 3-4 times until it sits right. The same was done in Portal where the portals would snap into perfect positions on several panels.



If you remember the puzzle in this image, it's one of the cases where I failed. I still love the idea, magnetising along the jumping metal balls, but execution is just so clunky, you'll hate having to repeat it 10 times. In the earlier version there were fire spewing pipes under you, so you would also die if you failed. I at least made that friendlier.


Multiple ways to solve puzzles

Well, let's be honest. I only ever have one way of solving something in mind but it's not so easy to contain all the abilities you're given. I know you all enjoy glitching puzzles... and that's what it is. It is the result of imperfect level design.
The problem I have is, that I cannot reproduce this fun aspect in a reliable fashion. If I get too good at the puzzle layouts, these happy accidents will disappear. I'm not entirely sure how to handle this in the future. But it will probably happen time and again, and if it's no big problem I'll just keep these glitches in.
What I do try to do as often as possible is that every contraption in the game can be used for multiple goals, but every goal has just one intended solution.



You can get to so many secret areas with just this one thing here!



Did you notice any of these design choices consciously?
Would you recommend other games that break these conventions?

- David

Happy New Year Everyone!

I'm super excited about todays update - update number 6 which we anticipate to be the last major update before we release version 1.0! Thanks for everyone who continues to support us through early access.

If you haven't picked the game up yet now is a great time to join us by buying the game, or if you prefer to wait until release make sure to add the game to your wishlist now.



For a while we've been thinking about adding more active hazards and enemies to the game and this patch sees that thinking take shape with drones. These are flying vehicles which will chase your vehicle and drop all sorts of nasty stuff on you. But don't worry, simply grab the cake ingredient they are carrying to send them spinning out of control!

With the drones we've added some toys for them to drop onto you. The first of which is a simple smoke grenade which you'll start seeing towards the end of Act 1. It's hard keeping those sails up when you can't see them eh?

With Update 6 comes Act 3! Lots of new objectives and some new mechanics on the map screen itself. We have not finished the story yet, or the final boss fight - but we wanted you all to have a play with the new mechanics and see what you think...

One of the Act 3 objectives is the mothership leg. Be prepared for motherships as big as your own vehicle trying to slow you down. To destroy them you'll have to jump inside and explore to find all the cake ingredients.


How do the motherships slow you down? Well they fire flipping harpoons at you that's how!! Also watch out for harpoon drones...

In Act 3 everything is getting a little sci-fi - which you would have noticed from the panels we introduced in the lasers update. The teleport grenades dropped from drones are using some super high tech ... tech to mess with your vehicle. When they explode they will shuffle the panels around in your vehicle - so get ready to adapt and rebuild on the fly!


We added workshop support *picks up a mic and drops it*

This is something the community has been asking for and I've been figuring out how to do for months and months. In the blueprint screen you can click save/load designs (another new feature) and you can save designs and upload them to the workshop. Anything you have subscribed to will then automatically be downloaded and you can load them from there. The game automatically creates a thumbnail and tags your vehicles for you, but you can edit everything on the workshop itself from within the steam client. Have a play, let us know what you think. I'm so excited to start downloading your vehicle designs!

• Changed lengths and par speeds of all legs.
  
• Changed cost of unlocking challenge modes based on additional stars available in act 3.
  
• Reduced the maximum height of balloons in the balloon objective in act 1.
  
• Increased cost of sails to $10.
  
• Reduced thrust of steam engines from 20 to 15.
  
• Drag coefficient now based on logarithmic relationship to allow bigger vehicle designs.
  
• Increased price of propeller and turbine to $40.
  
• You no longer unlock a new blueprint every truck stop in story mode. This was overwhelming for new players.
  
• When you are given a choice to unlock a blueprint you will now always have one thrust panel and one utility panel from the act you are in, plus an additional random panel from the act you are in and previous acts.

• Fixed bug where wheels would come off during act 2 boss fight.
  
• Fixed bug where boulder spawns into player and traps her.
  
• Fixed bug which occasionally stopped player from jumping on moving objects.
  
• Fixed bug where the headlights panel was still referencing some old assets from beta.
  
• Fixed bug where bees could push you through the floor.

• Updated all third party APIs.
  
• Added drone legs to act 1 and 2.
  
• The size of all grenade hazard sprites has been decreased.
  
• Music now plays throughout entire leg, volume changes based on vehicle speed.
  
• You can now jump (and wall jump) on propellers and turbines - but still get fired through them by a cannon.
  
• Changed almost all objectives in act 1 and 2.
  
• Added act 2 and 3 variants of the bridge and balloon tower objectives.
  
• Changed the idle animation speed of player character - this changes based on your vehicle's speed.
  
• Completely revamped the camera controller to add more effective screen shake.
  
• Increased opacity of the map in the map screen to make it easier to read.
  
• Added tutorial messages in truck stops.
  
• You can now save and load vehicle designs in the blueprint mode.
  
• Added all the new objectives to the challenge modes as possible daily challenges.
  
• Added a number of new achievements.
  
• You now collect cake ingredients from bridge legs.
  
• Balloons are now bigger.
  
• Added a custom mouse cursor.

something is on the way
15 days in counting

Join 3D Artist Louis Peters as he works on some asset creations for Eville! He'll answer questions regarding his workflow and perspective on game design.

In the last few streams, he's shown you how he goes about creating a character from start to finish. This is new to us, and we want to give the community a deeper insight into our creative process and give you the opportunity to influence the game. Like what you see? Have some suggestions regarding which content to stream next? Write your comment below!

Mosey on over to his channel on Sunday, January 10th to check it out! He'll be streaming at the following time according to your time zone:

8 P.M. CET
7 P.M. GMT
2 P.M. EST
1 P.M. CST
12 P.M. MST
11 A.M. PST

Here's some of the other work he's done on Eville:


Check out his Artstation for more of his great work!

We're currently planning additional streams for ya'll! Make sure to follow us on social media, and on Discord to ensure you don't miss 'em.

You can wishlist Eville and show us some love and by doing so, keep up to date with our development process.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/


[/url]Our discord server is alive! You can join the conversation and hang out with other fans on the discord server and talk directly to us regarding your thoughts and ideas about Eville.

• Fixed a bug due to which the disappearance of the zombie text remained on the screen.
• Added mouse inversion setting.
• Now running-in is carried out not only with the right shift, but also with the left one.
• Added a special effect when monsters disappear.
• Accelerated closing of elevator doors. This should prevent the texture from falling out.
• Changed the sound of pistol shots.

Bug Fix: When you use pose 3,4 in the "change shoes" menu, a white thing shows on the chin.
Bug Fix: Demon Slayer is displayed on the wrong side.
Added different staggering rates based on damage and agility.
Bug Fix: Running with a one-handed sword has no footstep sounds.
Bug Fix: some items display as white in the lingerie shop.
Reduced stun-lock duration.
Bug Fix: Opening a chest disables dodging.
Bug Fix: Some skin tones that are different from the rest of the body.
Bug Fix: Areolae Depth resets to zero after loading.
Bug Fix: You can not try on heels at home.

Discord, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit

A second level (The Headquarters) has been added to the non-VR -version of the game. VR-version will get the new level later. A secret has also been added. Brightness-slider has also been added to the pause menu and the white fog effect has been removed from the first level. Have fun spotting anomalies!

Greetings fellow Adventurers!

It's been a while since us, the humble servants of the King, have spoken to you... We didn't have much to say, but we have been quietly watching you from the castle's highest tower all along, you know... Your deads in the Kingdom haven't gone unnoticed, rest assured! Many of you have chosen the path of the true good, many others that of the most evil, and some something in between... yet all of you contributed equally to make Just One Line one of the best of its kind thanks to your feedback, to your content shared online, and to the many hours you have played the game. Thank you!



But now, it is time for Just One Line, to make another step forward, as we would really love more people to have the opportunity to enjoy the game, to grow our community and make its playerbase bigger still. We are glad to announce that in the very near future, Just One Line is going free here on Steam! You don't hear such a news frequently... but you heard it right! Just One Line is going free to play! And no! You -new and old players- will still be able to play the game as it currently is, no in-app purchases will be added to game as of the current content of the game (start to finish, all unlocks and achievements).
But please, all of you who are going to get it for free, are indeed encouraged to at least spread the word about this incredible text-adventure 2.0 .

Drinks are on us!


Thank you all and see you in the Kingdom!
- The humble servants of the King