Here are the patch notes for this build

• Added options to customize hair and skin colors when creating a new character.
  
• Added a female warrior model
  
• Added a female rogue model
  
• Added a female archer model
  
• Added a female mage model
  
• Fixed werewolf skin.
  
• Fixed merchant is not selling holding bags bug
  
• Fixed witch armor are chestplates bug
  
• Fixed NPCs having the warrior model.

Some pictures of the new update.





Next up are coming more armors & weapons, npcs with custom colors and armors and some new lore.

Finally - it's live!
I’ve been excited to get this one live for some time now! If you’ve watched the Dev Blog from this week, you’ll already have a pretty good idea of some of the new parts to this patch! If not, all good - I’ll break it down in text form below, and also couple it with a list of the full patch notes!

I did just want to start by saying a massive thank you for the support on the video this week! I was given lots of lovely comments about how much you all enjoyed that format, so I’ll 100% try to get those going more often! I’ll try to keep them to 10-15 min and aim for one every 7-10 days, or as soon as I have some stuff to talk about.


And as usual, I can’t go without thanking you all for the Positive Reviews - its amazing to see such support, and I can’t wait to keep growing this game over 2021 and beyond! As a solo developer with no marketing plan besides "hopefully people who stumble upon the game find it interesting...", reviews go a long way to helping make Vault the success I'd love for it to be!



Onto the details !

(As a note: this has been on the Beta Branch for the last few days, where I’ve managed to fix a few issues that were around. I’ll be monitoring things closely for the next 10 hours or so to ensure that nothing goes wrong, and hotfix any issues that appear straight away!)

So, one of the major issues with Vault was its presentation of its systems. Originally, I thought I would be expanding content in the form of more classes, cards, encounters etc by now - however one thing I’ve been told a lot is; Vault has a lot of content currently - it just doesn’t present it awfully well.

So, the new Intent and Tooltip system is a massive push to address this. Firstly, all monster cards have been reexported and setup to allow for these new changes. It also means that enemy names aren’t baked into the artwork, which was something that was supposed to happen a long time ago. Chalk that one up to not knowing what I was doing when I started the project!

On top of these changes, what a creature is planning to do is now presented, in short form, on the card. No longer will you need to mouseover to check the details of what's happening (something which was often forgotten/overlooked). Also, Passives were very easy to miss. A little strip of orange text under the creature name - it often lead to a lot of confusion! No longer the case! All passives now are presented as icons under the card in the “buff/debuff” strip, making them super noticeable at a glance.

I’ve also adjusted which tooltips show when you mouse over the card (just their intent/passive details and sub tooltips, no longer a wall of all their buffs/debuffs). A few other small things also, but hopefully these changes make digesting enemy details easier and more approachable at a glance!



Tooltips, tooltips, tooltips. Probably the one thing I get feedback on a lot - the game as a lot of them! The first step was to trim down as much of the text as possible. In some cases, I also adjusted the spell/card to have less tooltips intentionally. The next step however was to make these damn things more digestible! Here's what I’ve done :

Tooltips are no longer just a blue heading with a wall of text. Their text block is broken up with keywords highlighted in blue to make it easier to parse quickly.
Each has their own icon associated which will appear next to the tooltip, and also next to the heading, to make things easier to pick up at a glance.
Small changes to font sizes and positioning to make things less overwhelming.

So far, feedback has been great and I really hope these changes are a step in the right direction for everyone!



Spells have been tweaked! I spoke about this in the video, but the goal was to take steps to make Spells better, in an attempt to compete with that class spell spot that synergises with your spec so well. A lot have been deleted, some have been changed and even more have been added!

The Sacrifice spec got a little card expansion, with a few new toys being added in to help with Soultithe/Threshold builds. I’ll speak more about this change in the next Dev Blog as I being to shift focus to expanding card pools even more.



I’ve managed to find a new FX artist who has been delivering some incredible stuff! This is just the start of what's to come, as I slowly replace all the royalty free FX with new, exciting custom work! More of this to drip feed through over the next couple of patches.



More info on the why behind this to come next week , but figured it should be pointed out! Fatigue is now automatically applied to all creatures at the end of every even turn.

As I try to do every few weeks, I wanted to run a little optimization pass over this patch. With the new tooltip system adding a bit more overhead on the code base, it was important to relook at where I could refactor and trim down a few things. After profiling, looks like I’ve eked out quite a bit more performance - hopefully that translates to you all as well!

As always, I’ll list the full Patch Notes below. Sorry if this post comes off a bit disjointed, pretty exhausting last few weeks leading up to all this! I’m excited to finally have this live and shift focus to another area of the codebase!

Feel free to leave any comments, or log any issues in the Discord or on here and I’ll personally respond as quickly as possible! Thank you all for making Vault what it is, and I hope you continue to enjoy your time cleansing the hallways of these evil apparitions...

All for now,
Josh

---

+ UI/General;
- Class icons are back for cards!
- Clearing Introduction will unlock Hard as well as Normal.
- Creatures that take half damage from Bleed will have their Bleed number reflect that.
- Corrected a number of typos
- When discarding the cards will move up so you can see the keywords now.
- At your start of turn draw, any Affliction cards drawn will position themselves at the far left of your hand.
- Purging cards won't scale them down so much, so harder to get them 'stuck' in limbo.
- Floor 1 will now have a selected Mob Room which will give a Booster Pack in addition to its normal rewards.
- Continued tweaking of Spawn rules to ensure less double up fights.
- Have adjusted the sound on Doggy Pats
- Combo now has its own Orb similar to Corruption.
- Changes to how the floating battle text is displayed.
- More sound effects across the board.
- Fatigue will now be automatically added at the end of every second turn.
- Started replacing/adding new animations/FX for attacks.


+ Monsters;
- Card redesign, with shortened attack information shown on the card! (No need to mouseover anymore)
- Redcaps won't sync Attack anymore, nor will they dual Refuge.
- Tooltips on Enemies have been redone to fit the new structure. Status Effects/Debuffs won't show on mouseover, to avoid overload. This can now be accessed by mousing over each item.
- Loaded piglets will increase Battle progress by more.

+ Artifacts;
- Clarified Utility Belt - the card is added to your hand.

+ Spells;
- Lembas Bread : Removed.
- Sunder : Increased to Vulnerable 3.
- Cripple : Increased to Weak 3.
- Return: Cooldown reduced to 3.
- Energy Tap: Cooldown reduced to 3.
- Leverage: Apply Weak 1 to all enemies. Deal 2 Shii thrice to all enemies.
- Sacrifice: Threshold/Reduction increased to 10 and 3.
- From Dust: Deal 14 damage. Slay: Heal 5, and, if you are at full HP, Block 5
- Nightmare Steed: Increased to 2 Shield Walls.
- Blood Give Me Blood changed to Swarm: Your next single-target card played trigger +1 times. Cooldown 3.
- Massive change Swamp Witchs' spell - more info once you defeat her!
- 7 brand new Spells! (They're good!)


+ Card Changes;
- My Father's Curse: Unleash 50% (75%) Corruption. Recur 1. Rebound.
- New: Ceaseless: Uncommon Buff, 2(3) cost: Each turn, the first time you spend Combo, Combo 1(2). Expel.
- Grasp: Upgrade damage reduced to 10.
- Death Blade: upgrade now remains at 2 cost, damage reduced by 1.
- What Lies Waiting: Upgrade now grants Corruption rather than Soultithe, plus is also Draw 3.
- New: Proliferate.
- New: Dirty Soul.
- New: Debt Repaid.
- New: Veil.
- New: What Was Owed.
- New: Abyssal Unity.

Hey everyone! A few bonus updates from last patch we thought we'd throw in tonight! Enjoy!

Gameplay Fixes & Improvements

• Receiver button icons now get set from left to right in the following order LB, X, Y, B, and RB.
  
• Fixed issue where CPU would go for it on the 4th down when the score is tied in the 4th quarter when on their own side of the field, thus giving the other team an easy score and win if they don't convert.
  
• The ball no longer has to be on the ground for a player to grab it. The ball can be bouncing low to the ground and it can be grabbed or caught now.
  
• Bench players may or may not be wearing helmets on the sidelines now.
  
• Players don't immediately move to stance from huddle and have a delay to not look so twitchy between running to the line and going into stance.

If you experience any bugs or issues please report them here or more preferably in our Discord where you can chat with the community, report bugs, or give feedback on the game.

As always, if you've enjoyed the game so far and like what you're seeing out of the game it would be great if you can leave a review on Steam!

Twitter
Discord
YouTube

Update game difficulty and experience based on user feedback

1. Increased UI interface and color, make it easier to identify

2. Greatly improve the probability of saving human beings

3. Reduce the damage punishment, improve the killing reward, and speed up the pace of the game

4. The change of initial base location and building location makes it more convenient for users to interact with each other

5. Speed up the dropping time of weapons, enhancements and elements, and reduce the players' repetitive play

6. When fighting, the mouse is locked in the window to prevent double screen users from exiting the window when fighting, and improve the user experience

Greetings all, and happy 2021! I realize it’s been a solid year since my last update to the app, and I apologize for the radio silence. Turns out 2020 held some big life changes for me (as I’m sure it did for many of you), and I unfortunately had to make other projects a priority.

Over the last few months, I’ve been able to spend more time working on Flex in my free moments. I’ve been able to really make some progress, and I’m excited to tell you all about some new features and improvements coming this month!

Hand Posing
This feature has been near the top of the list for requests this last year, so I’m happy to say it’s finally here! There are a whole new set of options which allow you to customize your model’s hand pose.

Check it out [click the image for GIF]:


With Flex, I’ve always tried to walk the line between usability and customizability. Plenty of more high-end software packages give you pretty deep customization controls, but get pretty complex and sometimes clunky to use. I always want Flex to be fast and intuitive, to help you achieve your goal rather than get in the way. I hope I've achieved this with the hand pose controls.

As with all the features of Flex, the hand posing is an ongoing work-in-progress. So if you have suggestions for improvements, I’d love to hear them!


Performance Improvements
When I first released Flex, I didn’t have a chance to look deeply at the performance characteristics and optimize the app. Over the last few months, I’ve been digging in more detail and testing of different hardware to try and sniff out those culprits of lag. The lighting seems to be the biggest offender, so my optimizations thus far have been focused on improving the performance of lighting and shadows.

I've seen quite a bit of improvement so far while testing on several devices with differing spec. Additionally, the FPS seems to be much more stable while toggling through different combinations of lighting. I'll continue to test and tweak to try and get the best possible performance for lower end devices.

I have also added a “High Resolution Shadows” option in the settings. This will allow you to still have really smooth shadows if your machine can handle it, but not be required to use them if your machine is of lower spec.

Click images below for GIFs



Another simple feature I am putting in the upcoming build is a quick way to toggle the lighting on/off. This is useful for more than just performance. I find that sometimes the lighting can get in the way when you’re trying to pose your character, especially if your lighting is high contrast.



The last area of optimization is the RAM footprint. In my testing, it looks like I’ve been able to shave about 1 gb off the working memory for the app, putting it well below the 4gb minimum RAM requirement. This should hopefully help prevent unexpected crashes from occurring!


User Interface Refresh
I wanted to reduce the complexity of the UI, both to help performance, but also just to reduce visual clutter. I feel the new UI better reflects current trends in UI design, and better communicates user interaction with clearer rollover effects (for mouse interaction), as well as more forgiving interaction areas (for touch interaction).



One additional improvement is better support for vertical orientation. This should help those of you who use Flex side-by-side with other applications, or on tablet devices.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with the new UI. I feel it’s clean and responsive compared to the old version. However, if there’s anything that seems unclear or frustrating, please let me know!


What’s Next?
Over the coming week, I’m going to be working on fully testing and deploying this latest build. All the features are working great, but I want to make sure it’s stable on a wider variety of devices, and doesn’t cause issues with previously created character files.

In the next months, I want to start to tackle another big requested feature, multiple characters. Now that I’ve wrangled the performance to a more stable place, I can start investigating the possibility of adding multiple characters.


Thank you all for your support and understanding as we weathered the crazy year that was 2020. Over the next year, I will definitely be working on various projects to keep my income stable, but I’m looking forward to making more progress on Flex as it inches closer to the full release!

The Jeweler and the academy are now available!

Hello Lumia Survivors!

Starting this Sunday at 07:00 AM (PST), Every Week DROPS event will go live.
Receive up to 700 A-Coin per day by watching your favorite Eternal Return streamer on Twitch!



DROPS Information

• Title: Every Week DROPS!
  
• When: Sunday, January 17th until further notice
  
• What:
  
  • 100 A-Coin for 1 hour of viewing
    
  • You can acquire up to 7 times per day (maximum 7 hours = 700 A-Coin).
• DROPS Collection Period: Sunday-Friday 07:00 AM - 06:59 AM (PST)
  
• DROPS Redemption Expiration Period: 3 days from the day you acquire them.
  
• Channel: EVERY Channel in the Eternal Return: Black Survival category
  
• Important Note: Redeem rewards in your Twitch inventory every 1 hour of viewing to get MORE rewards!

※ NOTE

• Redeem rewards in your Twitch inventory every 1 hour of viewing to get MORE rewards!
  
• Every streamer must connect their Twitch accounts to Eternal Return: Black Survival game accounts in order to enable DROPS on their channels.
  Viewers should check the 'Drops Enabled' tagged on the streamer's channel.

DROPS Event FAQ

Before you participate in this DROPS event, please take a moment to overview the contents below. It will be difficult for us to assist you if you are not familiar with the following:

1. Please make sure you have properly linked your game account to the correct Twitch account.
   
2. Please make sure to click on the receive rewards button on your Twitch inventory page within the expiration deadline.
   
3. Please keep in mind you will not be able to receive multiple DROPS rewards by linking your Twitch account to multiple game accounts. You will only be able to receive rewards from one account.

... you all know the rest.

Changes this time:

• Improve the appearance of the ship when it has a lot of damage
  
  
• Fix bug: could not pause between death of one ship and spawn of the next.
  
  
• Add menu to paused state. Player can go to the Options menu from the paused state.
  
  
• Change shield augmenter functionality: shield size does not change, but the augmented shield protects against a lot more damage.
  
  
• Fix shield augmenter icons.
  
  
• Added Magnetic Field powerup and rebalanced powerups generally.
  
  
• Added audio volume controls to Options menu.
  

【Patch Note 1.825】
💻System💻
-In-game update checking has been restarted.
　You will be able to check from this patch.

-Fixed some minor bugs.

- ADDED: New UI images
- ADDED: New settings imagebuttons on the notebook UI
- ADDED: New quit screen