Dear #BestCommunityEver, we trust you all gained some well earned relaxation this weekend, and with today being Monday, we thought we’d kick it off with some good news. Although the fight against COVID-19 continues, the worldwide vaccine rollout is now entering full swing, and so is our #HaulingHope event!



So far, almost 100,000 American Truck Simulator and Euro Truck Simulator 2 truckers have reached their personal goal of 7 deliveries in our special #HaulingHope event, with thousands more already past the halfway mark - so close. Not to mention our social media profiles are still receiving a lot of amazing posts under the #HaulingHope event.

So, in an effort to give those players some more time to finish their personal goal, and continue our salute to the real truckers and support crews out there on the front line, we’ve decided to extend the #HaulingHope event until Monday 15th February 23:59 UTC!

Dear Players,

We will perform our weekly maintenance as follows:

• Global 9:00 UTC ~ 13:00 UTC
  
• Central (EU) 10:00 CET ~ 14:00 CET
  
• West Coast (NA) 1:00 PST ~ 5:00 PST
  
• East Coast (NA) 4:00 EST ~ 8:00 EST

• The option to toggle visual effects for the defense status applied by certain skills will be added.
  
  
• Praise the Sun event will start.

• Time to Ride
  
  
• Fluttering Snowflakes

Follow us on Twitter & Facebook to stay up to date.

Thank you for your support and understanding.


Best regards,
BDO Team

• German localization (translated by QL)

Thanks a lot QL!

Follow live After Actions Reports 

As the release date for War in the East 2 approaches, we are rolling out several informative and engaging After Action Reports.

These are published thanks to our community members, beta testers, and fans who are putting a lot of effort into playing the game and highlighting the key features that make this new chapter a leap forward in the history of the franchise.

You can follow a full Multiplayer Game carried out by Bobo, playing the Axis, and GloriousRuse, playing the Soviets.



There is another very cool AAR running, thanks to Loki, whose target is to provide in-depth analysis of what makes War in the East 2 such a major evolution from its predecessors.

Defending the Rodina

These are updated continuously, so make sure you're giving them a good read and following the product page with attention: there's plenty more to come.

Bugvasion TD is releasing in 10 days and boy we are excited. The levels were already done by last summer so we spent the last 6-8 months to further develop the gameplay side of things implementing new interesting mechanics, adding a skill tree system, refining the UI and developing a funny story around the quirky gameplay.

The gameplay changed a lot during development, it started out as a classic tower defense game where you have to build and upgrade towers in a strategic manner to overcome the ever growing hordes of possessed bugs. Slowly we added a few special attacks and shifted the gameplay so the player has to use both towers and special attacks in order to defeat the enemy, but we didn’t stop there. Special abilities were the next thing, these are passive helpers and only really work together with other tools, they don’t damage the enemy by themselves.

Combining tools in a creative way was the next step. Now if you use the Rolling Death special attack, light it up with a Magny Tower and roll it over puddles of gas placed by the Gas Drop special ability you can light up half the map and seriously hurt the enemy. Now there are more of these combinations in the game, but we want the players to find them and use them to their advantage.

Finally we’ve added quite a few static defenses like glue tubes or PEZ dispensers, these are a part of the level designs, their use is limited but if the player uses them strategically they can be a big help in the fight.

After release we are planning to do localization first, Portuguese, Russian, Hungarian and Deutsch language versions are already in the works but we won’t stop there, there are many more languages planned.

We also want to bring the Bugvasion TD experience to other platforms, we will keep you updated once we have an ETA on any of the ports.

Just a few more days and Bugvasion TD is out, we can’t wait for you to play it!

Demeter, Head of Development, FSG

Dragon Saddle Melee puts you in an old-school arcade battle against other players and waves of enemy dragons. Try to survive through all the rounds and end up with the highest score.



Come join the melee with us!

Dev Update #1

We're close to finishing the game but we still have lots of polish to work on! Here's just a quick update on what all we've been working on in the past month of so as we work towards gold!

Updates:

• Added tons of SFXs!
  
• New species! Salamander and Walrus, with new abilities, stats, and so. (you can check them out on our socials if you want to see what they look like)
  
• Finished ending of the game.
  
• Improved tutorial.
  
• Working on animated intro.
  
• Improved Final Boss to be more readable.
  
• Balancing rewards depending on the level.
  
• Improved the combat generation to increase the variation.
  
• Bug fixing & Performance improvement

Mainly just been lots of improvements and making sure we're giving the fans the best game possible!
We'll be posting screenshots and gifs on our socials as we continue working so follow us there; Twitter, Facebook and Discord
And don't forget to wishlist Ruin Raiders! It helps us out a ton!

Follow live After Actions Reports 

As the release date for War in the East 2 approaches, we are rolling out several informative and engaging After Action Reports.

These are published thanks to our community members, beta testers, and fans who are putting a lot of effort into playing the game and highlighting the key features that make this new chapter a leap forward in the history of the franchise.

You can follow a full Multiplayer Game carried out by Bobo, playing the Axis, and GloriousRuse, playing the Soviets.



There is another very cool AAR running, thanks to Loki, whose target is to provide in-depth analysis of what makes War in the East 2 such a major evolution from its predecessors.

Defending the Rodina

These are updated continuously, so make sure you're giving them a good read and following the product page with attention: there's plenty more to come.

I allways thought, to write a DevBlog is easy but i'am also worried to get too technical or to bore the readers with unintresting stuff.
I allways wanted to make a Game with Dinosaurs but never had the time, to dive deeper in this subject matter. I also did´nt want to start with such a project during my vocational training, to focus better on my final exames. But at the end it was itching to do so.

I started at a very young age to got interest in programming and 3-D-Modelling and did it during my School time as a Hobby, be it a tiny project for a friend or to try out something new.


An old attempt to model a Dino

I think it is hard to say, when the start date of an Indie-project is. Is it the first thought, to develop a game in this direction, the first prototypes or as soon as you pick an engine and type in the project name?
Well, the first plans to make a own game in this direction i had many years ago, maybe 2015. But at this point i did´nt had the time for it, because of my lifesituation and education.

Programming was at this point a Hobby and i made some experiments with the game-engine but nothing what you could call a real project.

When i was about to finish my vocational training (mid of 2018), i started to develop in a game engine first prototypes, which looked like Sanctuary Island. At this time i finished my vocational-training as a programmer and had more Time for it.

Unluckily, i had to change the engine in the middle of 2019, because it was not a good choice for a open world game. So the game is since summer 2019 in the Unreal Engine in development but meanwhile i can't work fulltime on it.

I finally could start to develop my first game, a childhooddream, with my favorite animals.
I honestly do´nt know what i could write special abou, because it feels like that 80% of the work is to research how i can implement something. But i can tell you, that it can get very emotional if you get to run for the first time a client/Server multiplayer because for a long time the only thing you see is a lot of lines of code. The Moment, you sucsessfully connect to your own dedicated server and your game model is working as it should... that shows you that the work of the past weeks was worth it.
Because i make my 3D-Modells myself, i could improve my skills.


Prototype in the old Engine

As i implement more features and the size of the playable world was growing, the old engine was not capable of it and so i had to switch to Unreal. I had to transfer my entire progress from the old one to the new. That took a lot time but it was worthwhile, because Unreal offers a large Toolset to design open world levels and is very multiplayer friendly.


Landscape on the Map

At the begining i was skeptical about the grafical BluePrint System of the Unreal Engine, because i was used to writing a code. But the Skepticism went away and now i dont want to miss it.


With patience, creativiti and curiosity it seems everything is do able with Blueprints.


Currently it looks like everything works out like planned. Lately i worked on a AI, which was running without problems on first sight. Only the pathfinding in water is not working properly, but i will find a solution.


Many, Many Bots

Behold, Crusader Kings III has been nominated as Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year in the #DICEAwards!
► Learn more here



Our next Dev Diary is scheduled for mid-February.
From here, things will ramp up and you will be able to learn more about the future of Crusader Kings III!
We thank you all for your patience while we are working very hard to produce the high quality content you all deserve.
See you soon! 👑