1.4b should fix some graphical performance issues with nighttime matches. Cheers!

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Production Director at New World Interactive. February has been an exciting month for us, with update 1.9.1 releasing just before a free weekend on Steam. This SoP will be short and sweet, so without further ado let’s jump in!

Key Points for State of Production #17

• 1.9.1 Update and Hotfixes
  
• Free Week Results
  
• New Weapons: QBZ-97 and QTS-11
  
• Community Driven Update

On Tuesday, February 2 we launched our 1.9.1 patch which included various bug fixes, improvements, and two new guns. A big change in this update is our new in-game stats system including the updated end-of-round screens. The new system is much more robust and was designed to eliminate issues that could happen with the legacy system, such as missing level-up rewards.

We have released three hotfixes to address high-priority issues. We’ve been monitoring and investigating reports of players who are having issues with cosmetics they own not appearing to be unlocked in their inventory. We are also monitoring and investigating other issues listed as known issues which you can find linked on our new public Trello board (Shoutout to our new hire on the Player Support Team, Bruno Chasse! He drove the creation of the new public known issues site).

From February 4th until February 8th, Insurgency: Sandstorm was available to play for free on Steam. During that period a lot of new players tried the game. We saw concurrent user counts averaging just under 10,000 for the period. On the weekend alone, we had over 280,000 rounds played on stats-enabled servers. Free weekends on Steam are a big driver for bringing new players to Sandstorm, so I’d like to extend a big welcome to all the players who have recently joined the community!

Our latest update included two new weapons, the QBZ-97 for Insurgents and QTS-11 for Security. I’ve invited Lead Game Designer, Michael “Mikee” Tsarouhas, to speak about the selection, implementation, and balancing of those two rifles:

“Insurgency has a wide swath of weapons, but there’s always new ones we are considering that can offer new gameplay opportunities, unique aesthetics, and thematic appeal. The QBZ-97 and QTS-11 were added in an effort to expand the range of capabilities for the commonly used Rifleman, Demolitions, Commander, and Observer classes, as well as try to have better representation of modern Chinese firearms which could be seen in our setting. We’ve got plenty of international guns, but we’re a little lacking on the East Asian side.



Adding new assault rifles is an interesting challenge for a hardcore modern military FPS game designer. In real life, modern small arms have largely plateaued. The technological advances and distinctions between each weapon a military deploys are much more minimal than they were in the previous century. You have to really think and iterate when trying to make a new gun feel unique in the game but still real. The QBZ-97 gave us a chance to have a low supply point cost weapon that was an alternative to the AKM, firing 5.56 and featuring a higher fire rate. The QTS-11 was an opportunity to make a more expensive supply point cost Security assault rifle that fired flat and smooth with a unique toggleable optic type that keeps you deadly at both long and close range. The fire rate in particular was a fun piece to balance, as pretty much all our assault rifles fire faster than the QTS-11. We weren’t sure if it would be viable. It was a bit of an experiment, and it feels like it paid off.”

Our next Community Driven update (1.9.2) is on the horizon. We are still finalizing some of what that content will be, until then I wanted to touch on how we plan these updates.

The goals of our Community Driven updates are to address as many feature requests and bugs as possible. We do this by keeping track of what the most discussed issues are on various platforms. While we’re always looking at our community feedback, there are often requests that aren’t immediately actionable. These updates are the perfect time for us to review the list and take on requests that are too big or require too much testing for hotfixing, but are also small enough that we don’t need to plan them into a major update cycle. There are a lot of reviews that go on with lots of team members to evaluate the technical effort involved and also make sure the gameplay impact is in line with the vision of the game. Once we have a consensus on what is achievable we have our development team start working on the content, get a build put together and tested, and confirm we’re ready for our targeted release date.
We’ll be wrapping up the planning phase this week and scheduling development to start soon. In keeping with the theme for this year, we’re working on the update a lot earlier than normal to provide us with more time in QA.

That’s it for this month’s SoP, until next time, keep your stick on the ice.

Greetings magicians,

It's time to get your magic cards ready because we have some very exciting news to share with you all today. Dandy Ace will be launching on Steam on March 25th, 2021!



For those unfamiliar, Dandy Ace is an over the top fast-paced roguelike experience that follows a fabulous magician seeking to combine and use his magical cards while fighting and looting his way to defeat the Green-Eyed Illusionist, Lele, who has imprisoned him inside the Cursed Mirror.

Dandy Ace has been a labor of love from the start for the Mad Mimic team and we’re thrilled to be finally showing off every trick Ace has up his sleeve this March.

We could not have gotten to this point without the help of you all, our community. Thank you to everyone that participated in our Beta events, played the demo, and added Dandy Ace to your Steam Wishlist. Your constructive feedback and positive responses to the game helped us shape Dandy Ace into what it is today. It has been a blast watching the content many of you have created so far, especially in Dandy Ace’s Twitch Mode, and we can’t wait to see you all play on March 25th!

As we look into the future, we will be sharing our plans for DLCs and other potential content following the launch. Dandy Ace will be launching first on Steam, but will also be headed to PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch later this year. Interested players can wishlist the game and try the free demo available on Steam prior to March 25th.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mad.mimic/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DandyAceGame
Discord: https://discord.gg/EDby5gp
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/madmimic

Notes:
-fixes occasional unresponsiveness from exiting battle
-fixes occasional unresponsiveness when looting some items
-additional inventory system fix with some items not showing correctly
-fixes shader issue with older systems.

More coming, please consider sending us your Log Files located in:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\UDXInteractive\WheelOfFate

It will help us solve glitches you may be experiencing.

Hey, friends! After a few years in development, 30XX is at the point where we're ready for one of the most critical parts of our development cycle - your feedback! So it's time for Early Access.

We made a sweet new animated trailer to go along with our release, which you can check out here!



A little info about what's here in this release from our Store page:

"30XX's Early Access build contains 6 of the "main sequence" 8 stage themes - the other two will be added during EA.

It contains the game's classic Standard roguelite mode, as well as a new "Mega" Mode, which still generates a unique playthrough of the game, but dying only returns you to the start of that stage.

Both of these modes are playable solo, in local co-op play, or online. During Early Access, we intend to iron out the bugs with 30XX's netcode - we expect it to be fully functional for most players at launch, but players experiencing issues can try Remote Play Together, which works well if you have a solid connection to your partner."

We hope you're as excited to get your hands on 30XX as we've been putting it together!

- Secure your raw materials with the new SAVE feature.

With this option you send your raw materials on a safety flight. The planes circle over their own city. If the flight is canceled, the return time is one hour. The fuel costs result from the distance to another continent

- Use the new Jumbo Transporter for your backup flights.
A real joy for every trader and for everyone with good trading relationships

- Post your reports directly from the game in the fully integrated Discord Chat

Pilots,

The following are the server-side balancing changes we've made this week:


We’ve taken our first pass on both the B-wing and the TIE defender in this balancing update. In the event we’ve over- or undertuned certain aspects of each starfighter, we’ll make further tweaks in the coming weeks.

The B-wing was struggling to get to objectives, so we’ve increased its mobility to be closer to the other starfighters while flying directly at a target. You’ll see some large percentage changes below because of that. B-wings will be able to boost more frequently but the boost charge will deplete faster when power to engines isn’t maxed out.

• Increased boost charge rate by 100%
  
• Increased boost loss rate by 500% (loss rate now 50% higher than other starfighters)
  
• Increased boost activation cost by 100%
  
• Decreased maneuverability penalty on all primary weapons by 33%

Meanwhile, the TIE defender has been over-performing and is especially deadly in the hands of very skilled players, so we’re adjusting it a bit so that it’s not the perfect choice for every situation while still rewarding skillful play. It’ll still perform in a familiar way, but masterful power management will be key to survival with its stronger trade-offs.

• Increased shield overcharge decay rate by 10%
  
• Shield charge rate slowed by 20%
  
• Boost loss rate increased by 100%
  
• Boost activation cost increased by 25%

Our store page is now more colorful. We decided to add new gameplay images which will represent how Beast Master will look like once it's finally released. We still might change the art style depending on the feedbacks. We hope you all like it. Thanks for your support.

New Season Of Necrosis Is coming on the next update guys! With New Material Changes, Optimization, Weapon SKINS (Finnaly!), Gameplay, New HUD, New Gamemode (Will be revealed Later), New Map, And More! Also Removed Flooded II.

Some Images Of The Newest Graphics:

- Metro

- Barn

- Ascension II

- Industry

- Contract

- Residential

- Container

- Cupule

- Warehouse

Hellish Quart pre-alpha v. 2021.02.17.0

FIX:

- Isabella: changing stances when on the right side is now done with correct up/down diection instead of left/right in game logic
- Fixed bug when Jacek tried to enter ragdoll mode after decapitation
- Fixed bug where Isabella sometimes freezes when changing high and low guard stances

NEW:

- Barabasz: some new attack animations (beginnig to differentiate Barabasz from Jacek)
- Added new music track for Gallows arena