Hello everyone, and to everyone who in the future who may read this.

Current state of things on my end. I want to be perfectly honest and upfront about things and that i'm having a lot of trouble internally with my self.

My mental state is in a bad spot to where i want to create, and work, and do the things to build towards my dream future of owning my own dev studio, but any time i go to do those things or think about doing those things its like my whole body shuts down and i'm numb to the idea or movement of doing so.

so its a cycle i'm trying to break, before i could just say doing something for 5 mins or even 10 mins would be worth doing nothing but i'm not even able to do that right now. This hasn't just affected my ability to dev the game, its also affected my writing, drawing, and anything else creative i like to do.

So what does this mean for the game? well, as it stands theres still a ton of work to do. I do plan to finish this project at some point in the future but don't expect it any time soon, I will work to do better in the future and i hope i can have an update sometime soon.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I announce the release of the second DLC today!

In this new experience you will explore a new archipelago where you will have to deal with dragons and, of course, chickens!

There will also be mini-games where you can win fantastic prizes (including cash!)

The release date is ... March 4th? Who knows ...

Stay tuned!

Hello,

some users told us that the game crashed always when they selected a new slot and tried starting the game. We checked the issue and observed that this always happened in laptops without a dedicated graphic card.

With this new version, the "LOW" graphic has a lower resolution for some textures in the game and this will evade the crash and improve the performance in low-spec computer.

In summary, if your game crashed, choose the "LOW" graphics option in the menu before starting the game.

Hi friends!

Today in the "play your favourite country" section, we launch a new DLC, United Kingdom! With 14 pictures of this cool country for just a few pounds! And with a 20% discount!

Of course, a free puzzle too!




https://store.steampowered.com/app/1501700/Super_Jigsaw_Puzzle_Generations__United_Kingdom/

Procedural Generation
I did quite a bit of work in the rivers procedural generation. Previously, our rivers were too “straight”, with only 45 degrees turns which looked extremely unnatural… the reason for this is the way I was planning to implement them first via flood-filling the geometry and advancing one tile at a time towards the sea.

That’s no longer the case (see previous posts about rivers procgen) so I changed the way they are built to instead place them segment by segment and pick an angle change within a sensible range for each new segment. This in turn allowed us to fix a bug on their geometry that was haunting me since the Steam Game Festival version (random gaps appearing, caused by the points of the polyline used to create the river surface being too close), as well as make it so we have much more control over the total river length we want in the map, and prevent them from overlapping. Of course we still need to work on their positioning and add branching so they are not that many isolated segments.



While we were at it, we decided to address a bit some visual aspects of the rivers; besides fixing how the “riverbed” was painted to take advantage of the new procgen in which the rivers are flat, we did some experiments on the color of the river texture and concluded (again) we need to modify the river shader for it to interact with the lighting conditions of the scene. I did some tests using the plugin we are using for the oceans’ water, just to evaluate how important it would be to implement some of its features in our shader (like simulating “foam” on contact with other surfaces, and having reflections with an animated normal map).



The forest are now a bit more spread out, with a dense section at their center and more sparse vegetation on its boundaries.

Save/Load
One big thing I missed during the initial work was properly saving and restoring the Terrain objects which are an important part of the game state; while of course there is always the option of storing the seed to regenerate the terrain every time, I opted to save the terrain data instead, to allow future scenarios where it can be modified in-game, as well as allow pre-generated terrains to work through evolving versions of the generator. I am also lazy and didn’t want to go through the generator ensuring all the dice rolls where made with a single pre-seeded generator.

Beside this, there were some tweaks on save/load as expected during playtests, including saving the weather and the player encampments.

User Interface
We are doing good progress in the revamped UI for the “transfer” popup (Used for trading, transferring items and units to camps, and battle loot), as well as the “inventory” popup (for which we still need to do some design work, to integrate with the “use item” flow)



More art!
Art keeps working at a quicker pace than we are able to integrate, so there’s a bunch of things we are going to be adding in the upcoming weeks including special NPC portraits, a complete new environment for the paramo (Andean Tundra), Potato and Maize farms, rocks and cave entrances, new panche raider model and some more redesigned UI.



Finally, we are experimenting with a better way to display grass in the terrain, since using geometry or billboards continues not being good options based in latest tests.

This week a familiar face will hold the tools to help you with your next challenge, just be sure not to sample too much of your own potion!

Use only mushrooms (anything that Mushroomer sells goes). Your potion must contain the Hallucination effect and at least one other effect. Your combination of effects, name, and description of the potion must make sense. Any order of effects is allowed, and each Alchemist may submit unlimited challenge entries!


Join our Discord to participate in the challenge and read more about the rules (in #weekly-challenges channel)!
Work together to reach community goals and unlock emojis for the whole Discord server.
The most interesting/creative recipe will be highlighted on our social media next week along with the new challenge!

This week we wanted to highlight a submission by extranji for the previous “Potion of Poetry” challenge.

Greetings Commanders!

Player Fleet (Ship Crew Part 2) is here!

This is a big update, so besides already taking a while, it will certainly receive more updates/fixes in the upcoming days. So be advised things will change, and to make sure, backup your save files.



You can assign crew as captains of your unused ship models, and they will become part of your fleet with all equipment and weapons properly installed! Simple as that.
You will need (and spend) Fleet Commander (Knowledge) points for each ship, as follows: Shuttle 2, Yacht 3, Corvette 5, Frigate 10, Cruiser 20, Dreadnought 40.
Mercenaries still work as they were and therefore don’t need FC when hired.

Fleet ship captains currently only use their Pilot and Gunner efficiency skills, and other crewmembers won’t be used for now. Later on I intend to make fleet ships fully operational with crew.

You will find the Fleet Control panel on the top right of the screen, with basic control options. This panel can be opened/closed by pressing Z (default).

I hope you all like the changes, and have fun!
- Laious

• Added 2 experience perks: Piloting (+2 bonus Space Pilot) and Command (+2 bonus Fleet Commander)
  
• Hired mercenary repairs are now paid by the player.
  
• 'Technology' and 'The Last Starfighter' perks now grant +2 bonus Tech Level instead of +1.
  
• The procedural galaxy will now generate high level sectors a bit farther away from the star zone, resulting in more low level sectors around the area. The game difficulty (relaxed, normal or hardcore) also affects this.
  
• Starter sector is now 'very small' size instead of 'small', this will make the new player experience a bit more pleasant without longer trips in a slow starter ship.
  
• Low level sectors (up to level 10) will now only be 'Small' or 'Very Small' sizes.
  
• Refineries will now properly refine higher quality metal, including a small chance to find specials (silver, gold and platinum). Please note that effective refinery rate is lower on high tier metals.
  
• Added new Red Skull Frigate (size 4): Nightmare.
  
• Added new Red Skull Corvette (size 3): Saw.
  
• Added Tier 3 (blue) independent Yacht: Dragon.
  
• Replaced ships: Wasp, Viper, Space Trader and Falcon with new models: Pegasus, Wolf, Hercules and Rokkuita, respectively.
  
• The Hauler (size 3 spaceship) model is now unlocked by default, just like the Speeder (size 1) and Galaxy worn (size 2).
  
• Increased Walrus ship model size from 2 (yacht) to 3 (corvette).
  
• Renamed ship model 'Interceptor' to 'Razor'.
  
• Changed V4G-A model colliders to avoid getting asteroids stuck on it's wings.
  
• Changed Galaxy and Phantom colliders to avoid getting stuck in other objects.
  
• Gunners on turrets with repair beams will try to heal allied ships now. It also works on AI ship turrets, including those on your fleet.
  
• Added option to turn 'Run in Background' on/off
  
• Venghi stations no longer have an Academy.
  
• Elites and Bosses below level 50 now have lower Damage Resistances and use slightly lower level weapons.
  
• Equipping a weapon will automatically assign it to the next free slot, if available and with enough space for it.
  
• Increased time between bursts of all Burst weapons and burst crafting modifier by 10-20%.
  
• Slightly increased camera visibility in low zoom levels, specially in level 3 which is the max zoom out for small ships.
  
• Result weapon on crafting will now properly account for ship bonuses. You may opt to show raw values instead.
  
• Your last selected weapon (on ship Hangar, Market, etc.) is now shown in the crafting panel for comparison.
  
• Increased chance of faction specific weapons being sold at their stations.
  
• Your ship's weapon damage bonus now also apply to melee weapon damage in Red Skull ships.
  
• Increased chance to find Escape Pods in graveyards from 3% to 4%.
  
• Sector map will now show basic sector information on the top left of the screen.
  
• Ravager bosses should no longer spawn right in the center of a sector.
  
• Battle Fleets now move a bit every 20 seconds instead of 30.
  
• Destroying Fleet Ships now always affect reputation, not only when you are attacked first.
  
• Fixed player ship getting teleported after leaving a station.
  
• Fixed predefined Beam weapons (including mining lasers and ION) that were hitting 25 times a second instead of 20 as intended (which is how crafted weapons work, hence they suffered no change).
  
• Fixed a BUG that occurred to some old save games prior to 1.1.9 and would make the game unplayable.
  
• Fixed active equipment not deactivating when uninstalled.
  
• Fixed Weapon Heat Cap bonus not applying on individual turrets.

Hello all! You might have noticed that Blackwell Epiphany has been updated (along with all the other Blackwell games) . We have re-compiled the entire game in the newest version of the Adventure Game Studio engine. This means that the game NOW WORKS ON ALL YOUR FANCY NEW MODERN MONITORS. As the game got older, many glitches started appearing. Those should - theoretically - be gone now. We know this update was a long time in coming. Thank you for your patience.

This does have the negative effect of breaking all your original save files. If you would like to revert back to the original version of the game, you need to to the following:

1- Right-click on the game in your Steam library
2- Select "Properties" and go to the "Beta" tab
3- Enter the password "oldblackwellepiphany"
4- select the beta version "original" from the drop down list.

The game should revert itself back to the old version. If it doesn't, uninstall and reinstall.

Thank you all, and enjoy the game!

-Dave & Janet

+ Small update to hopefully fix a crash people have been experiencing when loading in to tables

Hello all! You might have noticed that Blackwell Deception has been updated (along with all the other Blackwell games) . We have re-compiled the entire game in the newest version of the Adventure Game Studio engine. This means that the game NOW WORKS ON ALL YOUR FANCY NEW MODERN MONITORS. As the game got older, many glitches started appearing. Those should - theoretically - be gone now. We know this update was a long time in coming. Thank you for your patience.

This does have the negative effect of breaking all your original save files. If you would like to revert back to the original version of the game, you need to to the following:

1- Right-click on the game in your Steam library
2- Select "Properties" and go to the "Beta" tab
3- Enter the password "oldblackwelldeception"
4- select the beta version "original" from the drop down list.

The game should revert itself back to the old version. If it doesn't, uninstall and reinstall.

Thank you all, and enjoy the game!

-Dave & Janet