We’ve had a busy month, first preparing then running the second Beta Weekend and now analyzing the results. In this development update, we'll be delving deeper into the test itself, addressing some of the feedback, and sharing the winners of the Beta Weekend Community Contest!

But first, we want to thank all of you who participated in the Beta Weekend, shared their feedback with us, and those who streamed and created Nine to Five content! All of this really helps us identify what to focus on as we continue development. Some of you know, we do listen to the feedback and suggestions and with these monthly development updates we hope to share that process with all of you.

If you are not of the reading type, you can also watch us discuss some of these topics in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9_fvXIKv2Y

With this test, we focused on testing the overall second-to-second gameplay improvements we've implemented since the first Beta Weekend. If you didn't participate in the second Beta Weekend, or if you are unfamiliar with the changes, we highlight some of them in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqRclv6TGQs
Or if you want to see actual gameplay, have a look at our gameplay stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjBCGLDLRMk
Due to its focus and the limited duration of the test, this Beta Weekend didn't have any progression, crafting, daily missions, or other similar features you might expect from a modern online shooter. We've purposely cut them out of this test to focus more on the sec-to-sec gameplay, but we're continuing work on these features. A lot of improvements have been made on these since the last test, and we will be covering them more in upcoming development updates and streams.

Overall, we achieved everything that we wanted with this test. We collected very valuable feedback on the latest changes, and generally you seem to like the direction the game is moving towards. We will continue development as planned, implementing some changes based on the test, and we hope to have you all playing an even better version of the game soon. Even with the general feedback being positive, there were still some topics that were discussed in the community that we would like to address: mainly the Time to Kill and performance in the latest test.

The Time to Kill (TTK) is one of the more significant discussion topics from the Beta Weekend. Since the previous test, we've made a lot of changes to the second-to-second gameplay for example, we rebalanced weapons, improved the ADS, updated visual effects, simplified the armor system, all of which has affected the time-to-kill one way or another.

This led to some conflicting feedback; most players said that the time to kill has certainly improved and feels quite good now, but many consider the enemies to be bullet sponges. While this feedback can partly be attributed to the changes we have done, we do feel a part of it is also influenced by the different perceptions people have of the game.

Our design intent for Nine to Five is to create a team-based shooter experience, where team members can collaborate, strategize and adapt to earn their team a win. Putting it even shorter: think strategy and teamwork rather than twitch reflexes. Nine to Five is not intended to be a hyper-realistic shooter, where opponents get punished with immediate death if they peek out at an inopportune moment, but rather we want to give teams the chance to disengage and reposition themselves if caught in the open.

One more thing that could affect the perception of a long TTK is the fact that our current hit markers do still have some room for improvement. During the tests, we noticed that many players had issues understanding whether their shots were hitting the opponent or just barely missing. We will continue to improve the markers and the telegraphing of shots, hits, and misses as we continue development.

However, it is important to mention that the TTK is still not final, and the feedback will be taken into consideration. It is a tough balancing act of making the game fun for players with different types of expectations, but we will do our best to pull it off!

Quite many of you reached out to us regarding performance and connection issues. Some of these problems were caused by simply missing optimization, and we will address this as we continue development and get closer to release. However, there were some more complex issues as well, and thanks to the data and feedback from the Beta Weekend we will be able to investigate these further and nail them down.

Overall, we are striving for a balance between performance and quality, where players could run the game well on older hardware with some limitations in the graphics, as well as push the visuals or framerates to the moon on high-end machines. We still have some way to go, but we are continuously working on optimization and other performance fixes that should make the game run a lot smoother going forward.

There is still some work ahead of us as we prepare Nine to Five for release. As mentioned earlier, progression and crafting are still being worked on and we will be talking about these more soon. Additionally, based on the feedback and data we received from the test; we have identified the following areas as needing some more love:

• Armor balancing. Reducing the hitpoint values for medium and heavy armor sets.
  
• Item slots. Adjusting the item slots available for each armor set.
  
• New armor sets. Adding new armor sets for the upcoming tests.

• Recoil patterns. Adjusting recoil patterns to be more predictable and easier to control.
  
• Weapon balancing. Rebalancing some weapons from the Beta Weekend, i.e., the Union Foundry SMG aka Tommy Gun.
  
• Sniper glint. Adding a sniper scope glint that allows players to spot a sniper aiming at them.
  
• Bullet 'fly by' communication. Improving the communication of a bullet flying past the character to help players easier recognize where they were shot from and if the enemy is missing their shots.

• Medkits and turrets. Rebalancing medkits and turrets to fit the core gameplay better.
  
• Grenades. Improving the grenade throw trajectory and collisions to make aiming and throwing grenades easier.
  
• Item quantities. Rebalancing item quantities available for the player.

• Grenade indicator. Fixing the grenade indicator making it easier to spot and read and reflect the type of grenade thrown.
  
• Damage indicators. Improving damage indicators and hit direction communication.
  
• Teammate outlines. Adding an option to turn friendly outlines on or off in the settings.
  
• Drone icon. Adding a marker for your drone to avoid mistaking it for an enemy drone.
  
• Friendly markers in scope. Fixing the problem when your teammates weren't marked when looking at them through a scope.

• Occlusion system. Fixing bugs in the occlusion system to get better sound propagation.
  
• Footsteps. Increasing the volume and range for footsteps.
  
• Ladder. Changing the audio asset for ladder climbing and creating additional fall audio assets.

• Collisions. Making a collision troubleshooting for the entire game to find and fix any potential bugs.

• Tutorial. Adding a new tutorial and improving the onboarding to make game modes and gameplay features clearer for new players.

• Keybinds. Creating additional keybind options to allow players to remap and reset their settings.
  
• Sensitivity. Adding more precise sensitivity settings, allowing players to input their desired sensitivity values.

We cannot promise that all these changes will be in the next time that you play the game, but we will surely be working on them!

During the Beta Weekend we ran a contest where we asked players to submit their creations into three categories:

1. Best plays.
   
2. Funny moments.
   
3. Open category. Everything that did not fit the first two categories, goes here (memes, fanart, anything really).

Being big fans of the number three, we naturally selected three winners for each of the three categories.

The competition was tough, but we managed to select nine creators that will receive exclusive Nine to Five merch!

Check this montage featuring all the winners and some of the greatest and funniest moments from the Beta Weekend:

To see the original entries, check our Discord post: Link to Discord

Thanks everyone for your submissions and congratulations to the winners!

That is all we had in store for this update! We will have more news to share with you soon, so stay tuned!

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If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us on any of our Social Media accounts or Discord. We would love to hear your thoughts about the game as well as these development updates.

There’s plenty of work to be done and that always means just one thing: more tests ahead!

All the best and stay safe!

Miloš Jeřábek

Executive Producer of Nine to Five

Conqueror’s Blade is celebrating its second birthday, which means that as well as looking forward to all the great things to come in the near future, we can afford to take some time to reflect on Year Two. We don’t need to remind everyone that it’s been a difficult period in the real world, but it's been heartening for everyone at MY.GAMES and Booming Tech to see the community grow and thrive in Conqueror’s Blade. In return for your unswerving loyalty, we have a whole host of boosts, events and sales in play until June 23. Before we get to detailing those, here's a video dedicated to your efforts over the past few seasons. Thank you for playing Conqueror’s Blade!



Our first anniversary broke towards the end of an extended Season III and with Season VII nearing its conclusion, we’ve managed to effectively squeeze four full seasons into our second year. In that time the game has received over a dozen new and updated units, a whole new region and full language support for our Turkish and Polish communities. That doesn’t quite reflect all that you have achieved, however, so let’s do that now with a sparkly new infographic:



YEAR TWO CELEBRATIONS

Birthday Boost!

We’ll start with an extended in-game boost - a massive 40% increase in Hero XP, Unit XP and Bronze earned from matchmaking battles. In addition, rather than lasting for the duration of the upcoming weekend, this boost will be effective for the entire period of our birthday celebration, until 23:59 CEST on June 23!

• Starts: June 3, after the completion of maintenance
• Ends: June 23, 23:59 CEST
• Boost: +40% boost to Hero XP, Unit XP and Bronze from matchmaking battles

Medal of Birthday Honours!

In addition to XP and Bronze, you will also earn Imperial Medals from matchmaking battles for the full duration of our birthday events. These can then be exchanged for the following items before the end of June 23:



Celebration Sign-in!

Every day that you sign into Conqueror’s Blade during the anniversary period, you can claim extra in-game items, from Hero and Unit XP cards, to Unit Medals, Selection Boxes and a "Tiny Tyrant Seidr Druid" Avatar. You can also start the celebration off early with an entirely appropriate “Drink” Emote - so long as you use it responsibly, of course.

The log-in event can be accessed via the Activities tab by pressing “O”.



Anniversary Assignments!

Being something of a party animal, the Warden has devised a series of daily and weekly birthday quests for you to undertake. If you accept and complete any or all of them in time, the appropriate rewards (including more Imperial Medals) will be yours for the taking!
And the rest: Twitch Drops, Challenges, Sales, Spending Marathon 

• It goes without saying that Twitch Drops will feature as part of the birthday celebrations, with explosive rewards as befitting the celebratory mood and the exclusive new “Life of the Party” title. The event will run from June 4 - 7 and we’ll have all the details very soon.
• You can also claim a free banner and anniversary gift while pursuing all the items that have been discounted in our anniversary sale. Not only is the Minotaur Hero Attire back in stock as part of our special birthday bundles, but we have 40% off many cosmetics and consumables. See what grabs your fancy right here!
• As well as bargain classic attires, we have limited edition new ones like the Seidr Druid Hero Attire and Skogrseidr Unit Attire. Claim them simply by taking part in our Anniversary Attire Challenge - check out what you need to do in this article.
• For those that indulge themselves during our birthday celebrations by spending Sovereigns, we are also giving away Warlord Attire Chests and other bonus items. If you need an excuse to pick up more gold, you’ll find it right here. 

We hope you enjoy and make the most of the Year Two birthday period. At the very least, don’t forget to claim your FREE Year Two Anniversary gifts from MY.GAMES Market and Log-in Event items in-game, and remember that unless otherwise specified, all the anniversary events and offers will be ending at 23:59 CEST on June 23.

Have fun, and thank you for being a part of Conqueror’s Blade!

It wouldn’t be much of a birthday party without a sale, so for our second annual celebration we’re hosting one of our biggest and best yet. Not only do we have a record reduction on some of our most limited edition bundles (which include the much sought after Minotaur Hero attire), we have discounted masses of cosmetic and consumable items by 40%, and created two new artillery bundles - one of which is free! You can also claim a free Year Two banner from MY.GAMES Market! 

MINOTAUR BUNDLES

The Minotaur Hero attire was introduced a year ago as part of our first birthday celebrations and was immediately a hit, in spite of its limited availability. Back once again in the in-game Store and MY.GAMES Market as part of the Labyrinth Guardian Bundle and Fate of Theseus Bundle, we’re happy to say that the iconic armour has been polished up and restocked, with 25% and 45% discount to the respective bundles!



ANNIVERSARY BUNDLES

As well as returning bundles, we have two new ones, the Year Two Anniversary Artillery Bundle and the free-to-claim Year Two Anniversary Gift. Both are available in-game and from MY.GAMES Market, with the Anniversary Gift limited to one per account.
40% OFF COSMETICS AND CONSUMABLES

If you prefer to pick your sale items individually, the following have all been discounted by 40% in-game and via MY.GAMES Market. No Minotaur Hero attire among them, sadly, but you’ll find a whole host of classic hero and unit attires, banners, and weapon skins to choose from, as well as a selection of many must-have consumables. 
30% OFF PREMIUM TIME

Last but not least, for the duration that the returning and new anniversary bundles will remain available and the above discounts applied, there will be a reduction on Premium Time of up to 30%. This will only apply to time acquired via MY.GAMES Market, however.

The Year Two Anniversary Sale is scheduled to end at 23:59 server time on June 23, when the aforementioned bundles will be removed from sale and the banners and discounts can no longer be claimed. 

As well as sales, we have anniversary challenges, events, contests and much more besides. Check out the main Year Two article to ensure you make the most of the ongoing celebrations.

For a limited time during our Year Two anniversary celebrations, we are offering FREE Warlord Attire Chests for spending Sovereigns at the in-game Store. The more Sovereigns you can exchange for in-game items before 23:59 server time on June 23, the more Warlord Attire Chests you will receive. You’ll also receive an anniversary bonus, as detailed below:
As well as the Spending Marathon, we have anniversary sales, challenges, events, contests and much more besides. Check out the main Year Two article to ensure you make the most of the ongoing celebrations.

A number of exciting new Norse-inspired attires have been created especially for our Year Two celebrations. The best part is that there's no need to buy them - they're available for free when you complete a gauntlet of in-game challenges! This includes the mystical Seidr Druid Hero Attire and Mount Set, Skogrseidr Unit Attire, plus a Banner, Emote, and Avatar!



You can check on your progress and claim your rewards from the in-game Activity page when you log in, or by pressing F5. Don’t take too long, as you need to complete any challenges before 23:59 server time on June 23 in order to be able to claim the rewards listed below.

• Complete 5 challenge to receive 1x Unit Banner
• Complete 10 challenge to receive "Praise Nature" Emote
• Complete 15 challenge to receive Skogrseidr Unit Attire
• Complete 20 challenge to receive Seidr Druid Mount Set
• Complete 25 challenge to receive Seidr Druid Hero Attire
• Complete 30 challenge to receive "Skog the Mystic" Avatar

We also have anniversary sales, events, contests and much more going on to celebrate the anniversary of Conqueror's Blade. Check out the main Year Two article to ensure you make the most of the ongoing celebrations.

Thanks for looking in. This message is to make it easier to navigate the Glyph community. I'm thinking that since you own the (now delisted) VR version of our game, you'd be interested to know what's going on at the moment with Glyph.

And also to ask you to consider signing up for the PC demo of said game. It'll be released in connection with the Steam NEXT Festival later this month. If you own a Switch console, you can check it out today on the eShop!

Of course, we'd love to see you on our community Discord server as well. It's chill there, and you can usually get hold of a developer or the CEO/janitor or a marketing person - i.e., me.

Thank you! I hope to see you around the Glyph universe. /Rasmus


CLICK HERE TO:

Wishlist Glyph

Sign-up for the DEMO

Join our Steam group

Join our Glyph Discord Community

Visit the PlayGlyph website

• HOURS UPON HOURS OF FUN
  
• 80+ levels of Exploration mode. This means players have to put seriously relaxing efforts into the game before seeing it all.
  
• 30 blazing hot levels to put your skills to the stress test in Time Trial mode.
  
• 100+ secrets and upgrades. These are all part of the game from the beginning. With Glyph, you won’t have to pay for extra skins or cool unlocks.
  
• A classic and wicked mean final boss...

Wishlists are important for new releases, so that's why I'm saying it all the time and asking you to wishlist the full game... Wishlist. Wishlist. Wishlist. :) That word just glides right off the tongue.











Straight to the store page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1569150/Glyph/

Welcome to the first Live Dev hosted by Jakub Cisło. Find out about the story so far and peek behind the curtain in the appropriately titles "The Road to Project Warlock II". Tune in at 10:00 PT / 13:00 ET / 19:00 CET

Spearheading the Mechanoid Invasion, The Integrator is the single most powerful enemy boss of an Invasion and it requires teamwork, tenacity, and tremendous strength to defeat. The Integrator has arrived on Aelion in two forms: Training and Champion. The Training Avatar is for beginners and those new to Godhood. It is adapted for groups of five characters and will definitely prepare you to eventually face the Champion Avatar.



Potential drops you’ll receive can be found on the Adventure card before you queue for or enter an Adventure.

Avatar Trophies gained from Training Avatars can be used to develop your Halls in the Temple of Deeds. This is where you’ll find and be able to unlock divine specializations for your character, which are different paths and skill trees you can choose to explore as a junior god.

The Integrator is deadly and has a number of different attacks, from dangerous AoE (area of effect) bombardments to individual attacks on party members that require the rest of the team to help out. Once the Avatar has been damaged significantly and is around half of its health, smaller bosses will begin to attack you as well. It is worth noting that killing these bosses will cause the Integrator’s attacks to hit much harder, so you and your team will need to pick your poison.



When the Integrator is badly hurt, a self-destruct countdown will begin. You can imagine what will happen if the timer runs out!

After spending the last 4 weeks in beta, v2.2.2 is now live for all players.

Thank you to everybody who took part in the beta and provided feedback. I'm thrilled to hear so many of you are enjoying a boost in performance!

Below is a copy-paste of the original announcement posted when the beta was launched, for anybody that missed it. All these changes are now live for all players.

This update is all about building a foundation upon which Megaquarium can continue to grow. After the launch of the remarkably popular DLC, Freshwater Frenzy, last year and the continued success of the game's Steam Workshop, it became clear to me that some parts of the game needed a significant overhaul if the game was going to be able to continue to grow.

The major feature this update is a big performance boost which should allow every player out there to build bigger aquariums and enjoy a smoother framerate while they do it.

The exact improvement you will experience will depend on your specific hardware, but I'm expecting most players to see a 50-100% boost in average FPS.

This has been achieved by a complete rewrite of the game's rendering engine. Almost every object in the game (including modded objects, more details below) are now integrated into my own specialised rendering pipeline. This pipeline takes advantage of direct memory manipulations to get the vast arrays of mesh data from where they are stored to where they need to be, in record time. In addition, much of the per-vertex computation (offset, rotation, scaling and animation blending) has been shifted onto the GPU to lesson the load on the CPU.

If that weren't enough, I've introduced an experimental feature called 'Multithreaded rendering'. This feature is designed for players with CPUs with at least 4 physical cores. In this case, 3rd and 4th cores will be used to do rendering calculations, freeing up even more headspace for the main two cores. The trade-off is that this feature may cause a slight animation delay, especially on less powerful PCs. If you try it out, let me know what you think.

Believe it or not, there is still further optimisation to be done - especially around pathfinding and memory allocations. But I decided to leave these for a future update so that you, the players, could start enjoying this one!

The secondary feature of this update is a redesign of much of the game's UI to devote maximum space to text and maintain a minimum text size wherever possible. This was made a priority after several players came forward complaining of having difficulty reading the text in some areas of the game, especially on lower resolutions.

Check out the following before and after screenshots to get a feel for the impact of these changes.





The effects are most noticeable if you open the two images in two separate tabs and flick between them. I hope you'll agree that the changes are significant and make a big difference to the ease of reading all those complicated tank stats!

In some places, where the text is too long to display in full, the text is truncated and an ellipses (...) is added. Most of the time, the full text can be seen via a tooltip when hovering over the text.

Finally, a small feature that has been requested several times over the years: there is now a setting which makes the per object count in the build menu visible at all times without needing to hover over it.

Like the performance boost, these improvements are about getting the foundations of the game into a great place so it can continue to grow.


The perceptive among you will notice that I keep alluding to the idea of the game "growing" in this post.

I think it's finally time to announce that new content is indeed in the works. I'm tremendously excited about it and can't wait to start sharing the details with you, but that will have to wait for another time.

A big thank you to everyone who's been waiting so patiently. ːsteamhappyː

I've worked hard to try to make the optimisations included in this update as compatible with mods as possible. With that in mind, mods are now automatically assigned a "voCollection" on load to enable them to integrate with the custom rendering pipeline.

This means that mods should now run roughly as fast as vanilla objects!*

*Models will still run slower the more meshes and vertices there are, so try to keep these to a minimum where possible.

In my testing of over 30 of the most popular mods, I didn't find a single mod that failed to work with the update installed.

However, I did discover some mods which are "incompatible" with the optimisations. These mods continue to work but could cause the game to run slow, so they are marked with an 'unoptimised' icon in the Mod Manager.

Thankfully this should be easily remedied. Currently the only cause of incompatibility is the use of multiple materials within a single mesh. To make a model compatible, the modder needs to divide meshes up so that each one only has a single material.

Additional sources of incompatibility may be discovered, so please check the game's log file and the mod's info panel for issues with specific mods.

If you spot any issues with any particular mods while playing with the new update, then please let me know via the Megaquarium Workshop Forums and I will see if I can solve the issue.

The changelogs associated with this update can be found here:
v2.2.0
v2.2.1
v2.2.2

This is going to be a pretty short devlog. :D

We want to announce that we have finished the versions of Nintendo Switch, Ps4 and Xbox One and that we are currently working on fixing some minor bugs and taking them to the different stores of each platform.

Now we just have to wait for the different stores to give us the approval or in the case that there is a problem, solve it as soon as possible.


When this process is finished we will be able to give a more specific launch date.

We remind you that the launch will be simultaneous on all platforms. (PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One)



We want to inform you that we have recently added the Polish language and we plan to add some more in the future.


As an additional note we also want to inform you that the French translation has given us some problems, but we are optimistic and we believe that it will be available at launch.


About the closed beta:
We have a closed beta in mind in July. All those who have the closed beta option in your rewards will receive an email with more information.


Those of you who do not have access to beta in your reward can sign up here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc4whFzVYyisZfimXy3NwZpso9OIwlXf9kuXGs57tPaNcTqeQ/viewform