Hello everyone!

The time has come to talk about Operation 7 – Drop 2! This post will cover everything you can expect to see when the operation goes live on Tuesday, June 29.


Before you dive into the full post, check out the Operation 7 – Drop 2 trailer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWl5KVy2_Ns





Jasi Tak is an expert pilot whose laid-back attitude belies a fearless spirit. When Colonel Hoffman requested Tak's help, he was eager to give his all to help Scorpio Squad in their fight against the Swarm.


The COG Commandos are elite special forces soldiers who went from fighting humans in the Pendulum Wars to fighting Locust after E-Day. They take whatever the enemy throws at them in stride – these soldiers are the best of the best, and they know it.





After decades of rest, Mercy's town center is once again under siege. A large balcony in the center dominates combat around the sanctuary, where outmaneuvering the enemy is key to victory.




Outmanoeuvring the enemy is key to victory in Mercy's claustrophobic Sanctuary.




To kick off Operation 7 – Drop 2 we are going to be introducing a new mode to Versus: Capture the Flag.

In Gears 5, Capture the Flag is a variation of Gridiron, with the following changes.

• Players now respawn after being killed.
  
• Elimination victories are disabled.
  
• Touchdowns are now worth 4 points (previously 2).
  
• Touchbacks are enabled – taking your flag to your own Endzone returns it to the center of the map.
  
• The Endzone capture counter no longer decays after a flag capture is interrupted, allowing you to chip away at the capture time.
  
• The flag spawn delay has been removed.
  
• The Round time has been increased.

Additionally, we have a special medal group for this event, details below:


Should you complete the medal group you'll be granted the Pink Phantom Weapon Set!

We cannot wait to see what you all think when this mode launches at the start of Drop 2!




At the start of Operation 7, we released updates to Custom Versus that brought in special mutators and visual effects! We have seen how much you have enjoyed the variations since then and we are happy to tell you about the following updates!


This option allows you to swap all weapons on the map and players loadout to any single weapon in the game, including event weapons like the Golden Gun or Cluckshot. This allows you to live your dream and have a match where everyone uses the pipe!


This mutator is now available in Custom Versus, all damage is converted into freeze damage, and dealing enough damage will provide your enemy a frosty death.


This option will allow you to enable many of our past holiday/special event hats in your Custom Versus matches.


We have also added the following modes to Custom, Brawl, and Control: SSG (Shotgun Snub Grenades).


We have used this update as an opportunity to make the following changes to Co-Op vs AI.

• We have updated the matchmaking criteria to make latency searching in Co-Op vs AI more reliable.
  
• We have swapped Brawl and Control in place of TDM and KoTH in our Co-Op vs AI playlists.

In addition to all the above, we will also be bolstering our competitive rewards for our top players!

If you happen to finish in the top 100 at the end of a season, you will be provided with the following rewards:













And if you are the cream of the crop and finish at the very top of a competitive leaderboard, you'll receive the prestigious Golden Gnasher Bloodspray.

These rewards will be available each competitive season going forward in Gears 5.


We're starting things off for PvE in Operation 7 – – Drop 2 with a new event!


Horde Mania is an event with fast, intense waves and an extremely short build time. Your team will feel the pressure of near constant action across 25 waves. All the maps will be in rotation during this event, and we can't wait to see just how messy this will get!

Alongside the event, drop 2 also brings with it more balance changes across PvE in Gears 5.

• Changed the behavior of the Super Charged mutator from "reduced ultimate cooldown" to "reduced cooldown while doing damage" to resolve an exploit with Jack's ultimate.
  
• Reduced the amount of freezing damage dealt from the "Freezing Grenadiers" mutator.
  
• Reduced the damage resistance of the "Heads Up" mutator on boss creatures.
  
• Fixed an issue where Palace Guards and Flame Grenadiers could not be stunned or affected by Fear.
  
• Fixed an issue where Palace Guards and Flame Grenadiers would regenerate health even if "Enemy Regeneration" was not an active mutator.

• Fixed an issue where flying enemies would get stuck inside interior spaces on Bunker.
  
• Fixed an issue where the wave would not end if all players went DBNO if a Palace Guard or Flame Grenadier was present.
  
• Rebuilding the Fabricator will now correctly remove 4000 power.
  
• Added the Smoke Grenade to the Fabricator.
  
• Grenades will no longer trigger the effects of The Hammer, Armored Shot and Serrated Edge.

• Passive will now correctly penetrate enemy targets.

• Slugger's "Power Shot" Skill Card will now correctly penetrate enemy targets.
  
• The damage bonus from Slugger's "Power Shot" Skill Card will no longer be lost while using Heavy Hitter.
  
• Slugger's "Tough Skin" Skill Card now correctly gives resistance to ballistic weapons only.

Operation 7 Drop 2 releases on June 29, and we are looking forward to it! See you there! In the meantime, have a wonderful week everyone, and watch our socials for more.
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Hi guys,
We want to let you know that we have finished developing Project Nightmares. We are testing the game.
As we are happy to have finished the game, this year we have decided to participate in the Steam summer sale.

Stats
The graph below shows the number of bugs found, ranked by priority, versus solved bugs.


Coming soon...


Translations
We are exchanging keys for translations. We need Japanese, Chinese and more!
If you know someone who can help us with the translation, we will also give you a key once the translation is finished by your friend, who will also receive copies of the game.
Send an email to contact@projectnightmares.net
https://steamcommunity.com/games/projectnightmares/announcements/detail/2986424032095324491

Follow us: https://www.instagram.com/projectnightmares/

Please read the following post: https://steamcommunity.com/games/projectnightmares/announcements/detail/1724202719262895003

CoW Stalingrad is evolving fast and some of its features will be added to CoW Barbarossa


This may not succeed however :

Generals were constantly asking for reinforcements and those had to be taken from other Army groups whose general would fight not to let their assets go...

You can now too play this petty games.
Click on your Fronts or Army Groups : you will see a new HQ icon along your armies. This icon gives you access to new actions :
- Ask for more trucks
- Ask for more reserves
- Ask for more aircrafts

If playing as the Axis, you ma be offered the possibility to activate Army Group Crimea if it isn't active.

This new transfer feature has been playested in the previous days and seems to work fine. I hope you will enjoy it.


-Turkey can now directly besiege Batumi
-Giant Pockets have been added to the western part of the Caucasus
-A new Axis event have been added in the case the Army Group Center destroys all the soviets units in Rhzev or Orel.
(Some of these features have been added since a week or two , but they are now well tested and debugged, so they make it to the "official patch")


In the menu, I've added a "bug report" button : this feature will greatly facilitate my bug hunt.

Here is a list of some of the recently killed bugs:

-Some Buggy operations have been fixed : Narva, Kharkov, The Caucasus Giant Pockets
-You now really score points as the Soviet for taking Kharkov
-If you send aircrafts to "briefly" help Model, you won't lose them next turn.
-You no longer spend 2 Command points to fight partisans in cleaning operations.

Many other minor bugs have fallen, but I just keep track of the "Star Bugs".



Still in progress...
I am testing a lot of ideas... and discard a lot of them.
But I am starting to get satisfied.

Have fun!

Maestro Cinetik

If you still have the DLCs selected then it may cause an issue. You can right click in your steam library on Pumpkin farmer and go down to DLCs and uncheck the DLC's boxes and it should work. If not then please send a bug report and we can work on the issues together.

Good afternoon Wizards!

We are very close to the full release of Rift Wizard. Full launch is a very exciting event for me. It is the culmination of many years of work, and an opportunity to showcase the game to a much broader audience.

This will not be the final release- I intend to keep making balance updates and adding new content, and perhaps someday even a DLC or expansion if I can generate enough interest.

The significance of this launch:
1) I'll be calling the game 'released' instead of 'in development'. Early Access will no longer be an acceptable excuse for bugs, polish problems, ect.
2) Many people wait for games to enter full release to play them.
3) Steam visibility of released games is higher than that of early access games. Their visbility algorithms are not public, but the anecdotal evidence I've heard from other devs, is that they got big increases in store traffic at launch.

Meaning, many people's first experience with Rift Wizard will be this next build.

So lets take a look at the updated road map:



Bad news before good: two things I will no be doing for launch, which I have in the past talked about doing before launch:

Not happening change number 1: localization. Before I had looked into this, I had really wanted to do it. It seemed like a no-brainer back when I wrote the first roadmap.

But the more I prepared for this, the more obstacles I saw.

First of all, this is a very big technical undertaking. All of the pieces of the game which display text have to be touched- there are alot of these. Places where the text is generated rather than static require individual attention and thought to become language agnostic. I would guess that 1-2 months of development time would be required for this, and it might drag out longer.

I can envision a world where I spend weeks or months fixing UI bugs that only appear in Chinese, doing a generally poor job arranging text whose meaning is completely opaque to me. Or a world where there are players asking for tech support, or giving important gameplay feedback... in languages I do not speak. Or a world where I break things in embarrassing and obvious ways in the versions of the game that I do not play and understand. The common thread here is, I do not want to maintain versions of the game different from the one I normally play- there are too many ways to get into trouble here.

Not happening change number 2: spell acquisition. I recently tried an experiment with making spell acquisition more strict- specifically, in the beta branch, a circle is required for buying spells/skills/upgrades.

This has some cool features, and it was interesting (for me at-least) to play this version of the game and see some very new builds.

But it also has many drawbacks, and conflicts with various design choices made around the game being the way it is currently.

Equally importantly, the feedback around this change was almost universally negative.

So I won't be pursuing this change any further- full launch RW will involve the same spell acquisition system the game uses now, that is, buying any spell at any time with potential discounts on circles. This is difficult for new players, and also difficult for me to balance. Despite this difficulty, the game is good.

Keeping the game good while removing this flaw *might not be possible*. No design is perfect, and stepping back for a minute, I'm pretty happy with the quality of RW's current design.

My one request to the community is this: please make build guides and post them on steam. This is a game where guides can be very helpful to new players. I remember trying to learn Dominions 4- a game of similar, or perhaps even greater complexity than RW- and the moment it clicked for me was the moment I read a really in depth guide to playing EA Kailasa.

Anyways, onto what I *will* be doing:

1) Bugs, UI issues.

In the past, I've been willing to accept a large degree of unpolishedness, as the game was in a much higher state of mechanical flux. Now that the games mechanics are largely nailed down, and now that I would like to move the game out of early access, fixing these becomes important. In fact, its the most important thing- I suspect that clicking the 'final release' button in steamworks will result in a large influx of new eyes on the game, and these new eyes will notice bugs and UI weirdness before anything else.

Some potential examples:
- Making potions different from other consumables and preventing them from changing hotkeys
- Making player stun more obvious
- Targeting UI changes
- Displaying a better error message when trying to load incompatible saves
- In game Bestiary for viewing known monsters

2) Shrine Variety and Balance

Shrines are awesome. Right now though, I do feel like the number of useful shrines is a bit lower than what I would like. We all know that slimeform + boon shrine is amazing- but does anyone care about Otherworldly shrine?

I've been putting off making shrine changes since the high number of interactions between shrines and spells makes balancing and debugging them pretty hard- but it would be cool if at launch all the shrines were useful on at least one spell, and players continued to encounter new and interesting shrines for many of their playthroughs.

3) Lategame boss Variety and Balance

Many of the lategame bosses- Ygdrassil and Fallen Angel for example- were thrown into the game 12 months ago and have not been touched since. I've learned a great deal about what makes a good enemy since then, and its worth revisiting some of this stuff a bit.

4) Consumable Variety and Balance

Again, consumables have been untouched for a long time.

There are some consumables that I love- the weird power spike and decision making of dragon horn, the 2nd chance defense of golden stopwatch and teleporter.

There are some that aren't so useful- the shields in particular, could be revisited.

There are also some ideas I have for consumables that I would like to explore. I would like to make weird rare consumables a thing. An orb that does a Mordred style corruption on a 5 tile radius for example, would be pretty cool.

5) Overall Game Balance

I don't want to make too many changes to spells and upgrades, or add too many new ones this patch. There is plenty of content in the game for full launch already, in fact, the amount is overwhelming.

What I *would* like to do, is make sure each spell/upgrade has a reason for existing, and adjust spells/upgrades which are so generally useful and powerful that they prevent other spells/upgrades from being interesting.

Mostly this will just be about adjusting SP costs, damage numbers, ect- but this may involve some more basic reworks of how spells work, or new upgrades to make them scale better lategame.

Additionally, there is one more big mechanical change I am currently testing on the beta branch: the removal of 2-level scouting. This mechanic is fun and interesting, but also makes it easy for the player to avoid hard content and grab all the optimal loot. This has, obviously, a big impact on game balance.

How long will all of this take? This is more bullet points that usual, but they are all a bit smaller than usual.

I am guessing 2-3 months, but the objective is more important than the schedule here.

If there is anything else you think the game sorely needs before it is released to a wider audience, feel free to let me know, either in comments here (which I read every so often) or better yet on the discord (which I read daily).

-Dylan

This may not succeed however :

Generals were constantly asking for reinforcements and those had to be taken from other Army groups whose general would fight not to let their assets go...

You can now too play this petty games.
Click on your Fronts or Army Groups : you will see a new HQ icon along your armies. This icon gives you access to new actions :
- Ask for more trucks
- Ask for more reserves
- Ask for more aircrafts

If playing as the Axis, you ma be offered the possibility to activate Army Group Crimea if it isn't active.

This new transfer feature has been playested in the previous days and seems to work fine. I hope you will enjoy it.


-Turkey can now directly besiege Batumi
-Giant Pockets have been added to the western part of the Caucasus
-A new Axis event have been added in the case the Army Group Center destroys all the soviets units in Rhzev or Orel.
(Some of these features have been added since a week or two , but they are now well tested and debugged, so they make it to the "official patch")


In the menu, I've added a "bug report" button : this feature will greatly facilitate my bug hunt.

Here is a list of some of the recently killed bugs:

-Some Buggy operations have been fixed : Narva, Kharkov, The Caucasus Giant Pockets
-You now really score points as the Soviet for taking Kharkov
-If you send aircrafts to "briefly" help Model, you won't lose them next turn.
-You no longer spend 2 Command points to fight partisans in cleaning operations.

Many other minor bugs have fallen, but I just keep track of the "Star Bugs".



Still in progress...
I am testing a lot of ideas... and discard a lot of them.
But I am starting to get satisfied.

Have fun!

Maestro Cinetik

Devblog 2021.06.23



Hello everyone, here is the latest dev blog! Come check on what the team has been working on.

-----

Contagion

Available here:

https://www.monochrome-games.com/product/contagion-steam-activation-key/



#TeamJohan

Added “Money Bank” system into Flatline: if the player disconnects, and the map has not changed, they will still keep their money. Added “mini bosses” into Flatline, The Carrier being the first.

I also fixed where the game would fail to load particles properly, causing the game to crash. The flamethrower’s friendly fire damage has also been fixed.


-----

HeadCount
Available here:

https://www.monochrome-games.com/product/headcount/



#TeamLawrence

This week I finished the vehicle base, and am working on an epic boss fight to end the new campaign we will be releasing soon.





#TeamAlex

I’ve been hooking up the audio content Brian has been cooking up to their actors and setting up their animations and stuff. Here’s a preview of something new:







#TeamBrian

Finished up audio on Bombers (Flight, Dive, Siren, Fire, Bomb Drop, Impacts, and Explosions) and the APC (Engine Start, Idle, Fire, and Impacts) and am continuing work on our Modern City level design.

I promised some really cool screenshots a few weeks ago so come check this out. Blocked out level to the more completed and detailed level below. Make sure to watch the whole thing.

https://gyazo.com/036c5bfd733595a89a2841e5ad5fdb39

-----

And that’s it for this Dev blog, come join us on #FreeKeyFridays on our Twitch channel for a chance to win a key for Contagion or Contagion VR: Outbreak.

Twitch.tv/MonochromeGames

Also, join us on our discord, where we are the most active and you can even get sneak peeks!


Discord.gg/Monochrome

Devblog 2021.06.23



Hello everyone, here is the latest dev blog! Come check on what the team has been working on.

-----

Contagion

Available here:

https://www.monochrome-games.com/product/contagion-steam-activation-key/



#TeamJohan

Added “Money Bank” system into Flatline: if the player disconnects, and the map has not changed, they will still keep their money. Added “mini bosses” into Flatline, The Carrier being the first.

I also fixed where the game would fail to load particles properly, causing the game to crash. The flamethrower’s friendly fire damage has also been fixed.


-----

HeadCount
Available here:

https://www.monochrome-games.com/product/headcount/



#TeamLawrence

This week I finished the vehicle base, and am working on an epic boss fight to end the new campaign we will be releasing soon.





#TeamAlex

I’ve been hooking up the audio content Brian has been cooking up to their actors and setting up their animations and stuff. Here’s a preview of something new:







#TeamBrian

Finished up audio on Bombers (Flight, Dive, Siren, Fire, Bomb Drop, Impacts, and Explosions) and the APC (Engine Start, Idle, Fire, and Impacts) and am continuing work on our Modern City level design.

I promised some really cool screenshots a few weeks ago so come check this out. Blocked out level to the more completed and detailed level below. Make sure to watch the whole thing.

https://gyazo.com/036c5bfd733595a89a2841e5ad5fdb39

-----

And that’s it for this Dev blog, come join us on #FreeKeyFridays on our Twitch channel for a chance to win a key for Contagion or Contagion VR: Outbreak.

Twitch.tv/MonochromeGames

Also, join us on our discord, where we are the most active and you can even get sneak peeks!


Discord.gg/Monochrome

Over the years, Xsyon's primary audience has switched from players familiar with the MMOs of the past to a newer audience accustomed to the sandbox survival games of the present.

Accordingly, I am working on revising the interface and basic actions to accommodate and be more welcoming to new players. Most interface revisions will be optional and customizable to adapt to new player but keep things as is for veteran players of the game.

Today's patch is the first in a series that will continue to include improvements based on player suggestions. This patch includes:

- New Crafting Panel
-- Panel automatically displays all materials currently available in the player's packs for the active scheme. Players no longer have to search through their packs for tools and materials.
-- The currently selected scheme displays the final bonuses an object will receive based on the input tools and materials. This allows players to know exactly what their results will be before they craft an object.

- Top Menu Option
-- This option, available in the Options panel and set as the default for new players displays interaction buttons for a currently selected building, item, creature or player at the top of the screen without requiring the player to right click to select an action. All actions available are displayed and available until the player deselects the currently selected object.
-- For players that prefer the older right click menu, this legacy option is still available.

- Active Mode Interactions
-- Pressing and holding E while in combat mode (now called Active Mode) selects an object and displays options for interacting with the selected object. (Previously, players could interact with objects only in Passive non combat mode)

- Pressing the Escape Key deselects the currently selected object.
- Pressing the Escape Key without an object selected opens or closes the Exit / Logout Panel.
- Animations removed for some quick actions including opening containers, settings permissions and settings locks.
- Releasing left click when both right and left buttons are held down (used for movement) won’t deselect a currently selected object.
- Using a cart auto closes the cart and open cart containers.
- Hot keys available for Pet Commands. These keys can be set in the Keybinds Panel.
- Hot keys available for opening and closing packs. These keys can be set in the Keybinds Panel.
- The turn commands (previously assigned to Q and E) have been removed as they are not necessary and not typically used.
- Crafting and interaction commands revised on the server for improved speed and functionality.

To report problems with this patch or provide suggestions for upcoming patches, please join us on the Developer Zone on the Xsyon website.

Enjoy!

Online Multiplayer has been added! You can now race with humans over the internet in a straight race!

-Added Online Multiplayer!
-Can join an existing room, or create a new room
-Host decides which stage to race, as well as settings
-Host and clients can pick their own team selection, selection is of the AI teams
-Added different game modes, now has Race and Team Race, more to be added!
-Human players are now spawned in completely dynamically depending on player choices and session settings
-All RaceUI now accomodates more than one human player
-Entire GAME now accomodates more than one human player
-AI can now fire on their team mates when not a team based game
-Re-worked targeting model for deployables regarding allegiance
-Re-worked how AI pilots are stored when used single player, multiplayer and on team and non-team games
-Completely re-built how a scene is built and managed, event based system and scalable
-Re-worked all UI for all new changes for existing menus such as Custom Race
-Fixed menu clunkiness in Custom Race
-Fixed a bug where it would attempt to load multiple save files when now only using one on Title Menu
-Fixed not disabling vibration when finishing a race when AI took over player control
-Added option to hide or include obstacles and destructibles in race
-Changed 'Race' buttons to reflect new UI behaviour