We're back with the 3rd and final installment of Willow's 3-part conversation!
By now you’re probably aware that Willow “enjoys” her job in a way most people don’t. In fact, she’s been enjoying it more and more since the two of you started talking. Maybe even too much…
Okay, let’s be blunt. The poor girl is chronically hot-and-bothered. There isn't enough soap in the world to clean up her thoughts. She wants you. She needs you. Seriously, why don’t you just walk across your mansion and meet up with her already!?
Ahh, right, video game logic...
Well, maybe one day you’ll find your way to Willow’s section of the house. Until then, we hope you enjoy the rest of your chat!
We all know that controller support is a feature on Steam. But when I tried to include controller support into my game, the whole thing fell apart...
I don't understand how this happened, but it might increase the release date by the maximum of a year. (Don't worry. I'm fine. ːsteamthumbsupː) Basically, I am able to play the game through the IDE of GameMaker Studio 2, but the only problem is that I can't export it. So if I didn't notice this when I did and continued working on it, it wouldn't work on launch day! Eek! The stress! But also the relief... I mean, what is the chance that I would have seen that happen? 17%?
I think I needed that... I was getting a little off-schedule, so my game decided to give my a motivational punch. I think my game took it too far. I really don't know. I'm very scared that this will happen again. It seemed to happen out of nowhere. This will be really bad if I finish the 2nd dungeon of the game. If that... you know, DOES happen... hehahasoIHSDOPWhduiqywfnIYD"GOIDGOUYWGOIGYUWGWOIWG! ( I'll go insane.)
Anyways, I hope everyone ELSE is doing well. If you want to make a game in 2021... DON'T. But I'm determined to release this to Steam... even if I'm 3 years late! Good luck to you all! See ya!
We continue filling the Ancient Valley with multitudes of precious resources, interesting places, challenges and secrets. This time we also added more Cursed camps, and made their dwellers stronger.
If you venture deeper into the Ancient Valley, you will notice that once beautiful forests now succumbed to the curse: their trees' needles became crimson, and trunks - overgrown with swollen purple boils. The air reeks of corruption and despair. Travelers should beware not only of the degrading atmosphere, but also of the land's cursed guardians.
Meet the Ghosts
Ghosts of Arkana's past denizens hount the Ancient Valley's abandonned houses. And, truth be told, hospitality isn't their strong suit. But don't give up on looting the houses just yet - their new owners only appear at night, and don't present any threat during the day. Just keep in mind the time you have till the sun sets.
Mystical Cubes
There've been reports of mystical cubes appearing all over the Ancient Valley. Noone has managed to pinpoint when and where they appear, so noone can predict their placement just yet. All that is known is that they always emmit a golden beam up to the sky, making them quite easy to find.
Skill Tree
Picking your Ancestry in the Skill Tree is an important step in your character's development, as it unlocks one of the five skill paths, with their unique advantages in attributes and abilities.
E.g, a character with Rogue Ancestry will be able to throw spears with great accuracy, while one with Warrior Ancesty will be able to perform a special attack with Greataxes.
In this Update you'll also find new skill paths for Exlorer and Artisan Ancestries.
Even More Spells
We've introduced three new spells to the game: "Stone Skin" will reduce the damage you take, "Slowness" will, unsurprisingly, slow down your enemies, while "Chain Lightning" will damage several opponents. In addition, you can now target your allies with non-damaging spells!
Barrier of Chronos
The magic barrier that protects players in the Cradle of Keepers is now completely impassible. Yup, that's it.
Recipes' Effects Clarity
Until now to learn which effects the dish would give you on consumption you had to, well, eat it. Now you can view all the dishes' effects in their desctiptions, to have more understanding of how much and which kind of food you need to bring to your journey.
Experimental Changes
Here's the first batch of experimental batches, fate of which depends on your feedback:
Fall damage reduced by 50%.
Added animation to indicate that the fall will result in damage.
Nights became brighter.
Cooked food now restores HP.
We highly appreciate your opinions. Please make us know if you like these changes, or should they be adjusted later on.
Other Changes
Gameplay
Teleport is now assigned to the fourth quick-slot by default.
Challenges' text can now be re-read.
Titans gained a ranged attack.
Increased the time period during which you can claim rewards in Elite Cursed camps.
Increased the aggro range of Titans.
Reduced the difficulty of Cursed Chieftains' camps in Cradle of Keepers.
Map
Visual improvements to Ancient Valley's waterfall.
Visual improvements to Skull Hunter's camp in Cradle of Keepers.
Reduced the number and increased the distance between boars in their spawn areas.
UI
You can now assign any usable items to quick-slots.
Reworked the blood effects appearing when player suffers damage.
Unknown recipes are now hidden during cooking.
Added markings to Cooking Book recipes that you can't currently prepare.
Updated spells' reticle.
Sounds
Fixed cooking sounds.
Added new sound for learning cooking recipe.
Other
New visual effects and animations for teleportation and viewing crafting recipes.
Visual fixes for the "Ice Spike" spell.
Fixes for Prologue level design.
Fixes
You will no longer hear other players opening chests that you've already opened.
Titan shouldn't disappear anymore.
Changed colour of water splashes for "Water Walking" spell.
Smoldering Warlock's AoE attack now properly applies damage.
We look forward to seeing you in the world of Arkana!
1.3 will be updating a few tracks to bring them up to spec with the rest of the roster. The first of these is Metro, which is the focus of this update. We also have some news regarding the game's switch port, which you can find below the beta release information.
About
Joining the beta
Right click BallisticNG in your steam library and go to Properties
Go to the betas tab on the window that opens
From the dropdown select Beta. If the update doesn't automatically queue for download, restart Steam
What is the beta? For 1.3 we're developing and implementing new modding tools and features, some of which will be part of the upcoming Switch version of the game. We're releasing beta builds for each new feature we add so the community gets to play around with them early.
What's changed for beta 4?
Metro ended up being a frustrating track to play primarily due to the long, thin tunnels that demanded an almost impossible racing line on higher speed classes. This updates overhauls the tracks scenery to fix that issue and give it a much needed makeover, opening it up more and better integrating into into Vega City.
Thanks to Kabelsalat and Brobama for the super cool Scorpio construction vehicles!
It's been a little bit since we initially revealed that we were developing a Switch version of BallisticNG. We've had time to get the game up and running and figure out what we need to do, and we're ready to give some more details on the port.
We're targeting 60fps in singleplayer and online with support to up to 8 AI. Online will support 16 players with up to 8 lobby slots being available to AI.
We're currently targeting 30fps in splitscreen, however we are looking for opportunities to further optimise to potentially get it going at 60fps.
The game will run at 1080p when docked. The framerate targets above are for when the console is both undocked and docked.
The game will have a battery saving mode which will cap the FPS to 30 across the board.
Excluding the CRT filter, all retro effects will be available as options.
The upcoming Layout Creator 3 and in-game campaign editor will be part of the port and cross compatible with PC. We'll be looking at services in the future to enable this, probably Mod.IO.
Custom ships and tracks made for PC may potentially be playable on the Switch using the same service for hosting mods made in the internal game tools. There will be numerous llimitations and workflow requirements for this to work though, but we can talk about those at a later date if we get PC mods up and running.
Online will not be cross platform with PC, however if sales provide the budget to get platform agnostic matchmaking servers setup and maintained we will implement it. Remember to tell your friends about the game ;)
We have a few tracks, such as Basin, which we need to optimise to hit 60fps on the system. These optimisations will also be on PC and part of the ongoing 1.3 Beta.
Please note that we still do not have a release window. We have a lot to get through with new features, content updates and new content with the Maceno Island expansion, so all we can say at this stage is it'll be a while.
What we're currently working on is getting the fundamental engine changes out of the way first. As this work is being done alongside new content and new tool development it's taking time, however once it's out of the way further progress on the port should be much faster.
As many of you know its our goal to get back on track to developing the Year 2 content but as it stands we are curious which of these perceived issues are the most pressing to you our community.
This is where all the patch notes are supposed to go but I'm kinda waiting for the Summer Sale to be over before putting up a big announcement, otherwise who's gonna read it?
But yeah, Hatch and Slash. Once you reach level 5 and crush enough bosses you'll find a Mysterious Egg that'll get the ball rolling. You'll have the option of being followed around by a brave Battle Poultry who helps you crush monsters and get loots. They'll even pick up coins.
Monsters sometimes drop steaks made of themselves, feed those steaks to the bird and the bird grows accordingly. Steaks change different values (it's in the item card, I promise) and sometimes teach your pet a power that they use on their own. The banner one is pretty good.
I also nerfed one of the Dread Spire bosses, buffed Trigers, and made Real Armor a little tougher. Again, real patch notes later.
After a few months we’re back with a new devlog! Our team has been hard at work further polishing the mechanics, as well as slowly shaping up the environment of the game.
In Soyuz Constructors, you’ll be spending hours in the vast hangar. gathering materials and building various rocket parts according to instructions. It was essential to craft your work environment with proper care, while paying attention to details. The process required gathering as many resources and references as we possibly could, and then creating designs based on them.
Today, we’d like to show you some results of our work. 🙂
Let’s start big – here is the aforementioned hangar. It’s big enough to fit in a few big rockets, so you can work comfortably without worrying about lack of space.
Of course, as great as it would be to know everything about rocket building right off the bat, many of us have yet to learn the ropes. You’ll receive all the help you need in the form of blueprints. These detailed drawings will tell you all you need to know regarding the engines you’ll have to build.
Blueprints can be placed on a drafting table, where you can take a closer look at them.
Once you’re more or less familiar with what you need to build, it’s time to grab all the necessary components! To pick up screws, you just need to find a tiny box like this one:
Every box represents a different type of screws, so you have to make sure to pick up the right one!
That’s it for today! There is still a lot of work to be done, and we’ll most likely have even more 3D models to show you in the next devlog. We are also preparing a tutorial – it will take a while, but once we wrap up the work here, we’ll be able to show you more of the gameplay. We can’t wait to let you explore the hangar by yourself! 🚀
Make sure to add the game to your Wishlist to receive a notification as soon as new information drops in! If you'd like to discuss the game with us, join our Discord server! We'd love to hear your feedback!
Hey everyone, I hope you’re good! I wanted to personally thank those of you that have already taken the time to try out our demo and submit feedback. If you haven’t had a chance to play yet, we are keeping the demo live until Sunday 11th July, so still plenty of time to still get involved.
With regards to the feedback that we received so far, I thought it would be useful to highlight some of the points raised and share how we will be acting upon them as we continue development.
Demo feedback
After finishing the demo, we asked players to rate different aspects of the game, and the areas that you felt required the most improvement were:
Restaurant building options
Sense of challenge
Stock management system.
So this has encouraged us to focus our efforts on improving these aspects first! Alongside the QoL and tutorial feedback (really helpful), we also received the following common suggestions, which I’ll now address:
Recipe editor and menu tools
“I’d like to customise the appearance of my dishes more” - We can add additional 3D models and improve the usability of the UI on the recipe editor to support this.
“It would be great to have a small premade recipe book with suggestions for dishes!” - Recipe for Disaster now supports modding via Steam Workshop, which means that you can share your recipes with others!
Staff hiring and management systems
“Can staff skill levels be improved over time? How about staff training?” - Staff will level up skills depending on how frequently they perform certain actions, so if a staff member spends a lot of time on the grill they will level up their grill skill.
“It’s too easy refreshing the staff pool to always get who I want. Could this be a bit more restricted?” - Staff hiring is an incredibly important part of the game. As such the player will only be able to pick from a finite pool at certain points during gameplay which will mean that choices really matter. By EA release we also plan to include one-time applicants who will be exceptional workers, but come with a hefty price tag.
“It would be helpful to have more visual differentiation between staff depending on their main job e.g. servers and chefs” - We will add roles and uniforms which allow you to visually group staff together.
Pacing
“The gameplay loop gets quite intense! Could we have more unexpected occurrences that break up gameplay?” - We plan to add more social interactions, events, additional weather mechanics, mishaps and disasters to create more variety in the gameplay loop. Some of this will appear in-game during Early Access.
Restaurant building and customisation tools
“Please can we have MORE placeable objects and customisation options!” - Of course you can! We’ll continue to add new objects to the game including ones that have specific themes to give your restaurant’s more character.
“It feels like tables are too spaced out, and I’d like to be able to place my tables next to walls” - The plan is to implement tables which can be linked together, so for example, you’ll be able to combine two tables of two, to make one table of four. We’ll also make sure that you can place tables against walls, allowing you to fit more objects within a smaller area.
Sense of challenge
“More variety in goals and milestones would be welcome” - Each level will have its own specific objectives, on top of this we plan to implement a sandbox mode with configurable goals.
“It would be cool to see VIPs or restaurant critics” - Definitely! VIPs and critics appear as an event and will have very high standards! If you manage to impress them they will give you a huge boost in popularity!
“There needs to be greater clarity on what determines a customer’s review score” - We will continue to work on how reviews are presented in the UI to show exactly what is influencing customer opinion.
Ingredients stock management and ordering system
“The express delivery and keep minimum stock options are confusing. Could this be simplified?” - We’ve streamlined this system by removing the express delivery option, and adding hourly delivery windows. This should make the process of ordering and managing stock feel more intuitive.
“How about additional storage objects that allow you to store specific ingredients, for example a fish tank?” - A great idea, we’re thinking of adding objects such as a lobster tank and herb garden to provide additional storage for new and exclusive ingredients.
Updates: New landscaping objects and improved lighting Our art department has been working hard on creating new landscaping objects to beautify the exterior of your restaurant and make it more pleasant for customers dining al fresco!
We also added more realistic grass textures and new specular lighting to really highlight the contrast in light and shadow within the game’s environments.
That’s all for now but I’ll be back soon with another progress update. Take care until then!
Alex Mochi Founder & Lead Designer - Dapper Penguin Studios
