Patch 0.7.1 - 27th January 2022 is released! Branch: Playtest-Default
What's new?
Debug Console - This build provides debug console for a better playtesting experience - Shift+F2 to Activate/Deactivate debug console - Use "ListDebugStatus" to see all debug features
Sidequest - First look at the new side quest system - Transport goods between Silberblum storehouse and Pirnmill port for quest rewards!
Combat improvement -Now in a fleet battle, guns are allowed to lock on and fire at secondary target(s)
Visual improvements - New Character portrait for William Walter Wellington III - New AK fleet background image (as William's backdrop) - New Silberblum HQ background image (as Sigrun's backdrop) - New Quest item sprites - Smoke particles in ports now showing properly - Update in-game logo assets from Airship Academy to Airship: Academy
UI/UX improvements - Replace travel UI buttons with High-resolution assets - Improve UX/UI for item transfer system inside the shipyard - Better readability for item tooltip - Better readability for enemy fleet UI - Partial reskin of the travel screen UI
Miscellaneous - Resistance bonus for larger protection parts - Ship control types are now selectable (Classic turning and Advanced turning) - Port facility systems are now refreshed upon quest completion - Dramatic narration can no longer interfere with the combat gameplay - Allow the player to middle-mouse click and pan around during immersive narration - Change Ship-based encounter rendering range to 3,000m - Remove boundary from traverse map - Landmass for Everspring region
Bug fixed - Stackable item now working properly - Shipyard's firing chain panel now working properly
Patch 0.7.1 - 27th January 2022 is released! Branch: Playtest-Default
What's new?
Debug Console - This build provides debug console for a better playtesting experience - Shift+F2 to Activate/Deactivate debug console - Use "ListDebugStatus" to see all debug features
Sidequest - First look at the new side quest system - Transport goods between Silberblum storehouse and Pirnmill port for quest rewards!
Combat improvement -Now in a fleet battle, guns are allowed to lock on and fire at secondary target(s)
Visual improvements - New Character portrait for William Walter Wellington III - New AK fleet background image (as William's backdrop) - New Silberblum HQ background image (as Sigrun's backdrop) - New Quest item sprites - Smoke particles in ports now showing properly - Update in-game logo assets from Airship Academy to Airship: Academy
UI/UX improvements - Replace travel UI buttons with High-resolution assets - Improve UX/UI for item transfer system inside the shipyard - Better readability for item tooltip - Better readability for enemy fleet UI - Partial reskin of the travel screen UI
Miscellaneous - Resistance bonus for larger protection parts - Ship control types are now selectable (Classic turning and Advanced turning) - Port facility systems are now refreshed upon quest completion - Dramatic narration can no longer interfere with the combat gameplay - Allow the player to middle-mouse click and pan around during immersive narration - Change Ship-based encounter rendering range to 3,000m - Remove boundary from traverse map - Landmass for the Everspring region
Bug fixed - Stackable item now working properly - Shipyard's firing chain panel now working properly
Hey friends! We’re finally back from a longer than anticipated combo of holiday family break time followed by a bunch of sickness. But now that we’re healthy again, it’s time for another juicy beta branch update! We’ve got several new boss variants in here, so let us know how you think the bosses compare to each other on the difficulty spectrum.
We’d really love your feedback here, so use the in-game feedback report button or jump into our Discord and let us know how hard/easy these new ranks are for you. What should we tweak? What’s working well for you? How stupid are our jokes? We’ve still got lots more coming, so stay tuned.
To join the beta branch: 1. Right-click on the game in Steam and select Properties. 2. Select the BETAS tab and enter the password supersecretbetabranch 3. Select the beta branch from the dropdown. 4. It should update right away! You will know you’re on the beta build if you see a new version number in the lower right on the Roundguard title screen. 5. After you run the game, if your save files don't copy over and you'd like to keep playing with your main game save progress, you can go to C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\LocalLow\Wonderbelly Games\Roundguard and copy/paste the files from the "saves" folder into the "beta" folder.
New Content
The Mad Doctor (Act 1 boss variant) - Don’t be shocked when we bring ancient pop culture references to life.
Bleary, Blinky, and Goo (Act 2 boss variant) - Castle Springbottom’s original pioneers of physical comedy.
Fungal Heart (Act 3 boss variant) - Seems pretty hard to breathe in there, but act quick or it’ll only get worse.
Balance Changes
Reduced enemy difficulty scaling in the earlier Encore Ranks.
Combining Curiosity and Fervor no longer results in 100% chaos rooms.
The Mad Virologist now throws poison potions at you every turn.
Polish & Bugs
Fixed final boss little worm butt bits damaging less than they should at higher levels.
Fixed particles from air blasts that push you around disappearing too early. Now if you are going to get pushed, you should see the particles, even after freezing time to pause/aim/etc.
Fixed a Cyclotopus bug that could get the big eye stuck closed during the turn it should have been stuck open.
Fixed armored skeletons losing their invulnerability after save/load.
Fixed UI bug with druid sprout quest displaying the wrong number in some situations.
From Wednesday, February 9th through Wednesday, February 16th, love will fill the air as we celebrate Valentine's Day with Love Evolved 3. While ARK is under Cupid's spell, go fishing for love and gain a chance at new skins, items, and five new chibi pets to collect!
Show yourself some love with the new self-hug emote, or try to reel in one of the new swimsuit skins!
This event can be manually activated with the server arg parameter: -ActiveEvent=vday
For the duration of Love Evolved, we will be disabling the world buffs from Baby Boon & Maewing Poach on Genesis Part 2 on the Official Network. In the past, we've adjusted for the impact event have had on the rates by tweaking the bonuses that we use during the holidays, however, those tweaks lead to unfavorable circumstances on maps that aren't Genesis Part 2, so going forward during breeding events, we'll be disabling these mission buffs specifically as not to affect the bonuses on other maps.
2/09/22 - 2/16/22
Valentines Coelacanth can be caught for chibis, chocolates, candies
Mating can randomly drop chocolates and candies!
*Note that these bonuses are multiplicative of the game's standard 1x rates.
Official Servers: 3x XP, Harvesting, Taming, and Breeding (imprint, maturation, hatch/gestation), 0.5x Mating Interval, 1.5x Hexagon Bonus
There will be no EVO event this week. The next upcoming EVO event will be a part of the Love Evolved event on February 9th. You can find the rates below:
*Note that these bonuses are multiplicative of the game's standard 1x rates.
Official Servers: 3x XP, Harvesting, Taming, and Breeding (imprint, maturation, hatch/gestation), 0.5x Mating Interval, 1.5x Hexagon Bonus
Cheers! My name is Dmitry. In our free time me and my friends are developing Drake - a Top-Down Sci-Fi Action RPG in a space western setting!
The New Year is here, holidays gone, and we’ve found out we’ve forgotten to conclude the results of the last year… and even haven’t created any devlog! We suppose that our real indie-world works like - no post - no work done.
So, the belated RESULTS 2021 To be honest, this word annoys me (results), but self-reflection is a tool to progress!
Long story short: the game is in 3D now, we have defined the core gameplay mechanics, added a lot of assets, begun testing story variations, created a cool teaser and launched a Steam page!
Bye!
Just kidding, please add this game to your wishlist and get back to reading Drake Devlog 2021
Further there might be: a lot of text, devs terminology, pictures, maps, easter eggs, and a few useful links.
Let’s get started!
Formalization of the game mechanics
In 2021 we have finally defined the main theme of the game and how it should look like. We concentrated on the key ideas from quite a wide list of ones:
A Story which can be viewed from different angles. We really want to create an interesting and variative story about the brutal world of the future. It will develop around the player, engaging them in studying the world and proposing different options to solve the problems they face.
Gameplay follows the chosen role. We’d like to provide an ability to select the gameplay style based on personal wishes:
Use fast and dynamic battle system which depends on player’s reaction to speedrun the game level
Look for the alternative, slower paced ways, using hacking and solving technical puzzles
Go deep into the story, talking to other characters, convicting, manipulating and bluffing them
A Sci-Fi dystopian atmosphere. We've chosen a mix of NASA-punk and Space Western as the basis of visual style, music environment and overall aesthetics.
We have added all those points to the document called Drake Pillars - the basis of building the game. Basically, if you're a small indie or a big not-indie, and making games - I strongly advise you to read about Pillars and Triangles.
It will help you to not spray out in different directions and focus on alpha and omega. Our team suffers from this from time to time, basically. So, such document will help us to cut the unnecessary things and cultivate the key ideas.
The way we defined our “Pillars” most likely can’t be considered as ideal, but it helped us concentrate on really important parts of the game. If you are creating your own game - don’t be lazy and define your own Pillars. Those Pillars will help you further at different stages (it doesn’t even matter how finely they’re formulated). All in all, it’s just a text which can be edited and improved with better phrases anytime. The key is to keep the heart of the game in it.
Moving from 2D to 3D
What’s cool about being indie? You can just totally redirect the project (at least at earlier stages) and nobody gets hurt!
Probably, the most important and biggest thing we’ve achieved during the last year - is having remastered everything we did for the last 3 years. We have turned the 2D-sprite top-down shooter into a 3rd dimension one.
Just to have strict vision - a gif “before” and “after”
3D graphics solve many problems with visuals, customization and animations, but require more work with assets. We don’t have any financing, so we solve difficulties with models in different ways. For example, we thought that it would be simple enough to create 3D-models of cavern’s walls using only our own skills (oh, we were so wrong...)
After a few iterations we chose a variant, where we have about 20 different form-pieces. Those pieces were created with a custom-made form-generator and then manually retopped for the game engine. They have one shader, which we can expand further.
We decided to purchase various generic assets like station walls, tables, chairs, boxes, barrels, pipes, etc. from the Unity Asset Store at this stage. Most indies create their whole games using those asset-packs. Such projects may lose their own identity, but can be published really fast!
Anyway, purchasing quite a big asset-pack - be ready that your project will highly expand in its volume.
Another decision was to manually create all the characters, fauna, and other unique elements, for example the rover. All those items are the face of the project and it’s worth investing most resources into this part. I’ll write about this in detail below.
Characters and planet’s fauna
In 2021 our artists team was boosted with the 3D design specialists. After moving to a fully 3D look of the game we also started going deeper into the visual development of the characters, costumes and fauna.
The pipeline for character creation roughly looks like this:
Concept -> 2d Art for dialogues -> Sculpting (Zbrush) -> Retopology (3ds max, blender) -> Painting (Substance) -> Auto Rigging and Basic animations (Mixamo) -> Import to project (Unity)
Automatic Rigging and animations in Mixamo - are quite a weak part which limits us a lot. Skinning contains artifacts and requires some clean-up after the algorithmic approach. That’s required just to avoid stretching of the character parts which are not meant to be stretched. Also animations can work not as expected - probably because of multiple conversions of skeleton and avatars in Unity - and finally we are faced with different artifacts in bone orientation. So, if you plan to use Mixamo for your characters - keep in mind that you won’t get great quality. Except for that quality issues, at the starting stage this method can be quite helpful. It’s a way to liven your character up and check it in a project with less time and actions for further prototyping.
Unfortunately, Mixamo doesn’t work for the bugs (local planet’s fauna), and we have to rig and animate those little guys manually. Crisper - the easiest bug that is already done - its rig and animations were made with Blender. Here, basically, we've invested a lot of resources, but with manual editing that one looks awesome!
Global map, prototyping and chase mechanic.
We have added a global map prototype in the end of 2020. It was required to test the story. We placed a bunch of little text quests at each point on the map as a representation of the story which would happen in that place. This type of testing allowed us to check in game choices, the key flow of the narrative and the degree of broken logic in the storyline if the player skipped some quests for example.
In 2021 we reworked the visuals and playability of this map. Like other game levels, it received another dimension. Currently we’re using TerrainComposer2 - Unity addon, which helps us to create a planet surface on the map in a non-destructive way, meaning we’re still able to move or change something. For example, move a mountain to a man or redirect rivers backward, avoiding redrawing of the whole surface. This add-on is very interesting, but we miss some abilities for procedural approach, functions of erosion (which appeared in standard terrain editor of Unity’s fresh version) and other cool things. Also we're thinking about choosing Houdini to generate a map surface in 2022.
Picture below - just a part of map’s layers in TerrainComposer2, which endlessly are mixing up to a single surface. Those Nodes are just OP!
Also the global map obtained the seeds of the interface. We’ve created a prototype of various UI windows, tested some element placements and data locations, that should help the player on the global map. It became a good starting point for artists and game-designers. Now we want all the mechanics mentioned in the UI to start working (2022 goal?)
Finally, we have finished a big sprint (aka marathon) to create a chasing mechanic, which follows the player, forcing the character to move forward. Also added volumetric clouds to the map, which immediately stole all the GPU resources. (looks like we're creating next-next-gen game)
Arseniy, our lead developer, is very happy about having created the chasing system! Just look into his eyes filled with enthusiastic zeal to solve new challenges!
Teaser!
Together with the publishing of the Steam page we wanted to create a short video about our vision of the game in future. We combined "gameplay" parts from existing in-game assets, using the game engine. Introduction and the planet at the end of the video were made in Blender.
At this stage the teaser, most likely, demonstrates our feelings about the game, it’s atmosphere, and emotions. Basically, all game mechanics, locations and events still require a lot of work.
We hope that in 2022 we’ll create a full-fledged gameplay trailer. Actually we’d prefer to publish more videos about the game (but where is our additional 24 hours per day…)
Music
The sound in the teaser and in the game gives a huge boost to the atmosphere. I’d really like to write more about this part of production, but you need to listen! In 2021, the game obtained 3 unique tracks for different situations, and we started integration with FMOD for deeper development of the sound space and music variativity.
We've made a short video about the recording process for the teaser. Kudos to Misha!
We’ll be very grateful for checking out this video and liking it ;) It’s always inspiring!
Steam Page
We have registered a Steam page in the middle of September! In our opinion, it’s a giant step for all humankind those, who do this for the first time.
Don't forget to add the game to your wishlist, ask your friends, girlfriend, parents, grandma to do the same. It will help us a lot to understand if our way is right and will drastically support us.
That’s a decisive moment for small indie developers. Steam marketplace algorithm requires to see that your game is interesting to players before release date, and it’s very hard to perform this without big investments, marketing company or publisher, even if the game is incredibly brilliant. Most of the super-successful indie projects are well-built from the marketing side or just being a survival bias. It’s very important to remember this and not to leave this sales topic to the latest moment, sentencing yourself “when I’ll finish development - everyone will see it’s beautiness”
I strongly recommend subscribing to Chris Zukowski’s blog - he posts a lot of useful articles regarding marketing: http://howtomarketagame.com
And also, a friend of mine - Max, who exceedingly helps me with advice and useful connections, mails fresh news about the gaming industry every day: http://ingamedev.com
2022 - A way to heaven the Demo
We plan to focus on game mechanics and prepare a vertical slice - demo version later this year. There are a lot of interesting activities, festivals and events we plan to participate in further, so hang on!
[shadowbane] the anniversary Carnival will be launched on January 31, 2022. You can get rewards after logging in and signing in. If you reach a certain value, you can get attribute stones, comprehensive potions and other items!
If you reach certain active conditions, you can participate in the lucky draw. The prize pool contains glass weapons, advanced attribute stones, deputy stones and other items!
Invite players ((PT) 0:00 on January 10 - players who are not logged in on January 29) to return and have more opportunities to get mysterious rewards!, There is no upper limit on the number of times!!!
(PT) February 4 - February 7 (PT) from January 30 to February 3, bane circle super value special purchase was opened (PT) from January 31 to February 7, the annual super value special purchase was opened At that time, please click [ESC] - > [mall / leaderboard] - > [anniversary event] to participate in the event
if you want to use traffic lights, you can just turn them on and they'll be set up pretty decently for most situations. But if you have specific needs, you'll be able to edit the details:
You can add and delete traffic light phases at will and adjust their timing. The progress bar on the left shows the current phase and can be used to switch through phases quickly during editing.
The checkbox on the top makes it a little more efficient: High traffic intersections in real life use weight sensors in the street or cameras to detect if cars are waiting on a specific lane and adjust the light cycles dynamically. Similarly, with this checkbox enabled, the intersection detects if traffic is through on one side and skips the rest of the light phase.
For each phase, you can select which lanes are supposed to go. If you want, you can select conflicting lines on the same phase, but then cars may have to wait on each other to go!
Major Update Release Date
We want to fill the next major update with more stuff, but also let you know about when you can expect to play with it, so here you go: The traffic control update is scheduled for February 25th.
Traffic control is the main topic, but that's just traffic lights + traffic signs. We'll spend the next weeks until the release on quality of life stuff in our list (thinking about UI scaling + more grid building tools, as requested by you).
Today's Minor Update
This week I didn't get to all new saves that have been sent to me to check out, but today's update features:
A fix that prevented players from deleting adamantine mines
A fix where trains would lose cargo on their way (reason was: habitats were upgrading and goods on delivery didn't reroute to new upgraded habitat properly)
Hail Carthians This Developer update will cover December and January as we as a team took a decent and needed vacation for the holiday season! Nevertheless we are excited as always to share with you some of the things we have been working on, refining, developing, and implementing. So with out wasting too much of your time let us jump right into it.
~Revamping The Building System~ We have began tearing apart and rebuilding (no pun intended) our building system. This is something that has been on our list of things to improve for about 6 months, and is finally coming to fruition. We are extremely excited creating a more dynamic building solution closer in comparison to games like Valheim. Where you have a modular workflow to complete and add to a structure you are building. We find this type of system to be one of the most engaging and are excited to continue refining it for Carth.
~Engine Update~ This was something we debated about for awhile. Should we take the time to upgrade the internal Unity Engine to a newer version, or stay at the stable place we have been. Both had pros and cons to their ideals, but we decided the pros out weighed the cons to move to one of the latest and tech pushing versions of the Unity engine that is available. This in turn gives us a big advantage going forward, more optimization, features, and options in general. However, this was a move that took us about 2 weeks to recuperate from. Now that this is behind us however we are more excited then ever for the future.
~Options Menu~ One of the most common critiques we received during the short spanned demo release was the options menu not functions properly, being overly complicated, and just lacking in general. Not any more Carthians as we have dove in to fix these issues, and believe you all will have a silent applause when you compare differences from early versions.
~Main Map Work~ We continue to work on the game map as this is of course needed work. We are mainly focusing on fine tuning from the beginning area and working outward. We aim to try to bring great quality to all the villages, towns, and places of interest on the map yet realize some things we can add in the future. So far everything is keeping a very high quality and we are proud of the work being done.
New Dialogue System We were really excited bringing in a great dialogue system with many use cases. From merchants, mercenaries, civilians, intelligent AI, and always dragons you can now communicate! Not only communicate, but progressive communication that can be severely different bases on skills, traits, feats, race, sex, standing, level, the list could be expanded exponentially! With a clean ui we are just very proud and excited for this to begin finding its place within Carth.
~In Closing~ There are many other mundane things happening that really we feel are not quite worth noting, but nevertheless happen daily. In closing we want to as always thank our community for your support. It truly means the world to us, and we can never thank you enough. If you would like to be closer to the action and development of Carth please join our discord and twitter where we release content almost daily, interact with our community, and more. Links are at the bottom of the page. Cheers Carthians!