At the beginning of 2022, our new Spring update is released. This update mainly carries our Spring special events, in which players can challenge the fierce beasts only show up in early spring. Newly added in-game store. Now players can purchase basic materials, eggs and special-event-limited materials.
Spring Event: The Nian Beast
The theme of our Spring event in the beginning of this new year is the Nian beast. Note: This event would be longer and last for the whole season. There’s no need to worry and just play at your own pace!
Anomalies on the Land:
During Spring event, mysterious creatures appeared in this Dream Land. These creatures include Nian beasts with burning flames, cute mini Nian beasts and invincible boss: the King of Nian beasts. Mini Nian beast: Cute cubs of the Nian beast that appear randomly in the Dream Land. These puny creatures can only run away from you when being attacked. Defeating a mini Nian beast gives you one Memory of Spring. Nian beast: Powerful creatures that sporadically appear in the world with blazes burning on their bodies. Nian beasts are neutral creatures, their attacks cause fire damage and is hard to defend. They move slowly but have high defense, can only be effectively harmed by attacks of special weapons in Spring event. Defeating Nian beasts gives you 3 Memory of Spring, Horn of Nian beast, Fire Element and Sulfur. The King of Nian beasts: Powerful boss creature appears in early spring. One stays in Dreamland while the other is in the Oasis in desert. It would be extremely hard to challenge the King of Nian beasts and players will need higher-level special equipment, weapons and teammates. The King of Nian beasts would gradually drop Memory of Spring and Horn of Nian beast when its health drops. Players can find precious Nian beast’s Eggs after defeating the King of Nian beasts. By using Nian beast’s Egg, players can hatch their own Nian beasts. Note: All Nian beasts in the wild cannot be tamed.
Preparation for the spring:
To prepare for the challenges in Spring event, there are some special contents added in this event. Special contents: 1. Memory of Spring: The basic memory of Spring event, provides memories of special weapons and food. It’s also the basic material for crafting other Spring event items. Can be converted into a bit anima in Nian Beast Altar. 2. Horn of Nian Beast: The horn of Nian beast, material for crafting Spring event equipment. Can be converted into a large amount of anima in Nian Beast Altar. 3. Spring Potage: Special food in Spring event, requires Memory of Spring to cook. Provides advanced memories in Spring event. By consuming Spring Potage, players can get multiple advanced memories. 4. Water Dragon Mace: Special weapon in Spring event that performs water elemental attacks. Quite effective for Nian beasts. 5. Water Dragon Cannon: Special weapon in Spring event that performs water elemental attacks. Less dangerous that the rocket launchers but effective for Nian beasts. 6. Nian Outfit: Special festive equipment in Spring event, greatly enhances player’s fire resistance. Effective armor for defending attacks from Nian beast. Players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 7. Nian Hat: Special festive equipment in Spring event, greatly enhances player’s fire resistance. Effective armor for defending attacks from Nian beast. Players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 8. Nian Beast’s Egg: Precious reward for defeating the King of Nian beasts. Can be hatched into tamed Nian beasts. 9. Ice Nian Beast’s Egg: Rare reward for defeating the King of Nian beasts. Can be hatched into tamed Ice Nian beasts. 10. Nian Beast Altar: The Altar for your hatched Nian beasts, which could also be considered as the Utopia for Nian beasts. Players can convert Memory of Spring and Horn of Nian beast into anima within it and upgrade their Nian beasts, eventually merging them into Giant Nian beasts and the King of Glacier. Players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 11. Nian Beast Saddle: The saddle for Nian beasts, players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 12. Giant Nian Beast Saddle: The saddle for Giant Nian beasts, players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 13. Ice Nian Beast Saddle: The saddle for Ice Nian beasts, players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage. 14. The King of Glacier Saddle: The saddle for the King of Glaciers, players can acquire its memory by consuming Spring Potage.
In Spring event, hunt mini Nian beasts for Memories of Spring to craft special weapons. Challenge Nian beasts for more rewards, cook Spring Potage to unlock advanced memories. Arm yourself with advanced equipment, challenge the King of Nian beasts to hatch your own Nian beast. Build the Nian Beast Altar and raise your Nian beasts to finally get Giant Nian beast and mysterious King of Glacier.
Power of Nian Beasts:
Except for Nian beasts appear in the wild, there are other types of Nian beasts hatched from Nian beast’s Eggs, or merged in Nian Beast Altars. Ice Nian Beast: There’s a small probability that players could acquire an Ice Nian beast Egg when defeating the King of Nian Beasts, which can be hatched into Ice Nian beasts by Incubator or Large Incubator. Ice Nian beasts’ attack causes ice elemental damage. Ice elemental attacks causes extra damage to Nian beasts, but Ice Nian beasts is also weak to fire elemental damage. Giant Nian Beast: By converting Memory of Spring and Horn of Nian beast into anima in Nian Beast Altar, you can upgrade and merge Nian beasts to eventually get a Giant Nian beast with its true power released. The King of Glacier: Rare creature merged by Ice Nian beasts, causes massive ice elemental damage.
Adjustments:
1. New Content:
New Facility: Large Incubator. Large Incubator is used for hatching T-Rex Eggs, Scorpion Eggs, Serpent Eggs and Giant Worm Eggs. Original Incubator can no longer hatch these eggs.
2. Specified Descriptions:
We specified all descriptions in our game, adding information introducing their sources, attributes and usages. For example: Eating patterns are added into animals’ descriptions, special icons are added to the descriptions for foods which can be used to tame animals. Sources of materials and consumptions of facilities are also added. Most of these hints are represented by icons. The meanings of those icons are listed below: This form can also be accessed in Help window in game. 3. In-game Store Available: Store can be accessed from the menu in the left bottom of game interface. A new creature can be purchased in store: Bigmouth. 4. The outcome of Strange Eggs is adjusted: Increased the chances of getting insects.
Follow-up Update notice:
As we stepped into 2022, we will further optimize production process, game experience and combats. Effects of different attributes such as elements would be adjusted. Animals will have more special abilities, and we would work on fixing the synchronize problems of creatures. Also, new creatures and new Seed of Heart would be updated later.
Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. It’s been a few months since our last update but we’re looking forward to a great 2022 for Sovereign Syndicate.
It’s been a busy few months over here at Crimson Herring Studios, putting the final touches on our demo; but I wanted to take a few moments and share some really exciting news.
Our Game has been selected by Canada Media Fund to receive $250,000 in development funding!
We’re really excited about what this means for our community and everyone working on Sovereign Syndicate. Being able to grow our development team and accelerate production means a lot to us. And we’re hopeful this funding will open more doors to additional funding and business opportunities to help make the best possible game for our community.
Thanks again for all your support!
We’ll be releasing our demo to our Discord community soon for some user feedback and QA testing. So head on over there if you haven’t already.
Thank you all for continuing to follow the development of Fret Smasher! After the release of v0.29 the team decided to take a well deserved break, however we’re back now and we’ve made many changes! You can see the full list of changes at the bottom of this post, but we’ll go over the 2 major features with v0.30.
AUDIO EFFECTS!
With this update we’ve added a reverb audio effect while Hyper Flux is active, and a Whammy Pitch option! By default the Whammy Pitch option will be disabled but you can turn it on under the audio settings in game. The reason Whammy Pitch is disabled by default is there are still quite a few issues with it since it was added quite late into the development of v0.30. Hyper Flux reverb however seems to be working as intended at the moment and is enabled by default but there will be adjustments to the way it sounds.
CUSTOM THEMES!
You’re reading that correctly! We’ve implemented the first version of custom user themes! Inside your game folder there will now be a “Themes” folder. You simply need to drag and drop themes into the “Themes” folder then select them in game! At the moment you are only able to swap and change the resolution of note, sustain, strikeline, and particle textures. However we plan to expand themes quite a lot in the future! If you’d like to know more about our theme system there is a readme included with the the default theme template found in your game folder. So far we have had great results with the current implementation, however we’re sure there are issues that are yet to be found so be sure to let us know if you find any!
Full Changlog:
[Additions]
- Added keys volume in settings - Added instrument icons to the results screen - Added dedicated section on Ready-Up screen for chart descriptions - Added back the health bar so you can now fail songs! - Added chart modifiers - Added modal after title screen - Added back cheats - Added mute track on miss - Added custom theme support! (This is experimental, please report any issues!) - Added whammy distortion (This is very experimental, and is disabled by default) - Added song title and artist bars when beginning a song - Added bars to settings with limited ranges - Added caps to the Hyper Flux and HP bars - Added option to have highway bounce to the beat with the ability to choose when it turns on - Added setting descriptions - Added setting preview images - Added the ability to toggle particles - Added input background texture from song select to all menus - Added separate offsets for sustains and notes - Added option to scan for custom content (Highways, Backgrounds, Themes, etc) - Added Calamity by BandiPat to the song list! - Added Trans Pride custom theme
[Fixes]
- Fixed sustains being jagged when whammying - Fixed sustain textures not being stretched properly - Fixed bug with gameplay notifications which caused the message to reappear when missing a note - Fixed some charts not loading any beatlines - Fixed only the first beat being rendered on the highway - Fixed being able to move in the menus while scanning songs & in Rewired - Fixed position / size of highway borders - Fixed issue with pause menu disappearing when resizing window - Fixed scroll bars becoming too small when there are a lot of menu items - Fixed position of some menu assets - Fixed issue where you would need to hit 11 notes to reach x2 multiplier - Fixed sustain anchor position on strikeline - Fixed the way the note size setting functions to keep note position accurate - Fixed issue with [REDACTED] - Fixed settings only being applied when leaving then returning to the main menu - Fixed some settings only applying when entering a song - Fixed some settings incorrectly displaying the setting value until selected - Fixed some menu items overlapping menu borders in some cases - Fixed album art loading - Fixed bug with intro videos where skipping the first video would cut the second video at whatever time you skipped the first - Fixed slight note sliding effect
[Changes]
- Adjusted beatline width - Adjusted open note height - Adjusted hit window time from being 55 milliseconds in both the front and back to now being 60ms front and 50ms back - Updated song scanning - Increased fret after strum timer to 10ms from 8ms (Values will be adjusted as we get feedback if you feel things should be adjusted let us know!) - Rewrote player menu - Rewrote Ready-Up screen - Completely changed the way the highway fade is handled - Highway images will no longer stretch and will keep their aspect ratios - Adjusted position of sustains and notes on the highway - Adjusted the way the multiplier is handled - Updated divider arrow textures - Remade sustain textures - Removed Hyper Flux indicator around multiplier (It will now only pulse when HF is active) - Updated chart renderer - Remade string textures - Remade highway intro animation when beginning a song - Remade rewired menu assets - Adjusted default settings - Mouse cursor will now automatically hide after being stationary for 5 seconds - Updated miss sound effect - Players will now need to wait a few seconds after reaching the results screen to do any inputs (Previously it was very easy to accidentally skip the results screen) - Increased highway length - Moved streak and Hyper Flux notification up a tad to compensate for the lengthened highway
- Added keys volume in settings - Added instrument icons to the results screen - Added dedicated section on Ready-Up screen for chart descriptions - Added back the health bar so you can now fail songs! - Added chart modifiers - Added modal after title screen - Added back cheats - Added mute track on miss - Added custom theme support! (This is experimental, please report any issues!) - Added whammy distortion (This is very experimental, and is disabled by default) - Added song title and artist bars when beginning a song - Added bars to settings with limited ranges - Added caps to the Hyper Flux and HP bars - Added option to have highway bounce to the beat with the ability to choose when it turns on - Added setting descriptions - Added setting preview images - Added the ability to toggle particles - Added input background texture from song select to all menus - Added separate offsets for sustains and notes - Added option to scan for custom content (Highways, Backgrounds, Themes, etc) - Added Calamity by BandiPat to the song list! - Added Trans Pride custom theme
[Fixes]
- Fixed sustains being jagged when whammying - Fixed sustain textures not being stretched properly - Fixed bug with gameplay notifications which caused the message to reappear when missing a note - Fixed some charts not loading any beatlines - Fixed only the first beat being rendered on the highway - Fixed being able to move in the menus while scanning songs & in Rewired - Fixed position / size of highway borders - Fixed issue with pause menu disappearing when resizing window - Fixed scroll bars becoming too small when there are a lot of menu items - Fixed position of some menu assets - Fixed issue where you would need to hit 11 notes to reach x2 multiplier - Fixed sustain anchor position on strikeline - Fixed the way the note size setting functions to keep note position accurate - Fixed issue with [REDACTED] - Fixed settings only being applied when leaving then returning to the main menu - Fixed some settings only applying when entering a song - Fixed some settings incorrectly displaying the setting value until selected - Fixed some menu items overlapping menu borders in some cases - Fixed album art loading - Fixed bug with intro videos where skipping the first video would cut the second video at whatever time you skipped the first - Fixed slight note sliding effect
[Changes]
- Adjusted beatline width - Adjusted open note height - Adjusted hit window time from being 55 milliseconds in both the front and back to now being 60ms front and 50ms back - Updated song scanning - Increased fret after strum timer to 10ms from 8ms (Values will be adjusted as we get feedback if you feel things should be adjusted let us know!) - Rewrote player menu - Rewrote Ready-Up screen - Completely changed the way the highway fade is handled - Highway images will no longer stretch and will keep their aspect ratios - Adjusted position of sustains and notes on the highway - Adjusted the way the multiplier is handled - Updated divider arrow textures - Remade sustain textures - Removed Hyper Flux indicator around multiplier (It will now only pulse when HF is active) - Updated chart renderer - Remade string textures - Remade highway intro animation when beginning a song - Remade rewired menu assets - Adjusted default settings - Mouse cursor will now automatically hide after being stationary for 5 seconds - Updated miss sound effect - Players will now need to wait a few seconds after reaching the results screen to do any inputs (Previously it was very easy to accidentally skip the results screen) - Increased highway length - Moved streak and Hyper Flux notification up a tad to compensate for the lengthened highway
- Minor adjustment to level 4 - Fixed checkpoint spawn issue on levels 3 and 6 - Collision fix on level 6 - Pressing "Q" will now show Anxiety level and Speed - Clean up work in Shrimp's Code to improve performance and to make it easier for me to add cosmetics in the future - Removed WIDE Shrimp option when pressing "H" (Don't worry it will come back as a type of Extra in the future) - Fixed issue of not being able to equip Hyper Acid, and Prime Skins when buying them
The next update will make changes to the U.I for the menu, buying cosmetics, the stereo menu, change the menu sounds, and hopefully in this update I can tackle the way you apply skins as I have a better idea for it. February will have cool changes to the game with extra content such as changing skins on entities!
The issues detected today are now patched for ImmaterialAI and ImmaterialAI Plus, check that you have version at least 3.12.2 from Settings!
Changes
leveling up would crash the platform for users where on 3.11 would have level X, and on 3.12 with the experience requirement reductions should have X+1 but the level wouldn't update
experience required per level 1-10 is now 5 and 10-20 is now 7
adding nodes, links, AI flow answers now give 4 experience instead of 1
Unlocks
add node, add link, library now unlock at level 1
backups now unlock at level 2
On the side of new platforms, the MacOS and iOS builds are fully stable now, just have to get some forms approved with Apple. You'll be able (and can already) export your Steam app's IAI data to file and import it on any other release: phone, web, DRM-free desktop