Onwards to adventure! The adorable and squishy hero of Ziggy's Cosmic Adventures is here once again, now in plush form!

WARNING: Cuteness of your alien may drive you to madness. Upon depletion of life please expel out of your closest airlock. Stardust Collective cannot be held liable for any squealing, squelching, or smushing during the extraction process.

As an extra bonus, when purchasing the Ziggy Plush* you will also receive an exclusive in-game costume for your alien buddy! A costume that mirrors your real-life friend, stitches and all. Redemption codes for this additional content will be e-mailed to you when the game has released on Steam.

* Ziggy's Cosmic Adventures is not included in the purchase of the Ziggy Plush

Hi everyone!



Phew! This one took me a bit longer to get out the door because I had to get my hands dirty with a bunch of pathfinding stuff. Thanks for waiting patiently for me to put this one out. :) Also, thank you to those of you that were sending me builds and helping me find issues. Your help is so appreciated!

You should notice some improvements to the pathfinding speed. I went through and optimized several things, but I also worked on how paths are prioritized. Entities with the shortest paths or the most urgent paths (i.e., given a move order) should be calculated first. Also, NPC's are prioritized last, giving the player first dibs on pathing. In 0.10.0.17, you'd see a lot of entities hang up when given a move order, and that's because they were waiting for someone ahead of them to calculate a huge path. That should be much better. Now, having said that, you'll probably still see entities with the 'Routing' state, especially with a higher population or massive distance to travel. I've got a couple more things to add to reduce this wait for them, but, at the end of the day, it's either wait to calculate a long path, or tank your FPS. I'll continue to improve as we go.

Ok, so I needed to make this change to help with an issue where entities couldn't craft things if carry was disabled. Now, haul jobs use the carry skill and are issued by stockpiles, and gather jobs are used by crafting jobs to collect required items. Just like the equip item job, gather uses the survival skill. That's a temporary solution until I implement some code to assign the same skill as the job issuing the gather job, but I didn't have time this week!

As I was testing this week, I noticed that a lot of carry jobs were chilling while perfectly capable settlers sat on their hands. This would happen when a settler with a lot already on their plate was issued some carry jobs by a stockpile room. I've added in new code that checks to see how long a job idles, and, if it exceeds a specific time threshold, it un-assigns the entity (the one that's busy) from the job. This lets other entities pick up the slack. Hopefully you see some efficiency improvements as a result the next time you play.

I've fixed an absolute ton of combat related things BUT I wasn't able to get them all. I will continue to polish that up for the following patch. However, I was able to implement some line-of-sight logic for ranged fighters. You should no longer be attacked through the ground, and entities will try (as long as they aren't in a hold position order) to get closer if they don't see their target. I am going to add an overlay option that displays a line connecting an entity to their target. It will indicate line of sight and who's targeted.

Some entity notifications have been re-enabled. You should see them when you don't have a settler assigned to a profession, when a settler becomes an adult, when a settler is stuck, and when a settler can't reach a job. My suspicion is that these might be somewhat annoying at first, and will need some tuning. Do let me know which ones bother you, if any.

As this patch is mostly about bug fixing, tuning, and performance improvements, I don't have too much else to share, so here are the notes.

-Fixed a bug where the dialogue indicator would get stuck above entities.
-Fixed a bug where tooltips could have repeating text in the Saga window.
-Fixed a bug where disabling the tutorial from the tutorial popup wasn't working.
-Fixed an FPS drop from having lots of inaccessible jobs.
-Fixed some issues where entities wouldn't find a path to far away, usually underground, move points.
-Fixed a bug where entities would start mating while in combat or during a move order. Yep.
-Added 'gather item' job and renamed 'pick up/drop off item' to 'haul item'.
-Void Woken should be a default permitted race in most rooms now.
-Removed the loot skill as it's not used for anything.
-The selection box is no longer shown for right clicks during entity selections.
-Fixed a small memory leak.
-Fixed a bug where orders couldn't be given if one of the selected entities was dead.
-Fixed a bug where entities in hold positions couldn't attack close enemies.
-Fixed a bug where entities would stop moving randomly after being given a move order.
-Archers will now only fire an arrow if they have line-of-sight.
-Fixed a bug where health bar color was incorrect when loading a save.
-Increased landmine damage.
-Fixed a bug where entities would get stuck doing a job if the job they had started was no longer accessible.
-Fixed a bug where unlocking a door didn't open pathing to the room which had been locked.
-Fixed a visual bug where the lock icon wasn't updated on save file load.
-Added a tooltip for the entity state to show the full state display name.
-Fixed a bug where several entity notifications wouldn't show up.
-Fixed a bug where 'Remaining Days In Season' was incorrect.
-Re-enabled the lode overlay. You can see it when holding TAB.
-Ancients now start out with more Tomes of Arcana.
-All Arcana research is much cheaper.
-Fixed a bug where suggested props weren't showing when hovering over a room while placing jobs.
-Auto-job threshold amount to set will now look at queued and active jobs when attempting to queue jobs.
-Fixed a bug where entities in water could not be attacked.
-Minimap input will now stop entity follow if it's active.
-Fixed a bug that would keep some lists from not updating correctly.
-The kitchen now has the Misc skill as a default. That way, anyone with misc can join and do the butcher jobs.
-Added blueprint summon visuals for the Void Imp and Void Woken.
-Fixed a typo where Void Catalyst was shown as Void Crystal.
-Fixed a visual issue with jobs not updating shadows when removed.
-The Wood/Stone Bin can now also hold Refined Materials.
-Entities will now unassign themselves from stockpile carry jobs if the job sits for long enough without starting. This is to help free up carry jobs for other settlers that can do them.

There are still a few bugs to fix and performance improvements to make before I can push beta to production. As well, I still haven't re-enabled a few scenarios that I had planned to this week. I'm going to focus on those things and see where we're at by the middle of next week. I think by then things will be looking pretty good. :)

As always, thanks so much for the support! Have a great day.

Waylon

Rampant greenspread canopies a starburst of the Eaters' richest works. The jungle is torn at the corners, where crysteel balustrades and star orchid lancets peek through...

[203.18. Note: This update will invalidate existing saves. If you want to keep playing your current character, switch back to a previous branch. (Steam > Caves of Qud > Properties > Betas > select branch].

• We added two minor late-game regions, the deep jungle and baroque ruins.
  
  • Made significant changes to the worldmap to accommodate the new regions.
    
  • Added new creatures: deep slumberling, purple jell, trash abbot, and goatfolk qlippoth.
    
  • Added new flora: nachash tree and nimbus beam.
    
  • Added rare urberry bushes.
    
  • Added new items: ogre fur hat, ogre fur gloves, and ogre fur cloak.

• We added historic sites for the period 1, 2, and 3 sultans. The base number of historic sites per game now follows this pattern:
  
  • Period 5 sultan: 2 sites
    
  • Period 4 sultan: 2 sites
    
  • Period 3 sultan: 2 sites
    
  • Period 2 sultan: 1 site
    
  • Period 1 sultan: 1 site
• The world now properly generates all historic sites that, according to gospels and quests, contain relics. This means that occasionally some additional historic sites are generated.
  
• We made mid and late-game historic sites have fewer levels. They now max out at around depth 7.

• Added 48 new achievements.
  
  • Mechanimist Reformer; Aaaaaaaaargh!; Feast Upon the Goat Hearts! *cheers*; Rocket Bear; Two Cats Are Better Than One; Me, Myself, and I; Clonal Colony; The Woe of Apes; Close the Loop; Tourist; Sight Older Than Sight; What Are Directions on a Space That Cannot Be Ordered?; Star-Eye Esper; The Quasar Mind; There Can Be Only One; Glimmer of Truth; Sultan of Salt; Absolute Unit; Non-Locally Sourced;
    Surprise!; From Thyn Heres Shaken the Wet and Olde Lif; All Those Who Wander; The Recitation of the Drowning of Eudoxia by the Witches of Moonhearth; A Clammy Reception; What's Eating the Watervine?; Byevalve; You Recame; Dayenu; Belong, Friends; Token of Gratitude; The Laws of Physics Are Mere Suggestions, Vol. 2; Aetalag; I-; *gulp*; Jeweled Dusk; The Narrowing Sky; Dawnglider; Was It Something I Said?; Lottery Winner; The Psychal Chorus; Become as Gods; Live and Ink; tsk tsk; Raisins in the Layer Cake;
    May the Ground Shake But the Six Day Stilt Never Tumble; Red Rock Hazing Ritual; Mumblecore; Open Your Mind

• We gave Red Rock a big makeover. It's now much more cavern-like, includes unique encounters, and is home to a snapjaw settlement.

• The Rust Wells have been entirely revamped. The dungeons are now based on fulcrete wells that are dug into the earth.
  
• Added a mechanism to allow flight in strata beneath the surface when there is sufficient open sky above you.

• We revamped ruin generation and population in several sites.
  
  • Sites include ruin worldmap tiles (extending 30 strata down), baroque ruin worldmap tiles (also extending 30 strata down), unnamed ruins found in the jungle of deep jungle, and some named ruins.
    
  • Revamped ruined structures tend to be a little more complex than they were previously.
    
  • Ruin creature and loot population is much improved.
• We added a rare chance for power grid, hydraulic, and mechanical infrastructure to appear in various sites.
  
  • Possible sites include ruin worldmap tiles (extending 30 strata down), baroque ruin worldmap tiles (also extending 30 strata down), unnamed ruins found in the jungle or deep jungle, Bethesda Susa, and some villages.
    
  • Infrastructure and the equipment it powers will be found in various states of disrepair.
    
  • Infrastructure equipment may or may not have a use.
    
  • Added moon, sun, fool, milk, and secant gates.
    
  • Added -- or made dynamically generatable -- some other new furniture of varying technological sophistication.
    
  • Glass pipes now change color depending on what liquid is inside.
    
  • Removed metal and plastic hydraulic pipes.
• Also improved the quality of random cave encounters.

• We made a bunch of changes to starting equipment.
  
  • All castes and callings now start with at least 3-4 witchwood bark. Correspondingly, starting village apothecaries now stock only a token amount witchwood bark.
    
  • Reduced the number of starting torches to a more reasonable amount.
    
  • All starting food -- crusty loaf, food cube, Ekuemekiyyen greens, and salthopper chips -- can now be cooked with. Smoldered mushrooms still preserve into pickled mushrooms.
    
  • Made a bunch of tweaks to true kin starting gear. As a result, they now start with more tonics than they had been in the beta, but not as many as they were capable of starting with on mainline.
    
  • Scholars now have a chance to start with a couple books.
    
  • Pilgrims now start with at least one book and a wineskin.
    
  • Apostles now start with a honeyskin.
    
  • Consuls now start with a wineskin.
    
  • Watervine farmers now start with some random ingredients and a cookbook.
    
  • Arconauts now start with some canned Have-It-All instead of mystery meat.
    
  • Fuming God Child's ash-stained robes now grant +1 AV.
    
  • Greybeards now start with furs and a short bow.
    
  • Horticulturists and Priests of All Suns now start with a short bow.
    
  • Priests of All Moons now start with a compound bow.
    
  • Castes and callings that start with missile weapons now have more ammo.
• If you have Gadget Inspector, you can now deploy wire.
  
  • 1" of wire extends across one tile.
    
  • You can deploy up to 10' at a time.
    
  • Deployed wire can be used to connect components across a working power grid.
    
  • Wire objects now merge into a single coil that weight 1lb per 25'.
• Witchwood bark now heals a slightly reduced amount.
  
• Witchwood bark now heals over three turns in descending amounts (12-14 on turn 1, 6-7 on turn 2, 3 on turn 3).
  
• If you have the Hooks for Feet defect, your dismembered hooks now regrow.
  
• We reduced the defensive buffs from cooking with the preserved gland paste of the various bearded lizards.
  
  • Sleetbeard gland paste and concentrated sleetbeard gland paste now bestow +10 and +20 cold resist, respectively, instead of +100.
    
  • Flamebeard gland paste and concentrated flamebeard gland paste now bestow +10 and +20 heat resist, respectively, instead of +100.
    
  • Tartbeard gland paste and concentrated tartbeard gland paste now bestow +10 and +20 acid resist, respectively, instead of +100.
    
  • The gland paste and concentrated gland paste of nullbeards, gallbeards, dreambeards, stunbeards, and maze beards no longer offer any defensive bonuses.
• Added two new shields: crysteel aegis and flawless crysteel aegis.
  
• You can now butcher ape fur hats and ape fur gloves from albino ape corpses. The descriptions of these items were changed to make this more sensible.
  
• Relic curios that summon friendly creatures now typically summon higher-level creatures.
  
• Relic tonics now provide two attribute/mutation points instead of one (or boost an attribute by two instead of one).
  
• Relic melee weapons are now sometimes two-handed.
  
• Widened the range of possibilities for relic missile weapons.
  
• Removed short swords from the game because their stats were extraneous and identical to daggers. If they do come back, they'll likely be revamped.
  
• You now fall in love with statues and figurines depicting creatures you would normally fall in love with.
  
• The life drain effect of bloody soup sludges no longer triggers on all weapon hits, instead restricted to a hit from their bloody pseudopod.
  
• Rocks falling from the ceiling now respect phase.
  
• On Roleplay and Wander modes, Gyl is now a checkpoint location.
  
• Creatures no longer spawn inside the [redacted] at Gyl.
  
• You can now ask Pax Klanq to puff on you again if you lose your Klanq infection prior to finishing the quest to spread it.
  
• Snapjaw lairs are now populated with a variety of snapjaws.
  
• Sleeping waydroids in the Grit Gate enclave are now friendly to Barathrumites.
  
• Pathfinding now slightly prefers to avoid tiles next to pits, shafts, and open air.
  
• Industrial fans now blow gases around.
  
• Fixed some punctuation in messages about being blown around by industrial fans.
  
• Adjusted the tier of Bethesda Susa and Asphalt Mines subterranean levels.
  
• Increased the item tier of liquid-cells and nuclear cell.
  
• Adjusted the tiers of some missile weapons.
  
• Made a small adjustment to the creature tier calculation.

• We added a brand new Control Mapping screen with new functionality.
  
  • It's enabled when modern UI elements or the prerelease input manager is enabled.
    
  • Added support for multiple input devices.
    
  • You can now choose the control mapping scheme if you have multiple input devices connected.
    
  • Removed the Key Mappings option from the Esc menu. You can still access the Control Mapping screen via Options > Controls > Control Mapping.
    
  • Fixed several bugs with default prerelease control bindings.
• When the prerelease input manager is used with a gamepad, gamepad buttons are now shown in hotkey prompts.
  
• Added better keyboard button icons in the Control Mapping screen and character creation sequence.
  
• We added full Steam Deck support.
  
  • Launching on Steam Deck defaults to 1.25x.
    
  • Launching on Steam Deck defaults to gamepad input.
    
  • Launching on Steam defaults to the prerelease input manager.
    
  • Updated Steamworks SDK to 1.53a.
• Text input fields now display an overlay keyboard if one is available on the device.
  
• Added a brand new UI for the Continue screen and removed the stand-in overlay one.
  
• Mouse input is now enabled by default.
  
• Added a new force attack binding to the prerelease input manager which will force attack in the currently selected direction. (defaults to alt+L1)
  
• Added new tiles for the following objects: canned Have-It-All, canned mystery meat, bandage, desalination pellet, knollworm skull, blood-stained neck ring, miner's helmet, fire ant gaster, steel buckler, steel shield, carbide shield, bronze ingot, qudzu stem, rubber tree seed, fullerite aegis, hunk of cheese, Yd Freehold workshop sign, jeweler sign, some books, tokens, timecube, relic curios, gentling cone, eyeless crab legs, crimson hood, mirrorshades, telemetric visor, chrome mantle, mercurial cloak, rainboweave cloak, worn burnoose, Praetorian's cloak, leather scraps, panther's cloak, furs, point-defense lasor, precinct navigator, wrist calc, force bracelet, structural scanning bracelet, life loop, snakeskin armlet, chain gauntlets, elastyne gloves, plastifer gloves, carbide boots, fullerite boots, anti-gravity boots, bounding boots, brinestalk gate, small sphere of negative weight, data disk, waterskin, camel bladder, robot limbs, organic limbs, trash, security cards, spiral borer, Klanq infection, ganglionic teleprojector, forge, anvil, fused security door, geomagnetic disc, luminous mote, quantum mote, palladium electrodeposits, crumpled piece of paper, torn sheet of graph paper, Templar phylactery, chrome platform, pocketed vest, plasifer chem vest, puma chitin vest, fullerite flake armor, rubber suit, flexivest, nanoweave vest, all grenades, and all energy cells.
  
• Added new animated tiles for hydraulic press, hydraulic irrigator, pumping stations, and solar power stations.
  
• Broken wire now looks broken.
  
• Previously chosen conversation options are now more consistently recolored.
  
• Witchwood bark is now classified as a med instead of food.
  
• Shale that is adjacent to large pools of water now has its tile detail color altered to indicate vine growth.
  
• Tweaked seed-spitting vine's tile and ASCII colors.
  
• Tweaked dreadroot's ASCII and tile colors.
  
• Changed the ASCII and tile colors of various other objects.

• We refactored our systems for populating maps and creature inventories. Creature and equipment distributions may have changed somewhat (but not drastically).
  
• Humanoid creatures, particularly snapjaws and goatfolk, now spawn with a wider range of equipment.
  
• Snapjaw scavengers now occasionally spawn without equipment.
  
• Tweaked several artifact and junk population tables.

• Added a new music track to deep caves.
  
• Added a new music track to [redacted].
  
• Made adjustments to the Palladium Reef / Lake Hinnom music track.
  
• Renamed "desert rifle"" to "Isaachar rifle"".
  
• Renamed "borderlands revolver" to "chrome revolver".
  
• Historic sites are now built from a more sensible set of wall types, which includes gilded marble from the appropriate sultanate period.
  
• Added new descriptions for low and mid tier daggers, cudgels, axes, and swords.
  
• Added new descriptions for the following guns and ammo: Issachar rifle, carbine, sniper rifle, musket, chain laser, linear cannon, freeze ray, blood-gradient hand vacuum, chaingun, chrome revolver, semi-automatic pistol, chain pistol, pump shotgun, combat shotgun, lead slug, electrobow, grenade launcher, missile launcher, HE missile, phase cannon, nullray pistol, short bow, compound bow, and flamethrower.
  
• Added new descriptions for the following items: nanoweave vest and rainboweave cloak.
  
• Tweaked the details and added several new descriptions for relic base items.
  
• Gave witchwood bark a new description.
  
• Added signs for gutsmongers' shops.
  
• Warden Une is now officially true kin and can install cybernetic implants.
  
• Cloneling clones now count toward the achievements "Me, Myself, and I" and "Clonal Colony".
  
• Added iron gates.
  
• Replaced some doors with gates in zone generation where appropriate.
  
• Historic sites no longer have erroneous "unknown"s in their descriptions.
  
• Objects with fractional weight, like wire strands, no longer count as 0 weight items for the autoget option "Auto-pickup 0 weight items".
  
• Objects with negative weight are now picked up when "Auto-pickup 0 weight items" is enabled.
  
• Added better lighting to Grit Gate.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the razed goatfolk village to fail to build.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused read books to count multiple times for achievements.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the achievement for traveling to the Six Day Stilt not to unlock if you had accepted the quest O Glorious Shekhinah!
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the "Hole Like a Head" achievement to not unlock if you had multiple heads.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the game to freeze if you were dominating an object requiring fungal vision as the shimmering effect expired.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the shimmering screen effect from consuming Eater's flesh to persist when dominating another creature.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused part of the upper Tomb of Eaters not to be flagged as an interior space.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the main quest to skip ahead to "The Earl of Omonporch" if Asphodel died early.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused objects that were immobile for any reason to become immune to the effects of time dilation.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused one of the four children of the Tomb to occasionally not spawn.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused svardym storms to roll over to protected zones like the Yd Freehold if the storm started outside of it.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused lithofexes to refract their own lithifying gaze if equipped with refractive gear.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused high explosives (including sowers seeds) to occasionaly explode forever.
  
• Fixed some cooking effects not serializing properly.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the game to occasionally crash when you accessed a book.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused some relics to generate with place names.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused artifacts providing additional carry capacity to function when improperly equipped.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the hooks from Hooks for Feet to be placed in your inventory when buying new mutations.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused popups about extradimensional psychic hunters to continue appearing after you left [redacted].
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the Puff Spores ability to persist permanently if the Klanq infected limb was dismembered.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the Grit Gate communications panel to disable trading permanently.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Otho not to admit you to Grit Gate if your level was too high when returning from "More Than a Willing Spirit".
  
• Fixed a bug that caused Neelahind to end the conversation if, during "Kith and Kin", you accused a kendren in prosperous circumstances without having finished "Love and Fear".
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the dialogue of Bey Lah's residents to not immediately update after "Kith and Kin".
  
• Fixed an exception when a liquid fell through a pit.
  
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to swipe and lunge on the world map using a long sword.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the text for buying additional tinkering recipes in the water ritual to not update until revisited.
  
• Fixed a bug that let you trade non-gossips secrets as gossip.
  
• Fixed a bug that made broken wire attached to a live power grid fail to emit sparks.
  
• Fixed some bugs that sometimes made power grids behave strangely.
  
• Fixed a typo in Goek's dialog.

• We revamped the conversation system to be much more dynamic and moddable.
  
  • See the wiki for full details.
    
  • Conversations now merge their contents together by default.
    
  • Conversations and elements can now inherit their properties from one or multiple elements.
    
  • Conversations and elements can now have custom logic defined with C# parts.
    
  • Custom predicates and actions like IfHaveQuest or GiveItem can be added for use in XML.
    
  • Elements can now be distributed to other elements. For example, a choice can be distributed to every start node within the conversation.
    
  • Nodes and choices can now have multiple text elements.
    
  • Any element can now have predicates, including individual text elements.
    
  • The logic for the water ritual and dialogue-heavy quests such as "Landing Pads" has moved into Conversations.xml.
    
  • Added the IfTime, IfLedBy, and IfZoneName conversation predicates.
• We retired encounter tables (EncounterTables.xml) in favor of the much more flexible population tables (PopulationTables.xml). This may affect existing mods.
  
• Creatures that were previously equipped via encounter table equipment builders are now implemented as multiple creature objects with the AggregateWith tag (ex: Snapjaw Scavenger).
  
• Added extensive semantic tagging to several objects for power grid, hydraulic, and mechanical infrastructure.
  
• Added a new debug option, ""Draw zone semantics", that indicates the inside/outside areas of zones using the newest ruins builder.
  
• Added an option to disable achievement progress (Debug > disable achievements).

- Gallery is live: A monthly rotating art gallery that anyone can submit to.
- Two Gallery related easter eggs added
- Five easter eggs added to the main house
- Three new spaces in development in small neighborhood
- Manual and Developer's handbook updated to reflect changes

Patch Notes

- Performance improvements
- Fixed problem with rain in the chapter "Forest"
- Added new achievements
- Changed location "River"

As Legends Overload is a free expansion delivered via patch (V. 1.1.0.0), it should now be available to everyone who currently owns The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt. A lot of the specific changes are listed in the "Legends Overload" small update/patch notes announcement.

This includes being able to recruit Barklord the dog as a pseudo-party member (think of him as a "summon" that can be frequently called into battle), the new Action mode Boulderball, the new Legend Plus Difficulty, new passive abilities, and very importantly, a lot of new story content that populates more of the existing world maps and adds more endgame challenges.

The dev blogs at www.dragoon.ca/tdrlcdevblogs.html contain more information regarding Barklord, Legend Plus, Boulderball, the story content additions, the new passive abilities, why Legends Overload took more time than expected, the game modes scrapped during development, and more.


Next up will be the Tenebris expansion, which is aiming for a new playable character, a new world and the Naval Conquest mode, among other things. Work on this has already begun.

GREETINGS MAD FOLK!

Hello everyone, Dewald here. I am the solo developer responsible for this upcoming title. I want to thank everyone who wishlisted the game so far, wishlists are a valuable tool for us developers to see the overall interest people have for our games. Development is going well and I have many things I want to share with you but I will keep this announcement brief.

LET'S HEAR THE DETAILS

For any who are still not sure what MadMan is all about, it is a first person horror game very much inspired by other horror titles like outlast and alien isolation(my personal favorite) . The player will be wandering helplessly around a dark creepy and beautifully detailed world where danger can come from any corner. The villain of this game is a former doctor who worked at this mental asylum before losing his sanity and becoming the very thing he hated. He is always stalking through the halls searching for his next victim meaning YOU. In order to make this feel like a proper horror experience the player won't be able to fight back, your only options are to run or hide from the doctor. The game has a big emphasis on sound so the player must listen closely to interpret his whereabouts. Sound is your ally and pretty much your only ally in this madhouse. Since we're on the topic of sound, players will also be able to lure the doctor with sound, this can be useful to you as you can lead him to certain areas you want him to go to. This can be used to trick the doctor to move away from his current position so you can pass through unseen. While exploring the levels, players will stumble onto various clues which will help reveal the doctor's past piece by piece. Players will have various hiding spots like hiding inside lockers or under beds etc. to avoid detection. The core functionality of the AI is done and working but I will be spending an enormous amount of more time to make the AI as smart as I possibly can. Since the AI is what this game is going to be centered around I will do my utmost best to achieve the quality AI horror fans deserve. I am using behavior trees, a common practice used by many AAA games to build complex AI to make the AI have many branches of behavior for every situation.

GAMEPLAY FOOTAGE

I did post some gameplay on the steam store page as I feel gameplay is ten times better than a fancy CGI trailer which are all fake as no game ever looks like their trailers. As I add more gameplay features and improvements you can expect me to add newer and better gameplay videos in the future as the game grows.

ENGINE NEWS

The game currently runs on the Unreal Engine 4 however since Unreal Engine 5 is getting fully released early this year probably late March, I will be porting the game over to UE5 once it's released.

CLOSING MESSAGE

I hope you all are excited for the game and if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to comment below. I will answer as many of you as I can. That's about all I can say for now, stay tuned for more updates in the near future.

Ver. 1.0.7.5

Wow, time flies when you're having stressful amounts of work piling on you- I MEAN having fun! Have we really not released a Night Spasm since November?!?!

For the past 4 months, we've been working on CHAPTER 2 of Night Spasm! We know exactly what's up next for the Night Spasm story, and boy is it good (I heard that maybe a SPECIAL GUEST might be helping us develop Chapter 2? Who could this be???)! Even though this update is fairly small, it took so long because we've been preparing a LOT of content we're not quite ready to release. More information on that in a Devlog coming out today!

What you're REALLY here for is an update so beautiful Piccaso has been reeeeal quiet since this dropped (probably because he's dead). Introducing Night Spasm version 1.0.7.5! Really catchy isn't it? It's like a computer wrote it for us!

Here are the patch notes!

-Completely shortened the tutorial and introduction. The tutorial should be much more entertaining and take up far less time! Additionally, we’ve shorted a lot of other important dialog and made various moments optional to read!

-Changed the textbox color to black, making text easier to read while also serving as a “night mode” feature.

-Changed the text and menu font to Bahnschrift.

-Changed the battle text font to Arial.

-Increased the price of all items in shops by about 10 to 30 ckoins.

-Made the Vinnia Follow boss fight much more difficult and implemented some new moments.

-Made two new boss themes for Vinnia Follow and the Revenger King/Ravlonian King. Their exciting new themes should make their battles much more intense!

-The stun effect of all skills, equipment, and items available to the player will now inflict sleep/freeze instead. Having access to the stun infliction at any point caused boss fights to be way too easy. The equipment will remain unchanged for old save files.

-Enemy counter attacks now include their BD in the damage formula.

-Buffed all non-food healing items and all offensive items.



We realized we may have made some tiny lil' mistakes back then. "We all do!" (-Kevin McKalister). With this update, the visuals should be much more pleasing to look at, mostly the dialog. And speaking of the dialog, we REALLY forced a lot of storytelling at the start of the game. That's been taken care of now, as most of the dialog in 90% of the game is now optional! We'll even keep compressing the dialog as Chapter 2 gets developed. Who says a picture is worth 1000 words? 100 words could ALSO equal 1000 words!

Also really quickly, we'd like to remind everyone that we are searching for music makers. Whether you can make great bangers, dramatic bridges, or comedically-crappy masterpieces, we need you! Contact us either through Instagram or Twitter, links down below!

And remember, if there are any changes or improvements you think we should make, tell us via social media! Thank you all for playing and keep your controllers busy!

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mastermoes/

Business Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fanfaction_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/master_moes

FanFaction YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyfxy1iPguP5-tkdvEaDceQ

Personal YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDlZpndTqcTzYU8EigRznYw

Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/mastermoes

Do you want to play together with players around the world even if you don't know how to understand their language? Do you want to join an official game that you can join easily and play without the hustle of joining any voice channels?
Then you should try our brand new game mode for sure: QUICK PLAY with Auto Translation Chat Feature (Beta)



This game mode will put you in an official lobby where you will play with random players around the world using only in-game written chat.

Don't worry you don't need any translator because this game mode also has an Auto Translation Chat Feature enabled. You will see the whole chat translated to your own language during the game no matter who wrote in which language. This feature is still in beta so please go tell us any improvement areas you can see about it. There might be some changes for the core of this feature along the way already.

It is also very easy to start playing in this new game mode. You go to the main menu and click on the QUICK PLAY button.



Then the game will put you in one of the chat-only global lobbies.
The game will start automatically when there are 12 people in the lobby. In this new game mode, there is no host of the lobby and for now, you will only play with roles that are set as default in the game lobby.
Auto Translation Chat Feature will be active in both the lobby chat window and also in-game chat window, so do not hesitate to type in your own language. Everyone will see it translated in his/her own language.

The Last Taxi is a narrative-driven adventure game set in Progress Point, a politically and economically-divided sprawling metropolis that has fully embraced automation and human modification, creating a satirical and somberly-surreal vision of the future.

As the last human driver, you’ll meet a diverse cast of passengers, each with their own tailored conversations. Be drawn into morally challenging decisions that lead you into the heart of a dying society.

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Join us here on Steam Tuesday, Feb. 22 at 2 pm CST (02-22-22 @ 2!) and Friday, Feb. 25th at 3 pm CST for NEXT FEST as we broadcast our demo of The Last Taxi!

We'll be digging through all the game's conversation threads and answering your questions so if there's something you want to know, be sure to tune in!

Watch both streams to see the conversations and characters you may not know yet, but will certainly love - this demo won't be the same every playthrough!

We hope to see you there!