1.52 Update:

1. Attack Voice Added
2. Bug fix

Challenge another player in a single match where you select the game board or progress through the Campaign while accumulating XP. To play in the Campaign, just go to Multiplayer, Campaign, Create, then Invite to find an opponent by user name or add to your Friends List.

Make sure to join the ChessLocke Discord server if you need help finding an opponent.
https://discord.gg/ZEEXpHNvRW

I received a report for a game-stuck causing bug when meteors passed by in certain situations.
As this is a major annoyance, I patched this problem with this minor patch.

I hope you have a great time and please let me know if you encounter any problems!

Cheers
Raffa




Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug where an avoided Meteroid caused the game to not spawn the next wave.
  
• Fixed a bug where the game over screen caused problems or crash the game.

THE TIME HAS COME! Chordwatch is now officially available for purchase on Steam!

Save time and headache learning mysterious chord names with real-time chord recognition, and take the confusion out of creation with scale guides, chord previews and much more!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1884960/Chordwatch/
We can't wait to see how people use Chordwatch.

All the best,
Tom
Moonstop Software

- Add slow motion mode when pressing T
- Add camera shaking to explosion

I'm hard at work on the final level stuff! It's coming along pretty nicely, so expect to see it pretty soon! I also made some important bug fixes this week which I released early.

This week I was finally able to root cause an issue that I've noticed intermittently for a long time: occasionally when you're playing, you'll be jumping normally, and all of a sudden you'll land, charge up a jump, and lose all of your momentum. In order to fully explain this issue, lets go into some detail about how the momentum system works, and how some specific unity quirks were causing these problems.

Intuition would say that if you need the character's velocity when you hit something, then just check the velocity when you hit it. Unfortunately if you try that with Unity, you'll realize things don't work that way. On a given physics step of the game, Unity updates the positions and velocities of all objects that are controlled by the physics system. At the end of the physics step, Unity triggers the collision detection methods (OnCollisionEnter, OnCollisionStay, OnCollisionExit), based on the positions & speeds after the calculations have been completed. What this means is that if you have an object going 10m/s that hits a wall, by the time you are told by Unity that it hit a wall, it's speed would already be set to what it is after it bounced off the wall.

To compensate for that fact, PogoChamp uses a rolling window of recent speeds. Typically you'd only need the previous frame's speed, but due to the unpredictability of some of the collision behavior, I use a window of around 15 updates (0.3 seconds). When your character lands on a surface, the jump force is the maximum velocity within that time window, with scaling factors based on angle of impact, whether you're on a wall, and various other factors. In order to properly do the scaling, I store information about the collision at the time of impact.

During my investigation I noticed that very occasionally, the collision object I was storing would change its internal values to reference completely different objects. This was something I'd never noticed before, but I guess Unity reuses the allocated Collision objects, and doesn't guarantee anything about collisions beyond the frame that they were first created. This could occasionally result in a bounce where by the time your character was ready to jump, the collision it was using for momentum scaling had changed to a different collision, and you'd end up with a default strength jump no matter how fast you were moving before. To fix this, instead of storing the reference to the previous Collision, I now store a struct with the values I care about (mostly the collision normal).

The other "dud jump" bug was related to the way I calculate whether you are jumping manually or due to a bounce. There's special logic to "fake" a bounce with some default values so that I can reuse the same logic for manual and automatic bounces. Unfortunately I was a little inconsistent with how I was using the Update and FixedUpdate methods, and my naiive understanding of resolution order when it came to Collision detection bit my pretty badly. I assumed that OnCollisionEnter triggered before FixedUpdate during the physics loop, but it actually happens after. Here's a summary of the steps that were causing the bug.

1. [End Of Physics Loop] Unity detects a collision and registers the character as being "on the ground".
2. [Update Loop] My code detects that you are on the ground but not bouncing, so resets your landing velocity and starts a manual bounce.
3. [Physics Loop] My code calculates your bounce force with the newly reset velocity.

What this meant in practice was that if the update loop ran between the time the landing was detected and the physics loop ran, your character would do a default strength jump. It's actually surprising to me this issue didn't happen more often in practice, given that the physics loop runs 50 times per second and the update loop runs much more often.

The fix to this was to properly move step 2 of the FixedUpdate method, which worked great, except when I messed up the logic on an if/else branch and completely broke swimming for 20 hours... That is fixed now though.

• BUG FIX: Fix a couple different bugs that resulted in improperly weak jumps in certain situations.
  
• DEV: Update Level Select to handle the final levels.
  
• BUG FIX: Fix camera movement bug when you teleport after moving quickly in the Level Select.
  
• DEV: A bunch of bug fixes related to things you don't know about yet (related to the final level).
  
• BUG FIX: Disable They See Me Rollin' achievement when you "jump" with the bazooka.
  
• BUG FIX: Daily challenge now properly displays an error when it fails to load in certain ways.
  
• BUG FIX: Daily challenge now loads properly (JSONUtility can't serialize Dictionaries...)
  
• UX: Rename "Upload Gameplay Data" option to "Upload Error Logs", and remove the normal metrics uploads because I wasn't looking at them anyway.
  
• UX: Remove tooltip from "Upload Error Logs" option.
  
• BUG FIX: Crash logs upload properly again (another JSONUtility problem).
  
• DEV: Lots of work on the final level stuff. It's coming along nicely, but I don't want to spoil anything.

Greetings adventurer!

We have some great news to share: we're creating a series of videos for you guys to dive deeper into the world of Arafinn and the development of Return to Nangrim!

Kicking-off with the first video in our Explainer series: an introduction into the lore of Arafinn. Check out the video below.

Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and hit the bell button to get notified when the next video comes out!

Graphics have been improved. That includes new graphics and animations for rabbits and Thump sprites and a new background scene.

Preview on Youtube

• Ability to restart the turn (undoes everything since beginning of the turn)
  
• Better distinction between Mana types (crystal/essence/ambient)
  
• Location interaction info now shows Enemies final stats (accounting for buffs and fortifications)
  
• Show Blessings and Followers as icons below cards panel (bottom right)
  
• Show Wounded + Exhausted Followers on Pause & Campfire screens
  
• Added Special Location Market cards to Campfire & Pause Screen
  
• Rebalanced XP for a bunch of low-XP enemies
  
• Added ability to File a feedback from Home and Pause menus
  
• Added custom rules in Game Option to clear Movement and Leadership points on Battle Start
  
• Invert reputation discount display to prevent confusion (+2/-2)
  
• Minor cards and other texts updates
  
• Added explanation about 'Pause' (Esc) screen in Tutorials
  
• Minor tweaks to tutorials
  
• Removed backquote shortcut for market which was redundant with '4'

• Fixed Prowess + Arcane Language combo should not improve attacks generated by Prowess spawner
  
• Fixed computation & display of hand size bonus for conquered citadels and kraks
  
• Fixed Arcane Mimicry + Crystal siege combo not generating mana until commit/end of turn
  
• Fixed double application of passive unit skill effects after commit (ex: Holy Slayer Ring)
  
• Fixed Holy Slayer Ring should also double follower attacks
  
• Fixed Restoring battle should not draw new summoned enemies
  
• Fixed Double counting of wounds during some effect payment
  
• Fixed Restarting a Battle loses the Benediction state/mana
  
• Fixed buttons that would emit sound even when muted
  
• Fixed occasional errors with Steam Achievements
  
• Fixed Cards like "Use Move as Attack" clearing its own state
  
• Fixed Benediction UI state not always refreshed when changing benediction
  
• Fixed occasional crash in Pause screen
  
• Fixed tooltips remaining open on Tutorial and Map screen

Okay, to be fair, it did not take much effort. In fact, I did nothing. It just works out of the box apparently. I don't know how Valve did that, but I am impressed!

https://twitter.com/NevercuteGames/status/1502441675951677443

If anyone has a SteamDeck and feels like providing confirmation on this, it would be good to see that it's not just a one time fluke.