Soar high and command the fury of the elements with the latest Prime Vault release!

Get Zephyr Prime and Chroma Prime, along with their signature Weapons and Customizations for a limited time!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599190/Warframe_Prime_Vault__Zephyr__Chroma_Dual_Pack/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599191/Warframe_Prime_Vault__Zephyr_Prime_Pack/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599192/Warframe_Prime_Vault__Chroma_Prime_Pack/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599193/Warframe_Prime_Vault__Zephyr_Prime_Accessories/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1599194/Warframe_Prime_Vault__Chroma_Prime_Accessories/

Ho there travelers!

Hope spring is finding you all well! We’re having days in a row with no snow up here in northern Norway and that’s something I guess.

The upside is that inside weather means more work is getting done on;

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1609100/

The teaser is a wrap! You’ll have to wait a bit more for it as we’re saving it for a festival this summer!


The cold, dead stars hate you!

It’s a bit of a challenge to find a format that does justice to the crisp pixel-art of Skald and I think we’re getting very close to cracking the code in this teaser. I can’t wait to show it off and hope you like it. A big thanks to Sarah Gonidec and Roland Smedberg for all their hard work and endless patience!

The new demo will be out in mid June if all goes according to plan! The aim is to polish the game-systems as much as possible so that the demo represents the final game as much as possible in as many areas as possible.

In particular, we’ll be digging deep on combat and the general UI.


I’m going to add more of a button and icon-based UI in the cases where it makes sense – such as in combat.

I’m adding in a lot more animation frames in general. Both for creatures and specific weapon attacks.



There is still some work on the timing aspect as some animations are a bit too fast or “off” but I can see this will go a long way towards making the game look a lot more varied.



Adding more detailed monster models also makes everything look a lot cooler. I really hope we’ll have the multi-tile monsters fully up and working by the time the demo launches as they have quite a battlefield presence.



Also note how the fire above has a new look! All the flames in the game will now be made by procedural effects. This includes props like camp-fires and torches as well as spell effects. Stay posted as we show off some of the flashy and arcane magics that will be at your disposal!

As the demo comes out, just keep in mind that it will be shorter in content then the current demo – at least in the beginning. It’s very important that what we put out is polished and making it short and sweet is the priority to begin with. Stay assured though: We’ll be padding it with more content as we go!

In case you missed it, Fiona and I recently did a stream with my producer at Raw Fury: Daniel Jonsson. We had a little round-table about what the day-to-day collaboration between developers and publishers looks like and I warmly recommend giving it a watch.



Coming up, on May 12th at 4PM CET at Raw Fury’s Twitch channel, we’re having a talk with Raw Fury’s rock-star scout Johan Toresson!



We’ll be talking about how scouts work for publishers and how and why you should pitch to them! This is a must for fellow game developers or anyone who is just interested in how the industry works!

If you love indie-punk, ramen with an attitude and new curse-words, Johan is your man (May 12th, 4PM CET at Raw Fury’s Twitch channel)!

Keep following this devlog, my Twitter and the Skald Discord to stay posted on our awesome quest to bring you more retro-RPG awesomeness!

Cheers,

AL

+ New sounds
+ New settings
+ And other stuff

Hello.

In this blogpost we'd like to share some news about weapons and combat system of both HWR: Reforged and HWR: Downfall.

In our opinion, the original Heads Will Roll both had a pretty respectable arsenal of weapons and did a decent job highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of different weapon types. In Reforged and Downfall we decided to expand the overall arsenal while, at the same time, increasing and preserving the uniqueness of each weapon.

At this point in development there're 56 different melee weapons in the game including several ones that fall into completely new categories like 'curved swords' and 'throwing spears' that were not present in the original game. Both of these are an interesting addition mainly because they allow us to introduce new attacks and mechanics that, in turn, enable the player to create more unique playstyles.
So, for example, curved swords have a new attack that increases the damage dealt to target by a portion of attacker's agility, but only if the blow lands clean (i.e. not fully or partially blocked by armor). What this means is that now there's a weapon, damage output of which scales with agility rather than only weapons skill or strength. Coupled with the addition of all kinds of new trinkets this allows for completely new playstyles that do not rely on brute force or heavy weapons for high damage output but rather on agility and precision.

The introduction of throwing spears and javelins too aims at diversifying the approaches to combat that are available to the player. The 'Spear Throw' attack makes use of both agility (to hit the target) and strength (for damage modifier) for an absolutely devastating effect. Even at the start of the game, with a relatively weak character, this attack is capable of doing damage in the realm of high 20s and one-shotting shields. And since all throwing spears have at least one melee attack, your options with them are never limited to just throwing so you can hold your own in melee combat. Thus you can both throw your spear at the beginning of the battle and then instantly switch to the second weapon. Or wait until there's an opportune moment or a proper target and then throw it.



Another thing we did was buffing the one-handed longswords. In the original game they were widely considered to be one of the worst weapon types. And this, by itself, is not a very bad thing as, contrary to the popular belief, in the real medieval combat the longswords were never considered to be that amazing of a weapon. Depending on the situation, a poleaxe, a spear, a mace, a flail or an axe would pretty much always be a better option that a sword, while circumstances where a longsword would be better than any of the above were very rare.

But, at the same time, longswords were indeed used very widely and were by all means an iconic weapon of that era. Thus, searching for a way to buff them in the game, we came up with an idea of another attack — a fencing move. Dubbed 'Counter Strike' this attack increases the hit chance if the target has missed their previous attack or has a 'feinted' debuff applied to them. The idea should be pretty obvious: deceive your enemy with feints, make them miss — make them pay. Obviously, this playstyle too can hugely benefit from a variety of new trinkets that can improve your feinting skills, dmage output, chance to inflict a bleeding or an injury or break enemy's armor.



On top of that a lot of weapons (both old and new) received unique attack effects: rusty swords and axes can inflict a small poisoning; messers, gross-messers and curved swords have a higher chance to inflict bleedings etc.

And even that's not entirely it as there're actually two more new attacks - Helmbreaker (for Horseman's axe) and Coup de Grace (for several swords). But in the interest of time we'll leave them for another occasion.

If you liked the news then rejoice as Downfall is just a couple of months away. And, hopefully, it will not disappoint you.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/687800/Heads_Will_Roll_Reforged/

Fixed some bugs and changed fonts

Hey, everyone. Robert here. When The Hand of Merlin released into Early Access last year, many of you told us that its level of polish didn’t feel like an Early Access game at all. And what greater compliment can there be? Thank you for that!

Before we put on our party hats and light the candles, let’s kick things off with a fun fact. Did you know that The Hand of Merlin was not always called The Hand of Merlin? In fact, finding the right title took a while!



At first, we went with Guardians of Erda: Merlin’s Tale. Quite a mouthful, huh? It was supposed to convey the message of the journey, of saving the world, of getting back in touch with Merlin’s lost kin, the other Guardians. But it just didn’t roll off the tongue.

The title we landed on, The Hand of Merlin, is also very symbolic. It can be taken to mean that Merlin has a hand in shaping the world and its history. But it also represents the Heroes that help carry out his task: the fellowship itself acting as the hand of Merlin. Plus, it’s way shorter, so that’s good!

Over the past year, we’ve been doing live development in Early Access, while also porting the game to consoles. That includes pushing regular content updates at a steady month-and-a-half interval, with lots of small updates in between, usually weekly or bi-weekly.

Let me tell you – it’s been a brutal experience! 🙂 But also very fun, with lots of things we’ve learned on the way.



Thinking about some of the highs over the last year, we really enjoyed seeing popular content creators livestream or review our game. It felt good to hear folks praising various gameplay aspects, or just plain-old having fun with it!

Another high would be… um… helping folks with technical issues. No, seriously. It may sound weird, but it feels good to have a happy customer praise our technical support, especially since we’re such a small team and all spread so thin. There’s no dedicated community manager or tech support contact: it’s just us, the three programmers on the team, juggling coding new features, bug fixing, tech support, build system management, and everything else in-between.

And of course, you can’t have the highs without the lows. In the early days of EA, seeing those very same content creators across Twitch and YouTube finding a nasty bug was a bit deflating. One time, all the textures went haywire and started blinking with psychedelic textures during a stream. The chat exploded, and the guy was laughing, but we on the dev team just wanted earth to swallow us. 🙂 Fortunately, we were soon able to reproduce and fix the bug, but I promise that we will never forget that scene with flashing neon floors on livestream!

Even with so many people praising your game, it’s still difficult seeing negative reviews pop up. I keep track of all the reviews and posts, and every unfavorable one is a kick in the gut. Still, we sift through them and often there’s something actionable to be found. Something to address, to help make the game even better.

The worst mistake you can make as a dev, I think, is to react emotionally or start arguing. Even if there’s an angry post on the forum, I ask myself: how come that person is so angry? Is there something we can change to address their issue? Oftentimes, the answer is yes, and then the person goes from feeling angry to feeling vindicated. That’s such a great feeling when that happens! So, this actually started as a “low,” but became a “high” by the end! 🙂



And so, here we are: 365 days after The Hand of Merlin’s first day in Early Access. It’s been an amazing year, and we’re very excited to reach the end of our EA voyage and officially release version 1.0 in the near future (you’ll be hearing more about that very soon)!

Before we wrap things up here, I’ll leave you with one more fun fact about The Hand of Merlin: An artistic influence on the game was Excalibur, a 1981 film. The entire movie is a visual trip, and really hits the nail on the head with that weird, off-kilter medieval feel with dark mystical undertones.

The movie also features some very shiny armor, which due to the physics of optical lenses used in cameras, produced strong fringes of light extending from the borders of those bright suits of armor. This in turn caused the film to have an almost dream-like, otherworldly feel to it. We actually replicated this artifact – this feeling – with a strong bloom effect in-game.

Thank you so much for your continued support and feedback. You’ve all definitely made this first birthday all the more sweet!

In the updated development plan, we said that the next update would be released in May. However, in the course of our work, we took another look at some aspects of raids and made the decision to move the update to June.

Raids will become an important part of Black Skylands, making late-game and post-completion gameplay more exciting. Your impressions of the update are the most important thing for us, and in order to insure they are positive impressions, we need more time to devote attention to all the details and aspects of development.

We will try our hardest to release the update as soon as possible. Thank you for staying with us, supporting the game's development, and sending us feedback! We hope to bring you new content soon!

For now, we'd like to show you an example of a raid level from the upcoming update.

---

Yours truly,

Greetings, Adventurers!

Cheer on some of your favorite New World content creators as they battle our development team in 3v3 Arena matches. Each week different creators and developers will face off in five Arena matches to showcase the new PvP mode. Join any of the participating creators’ Twitch streams for banter with our development team, a Twitch Drop, and strategies to use in your next PvP encounter. Make sure to tune in on May 12th, 19th, and 26th at 11AM PT (6PM UTC) so you don’t miss any of the action.

The Combatant’s Supply Chest Twitch Drop is packed to the brim with level appropriate loot to help improve your performance in PvP battles. This unique Twitch Drop will be available for 96 hours after the end of each event. Viewers will need to watch 2 hours of New World to earn each Drop. Once earned, players can claim their chest(s) through the ‘Item Claim’ tab found within the in-game store after the content update that introduces the 3v3 PvP Arena. Please visit our Twitch Drops page for more details on how to link your accounts and collect them.



You can collect a total of 3 supply chests, 1 per event. Please note that once the Drop collection window has ended, your progress will not carry over to the next Twitch Drop. Each supply chest will have the same contents, listed below. Charge more confidently into the Arena with:

• 2 Vials each containing 1,000 Azoth Salt – Azoth Salt is our new PvP Currency that allows you to purchase PvP exclusive rewards.
  
• 3 random pieces of exclusive PvP focused gear with higher rarities and PvP centric perks.
  
• 5 Health Potions – these will instantly restore a portion of your health, so don’t enter the arena without them.
  
• 10 Stat Boosting Food – Come hungry, because the chest will reward you with level appropriate specialty food to boost a specific attribute stat (STR, DEX, INT, FOC, CON). You’ll receive 2 Stat Boosting Food per stat for a total of 10 items.
  
• 2 Honing Stones – These will boost your weapon damage by a percentage for a period of time to help you dish out major damage.
  
• 2 Gemstone Dust - This increases your elemental damage absorption by a percentage for a period of time and is very helpful against the mages of Aeternum.
  
• 2 Oakflesh Balms – This will increases absorption of Physical damage types (Slash/Strike/Thrust) by a percentage for a period of time or a total number of hits are received. Like the name implies, this balm will make you sturdy as an oak in close melee encounters.

Different trios of content creators and developers will step into the ring each week. Check out the creators’ Twitch channels to watch the event, hear the developer’s commentary, and witness high-level PvP gameplay. The New World development team has been hard at work to create a new PvP Arena experience, but how will that knowledge translate into skill?

Creators

• DannehTV
  
• BagginsTV
  
• Redbyrd

Developers

• Mike Willette, World Experience Lead
  
• Chris Corey, Designer
  
• Patrick Smedley, Game Designer

Creators

• Techniq
  
• Katcontii
  
• Towelliee

Developers

• Dave Verfaillie, Creative Director
  
• Drew Higbee, Senior Product Manager
  
• Kevin Mesnard, QA

Creators

• Ginger Prime
  
• To be Announced
  
• To be Announced

Developers

• Mike Willette, World Experience Lead
  
• Dave Hall, Gameplay Design Manager
  
• Zach Holm, Level Designer

The Public Test Realm (PTR) is a server that gives players an early look at upcoming features, like Arenas. These preview builds are snapshots of upcoming major releases and are not final versions. You may encounter bugs, crashes, missing text, or other issues. Work together with the rest of the community and our team to help us catch and resolve all serious issues before they reach live servers, and provide your feedback on features making their way to Aeternum. The current PTR has Arenas, new mutators, and more— learn how you can participate in our PTR details article.

Thanks for your support! We look forward to seeing the unique strategies players create for this new game mode, especially in the Dev Vs. Creator showdowns. See you in the Arena.

Join Community Manager Ezrabell in the next Community Livestream as he plays MapleStory! Grab your snacks and prepare for an adventure of fun in this upcoming livestream. Join us on any of the platforms listed below this Friday, May 13th at 4:00 PM PDT (7:00 PM EDT).

CM Ezrabell will be playing MapleStory on his character, partaking in activities and events around Maple World! There will also be giveaways throughout the stream so join us for an opportunity to win some Lotus Leaf Chairs, Nodestones, and Reward Points! Make sure you don't miss out on the fun~ See you Friday!

MapleStory Community Livestream will be available on the following platforms:

• Twitchhttps://www.facebook.com/maplestory[/url][/*][*][url=https://www.youtube.com/user/MapleStory]YouTube[/url][/*][*][url=https://twitter.com/maplestory]Twitter[/url][/*][*][url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/216150/MapleStory]Steam[/url][/*][*][url=https://www.facebook.com/maplestory/]Facebook[/url][/*][/list] [url=https://www.twitch.tv/maplestory][img]https://nxcache.nexon.net/cms/2020/q4/2245/1024x576-v1.png[/img][/url]  
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Steam
• Facebook

 

Optimization Series:
Part 1: Optimization Goals
Part 2: Before and After Results
Part 3: Technical Deep-dive


Introduction:
Welcome to part 1 of the Death Carnival optimization mini-series in which we will share some of the experiences we had when optimizing for the game.
Death Carnival is an upcoming fast-paced arcade shooter with singleplayer, online coop, and competitive PVP. It is built on the Unity engine and is slated to be released later this year.
This first post will be focused on our optimization goals, and why we’ve been doing optimizations along the way instead of waiting till the very end of production.
Firstly, we wanted to do some level of optimization now, to answer the question of, how well will it run on low-end hardware such as low-budget laptops or even low-mid range mobile phones.
We want Death Carnival to be accessible. Both in terms of ease-of-controls, in being able to understand how to play the game quickly with our easy arcade controls, but also being accessible via a broad range of hardware. We needed to make sure common devices in different countries around the world can play the game smoothly, with at least 60 frames per second. The game is fast-paced and arcadey, and having a decent framerate is important for us.

Low-End Hardware Support:
What does low-end hardware mean? On PC, we used a $250 laptop with a Celeron CPU, 4GB of RAM, and an Intel integrated UHD600 video card to do our low-end performance testing.
Haven’t heard of that video card before? Here’s another way of looking at how powerful it is.
In terms of the G3DMark score, the UHD600 has a performance score of 328, vs GeForce 1060 having 10,071 and a Radeon RX 6900XT having 25,497.
Basically, if we can optimize it well enough to play on this $250 laptop, it should run well on most PC hardware. And on mobile devices, we have plenty more optimizations that we can do as well to try and get it to run even on lower-end mobile phones.



How about Compromises:
What about compromises in quality to achieve great framerates? Maintaining a high standard of quality is quite important to us, so there are some rules we need to make sure we don’t break:
1) Make the game look relatively similar between budget hardware to peak performance hardware. Budget hardware players should not feel like they’re suddenly playing a completely different game and breaking their immersion in their game experience.
2) Game needs to scale well at multiple resolutions from 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p and up to 4K and even 8K resolutions. We want to futureproof the game to a certain degree.
3) There should not be toggleable (in-game or 3rd party) visual elements that will significantly impact the combat performance of players.
With the rules mentioned above, and many other factors that are considered, we basically had to make sure the game continued to look great even when we super-optimized its performance.

Results Sneak Preview:
And for those skimming the article or actually reading this far, on that $250 laptop that we mentioned before, we achieved astounding performance results.



Prior to our optimization attempts, the game ran at 5 frames per second on the laptop. After our first batch of major optimizations, it reached 22 frames per second, which is still pretty respectable for a visually complex game such as ours. And most recently, we made a breakthrough with our optimizations and achieved over 80 frames per second. That is a 1600% increase in performance!

And to top it off, this isn’t even our final form yet, we have lots more optimizations available to us still, but I think we’ve definitely cleared some major hurdles in making Death Carnival widely accessible to everyone around the world. Until next time!

Our next post will be more details on the Before and After performance results across a wide range of hardware, along with screenshot comparisons.