Well well well... it has been awfully quiet around here for a while now, for a good reason: Downtown Drift hasn't seen an Update for almost 2 years. So finally, after a long hiatus, there will be a new Update coming this Friday Monday, the 27th30th of May 2022!
For a lot of reasons I unfortunately haven't gotten around to working on Downtown Drift earlier, but mostly it was a lack of motivation. Especially during these past two years it had been quite hard to find the drive to work on the project, but I always felt like there was unfinished business here. So over the past weeks I have been putting in some hours to finally fix those issues with Downtown Drift that have always bothered me in the past.
Beyond this next update I intend to continue with adding more content to Downtown Drift over the next weeks. So I hope everyone is as excited as I am to improve and develop Downtown Drift further to make it the truly great game it deserves to be!
Best,
ThatMadProgrammer
Postponed the release date because I underestimated how much work still had to be done... Sorry!
Tomorrow is the big day, Raji: An Ancient Epic Enhanced Edition will launch at 10 pm IST and we hope that you're all as excited as we are.
Unfortunately, there is one peice of news that we need to share with you, and that is that the six announced regional Indian subtitles will not be in the Enhanced Edition on launch day.
The quick reason - we recently encountered some issues with how the game's engine displays the characters of the regional languages.
The more detailed reason (this comes to us from the development team) the game uses Unicode blocks to display characters from the regional languages.
Bengali (for Bangla and Assamese)
Kannada (for Kannada)
Telugu (for Telugu)
Tamil (for Tamil)
Devanagari (for Hindi and Marathi)
Within most Indian languages, there are certain symbols called diacritics (or Matras) which when attached to a letter, change the way that letter is supposed to be drawn. Put simply, it changes or adds to the shape of that letter.
Unfortunately, quite recently (so very late into development) we learned that except for the Devanagari Unicode block, these diacritics are not being drawn correctly, hence the bug.
The good news is that we have identified the problem within the engine's source code, and are working towards a solution.
We know that this will come as a disappointment to many of you, but we hope that you can understand the situation. That said after the team's hard work in the last few days, we are optimistic that the subtitle patch can be put together relatively quickly.
Made small balance changes for the middle and late stages of the game. The parameters of the residential skyscraper have been raised so that it can better compete with modular housing with 8 levels. Also good news is that cards and badges will be available soon.
In both versions:
Added replacement function for modular buildings.
Growing fruit in one cycle increased from 15 to 17.
The capacity of residential skyscrapers increased from 250 to 270, aesthetics increased from 4 to 5.
The capacity of modular housing units has been reduced from 26 to 25, energy consumption has been increased from 4 to 5.
Fixed a bug when positioning buildings on wall-mounted wind turbines built on cliff extensions.
Fixed weather effects in screensavers.
Potentially fixed bug that caused asteroids to accumulate in orbit, which significantly slowed down the game.
The attack of looters in the normal mode is much weaker at the initial levels of development of the city, and depends better on the level of city growth.
Remaster version:
The maximum size of the interface in the settings is slightly reduced. (to avoid the interface going beyond the screen)
Depth of Field effect returned to settings. (disabled by default)
Tone of night windows fixed (was too blue)
Shadow quality improved. (as it turned out the best shadows quality was low resolution)
SSGI exposure to lighting is reduced by 25%, not so bright shadow side during the day.
The overall post processing has been slightly modified to make the image a bit cooler.
SSR now also reflects reflections on water and glass.
Contains 5 new achievements to unlock: - 1 bonus stage - 1 relic to access 2 minor gameplay mechanics - 2 new arcanas - 1 more rank for the Skip power-up
Tweaks: - Halved base duration of Shadow Pinion and Valkyrie Turner - Shadow Pinion and Valkyrie Turner striking attack has a damage bonus depending on how long it has been "charged" - Arcana XIX - Heart of Fire also affects Valkyrie Turner's striking attack and Phiera Der Tuphello - Every bonus point in Armor now also increases retaliatory damage by 10%. Retaliatory damage is currently inflicted by NO FUTURE and Arcana XIX - Music and music mods can now be previewd in stage selection screen - Rerolls can now be used to draft Arcanas
Bugfixes: - Unfortunately, due to one of the new game mechanics, the time has come to fix the Bone-stuck-in-the-boss glitch - Tentative fix to items sometimes not leveling up near the end of a run
New minor game mechanics
Due to the amount of work needed to improve on the save data issues with Mac and Steam Cloud, and also for the future patch 0.7, patch 0.6.0 will have less content than usual. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I also hope you have fun with the new little mechanics added in this patch!
One of the new mechanics is mostly for players who simply enjoy playing the game even when there's nothing left to unlock, so please don't feel like you have to grind for these new bonuses.
Future content, unlocks, and achievements will still be (un)balanced on the vanilla character stats and power-ups* and so will not expect you to have accumulated any of these new bonuses. * Curse excluded
Our new build just went live on Stable, containing fixes for every Achievement that wasn't previously triggering properly. New achievements await on your next trip to Beor.
Along with a host of stability fixes, Build 1171 contains a fix for our Death & Dying system for heroes. Character deaths could sometimes get a little wonky if you only had one living hero in your party, and the system never really handled party wipes elegantly up until now.
This fix means I now have much more leeway in my writing to unleash potentially lethal consequences for failed missions. Look for a deadlier adventuring experience in coming patches. Mwahahahaha!!!
UP NEXT Your choice between siding with the Undermarket or Fantastical Crimes Unit will play a much more significant role in the reworked first month of quests and we're expanding the Spirit/Hunger/Foraging system.
We're also testing out a crazy exciting potential new feature this week that I hope to tell you lots more about in the very near future.
DECORATE THOSE TAVERNS! Clicking the DECOR button allows you to decorate your tavern with the trophies earned by your heroes' victories (and defeats).
We Want To Hear from You Epic Tavern streams development every Monday and Friday on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/epictavern). Mondays at 7pm EST: Narrative Chat with Tomo and Shawn Friday at 7pm EST: Bug Squashing with Rich
Dev Chats on Discord NEW TIME: Every Wednesday from 2-3 pm EST, join Tomo and Shawn for an open voice chat about game design and storytelling where we field any questions from our players. Stop on by! https://discord.com/invite/epictavern
- band friends no longer appear during the pumpkin event - removed an unwelcome NPC from the museum - adjusted seed store interaction range - adjusted collision walls in Roomwoods - adjusted pushable blocks to behave more consistently with the player's laser - adjusted jumping collision detection - updated goo slime's dialogue - fixed rare iceberg robot disappearance - fixed a bear child being off screen under extremely specific circumstances - auto saving no longer occurs if the player is inside of a rock for some reason (or any other place that you would traditionally not want to be inside forever)
One of the big questions you have to answer when making a game is how much will it cost to play? There there are many different monetization methods that range from the simplest; pay some money and it's yours forever. To the ever complex live-service micro transaction. I have decided that for Engineer Alpha I will only ever be using the simple method of you pay the price you see and you get the entire game. I want this game to be around for as long as possible and the only way I can see that will do that is by only ever charging the player for one thing, access to the game. Anything else has a tendency to create a rift between what is good for the players and what is good for profits. As well as selling anything else is like saying "we choose to make the game worse so we can sell you a solution". None of this sits well with me and I believe in leading by example so that is what I am going to do. Also in that same vain the game will never go on sale or have a drop in price so long as it is being actively developed.
The price will however go up. The first price increase is planned to take place this summer (so no sooner the June 21 2022) after the release of Version 0.3. The current plan is to increase to $10 usd.
As for the release of 0.3 the current hope is to have a development version available here on steam within the next two weeks. This will be an optional branch that you can choose to get if you want to try out the latest toys before they go live for everyone in the following weeks.
