Jun 4, 2022

Gatewalkers - A2Softworks

Dear Gatewalkers!

Today we will tell you more about a character that you meet in Gatewalkers - the huntress, Martha.

Martha was born in one of the dilapidated, abandoned villages. Her mother died of a mysterious disease a few days after giving birth. Her father took her and after weeks of traveling, they managed to sneak into the City where they settled down.

Martha was sick a lot as a child. She believed that she was only a burden and a worry for her father, who spent every coin on medications. After discovering who the Gatewalkers were, she wanted to become one herself. Her father was against it. Martha thought that he could change his mind if she had more strength. So, she joined him on his hunting trips and spent the following years hunting animals, climbing trees, throwing knives, and shooting arrows. However, heavy exercise aggravated her disease. One day, while fighting a boar, Martha passed out and almost died. The local doctor was useless. The only hope was a scientist living in the Guild.

Victor took care of Martha and cured her with the appropriate doses of toxic plants. After six months of intensive treatment, she recovered almost completely. Victor suspected that severe side effects could appear in the future, but he kept it a secret.

Martha knew this was her chance to become someone important. She convinced her father to stay in the Guild by saying that she had to pay off her debt. A few days later, she started her training.

Now, she is an excellent huntress. She is mainly involved in hunting and gralloching animals. It makes her happy.

She is friendly with everyone in the Guild but prefers to spend time alone. She loves to practice the art of hunting, reading or visiting her father. There is only one person in the Guild, who makes her angry. It’s Loulou Dupont - also a great huntress. She thinks Loulou is constantly bragging about her skills, but in reality, Loulou wants to impress her... Or maybe even charm her.

We hope you liked finding out a bit more about our characters! Soon we will share with you information about others. If you like to share your thoughts about anything, please don’t hesitate and join our Discord server here:

(click on the banner above)

You can also follow us on social media!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GatewalkersGame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/GatewalkersGame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GatewalkersGame/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gatewalkersgame

Jun 4, 2022

Content Update 6/4/2022

Crunch Element - Bioz

Crunch Element is pleased to announce the release of a new update! Magnified optics are finally here along with a new health syringe, bug fixes, and more! As always, please ping me with your feedback and bug reports in the Discord channel so this game can get even better! If you are enjoying the game so far, consider leaving a review on the store page. It goes a long way towards helping more people find out about the game!

New 1-6x LPVO Optic

This variable optic allows for quick target acquisition at 1x magnification while also enabling long range shots at 6x magnification. Scope magnification can be adjusted by pressing the trigger while hovering the scope.

New 4x Optic

This fixed-zoom scope is a classic optic providing 4x magnification for both close and medium range encounters.

New health syringe

The new health syringe can heal up to 100 hitpoints so you can quickly get back into the fight! It can be purchased in the truck shop during operations and it can be used across multiple stages.

Sandbox Updates

The sandbox received a few updates! Targets have been updated to have more visible hit locations with reactive feedback to optimize your live-fire training. A new item spawner has also been added to allow you to quickly test new items and weapon setups.

Changes

- Added LPVO scope
- Added ACOG scope
- Added health syringe
- Updated targets in sandbox
- Added item spawner in sandbox
- Added garbage bin in sandbox
- Added new destruction effects for cabinets and couches
- Updated sabotage objective to require button press before being able to destroy it
- Updated intervention objective to deal damage on incorrect code entry
- Updated HUD console to display other players leaving and joining
- Fixed issue with truck door pushing players under map
- Fixed issue with guns looking small in scaled down hands
- Fixed issue with shield scaling to massive sizes in coop
- Added log files for easier bug reporting
- Updated breaching sounds to be heard more accurately by enemies
- Improved magazine interaction
- Added grab indicator on magazines
- Added player health bars
- Updated MX18 magazines to be grabbable while in gun

Jun 4, 2022

1.4.2 'Minor Civs Detected' Update Released

Interstellar Space: Genesis - Adam Solo

Hello everyone!

It's been about a week since we released the Evolving Empires expansion and the free 1.4 update. We hope you are enjoying the new expansion and the new free update with all the new features and improvements.

In the meantime, we've been listening to your feedback, and we released the 1.4.2 Beta update a few days ago for beta testing. Now, we're releasing the official new update for everyone! Version 1.4.2 makes significant changes to the new 'Minor Civilizations' feature of the Evolving Empires expansion. It also fixes some issues found since the release. Most changes are for the Evolving Empires expansion, some are for Natural Law and there also changes to the base-game.

We received a lot of great feedback on the new expansion, and more concretely on the new 'Minor Civilizations' feature, which helped us understand that some tweaks and balance changes were in order to unlock its full potential. We became aware some people reported not finding enough minor civs, or when they did these sometimes appeared a bit too late in the game. We also became aware the unintentional destruction of minor civs with blind colonization (not having full scan over a system) was an issue for some people. We acknowledged the situation was not ideal, so 1.4.2 addresses that.

Thanks to everyone who helped beta test this update. To everyone who helped, don't forget to revert from the unstable to the default Steam branch, so you can get the 1.4.2 official update.

Please enjoy the new update, and let us know if you find any issues. Thanks everyone for reading and for the support! If you have a few minutes to spare, and have been enjoying what we do, please leave us a review on Steam! ❤️

Level up your Galactic Empire with Evolving Empires today!

The Dev Team
Praxis Games

Version 1.4.2

Compatibility note: Saves from previous versions are not compatible with 1.4.2 when playing the Evolving Empires expansion. For the base-game and Natural Law they are compatible. So, if you're playing Evolving Empires you will need to start new games to enjoy this new update. If you want to finish your current game with the previous version (1.4.1) please go to the Steam client -> Games -> View Games Library -> Right-Click on Interstellar Space: Genesis -> Choose Betas tab -> Select the "old_version" branch.

GAMEPLAY

[h5]Evolving Empires[/h5]

New 'Detected' state for 'Minor Civilizations' allows minors to be revealed with 'Basic' scan level (e.g. normal ship visit or basic remote exploration level), where before 'Full' scan was required to reveal the minor. This new state doesn't reveal the minors' type nor allows access to its relationship bonuses. For that, 'Full' scan is still required. In the 'Detect' state, you only know a minor is there (intelligent life signals detected) but you do not know who they are nor what bonuses they may provide. This resolves the unintentional destruction of minor civs with blind colonization issue, and will allow for more minors to be revealed early, although with no detailed information yet.

BALANCE

[h5]Evolving Empires[/h5]

The game offers a bit more minor civilizations at the start now. The minor civs slider tooltip now states that 5 to 12% of star systems will contain a minor, depending on the minors abundance set (none, few, average, many).
Minor civilizations are now distributed more evenly throughout the galaxy map. Before, minor civs could appear in clusters too near each other, and not enough could be found near homeworlds. That is now fixed.
The Cerixx affinity's evolution perk 'Technophiles', which allows buying techs with cash, now only requires 0.75 BC for each remaining RP a tech requires to be researched, where before the conversion was 1 BC to 1 RP. This balance change was also done to make them more competitive and to ease the buying of techs with money, which is a lot of fun by the way.

[h5]Natural Law[/h5]

The Cerixx race now has the '+1 BC per POP' racial modifier bonus. This race needed this money bonus to be more inline with its strengths as a race and to stay competitive.
The Cerixx race now has the 'Easily Seen' special ability. They are small, but they ride big mechs after all :) This compensates the added money of the item above and it makes sense for them to be more spied on, due to their love for shiny new tech and somewhat careless behavior. They do have the 'Investigation' unique ability though, which catches spies currently undertaking espionage, so it's a gamble for who decides to spy on them.

[h5]Evolving Empires[/h5]

The AI now surveys minor civilizations quicker and more efficiently. Before, the AI could interrupt surveying minors and lose progress too often, and would start surveying minors a bit too late. So, expect more competition from the AI on the minor civs department now!

UI / GRAPHICS

[h5]Natural Law[/h5]

Cerixx ships' Frigate A and Cruiser A now have a bigger engine trail effect to make these ships easier to tell which part is the front and the back.

[h5]Base-game[/h5]

The images of buildings, planet specials and ships displayed on tooltips were increased a bit.

BUG FIXES

[h5]Evolving Empires[/h5]

Fixed a bug that would cause duplicate leaders to appear and accept working for different empires, which could lead to additional issues when influencing those leaders when a "copy" of the leader already present in the influencing empire. This was caused when all leaders were dismissed when the Kaek empire chose their 'Hub and Spoke' evolution perk, which was accounting for all leaders the Kaek knew about, and not just the ones that were actually working for them at that time.
Fixed an issue that was not allowing for new scanner technology to take effect immediately when bought with money using the Cerixx affinity 'Technophiles' evolution.
Fixed an issue that was not allowing the access state of known 'Minor Civilizations' to update upon picking the 'Empire Patrols' evolution perk of the Cerixx affinity evolution. Now minors' access state (e.g. exclusive access), updates immediate and not just in the next turn. [Evolving Empires expansion]
Fixed a bug that would cause a blocking issue with remote exploration when playing with the Palacean affinity when a monster offspring would join the empire on a system (Natural Allies' evolution perk) without a fleet being present.
Fixed a typo on the Android leaders' description. 'Creatores' is now 'Creators'.
Fixed an issue in the Peacekeeper Bays' special system description, which was missing. The description read '[PEACEKEEPER_DESCR]' after loading a save. This is fixed now.

[h5]Natural Law[/h5]

Fixed a bug that would cause the Cerixx's 'Containment' unique ability to become permanently in effect, and blocking fleets in a system forever, after the Cerixx were vanquished, as the containment field would never be lifted after that point. Now it is lifted when the Cerixx empire is eliminated from the game.

[h5]Base-game[/h5]

Fixed a bug that was allowing all empires to receive the benefit of the 'Neutronium Armor Coating' tech (bonus to armor) with available sources of the 'Neutronium' strategic resource, even without having researched the tech.
Fixed a bug that was causing upgradeable buildings (e.g. Airspace Support Facility, Marine Garrison) to not automatically upgrade upon conquering a colony. Now these upgrade to the newest available technology.
Fixed a bug that would cause the 'Delicate Delicacies' event action notification to disappear upon resetting or reordering the tech queue.
Fixed an issue that was causing some lag in the planetary view for 4K resolutions, especially noticeable on the Terran terrain, but also others.
Fixed a bug that was allowing for the function keys (e.g. F1) to be pressable on the main menu and new game screens.
Fixed an issue in the ships' overview panel with the stationed status filter for ships. Some ships could be listed as being stationed when in fact they were traveling.

Jun 4, 2022

Dev Blog 18

Day of Dragons - Bad Parrot

Hello everyone!

We apologize for the gap in Dev Blogs over the past few months. A mixture of life events and the release of the Flame Stalker had our attention focused elsewhere. But, we will try to once again give monthly updates on the development process of the game.

As some of you may or may not be aware, we have recently changed the development timeline on our Trello Roadmap. This is because we are making the switch to Unreal Engine 5.0! With this change, we are working on some exciting new content, some of which we know you have been asking for.

Read about the reasons behind the switch to UE5 from our Lead Developer below.

A Word from the Lead Developer

Greetings everyone. I hope you are all doing well this summer.

Before I talk about UE5, let me address the elephant in the room... oh wait, that is not an elephant, it is an Inferno Ravager. Many fans have asked, "When is it coming out?" The answer to that question is Update 1.0. Obviously, the follow up question is, Why? Why was it pushed back? Well, when we finished it's animation set, much was broken. The adult back legs were too short for walking/running, the baby arms were too short as well, many of the animations were unusable. It simply did not meet my quality standards so we had to go back and fix a lot of things on the Ravager. Understand that this is our first Wyvern. The body is much different than a dragon since its wings are also its front legs/arms. With a dragon, we had the ground stuff figured out from the Acid Spitter Drake, just add wings. But with a Wyvern, it is our first Wyvern and to quote a friend, "Mistakes were made" but were fixing those mistakes and plan to release the Ravager with update 1.0. One of the things we had to do with it is go back to the drawing board and decide how it would stand on all 4's, how it would walk, etc. This is one of the reasons we hired Xilev, our 2D Sketch Artist who helped us conceptualize those things in these awesome sketches seen below.

So that's why it has been pushed back and we are committed to making it right before releasing it instead of releasing it and then fixing it later. But enough about that, let's talk about the other thing.

Most of you have heard the big news that Day of Dragons will be switching to Unreal Engine 5. This is extremely exciting for us because of all the open world tools that UE5 offers to game developers and how Day of Dragons will use them. Let's look at some of these tools.

World Partition. World partition means no portals. The old world composition system of UE4 meant to make a huge world I had to load all the maps on the server and then load and unload each map on the client using portals. With World Partition, we can simply create the huge world and the engine takes care of loading and unloading the areas and actors that are too far away for you to see or interact with, freeing up resources and memory. I love it.

Large World Coordinates. LWC uses 64bit floats instead of 32bit floats for world coordinates meaning that we no longer need to use client origin rebasing to make up for the lost precision and accuracy of movement and projectiles being synced over the network. 64bit precision allows for very far distances from origin (0x,0y) that 32bit cannot offer. In 32bit UE4, precision begins to take a hit after only 1500 meters from origin (center of the world) and for our 16km map, the farther you got from origin, the more lag/desync you would experience. LWC will fix that.

Lumen Global Dynamic Illumination. UE5 introduces an amazing upgrade to its lighting system with Lumen. FINALLY we will be able to use dynamic lighting (needed for real time-of-day simulation) without losing color accuracy, shadow accuracy, and shading/ambient light accuracy. Lumen gives us the accuracy and beauty of static lighting with dynamic lights such as the sun and moon directional lights which move during time of day transitions. Lumen is going to make our world look accurate and beautiful. I cannot wait to play the new map using Lumen lighting.

Volumetric Clouds. UE5 has something our fans have been begging for, volumetric clouds that you can fly into and above while First Flight is playing just like in the movies. ːsteamhappyː We'll make it scalable for players on low-end machines and allow you to switch to 2D clouds if needed, but for those with good PC hardware, ACTIVATE FLUFFY CLOUDS!

There's other cool features too including their new water/river/ocean system, better animation tools, new physics system, etc. Playing DoD in UE5... well, it's going to be awesome.

- Jon Slabaugh
Lead Developer

Now onto the juicy stuff!

New Skins and Skin Crafting

Concept Artwork created by Xilev

One of the exciting changes coming to the game will be the new skin system. The updated skin system will allow us to use a broader range of colors when designing each skin as well as use different patterns designed by our 2D Skin Artist(s) and then translated into 3D using Substance by our Technical Artist. Here is our first example of a new Shadow Scale skin pattern designed by our 2D Artist, Xilev and brought to life by our Technical Artist, Flicker.

Upcoming Shadow Scale Skin Pattern top view

Upcoming Shadow Scale Skin Pattern bottom view

We will be combining this new skin system with the new nesting system in update 1.0. Dragons who invest fully into the Breeding tree will be able to craft skins using color swatches derived from the dominant/recessive color genes of the parents as well as any unlocked colors to apply as a color mutation in the egg. This feature and more will be included in the next update to our nesting system.

Creating the Mega Map

The world of dragons is about to become quite a big larger. With the current Forgotten Forest Map, the world is 16 x 16 km square. While for most games this would itself be an extremely large map, flying makes traveling from one edge of the map to the other too easy. We originally wanted to remedy this by creating four separate 16km maps and having a portal system to transport players from one biome to another through our mega map system. However, with the release of Unreal 5's open world tools, our plans have changed.

With Unreal Engine 5.0, we are creating one mega continent containing multiple biomes without needing to use portals. This new mega map will be a minimum of 32-40 square kilometers, or four of the current maps combined.

Concept artwork of possible mega continent design

This new mega continent will host not only the five originally planned biomes (the Forgotten Forest, Lava Lands, Winter Winds, Shimmering Caverns, and Dangerous Dunes), it will also contain tropical, canyon, ocean, and island biomes which were being planned as an expansion map later down the line. However, our island biomes won't all be surrounded by water. Players will be able to live on floating islands located in different parts of the map, as well.

Below, check out the video of our Level Designer, ZaichoThePsycho, walking you through just a small section of the upcoming map as well as images of more areas to come.

8k x 8k Coastal Region

8k x 8k Gulf Region

8k x 8k Canyon Region

Upcoming Dragons, Models, and more

Big Dragon Rig

Blitz Striker Rig

New dragons are also getting prepped for gameplay. The still-to-be-officially-named Bio Dragon is now completely rigged along with the Blitz Striker. The Bio will be the next dragon to be animated.

The Feathered Zygovo is also getting tended to. We are currently working on feathers, textures, and tweaking the look.

Feather placement test on the Feathered Zygovo

Other dragons are also getting some tweaks. After issues that arrived during the animation process of the Inferno Ravager (which has temporarily been placed on hold due to walking issues due to leg length), we are going through all of our wyvern models and changing the leg to wing length ratio. This will prevent the dragons from having legs that are way too small for their bodies.

The Singe Crest was the first to receive the new portions and now has a more suitable leg length (and smaller feets).

Tweaked wing and leg length on the Singe Crest

We plan to release the Inferno Ravager along with the Bio Dragon, Blitz Striker, Sandslayer Worm, and Magma Elemental in update 1.0 which will debut on Unreal Engine 5.

On the VFX side of development, our team has been preparing for the transfer to UE5. Our VFX in UE4 were built in Cascade and UE5 uses Niagara, and so Flicker had the task of converting all current UE4 FX over to the new particle system. Unlike most animal survival games, Dragons use a lot of visual fx for their element abilities, so making Niagara versions of our VFX particles was required. VFX has also been working on creating the damage skins for the remaining modeled creatures as well as some other projects.

Bio Dragon damage vfx

Cave Cutter damage vfx

Dune Weaver damage vfx

For Environmental Assets, we are nearly finished with our next two set of corpses. The Swamp Snapper corpse will be added in the next update. Since this AI has a unique body plan, he will be getting his own yummy corpse for dragons to snack on.

Wyvern corpse model WIP

Swamp Snapper corpse model WIP

After the corpse are completed, our Environmental Asset Artist will move their to creating the nests for the next set of dragons as well as starting some new projects to create special environmental landmarks for the new mega map/continent.

With new diets soon to be added to the game, we will need food sources for these dragons as well. The Bio Dragon is a nectarivore and will need a plant to drink from. Our concept artist is currently working on designing the Bio Flower and it will then be sent to Brigade to bring to life. This current design is inspired by Columbines and Passionfruit flowers.

Bio Dragon Flower WIP concept

That's all for now. Our Lead Developer, Jon, was able to do an unscheduled Dev Q&A. If you haven't seen it yet, we suggest you check it out!

Dev Q&A Livestream

Our next Q&A livestream has not yet scheduled. Stay tuned and watch for updates to find out when the next one will be!

From the Community

Each blog post, we pick some of our favorite screenshots and artwork posted by the community to showcase here. Want a chance for your submission to be showcased on our next blog? Post it in the appropriate channels on our discord!

Some of our favorite recent screenshots...

by Katharsis#9449

by Lummetus#5250

by milf#2262

Some of our favorite artwork from the community...

by ProwlerPaws#1414

by Oka/Karta#7648

by Nihil#6527

Thanks for reading!

~The Day of Dragons Development Team

Don't want to miss out on updates? Follow us on our social media accounts or become a patron to get updates before they are released!

Discord | Twitter | Youtube | Instagram