220: Early Access 0.12.57 - July 16, 2022 5:00 AM EST • You can now trade while in a dungeon. You will not be able to fight or do anything else while trading. There are new screen-locking mechanisms that prevents you from doing anything else outside of the trade window. Please keep your arms and legs inside of the vehicle at all times! • Fixed several skills that had undefined references in the combat log. • Mob health multiplier has been increased when in a party. • By order of the King of Edenburg, the maximum amount of gold that can be traded at once is now 1 million gold.
You probably guessed I was doing the development digest today based on the fact that it's several hours late, huh?
Janna's been super busy and will be for the next two weeks as well. It's not easy keeping things together without our producer and community manager!
This week I've been working on a few odds and ends as I chip away at the main storyline for Windless Woods.
I built a new visual lore-writing tool behind the scenes. Now Wendy, DD and I can write more in-game books without having to wrestle with data tables and page formatting. It's already proving to save us a ton of time and should result in lots more fun lore (leading to fun secrets, of course).
I also spent a bit of time scrolling through our new Canny board for features and ideas, as well as our ideas channel on the Discord. and found a few super simple features I could knock out. So I did that!
I made the trellis furniture items into planter items so you can now place seeds in them, added a toggle on player housing signs to hide the property marker posts, and finally, made some changes to the weight system. We kept hearing gripes about inventory size and so, after really breaking it down, we decided that there were a handful of different items that really shouldn't count toward your weight. So I spent some time building a filter and a tag system that we can use to tag specific items to no longer count toward your inventory weight. Currently this includes keys and seeds. We also discussed some potential unique bags that would make specific item types weigh nothing, like a miner's bag which would make all ore and gems weightless.
I also did a bit of modelling this week and started implementing a new special crafting bench similar to the astral forge. I don't want to spoil it though, so you'll have to wait until the update to discover where and what it'll craft!
Aside from fixing a whole bunch of items in the world I broke, Wendy spent the week doing a lot of clean up work in Dewdrop Village. She's also begun setting up the NPCs there as well as started writing a few quests and dialog for them. Dewdrop village is going to be a really fun little area for you guys to explore, I think. It has a good sense of progression built into it and I think it'll really add to the overall theme of the zone.
Louis has got the brand new glyph magic system working this week. In the last couple of days, he's added the first two spells to the game. The first glyph is the classic, tried-and-true staple of RPGs, Fireball. This spell launches a ball of burning arcane energy which will erupt in a huge radius on impact. Don't get caught in the explosion! You might have noticed he spent a bit of extra time on the VFX, too. You certainly won’t be getting this glyph confused with the (now defunct) basic attack from the old “Novice Staff of Fire”.
The second glyph he’s added is a throwback to the original single player version of Swords ‘n Magic that some of you may remember from my early days on Twitch, or from the library of old versions we have available for certain tiers on Patreon. It's the “Launch” spell. This utility spell will send you soaring into the air, if only for a brief moment. Use it to escape a sticky situation or to reach unexplored heights.
Jesse has been hard at work adding the final touches in the Eyre and getting me and Janna super inspired to start making new furniture pieces for you guys to discover in the shops there.
And last, but definitely not least, DD has been chugging away at balancing quest rewards and tweaking the job boards in each town. A lot of our existing jobs in the job boards had quests that would take you all the way to the other side of a zone, even when there was a closer job board in that area. He's been restructuring a lot of these jobs to be more interesting.
We also spent some time chatting as a team about our existing quests, specifically on Azura and their purpose in the game. We've come to the conclusion that the job boards are a great alternative to some of our early game quests. Most of those quests were built when we had very few tools to work with for quest design and very few features and interesting item types to give out. We decided that it would be worth our time to go back through and refresh some of those old quests. And somewhere through that conversation, we also decided that from now on quests in the game have to meet a few requirements. They need to give unique rewards or perks, never just some gold or basic resources, and they must always be associated with a longer, more immersive story. We'll never be making simple fetch quests for the sake of having more quests. And that means that if an existing quest doesn't tell an interesting story or lead to a unique reward, it'll be scrapped or updated.
Unfortunately, we definitely don't have time for a lot of these changes for the Windless Woods update, so it'll be a future endeavor. But we're really excited to clean up some of those old fetch quests we've never really been happy with.
That's about it this week. We're mostly in the cleanup portion of this update, so we’re spending a lot of time tying up loose ends and linking our mechanics together to make a cohesive experience. Next week's digest will probably not be as interesting as this one... Unless Louis knocks out some wicked cool spell glyphs we can share with you!
You can get 4 types of "Toram Birthday!" emblem during the following period. The emblems grant you special effects and rewards to enjoy the game more!
Emblem
Condition
Rewards
Toram Birthday! A
Logged in the game.
Ticket Piece x700
Toram Birthday! B
Played more than 1 hour in total today.
Victory Gem x1
Toram Birthday! C
Played more than 2 hours in total today.
Fairy Sewing Tool x20
Toram Birthday! D
Played more than 3 hours in total today.
Orb Shard x300
Toram Birthday Emblems Available Period
From: 07/17/2022 at 5:00 AM (JST/GMT+9) Until: 07/18/2022 at 5:00 AM (JST/GMT+9)
Please note that the emblems are reset at 5:00 AM (JST/ GMT+9) every day, so please don't forget to claim and receive the rewards once you have cleared the condition.
*You can claim and receive emblems after clearing the conditions from [Menu > News > You've got Emblem].
Notes
*Please note that the available period may be shortened or changed. *Limited-time events or promotions may be held again in the future on different conditions after they have ended.
Hello everyone, It's been a while since the last update of Spirit Overflow. Today, I want to share with you our new plan and what we have been working on for the last few months.
First, thank you all for your support for Spirit Overflow, and keep providing us with valuable feedback. We are moving on to our next project, which is an evolution of Spirit Overflow. We want to build a platform that integrates all kinds of smart fitness equipment and turns them into game controllers to play a variety of active games, we call this platform "Kinix".
Our first step in building this platform is to create a unique online multiplayer cycling game. It's a fun, fast-paced mini-game collection. 4 players will compete against each other in a series of mini-games. Each game has its unique gameplay and theme. This game was designed based on the feedback from Spirit Overflow players and we really hope you will enjoy this new iteration.
In Kinix you can also customize your character and purchase in-game cosmetics.
After launch, we will constantly update the game with more minigames, skins, and in-game events. Eventually we want to build a cycling metaverse that has an open world and lots of mini games
We will later launch the new game on our own Kinix launcher. After the new game is launched, Spirit Overflow will be withdrawn from Steam permanently. Thank you for all the support and love.
Currently the game is only open exclusively for our Discord members (Join here: https://discord.gg/YJdR38HgsK), We will have an open beta soon, please follow us on social media or join our discord for further information, you can also check our official website : https://www.kinix.jp/
We've received initial community feedback on the first version of Alone Again and have already made major fixes! Thanks to everyone who sent us feedback and reported game issues! Soon we will have a new version that will improve the user experience!
This time around we don't have much to say or exciting news, this is just a big BIG BIIIIG
THANK YOU
for the incredible support you've shown this little free game so far. This has smashed any expectation we ever had. A whole 10000 people interested? Wow.
So yeah. To everyone: the ones that wishlisted, the ones that downloaded (and it's just sitting in your library), the ones that actually finished it: you rock!
This is what motivates us to dtrive further. Our next game, which is already in development, will be something completely else. Not a visual novel, but a bu-
Ah. Not for now.
We will forever be greatful. Who knows, amybe some day Kureha and Blackwing will return for another adventure. Until then... Thanks again.