Since our announcement at Gamescom's Opening Night Live, we’ve been keeping your interests piqued by showing off the game at events and sharing content on our socials.
For those that may have missed it, we’ve put together a little roundup of the chaos...
GAMESCOM
Please keep your hands inside of the vehicle at all times.
We've loved seeing you get your hands on the game!
Bribery works wonders.
PAX WEST
More event-goers getting stuck into the action!
FAN ART
Our wonderful community have already been busy re-imagining our colourful characters. Here's just a couple of our favourites! We LOVE seeing your art so please continue to share it with us on Twitter!
Hey everyone! We're very happy to hear that so many of you are enjoying the game! We have been working hard to implement as much of the feedback we receive as possible. We want to bring you all the best experience we can. Please continue to leave us your ideas & feedback in the discord or fill in the survey that you can access through the game.
A Hero's Rest Patch v0.295.27 Patch-notes
New:
Reworked the speed system - it now allows you to slow down the speed by half, and still perform every action possible, crafting, building, and opening menus freely.
Heroes that are done with their adventure will now show as "returning" in the hero manager, meaning they are on their way back to town and will arrive in the next few days.
By hovering over the status of the Heroes in the Hero Manager, you will now be able to get a better idea of what they are doing.
Added the option to freeze the scene during photo mode to ensure you capture the exact moment you desired.
Changes:
Changed the "No Quest" notification to better guide players to the reason that notification happened.
Re-balanced the profit earned by Potions & Food as it was heavily overwhelming the profit earned by crafted items, this was especially exploitable at the end game.
Changed the Difficulty slider to better represent the game experience and for better visibility.
Fixes & Improvements:
The blacksmith vendor now goes by Blacksmith Vendor... instead of Blackmsith, may the force be with him.
Improved the flow of the tutorial for a better player experience.
HotFix:
Added a tooltip to the Royal Request menu, to better show the ability to drag the mouse to fill the request.
Fixed a bug where multiple tooltip text would overlap when focusing the camera on the shop displays.
Fixed a bug where quests would craft slower than intended in the new speed.
7/10 Hotfix:
Fixed a bug that was causing resources not to be spent at times when crafting.
Fixed a bug where some objectives would not progress correctly when exiting the tutorial under specific circumstances.
A new era for DogeFight. Rediscover this multiplayer fighting game, this time with many gameplay improvements, a brand new interface as well as lots of new content such as new maps, playable memes and mechanics. Gigachad also arrives in the game, ready to demonstrate its power to the other Heroes (He solo PepeTheFrog).
The Industrial Frontier DLC is almost here, arriving on October 13th at 5PM UTC / 10AM Pacific Daylight Time!
In this announcement, we discuss new information and details on this new DLC. We also have an incredible month of updates planned, with hints below on next weeks minor update, as well as a Halloween update in the works!
The New Biome
The new arid mainland is the new, dry biome, inspired by various deserts, canyons, mountain ranges, and styles of geology from around the world. Different areas of the new mainland represent the style and nature of various world locations, each blending into the next to create a varied and diverse landscape.
There are various built locations around the world, including an abandoned and damaged nuclear power plant on the coast (with low levels of radiation), a large oil and gas storage yard, abandoned iron ore mine and ore terminal, huge flat salt plains with ship wrecks reminiscent of the Aral Sea, metal works and foundry, gold ore separator, deep uranium mine, a radio frequency telescope inspired by the Arecibo telescope, and many other unique locations.
The new biome is 30km from end to end, 400 square km in total, and surrounded by many new small dry islands. The many dozens of new locations and landmarks across the islands are named in honor of the many great Stormworks vehicle creators who have shared their creations on the workshop.
New Rail
The new railway lines are extensive and are designed to largely form loops, as well as provide freight access to many of the new industrial locations. As well as routes and junctions, there are various shunting yards to allow for more of the operations required in rail freight. Next weeks minor update will make further big improvements for train gameplay,
Mining and Refining
The new mining system adds a new mining drill component, which can drill mineral patches to break down and extract minerals. These minerals can be held in hoppers in a similar way to coal. New mineral types include iron ore, aluminium ore, gold rich dirt, and uranium ore. These can be refined and reduced via the metals foundary, dirt separator, centrefuges, and industrial laboritory. Pure metal ingots can be sold at the metals trading yard, while uranium ingots can be taken to workbenches for building uranium fuel rods in career.
Animals
The new animals are largely grouped into some main categories: domestic dog breeds, farm animals, predators, and herbivores. There are around a dozen breeds of dog, from traditional working dogs such as German Shephards, to less traditional search and rescue canines, such as the Pug. Farm animals include breeds of horse, sheep, cow pig, goat, chicken, etc. Predators include types of bear, wolves and more, while prey includes types of hare, deer, etc.
As a reminder of the upcoming timetable:
Oct 7th: Train themed minor update
Oct 13th: Industrial Frontier DLC Launch
Oct 25th: Halloween update
Thank you to everyone for all the support we have received. We are super excited for the upcoming expansion and can't wait for release! We look forward to your feedback, and see you next week for the minor update.
Okay, screen resolution issues still happen in Star Explorers. In order to help prevent the game from making itself unplayable, I have added an extra button to the main menu...
You can see a small reddish oval in the upper left corner. It says "click here to reload the game with default video settings." Somehow the game can still fail to get the setting right, and on some occasions under certain hardware configurations, the game will open in a window that is too small to be playable.
Previously, there was no way to fix this unless the user manually found the configuration file and deleted it (or edited it) but this was not a good solution.
So I offer a slightly less bad solution, which is this button.
If this happens again, the player can simply click this button and it deletes the configuration file for you, restarts the game and loads the default settings.
Interactive Guide
The interactive Guide is still available. However, instead of being on by default, I have turned it off. It (also) still has some issues and may be responsible for preventing the ship's computer from recognizing Acknexium when it has been found on a planet.
This is a bug that I am having a hard time reproducing. If anyone can offer any insights as to when and how this happens, I am very interested in hearing it. In general, if this happens, you can still complete the quest by finding Acknexium and trying again (on the same planet or another) but for obvious reasons it would be great to have it actually work consistently.
I have never gotten this problem to happen, despite many attempts. If anyone wants to record their play-throughs, that would be of great potential benefit, as I might be able to see what's happening.
In general, if you are using the guide, try to follow what it says exactly, and don't go off course until the guide says it is over. I will continue to try to reproduce this problem myself. Maybe I will get (un)lucky one of these days.
New - Cars now have a “hit stop” effect on player collisions
Balances - Baby Powder: Now deals 10 damage per inhale - Players can no longer detect while “powdered”
Bug Fixes - Fixed daddy collision issues with bathroom air vent - Fixed a bug that caused certain objects to have unrealisitc movement when climbed on - Fixed an issue with the drawer under the oven - Fixed a bug where the baby shoving the table and other physics objects wildly - Fixed following white icons: - Every marble had the same color icon - White icons in the lobby settings - White icons in Dadmart - Marble missing icon - Roman candle in the garage had no name and icon - Fixed the vents which didn’t work at all - Fixed the van is disappearing. - You can not put the A. A. E. D on the baby as Daddy. - If you go to the corner of the bath where the duckling is lying, then you will become small (daddy only) - Fixed a bug preventing the player from flooding the house / The house takes too long to flood - Fixed a bug where it was impossible to pick up the aquarium - Fixed a bug preventing the player from eating forks and knives
Audio Fixes - Fixed a bug where nighttime ambience played daytime ambience - Fixed a bug where pouring baby powder and turning on the paper shredder would not stop playing the sound - Fixed a bug with the paper shredder audio - Fixed a bug with the dishwasher playing the wrong sounds (or no sounds at all)
Other Changes - Disabled the end of game fireworks - Made it easier for babies to climb when ragdolled (you must hold jump to climb)
Is there anything better than tending to your own garden on a relaxing summer evening? Well, good news for you! You will be able to do exactly that in Above Snakes! Watch our latest devlog to see our farming system in action, the beauty of our new farmland biome, and our first ever interactive cutscene!
Watch the Devlog
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Farmland Biome
One of the latest biomes that we have designed is the farmlands. These are one of the warmer biomes that can be connected to prairies. Some of the farmland biomes are owned by a new character called Basil Biggs. Basil has his own cattle ranch that, unfortunately, has been invaded by lost souls. You can choose to help him fight back against these enemies, repair the ranch, and also get his beloved cows (Patsy and Betsy) back after they had escaped.
Crop Farming
You can have your own crop farm at home! If you found a crop on your journeys, you can sow it on a garden plot and allow it to grow. After planting, make sure to water and fertilize any crops regularly to increase growth speed. You can check the status of the garden at any time. Crops grow in four stages: from seeds to saplings to plants to plants ready for harvest.
Nighttime and Torches
We have vastly improved the night mechanic. When nighttime originally descended, it was very dark but you were still able to see the whole screen; this version of night went against our whole idea. Therefore, we added a light radius around Aiyana and made the rest of the screen completely dark. You can enhance your light radius by crafting torches. Torches can be placed to illuminate an area or carried if you plan to explore at nighttime.
Monocular
We have also added a new item which we think will come in handy: the monocular. Remember how, when you want to explore a new biome, you need to go back to your cartography table and research world pieces? Well, we think that you should also be able to do that mid-journey too. The new monocular item will grant you access to your cartography table from anywhere in the world for the cost of a couple pieces of glass and scrap parts.
Interactive Cutscenes
Parts of the story of Above Snakes will be told in interactive cutscenes that take place in a dream-like space. After finishing the cold biomes, the tribe elder will invite you to smoke a pipe with them that transfers your mind into some kind of trance or dream state. This is the first of the cutscenes where you will get some vague information about the source of the spreading plague. Watch our devlog if you want to see a sneak peek of our first interactive cutscene!
What's Next?
As you have probably noticed, we are pushing out content for Above Snakes non-stop. We are continuing our work on the game and remain focused on the end goal. In the past couple of months, we have consistently updated the Alpha (and before that, the Pre-Alpha). We have come to realize that updating the Alpha takes time away from our development of Above Snakes with usually 1-2 weeks of polishing and bug fixing. We think that it is in everyone's best interest if we put our focus more so on completing the game before everything else and, therefore, invest these weeks in new content instead of preparing a build.
With that said, we have decided to cease updates to the Alpha and, instead, are working on finishing the Beta. This decision will also see the addition of more content per devlog. We are currently on schedule with our progress and are aiming to enter the Beta phase this winter; we will see plenty of new people joining the fun who had backed with Beta access. We sincerely hope that everybody who backed the Alpha understands why we are now moving forward. The current version of the Alpha, of course, stays online and can be played until we launch the Beta.
We hope that you enjoyed our farming devlog and we can't wait to hear your feedback. In the video, we showed all of the different crops that are already in-game. What crop do you want to sow and harvest most? Let us know in the comments below! Cheers, Tobi