Oct 4, 2022

Guild Wars 2 - AN GW2 Mod 5

General

The Jormag legendary variant skin collection is now available. Speak with Leivas after unlocking an Aurene-based legendary weapon to begin this collection!
You can automatically salvage crafted items for research notes from the recipe window. Using this option does not consume charges from your research kits; you don’t even need to have one in your inventory.
Item tooltips now display the types of salvage kits that can be used on that item.
Items that were salvageable prior to the 9/13/2022 update and were incorrectly flagged as unsalvageable, such as collection items for legendary trinkets, are now salvageable again.

World Polish

Fixed an issue that prevented the Hero panel preview from displaying correctly on high-resolution monitors.
Changed the environment map used for lighting in the character selection screen to match the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons background.
Fixed an issue that prevented some players from entering the Tower of Nightmares encounter in a squad.
Fixed an issue that blocked players from accessing Canach's Lair through the Scrying Pool in the Eye of the North.
Increased the frequency of the Desert Highlands event chain that begins with "Defend Second Spear Nayrim from the Awakened" to make it more accessible for players completing their griffon mount collection.
Fixed an issue that prevented players who completed the story mission The Nightmare Unveiled from being awarded the achievement The Nightmare Unveiled (Historical).
Fixed an issue that caused the waypoint in the squad version of the Tower of Nightmares encounter to direct players to the public version of the instance.

Raids

Fixed an issue that caused Emboldened mode to reactivate after defeating challenge mode bosses, preventing some players from receiving the correct rewards for the encounter.

Check out the full update notes here.

Oct 4, 2022

Riley & Rochelle Devlog Pt.4

Riley & Rochelle - Owl_Skip

Most of my previous games have had a soundtrack at their core. In the case of family, the soundtrack contained homages to the bands of the late 80s UK indie scene - The Smiths, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears etc. In Rivals, the style was that of country and alt-country, taking in groups like Wilco, Son Volt, The Shins and Grizzly bear. While Echo Beach had been more varied and focused on a pop sound, Riley & Rochelle was a return period pieces, which would encompass the breadth of the 90s.

Rochelle's Music

Rochelle's music represented the biggest step outside of my tastes yet. In other ways, the music was not particularly difficult to conceptualise. After all, I was a child of the 90s - growing up with stars like Celine, Whitney, Mariah, Toni and many others. Another thing was that the UK Britpop I grew up listening to was inherently melodic. As such, I've always had a taste for strong tunes, which the divas had in multitudes.

Early on, I decided that I wanted to base Rochelle's early music closely on that of Celine Dion's. By the mid 90s, Celine had settled into an established template, but her early work exhibited much more variety - experimenting with new wave pop, as well as more traditional balladry.

We see Rochelle progress from classical-lite pageantry (Richelieu), through euro pop-rock (Couer Brise) to her first big hit 'Strong'. This is a wide range of styles straight off the bat and required a very capable vocalist. I found Colombes Ran, an Madagascan singer, who also spoke fluent French and sang Celine Dion like the lady herself. We were very nervous waiting for our recording of Strong to come back. When it did, we immediately knew we had nothing to worry about.

I think one of the reasons I didn't find writing Rochelle's work particularly taxing is because it was so biographically driven. I knew the beats that Rochelle's character followed and wrote songs that either fit or the story could be altered to. In particular, a lot of movies feature in Rochelle's career, allowing me to have fun with over the top ballads.

The one anomaly is Stay, written by Rochelle, but sung by popstar Brandon Boynton. This had come from a closely preceding project, in which I wanted to make a game similar to Family but involving the 1990s Swedish Pop Sound (Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Britney, Christina). One can clearly hear the song's lineage from these mid-90s radio hits.

Riley's Music

Writing Riley was quite a different proposition to Rochelle. His songs were more incidental to his story beats, but were rather meant to be tied to personal development. I wanted to hear a real evolution in his sound - from indie DIYer to hitmaker to auteur.

Luckily, I had no doubt who would voice Riley. Riley Catherall had worked with my on Rivals and Echo Beach and had the perfect singing voice for the role. In fact, I had around this time considered making a game for just the Riley character, based more closely on Elliott Smith, which had generated some of the material.

Riley's music also had specific influences - Elliott Smith, Radiohead, REM, Neutral Milk Hotel. However, he also represented more of a general type and so I wasn't as concerned with nailing a specific artists' style and only one or two are distinctively homages (try and guess).

Oct 4, 2022

Is that a Worm spitting Holy Grenades? Yes it is.

ARK and ADE - CastelloInc

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since our last update, we’ve had many exciting things going on in the last few months. Just to share a happy example, we're jubilant to announce that we are finally able to get a salary from our "hobby" and can finally call ourselves Professional Game Developers! And that's only thanks to you! All of you!

To celebrate this, we wanted to give you an update with some new cool content and features, so you can see that we’re still actively working on it and hopefully provide you a reason to revisit the game for another round, or ten.

We are also happy to tell you that we decided to lower the base price of ARK-ADE to $9.99 from now on. Although we heard different thoughts in the community, we strongly believe that the more people who engage with our game, the more the community benefits, and the bigger the game will become… we hear you guys, and we really want to emphasize our appreciation and that your opinion is super valuable and important to us.

Of course, after taking this decision our first thoughts go to all the wonderful souls who believed in our work from the very beginning. Our warmest thanks to all of you; you were the first who believed in us and that means the moon! You maybe don’t even realize how vital your support has been to make dreams come true. We wouldn't be writing this without you!
While we’ve made the decision to adjust the price to be able to move forward and hopefully have a positive effect on more players discovering the game, we have a little something special for you who supported us early to show our appreciation to our Founding Players. We will give you special recognition on our Discord and let you know there when our little extra thing is available. To make sure everyone’s taken into account, and if you haven’t joined our Discord yet, we’ll set the cut off date two weeks from now to claim the status of a Founding Player.

Join our Discord HERE -> https://discord.gg/CJrEP8vA6S
That being said, let's dive into what this update will bring you…

THE WORM

The brand new hand-made boss of the “Sand Wave” level is ready to give you some hard time.

The Worm should be fairly manageable if you play NORMAL difficulty, really difficult in HARD Mode and a f#*!@>g nightmare in EXPERT mode.
But this is just our opinion. As usual, please speak your mind openly and give us some feedback!

Spoiler alert: he’ll try to chew you! :O

RESPAWN BEFORE THE BOSS.

Some of you told us that being forced to restart the entire level every time you die duringa Boss fight is a bit overwhelming. At least if playing at NORMAL Difficulty. So from now on, if you die fighting a boss, the option to "CONTINUE" will let you respawn right before the boss and provide you with another chance. This however, will bring the score points on that level back to 0, meaning that to get to the leaderboard you still have to run the whole level with one single life.

But for sake of the fun of ALL the ARK-ADERS, this should be helpful.

COMPLETION TRACKER

We have had the lobby/basement slightly restyled. Now you'll be able to check your achievements, the secrets you've found and which bosses you have defeated in a cooler and more visual way in the basement. Completion percentage of the game and some other cool stats will be there for you as well. Unfortunately, you’ll have to re-find the secrets and re-beat the bosses to see them in the new basement, as we unfortunately didn’t track any of that data before the update.

Fun fact:
None of us is actually able to complete the game; it might still be too hard at extreme difficulty level. Yes, we can’t even 100% our own game. :')

Fun fact:
None of us is actually able to complete the game; it might still be too hard at extreme difficulty level. Yes, we can’t 100% our own game. :')

MORE STATS

This is another request by the community we decided to welcome gladly.
At the end of the level, you'll now find more stats about your play divided in two categories; Attack and Defense. If you would like to include more stats to the current list now in the game, please let us know and we’ll look to update if possible

Changelog summary:
Enhanced overall performance
Sandwave boss (Worm)
Boss re-spawn functionality on Normal difficulty
Base price point lowered to $9,99
Enhanced end-of-level statistics
Physical Trophies and progress statistics in the basement
2 new enemies (invisible guy and minigunner)

As usual, thank you so much for playing our game and following our updates! We’re really excited to be able to keep doing what we love. And we love Video Games! :)