New Scene Welcome back to another Iragon changelog. This week we have a new cutscene for you. Upon entering New Solis Lexi, Darick and Brianna are shocked at what they find. This creates some tension between Lexi and Brianna and things get heated up. You can see for yourself in the Experimental Hall in the Lexi New Solis Scene in both TP and VR. Please have a look and tell us what you think.
Inventory We’ve also completely redone the inventory screen in the game. It now features a 3D weapon model and a more detailed display of your weapon's attributes.
Spell Iteration Lastly, the spell system has gone through another iteration. The Lightning AOE, Ice AOE, Ice Projectile, Lightning Projectile, and Fire Projectile spells have all had changes done to them, big and small. They are testable through the New Spell System portal in the Experimental Hall.
What would you like us to improve?
This is an easy one. Let us know about anything that you'd like us to improve in the game. It can be anything that you're not totally happy with.
Hi all, A couple speedrunners reached out to me and requested some speedrun-friendly features, so I've added the following to the Game Options menu:
"Show Speedrun Clock" - This shows a speedrun clock to help you time your runs better. The clock pauses in between levels, during load times, and during rewards screens.
"Auto skip cutscenes" - this automatically skips cutscenes without you needing to hit "skip scene".
You can find these options in "options -> Game options".
With this update, speedrunning the game is a little easier. Thanks for listening, as always feel free to post a steam forum thread if you run into any issues.
We’re happy to see you again! Stock up on repellents and sharpen your claws – we’re going on a new journey in the world of Knock On The Coffin Lid!
Steam Awards 2022
First of all, we want to remind you that you can nominate us for the Steam Award in the Labour of love category. This nomination means a lot to us, because we are working tirelessly on our game! Please support us and help us to make it to the finals!
Now let's get to the development process and one other, very important thing, which we’ll inform you about at the end of this diary, so be sure to read it to the end!
Time to make a camp
We work hard on events every day. Our beloved artists are laboring away to please you with new art. At the moment, several events are in the process of being made. The bandits’ camp is finally ready to be shown. These bandits seem extremely serious. It's best not to joke with them. Do you think they’ll let you relax by the campfire, or will you have to clash with them in a life-and-death battle for a place to rest?
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Unexpected meeting
And these two, what are they up to here? This dwarf seems to look worried. Has the elf been threatening him? Or maybe we're in for the craziest team-up since The Lord of the Rings? ⠀⠀⠀
Zombies all around, even in the swamps!
Yeah, it's not the best time to chill in the bog – one of the training zombies is going through the gifted hands of our artists. He’s preening himself and ready to meet everyone who passes by his quagmire.But you can always fight him and get something nice for beating him.
This guy is swinging his mace way too skillfully. Apparently, these are his residual reflexes after zombification. So if you don't want to burn, be careful. As soon as he blooms in the skillful hands of our artists, there will be no escape from him!
Mosquitoes and other animations
Since we’re stuck in the bog again, it's time to get acquainted with the local fauna again. We showed you our beautiful Mite Queen recently, and now, finally, her animations are finished! Our animators have made her incredibly lively and strangely attractive. Be careful, don’t join the cultists! ⠀⠀⠀
But even without her, the bog is full of parasites – these phenomenally huge mosquitoes have just flown out of the magical animation room and are ready to drink some players' blood! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
In the past we showed you how we develop new characters. One of them is the elf in the picture below. He has finally gotten an axe, some stylish movements and some green goo dripping from his mouth… It seems to be time for us to run or fight for our lives! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
New cards and icons
Every little thing is important in game development: each icon and each status gets its visual display in the game. And the making of them goes on non-stop.
Vanadis keeps getting new cards. Here is some of the art that we’ve made this week: ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
Yeah, this lady is deginitely not to be trifled with – there are too many animals ready to protect her.
And finally, we saved the hottest news for last, so buckle up:
AN UPDATE AWAITS YOU NEXT WEEK!
That's right – we’re finally ready to add all the updates from the open beta version to the main version of the game. Although our work isn’t finished yet you’ll still have something to be surprised by in the new version! So be patient, very soon you’ll have the opportunity to play the updated KOTCL and try out the mechanics, as well as admire new events and the card generation system!
We enjoy showing our game’s development process in our social networks and we’re always open to your suggestions. So join us on Discord and Twitter to chat with us and don’t forget to visit our YouTube channel, where we post video-diaries straight from the developers’ room!
The rabbit hole we dove into this week concerns gameplay and decorative patterns for major sites. The Raaf Temples and the ‘haunted’ encounter spearheaded these developments and you’ll find they have improved considerably.
Unfortunately, the hole turned out to be quite deep, this left little time to fix bugs. There should be more room for that again next week. We also plan to improve more major sites and encounters and a similar vein. Over time this should improve the quality of the level generation and gameplay overall.
Finally, the two features introduced to reduce ‘loading’ times are no longer experimental. ‘Keep local files in memory’ is now switch on by default, while ‘generate in background’ is switched off.
New Features - New status effects: Uneasy and Foreboding. - Improvements to the Ancestral Spirit encounter. - Improvements to the Raaf Temple template. - Improves a number of existing decorative patterns. - Adds a number of decorative patterns. - Improves the way the level generator recognizes and handles ‘key points’. - The feature to keep local levels in memory is no longer experimental, and it is switched on by default. - The feature to generate levels in the background is no longer experimental, but it is switched off by default.
Gameplay changes - Fixing issue with magic effects not always spawning correctly. - Fixing minor generation issues with spider web and spider eggs.
contrary to the rumors we are still delivering regular updates for the PC version. So let’s forget about the doomsayers and get started!
VR HOT started with only one room. Later we added the BDSM room. We understand that having nice and functional environments is important to many users. With this update we are adding two more simple rooms. (There’ll be more in the future)
Handling all the HottieCards is becoming more and more difficult. We will introduce paging for a better overview and easier handling of them. Btw, join the HottieCard Discord if you haven’t yet!
You will get even more sliders for several shapes - Eyes, Nose, Cheeks, Breasts, Torso and Body.
We spent A LOT of time on smaller improvements such as performance, hair collision (we’ll feature this in the next video), vulva and vagina physics, joint rendering, eye movements, upscaling quality and more. As always: bug fixes.
More details next week with the update, we’re not done here yet!
this is a tricky release, but hopefully it's going to be fine!
We had to replace part of the navigation system since it was reaching its limitations. The new system should allow the workers to be able start moving faster and react better to encounters. We had to put a limitation on the amount of workers you can have in your factory, for now it has to be 60. But don't worry, you will be able to fire them and hire more trained ones. This limitation is technical and sadly cannot be overcomed easily. So please be patient!
Here what changed:
Added full localization of the new strings
Added counter for workers amount
Updated the workers navigation system to make the react better to the environment
Fixed producers sometimes getting stuck when loading a game
Fixed workers sometimes getting stuck when loading a game
The release of the Major Update is round the corner now and in the run-up to it we’d like to talk about the most significant element for any game — the gameplay. We’ve partially mentioned some of the changes in the technical update and now we’ll tell you more about each improvement.
The most important changes happened to the fighting system. We’re trying to make every fight as dynamic and interesting as possible — and the first step to it is combos. Now Jack can make three to four strikes one by one coming closer to the enemy and increasing the damage. He has also learnt to block the strikes — we’re going to add different variants of dodges and slides later. NPCs (both people and abori) also got combos — as a rule, they consist of two or three strikes.
We have also worked with fighting animations. You can see where exactly the shot hit and how much damage it caused by the NPC's reaction — and now you can finish the enemy with a good old headshot! You also have to watch your stamina during the fight — if Jack runs out of it, he will freeze for a short time and the enemies will definitely use it! And if our character gets significant damage he will need some time to recover from it — Jack will cease any actions he was intended to do, whether it’s a combo or reloading the weapon.
Speaking about weapons — we want to make The Edge a wilder place which means that there will be even less traces of civilization. That also goes for good weapons. It will be replaced by simple scolders and powerful homemade abori rifles — bangboks. They allow you to shoot from just one barrel as well as from both simultaneously which will help to cause more damage. A priceless opportunity considering aggressive fauna of K’Tharsis — if it’s possible to spare no bullets.
A lot of players complained that not every strike counts in the fight with enemies who are not tall enough, like bugs and crucases. We’ve solved this problem — and in an attempt to avoid the impression that Jack hits the air above his enemy, made an animation of bending during the strike.
We have also fixed the problem of interaction with objects. Thanks to the updated system of focusing and new filters, the interaction has become more precise and believable. For example, now you can’t pick an object through the wall and there will be considerably less pixel hunting.
One more important change for the Major Update 0.70 is a wheel which allows a player to choose weapons and items more conveniently than with the hotbar. We’re planning to test it but in the future updates the final choice will be up to a player. Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on what seems more convenient to you.
And of course, we’re concluding another key raffle in Discord — one of the final ones. The winners of this week are:
@falletangel @HuskyBit @СТОН СОСЕДА @pesan @Zelos
Congratulations, mates!
The raffles are coming to an end but nevertheless you still have a chance to win the key — join our channel for this. And while you wait for the results, don’t forget to drop by our devblog, get the freshest news from the development, leave your feedback and ask the developers everything you want to know! If you didn’t manage to get the key, don’t get upset and stay with us—we’re planning to go on having interesting events and raffles.
That’s all for now, friends. Try our new update and make sure to leave your feedback in the comments!
It appears the worshippers of the Cuddles of Ch'thon are going to outnumber those awaiting the glorious dawn of the Aetherials!
Makeship has extended the campaign by an extra week, but this is the last time the Chthonian Devourer is going to be available ever, so if you're interested, make sure to grab one soon on the Makeship store!
Another new addition coming in the next update is a new campaign tutorial. It complements the basic and job tutorials we added in the previous update to help new players get the hang of campaign gameplay, mission structure, and the lay of Europa.
Guiding new players through starting a campaign. The campaign tutorial places you at a simplified outpost and guides you to gear up and complete your first mission.
Tips and hints along the way. The new tutorial makes use of hints to highlight important NPCs, items, and submarine systems that are important for all jobs to understand.
Integrated into the singleplayer campaign. The tutorial mode is enabled by default when you launch a singleplayer campaign and can be turned off in the settings.
We’ve also made some final tweaks to the new tutorials from the previous update by adding some extra text, exit popups upon completing objectives, and overall small improvements. We’re very excited about our completely overhauled tutorials and hope you will find them helpful!
The campaign tutorial will be released along with our December update, and you can already test the upcoming changes in the Unstable test version. Read more about the new additions on our blog and stay tuned for the update, coming in a few weeks!