WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: The Omega Strikers PC Open Beta will end at 11:59pm ET on January 1st, 2023.

• Omega Strikers is now scheduled to launch in April 2023 for PC, iOS, Android, and consoles with full cross-platform support.
  
• All your account progress will carry over when we come back with our full launch.
  
• Full launch will bring a new ranked season, battle pass, and major content updates.

Read on if you’d like to see a sneak peek at some of our in-progress work, including new features and content that’ll arrive alongside full launch.

But first, let’s talk about changes to our release plans.

Let’s not beat around the bush. We’ve pushed back release dates a couple of times now, which can be frustrating—for both you and us. We’re a small team with big ambitions, so we’ve had to go through a bit of a learning process with this PC Open beta.

Now, though, we’ve got an incredibly strong roadmap for features and content that we think players will love, and we want to be realistic about the level of work it’ll take to get all this stuff ready. Pushing back to April gives us needed time to develop and polish these major changes to the game, which makes us confident we’ll be able to hit this new launch target.

Okay, so now it’s time to actually show you some of the cool stuff we’re working on.

We previously shared that we want to make some big improvements to Omega Strikers before we go forward with our full launch. The most important of these changes will be targeted at adding appreciable depth to gameplay and increasing variety from match-to-match.

Today we’d like to show off some progress we’re making in these areas, ordered roughly in order of the impact we think they’ll have on the game.


To make playing as (and against) goalies more interesting, we’re developing a new environmental obstacle called goal barriers.



These are destructible energy walls that must be struck by the core before your goal gates open. Since they must be broken down piece-by-piece, the arena gets re-shaped and broken down in different ways over the course of each round.


Another major gameplay change is a new ability for all Strikers called Core Flip (final name TBD!):



The Core Flip will be a new action that gives Strikers a moment to shine. When used, your Striker will knock away nearby foes, become unhittable for a short while, and launch the Core into the air. While the Core is airborne only you can hit it and your next hit against it will be greatly empowered.



In playtests, we’ve seen this combination of mechanics create some very impressive plays. For example, Strikers can now make the Core dodge a critical hit from an incoming ability and reverse a scary situation by hitting a very powerful angled shot back at the enemy. We’re still tuning the mechanic, but we’re feeling really good about how it’s coming together. We hope to share more about it soon!


By introducing environmental hazards into the arena, we hope to more meaningfully differentiate maps from each other. One small example would be new areas where you can get knocked out. This map concept has a deadly hole in the middle of the arena.



Another concept we like is a “gravity anomaly” device that sits in the middle of the arena and sucks in both players and the core if they get too close.



Environmental buffs like “speedgates” will increase both the speed of both Strikers and the core. Here’s a closer look at a map which features speedgates along its edges.


We’re also developing “game buffs” that differ from match-to-match. For example, on Super Surge all players will get a buff that grants huge match-long buffs to dashes, hastes, and blinks.



Another map grants the “Gigantify” game buff, which makes you much bigger after using your special.



Some of our other experiments with game buffs have arguably gone too far:



We plan to have five different game buffs at launch! What buffs would you like to see added?


We've heard that players want more ways to achieve progress in-game outside of ranked and the battle pass. So here’s a peek at “Striker Affinity,” a new character-specific progression system that rewards you with cool cosmetic rewards as you master new Strikers.



Striker Affinity also has a leaderboard component, so you can track your progress on that character against other players.


We want maps to play and feel different from each other, so we’re working on new background environments. Here’s an in-progress concept for a “night market” background:



We’re also taking to heart your feedback about the UI/UX around the game. In general, we want to polish up menus and make the game look more “done.”

Here’s an early look at a new “VS.” screen that appears between Strikers Select and the start of a new match:



And a mock of the new End-of-Match screen:




Along with purely visual UI/UX changes, we’re adding new features like better player reporting:



We’ll also launch with a party chat feature which lets you quickly shoot pre-made messages to each other, including your Discord info if you’d like to set up a call or talk with more freeform text. The idea here is to make it easy for people to party up without requiring people to pull up a keyboard if they aren’t playing on a PC.




Finally, we want to level up our game when it comes to skins and cosmetics. Put bluntly, we want to keep funding the development of this game by making awesome skins that explore new fantasies for our Strikers.

So here’s a sneak peak of some upcoming skins, including original goal score art that will come alongside certain premium skins:

Raindrop Era





Wizard Prodigy Luna



Orbital Force Estelle






We hope that if there’s only one thing you take away from this post, it’s how serious we are about making Omega Strikers as great as it can be for you. Instead of rolling straight from our PC Open Beta into launch with no time to breathe, we want to actually take the necessary time to implement big changes based on what we learned from the beta.

Your feedback has been so crucial to help light the way for us. Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be sharing more sneak peeks of our progress in our Discord, which you can join here. We’ll talk soon!

–The Odyssey Interactive Team

Hello Managers,

We would like to reiterate our thanks for your support. Many players have become managers of their favourite teams and they are sharing their experience.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2098130/International_Basketball_Manager_23/

After the Hotfix we uploaded the other day to fix the most urgent bugs, this new update 1.1.0, apart from fixing some minor bugs detected, also adds new features gathered from your comments and feedback these days. So these are the new features and bugs fixed.

EDITOR

• Steam Workshop now active. We have activated the Steam workshop so that everyone can share their mods and also download those mods already created in an easier way. Now in the Editor you have the option to Export/Import mods locally or in the Steam workshop.
  
• Free agents players are now available for editing and photo editing.
  
• Open the editing of all fields of licensed players in the game.
  
• Open the editing of the coach, photo, president and flag fields of the licensed teams in the game.
  
• Fixed a bug with some players' photos that could not be changed because their name was duplicated in the database.
  
• Fixed a bug that did not allow to edit most of the jerseys of the US college competition.
  
• Small bugs fixed in the editor and other small improvements implemented, such as navigation with the tab key to move from one text field to another.

NEGOTIATIONS

• Fixed a bug that caused a player to always ask for more salary on the first counteroffer he had during a negotiation.
  
• Fixed a bug that told you that you didn't have enough money to sign a player in the last year of his contract.
  
• You can now negotiate with all players found by the scout, even if the country has no competition.
  
• Added the player's conference in the Portfolio screen when you "Scout a player" in a US College League game.
  
• Added the College or U18 players you are recruiting to the "Status offers" screen. This way you will always have them there in case you want to resume a negotiation with them.
  
• Now if we scout a "Free agent" player, in Portfolio you will see the salary he would be willing to start negotiating with a team with your characteristics. However, the player may not even want to negotiate his signing and may tell you that he doesn't want to go to a team of your level.

SIMULATION

• Implemented substitutions of more than one player at the same time. It is now possible to request substitutions for all five outfield players at the same time.
  
• Fixed a bug that changed manual substitutions to automatic when starting a new match. Now, if you leave the substitutions on manual, it will save this setting for the next match.

OTHER ADJUSTMENTS

• Fixed a bug that did not save the box office ticket prices correctly.
  
• Fixed bug that didn't allow individual training sessions from season 2 onwards.
  
• Fixed crash when consulting the history of scouted players.
  
• Revised the annotations of US ABL league matches, to increase a bit these annotations.
  
• Draft preview screen without free agents. Now all players shown belong to a college team.
  
• The college players appear in the "Search by filter" screen. If you play with a non-college team you can now find college players to keep track of in the future.
  
• Fixed visual bugs on multiple screens.
  
• Other small bugs fixed.

We remind you that we have the IBM23 Discord server where you can comment your experience with the game, make suggestions, help us if you find any undetected bug, ask for technical support, comment everything related to workshop and mods and many more.

Thanks for your support, Managers!

- Added German translation (Thanks Kampy!)
- Added a Credits section.
- Changed Non-pixel title font.
- Added an option to turn off mouse scroll.
- Bug fix/ Bug: Enemy target's marked target is not displayed properly.
- Bug fix/ Bug: Some class windows can not traversable when using controller.

I've finally got round to adding a basket and checkout system on the trading screen! If you've played a Bethesda Fallout game or similar RPG you know how this works - you can add multiple items from your inventory and the trader's inventory to a basket, then click Confirm to make the trade. This means you can barter for items even if neither of you have a large enough amount of gold to cover their total cost. It's been on my todo list for a while.



A few months ago I introduced a shortcut when trading and transferring items where right-clicking on them would transfer the whole stack instead of showing you the dialog where you set the amount to transfer. If you left clicked it showed the dialog, which I made it default to 1 item. So if you wanted to transfer 1 item you would left click then mash OK, if you wanted to transfer all you would right click.

But I think I got it the wrong way round. I've changed it so right-click transfers 1 item immediately, and left click shows the dialog (still), but defaulting to All. So if you want to transfer 1 item you right click, if you want to transfer All you left click and mash OK. The advantage of this is if you want to transfer, say, 2 or 3 items you can just repeatedly mash right-click without having to operate the dialog box. So I think it's better, but it does take a bit of getting used to if you just got used to the other shortcut - sorry about that.

Other cool stuff: I added distinct map icons for traders and leaders in AI settlements, and for unconscious people. And I made the speeches people use when you ask how they're feeling, or their opinion of you, a bit more varied and more appropriate, so if you want a better idea of why they're feeling the way they are you can try asking them again.

Here's the full list:

• Basket & Checkout system on trading screen
  
• When transferring or trading equipment, right-click transfers 1 item instead of all the items. Left click shows the dialog to set the amount, which defaults to All.
  
• Hint about using Notes screen
  
• Allow Notes screen to be accessed from hovering over characters on map screen
  
• Fix for traders sometimes creating fires in the player's base
  
• When characters tell you their opinion of you, or their morale etc, there will be some variation in the memories they pick each time, and they will try to pick some that fit the way they are feeling, rather than just the strongest 3 each time
  
• Added distinct map icons for unconscious people, and for leaders and traders in AI settlements, also made the map icons higher resolution
  
• Fixed a few bugs with people joining your community
  
• Fix for one character picking up all the ammo
  
• Fix for chef getting who was set to auto-deposit wood getting stuck in a loop picking up wood for a fire, then depositing it again
  
• If extortion squads demand to be let into your gates while you are in combat with someone else, they won't escalate so quickly
  
• Made NPCs less likely to attack you if you pick up an unconscious community member of theirs who isn't close to a fire, and try to bring them to one
  
• Added theoretical support for Dutch and made languages page scrollable
  
• Fixed message when you try to give a book to someone twice saying you (the giver) has already read that
  
• Crash fixes
  
• Updated Korean, Lithuanian and Latin American Spanish translations

v173 will be in the "publicbeta" branch for a while, before pushing it to the main game. If you want to try the latest features as they come out (and help test them!) it's a good idea to start using this branch. But keep in mind:

• Because it's the bleeding edge it could be less stable
  
• If you want to be able to play online co-op with someone you'll need to be on the same version as them
  
• If you go back from the "publicbeta" branch to the main branch you may not be able to load savegames created on "publicbeta".

To use publicbeta, just right-click on Survivalist: Invisible Strain in your Steam library and go to Properties, then Betas and in the drop-down select "publicbeta".

Hello, village elders!

Today’s winter update concludes this year’s update spree. Don’t worry: We’ll continue with updates in 2023!

This update has a bit of everything: sound, quality of life updates, new furniture and so on. We also threw in a chunk of fixes.

See the notes below for more info and for now, we wish you all fantastic holidays and a happy new year!

The teams of Render Cube and Toplitz Productions

• Horse and donkey fall if they hit the ground hard enough.
  
• Sounds for many items to pick up from the ground.
  
• New building – Farm Shed (Employees work in the fields and orchards. Those in the barn don't do it anymore).
  
• New furniture – Composter.
  
• Five new furniture – Containers.
  
• Seven new wall decorations – Reliefs.
  
• New Gate – Plank Gate.
  
• New Fence – Plank Fence.
  
• It is possible to build the snowman in winter.
  
• It is possible to craft snowballs in winter.
  
• Over 20 new locations generated on the map.
  
• Aim Assist for controllers.
  
• New break animations for employees.
  
• NPCs reacting to getting bumped into.
  
• NPCs reacting to getting hit by a snowball.
  
• Horse can fall if it hits something at high velocity.
  
• Donkey can fall if it hits something at high velocity.
  
• Gameplay tips in loading screen.
  
• In some dialogues the ESC/Cancel button will result in exiting/going back in dialogue.
  
• New status indicating the number of problems with work in fields and orchards.
  
• Number of coins in possession visible during dialogue.
  
• Sounds for Player's Scythe and Sickle.
  
• Sounds for picking from fields and orchards (every vegetable and fruit has its unique picking sounds).
  
• All foliage types have their unique picking sounds (for example: there are different sounds for reed, stick, stone, broadleaf, mushroom, or sapling etc.).
  
• Sounds of eating: carrot, onion, and beetroot.
  
• Sounds for inspector mode.
  
• Sounds for wicker chests.

• Animals launching into the air when killed on steep terrain.
  
• The Talk area marker on the compass is bugged when player is mounted.
  
• In the quest "Young Love" flowers stay in the inventory after talking to your son.
  
• Furniture from "Other" category can be built before getting permission to build on the land.
  
• Wrong item selected after removing whole stack.
  
• List in Builders Hut not updating when buildings get damaged by a tree.
  
• Disappearing items when loading a game save.
  
• Toddlers sneezing problem.
  
• Dough in cooking stove is not showing correctly in third person when ending crafting.
  
• If LMB was pressed before RMB for Throwable item, player had to release both buttons to be able to throw it again.
  
• Fixed fast traveller lantern sounds.
  
• Quests with building furniture may work incorrect in some situations.
  
• Gates cannot be placed on permanent roads.
  
• Some achievements didn't unlock properly.
  
• Player animation stuck when falling off a mount in some cases.
  
• Combat music not ending sometimes on season skip.
  
• Player being able to throw objects like snowballs with zero velocity resulting in projectiles falling down in a spawn location.
  
• Sometimes items disappear in animations.
  
• A possible fix for enabled animations on some workbenches when no NPC is nearby.
  
• Faded audio sometimes not returning on camera fade.
  
• Possible case of broken ambient audio transitions.
  
• Animals running sideways diminished.
  
• Sleeping for the family quest makes the bed inaccessible.

• Memory usage optimizations.
  
• Increased the basic building limit by 5.
  
• Animals don't reproduce if they are hungry.
  
• Animal Inverse Kinematics improvements.
  
• Several animal walking/running speed adjustments.
  
• Improved falling off a mount.
  
• House decoration system (More slots).
  
• Improved the pathfinding on roads.
  
• House decoration menu now has categories for easier management.
  
• Small trees in orchards don't block characters.
  
• Assigning an NPC to a workplace now no longer requires selecting a profession (now every building has only one profession).
  
• Desired skill and profession added to building slot in NPC workplace selection.
  
• In the building details at the storage part now weight and coins are visible.
  
• Stage names for fields and orchards, suggesting next tasks.
  
• Several UI optimizations.
  
• Using unstuck button outside of map borders now should move player to starting location.
  
• Count of throwable weapons is now shown in HUD.
  
• Loudness level of music. Default value of music that we recommend is on 75% and all other sounds like SFX we recommend on 100%.
  
• Music Soundtracks are levelled to general loudness standards.
  
• All languages updated.
  
• Reputation decreases when hitting animals from NPC villages with snowballs.
  
• Damage calculation when hitting tail bone in animals.
  
• Changed returning dialogue order when buying animal from locations, so that it's not required to return to the category each time the player buys something.
  
• Changed the way coin prices are displayed in dialogues.
  
• Darker colour of fertiliser in the fields.
  
• FOV blending alpha for rock/snowball, bow and spear.
  
• Throwing animation in TP is now quicker for Rock/Snowball.
  
• Roof textures.
  
• Construction progress in the ghost.
  
• Optimized NPCs.
  
• Horse sounds are less frequent.
  
• Mixed river sounds.

Hello, Rulers!

The end of the year is almost upon us, and we have some good news to bring you before saying goodbye to 2022! As you may have read in our previous post, Lakeburg Legacies is going to be released in only a few months, in Spring 2023. We hope you’re as excited as we are!

In the meantime, we will keep you updated with our progress. And there is a lot to show you!


As we refined most of the game’s systems to bring them closer to our vision during the last few months, the old character sheet became more and more obsolete. And now that all changes have been implemented, it’s normal that we completely revamp its interface too! 🛠️

The “Life” page will give you all the information you need about a villager’s current state, strengths and weaknesses, personality, and needs. This is where you’ll want to go to figure out in what buildings a villager would perform the best, understand what negative traits are affecting their stats, or see how much life expectancy they have left. 🕯️



The Legacy page is one you may recognize, as it hasn’t changed much other than aesthetically. This is where you can keep track of a villager’s lineage, and see their family grow with time (and just a little help from the storks)! 👩‍👩‍👦



And finally, there is one new addition to the character sheet, in the form of the mysterious “Relationships” page. 👀


Drama and social interactions are at the core of Lakeburg Legacies, and as such they deserve their very own space!

The Relationship page of a villager's character sheet will show you the other villagers they have encountered, as well as the type of relationship they share. Are they simple acquaintances, secret lovers, besties, mentor and student, or even nemeses? ⚔️ This is where you can watch all these relationships evolve, and even generate some new ones yourself to increase the chances that your favorite villagers appear in the same events!




Following the rework of the Dating system, that we’ve dived into in the previous dev journal, we’ve felt the need to rework the Houses’ interface to display more information about the state of a couple’s relationship. Players can now directly have an impact on the evolution of a family, by making the couple interact to improve their relationship, making them have a baby, or having them break up. 💔

We also had new backgrounds made for every time the house grows to host more children! 👨‍👨‍👶‍👶




Could it be... Yes, there are indeed some new buildings we haven’t shown you before! They are going to join the town of Lakeburg to entertain the population. We should be able to tell you more about them very soon, but for now you can enjoy this first background! Will you be able to guess what the purpose of this place is?



The answer will be revealed in the next dev journal. 😉

Until then, we're sending you our best wishes for the year to come! May 2023 be filled with joy, laughter, just a little touch of drama...and perhaps some time spent playing a certain game!

Join us on Discord, Twitter & Instagram to discuss with the team and other players!

Do you feel that chill in the air? A storm is on its way! From December 20th to January 2nd, Roundguard is celebrating the wintertime with a special event!



The dungeon is blanketed in a fresh coat of snow, the jingliest jingle bells are here to welcome you, and the dungeon denizens are dressed for the weather. You know what that means... Pom pom hats!

Put on your fuzzy slippers and try your hand at two weeks of unique daily challenges with winter rules. Look out for snowballs snowballing and icy winds blowing through every day.

Good wishes to you all for a cozy end of year with endless marshmallows in your hot cocoa!

<3
Andrea, Wonderbelly Games

Hi there, Rockstars! We have an exciting update coming in hot: The Controller Update brings controller support to Unplugged, letting you rock out without using hand/finger tracking!

We've spent a lot of time designing a way that works with the required inputs and we're very excited to hear what you think of it! It may seem simple at first, but once you take it up to Hard Mode, it will be the true test of shredding riffs for you!

This update makes Unplugged: Air Guitar compatible with HTC Vive (Pro), Meta Rift (S), Valve Index and Windows Mixed Reality headsets + controllers. Additionally, this update comes with 25+ new tracks!



We want to give a big shout-out to the players for being part of our rock journey and making the continued development possible for Unplugged: Air Guitar. Keep on rockin', we hope to see you climb on the leaderboards!

-Anotherway & Vertigo Games

Hello again, everyone! The next update will be logistics focused. New features are time consuming to code and do not add that much to write about.


With this being the last post this year, I would like to start by talking about development stats. For me, it is always interesting to hear what it takes to build something and it only sounds fair to share some data about Sweet Transit (Also, as I said, there is not that much content to write about). I started working full-time sometime in November or December 2020, clocking more than 4.8k hours during that time and some before. It is more or less typical work hours, but every game dev knows that a lot of the problem solving happens when you are not 'working'.

Sweet Transit is made using my custom game engine with Monogame as a base. There is no good way to measure code, but using Visual Studio DPack Solution Statistics tool shows 206k lines of code and 1k files throughout 9 separate projects. The main project is the game, which contains 170k of those lines, and the other ones are server, custom tools, reusable libraries and testing. Work is mostly evenly divided between new features, UI, refactoring and bug fixing. These days I do not spend time on optimization as it is not really needed thanks to refactoring and efforts to have clean code all around. But to be fair, there are some classes that are scary to approach such as train movement calculations and I only have myself to blame.



Graphics are mainly done using Blender->Substance->After Effects->Photoshop stack with some custom tools in between to make it more straightforward. Currently, the graphics only folder has 190k different files and is 185GB. There are many different files, such as sprites, textures, references, project files and so on. There are also other smaller folders regarding UI, icons and design, all housed inside my PC and personal Dropbox as a backup. In the end, the Sweet Transit project folder has data worth of 250GB with only a build size of 2GB to show for it. Now imagine how many terabytes of backup AAA games have. Good advice here is to never do your maximum and forget being a perfectionist. Graphics take the longest to do and usually they are tied to the content. Make and optimize your pipeline with the visual goal of "good enough". As an example, my hourly limit to make a locomotive with its wagon is 30h and that includes going from an idea in my head to an iterated in-game sprite with all relevant data set. It is a lot knowing how many different kinds of content are needed to make a game. There are tiles, trees, decorations, villages, industries, people, goods, and it all adds up.



The biggest thing I learned during the past two years is just how many things I do not know. "Finish a game" advice is a golden one. Just don't start with your multi-year dream project if you value your sanity. Now let's talk about new features.



The long awaited undo feature is being worked on. A standard undo with CTRL+Z will remove or rebuild your last build step with a moddable history of 50 actions. Together with this will come a redo with CTRL+Shift+Z allowing you to go through build history both ways. It was less complex than expected. However, I believe that bugs and side cases will be all over the place. The QA team should have their hands full checking this one.



Blueprint Library should also be a welcome addition. Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program were the main inspirations. This panel will allow you to share blueprints, folders and rearrange them seamlessly using the game or windows explorer. Preview is interactable allowing you to zoom in, out and navigate.

I am not yet sure what to do regarding icons. Other game blueprints are more varied allowing industry specific icons to be used. But in Sweet Transit it is only rails and stations. Rendering a preview is an option, but if the blueprint is large then only noise will be visible. Feel free to share ideas as I will tackle this after the new year.





Bridges are still straight except for the steel one. Steel bridges will have corners now, allowing you to drag multiple shapes. Can't wait to see the new intersection designs!





There will be a new game mode! Newcomers are having a hard time learning how to properly use signals which is understandable. Experienced players need a place to test their solutions. Scenarios will solve both of these problems, allowing players to solve ever-increasing difficulty challenges and measure their throughput. And best of all, it is compatible with mods.





Finally, build mode will allow you to go to the map view for a general overview of where you can or can not build. There is still no ability to build in map view, but at least you will be able to zoom out.




Until the next week!

• Fixed bug with profit numbers visiblity on the Ice Citadel.
  
• Fixed bug with trading via portal to an Orbital Station that does not have money led to the complete disappearance of goods from the platform without receiving income.
  
• Changed the design of gardens on large wind fields now it can create a hexagonal canvas.
  
• Remaster: Added new years decorations. it will be activated on game date and relative to real December. (will help navigate the game's flow of time)
  
• Remaster: Fixed the colors of the main UI icons.