This year I learned what it means to finish creating a game. The last months have been insanely rich in lots of playtesting and iterating on some of the game rules/design.
Just as you believe that the game is done-done, there are some new suggestions/issues that should be addressed before the release. And I'm not even talking about the good old scope creep, as it's often not a case of "I need to add more playable characters" thing, but more of a "this character needs rebalancing, and this mechanic could be made more meaningful".
This is how games are made. Their core goal is to entertain, and I am lucky enough to have people around the game that are constantly giving me feedback on how to improve the product. This is great, and I'm extremely joyful because of it. The game is in its best form since, well, ever!
Currently, Shardpunk is undergoing the process of transitioning from "done" to "shippable". I cannot wait to join the ranks of indie developers who actually managed to ship their first game as a commercial product!
With the release date scheduled for Q1 2023, it won't be long before Shardpunk will be publicly available. I mean we're still talking about a few months - but as I am working on the game for a few years already, that's literally nothing.
2023 will be a good year, and I wish all of you the best! May all your wishes come true! Take care!
Today is the last day of another year of our game’s development.
The first half of the year was quite uncertain for us and full of all sorts of things to deal with. We limited Steam communication focusing on the progress of the game, adding new functionalities and refining what we already added and wanted to add before game's release. Even though we didn't manage to finally release the game at the end of the year, we are still very pleased with the amount of work that has been done till now. Many of you doubted us during that time, but we hope, despite the extended waiting time, you will take part in the open playtests and help us in this last, most important phase of the game’s development. Thank you for your great help and support so far!
Unfortunately, our internal testing and reviewing phase are slightly delayed. At first we had hoped to launch the playtest before Christmas, but now it should go live early in the new year. Before the launch, we will get back to you with more information on how the playtest will look like and what will you be able to experience in it. You can still sign up for Playtests via Builders of Egypt Steam Store Page.
So time to get back to wishing! First and foremost, get ready for the upcoming premiere of Builders of Egypt! Take care of yourself, your families and friends. Find the time to rest properly and relax not only by playing games. 😉 Stay safe and healthy and don’t forget to regularly check our community hub and news for another update!
Stay tuned and see you in the New Year Egyptian Builders!
As a newly formed team, before starting a big project we wanted to exercise on the existing one and tried to make Gust easier to understand and less frustrating without losing its soul. We did a short but big update.
Collapse: A Political Simulator - Kremlingames Official
Dear players! We are pleased to present the biggest update to this game.
The changelog is attached:
А. Party coalition mechanics: - Coalition window - Ability to create coalitions - Ability to influence the party in coalition with the player - Interaction with the party in coalition with the player - Ability to go to the regional elections together, to vote together, to impeach together, to take over the Prime Minister's office together and more - Full redesign of the preparation and implementation of regional, general and presidential elections Б. Statistics: - Added section with the following indicators: Industry Index, GDP, GDP per capita, HDI - Redesigned the Ownership Ratio chart: now it shows absolute values instead of percentages - Comparative charts with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Poland have been added - Comparisons with the Republic of 1989 have been added В. Increased flexibility of the game: - Expanded interaction in player's party window with population (via new events) - Changed campaign pledge events: All pledges are now always available, but their debuffs depend on the leading wing of the player's party - Added additional faction relationship modifiers - Buttons associated with special coup endings moved to a separate part of the screen - Added 2 new unique buttons for each faction - Introduced a debate between a player's party and his closest rival - Memorized the change of wealth of classes and regions, and affects the support of the owners of certain ministries - Several dozen new events Г. Improvement of the law window: - Reduced support buffer for proposing a law that has not been passed - Before a package of laws is passed, it will now say whether it is approved and how many laws are being put forward. - The name of the law whose status has been changed is highlighted - The design of the pre-proposal for a package of bills has been changed. - Faction support for the package of laws is displayed. - Reset button appears in the Law Package window instead of the Back button, and if a law is selected, it resets all of the selected laws. - Law package cost is reduced if 3 or less laws are nominated. - The law window now shows the value of the needed resources to advance the law - More laws require a constitutional majority - Bots now nominate more bills - Bots no longer propose laws on the 1st of each month, but twice a month - on the 14th and 28th Д. Modding tool: - Ability to create new events, modifiers, endings - Ability to rewrite existing events, games and endings - Ability to create your own game situations - Reworked interface for adding mods into Steam and loading mods from Steam - Link to new modding tutorial: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mAQd9vfuX2gaDEDwNoZ1ApyKPh2Ngp2uPkmsgaxQ-_k/edit?usp=sharing Е. Economy: - Added indicators for three economic sectors with their status and levels affecting the country's economy - Environment level and its influence on the country's performance added - Corruption and its impact formula has been changed Ё. Balance: - Each party has become unique - with its own modifiers and solutions - Reworked the effects of all modifiers - Some button descriptions adjusted for better understanding - Changed the relationship with classes for passed laws by a factor of 10 - Decreased dependency on treaties in the diplomacy section (proportional to the importance of the treaty) - Less compromise is now needed to bribe more deputies to vote - Bug fixes, game load optimizations have been improved Ж. Other: - Added ability to delete all saves - All modifiers now have their own pictures - Corruption status is now shown in the region window, as this is a very important indicator - Your party icon is now displayed in the main window - New achievements
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL! THANK YOU FOR BEING WITH US!
Task Force Admiral - Vol.1: American Carrier Battles - Drydock Dreams Games
Dear Fans, Dear Followers, Old & new,
Welcome to this December 2022 dev diary for Task Force Admiral.
As December is only going to remain with us for a few more hours, the time for our usual Monthly update has come. Join us as we detail a few of the features & mechanics we have been working over the past few weeks.
Anti-Air Artillery Effects & Mechanics
We will begin with the part of the work pipeline that involves the most eye candy. We’ve been at work on implementing Anti Air artillery systems in-game, both visually and on the programming side of things. Visually speaking, it was mostly about optimizing the explosion and smoke effects, while adding a few new gimmicks to improve overall immersion, such as shrapnel effects in the water below the explosion proper.
As far as its in-game implementation goes, anti-air artillery is a complex, multi-layered affair that requires a detailed approach for it to shine – or at least start to look the part. Three main types of AA guns have to be accounted for in Task Force Admiral :
Heavy Anti Air is made of naval guns acting in AA mode. Some of these are dual purpose by design, as their inner workings support high angle elevation while still allowing reloading and firing at a useful rate. In this category, you will also come across single purpose mounts, which cannot elevate past a certain angle and train past a certain speed and still remain efficient. Yet, most of these guns do have some limited anti-air use, as they can still shoot at low flying objects, and as such they will take part to the defence of the force against torpedo planes. This category of guns usually fires a time-fuzed projectile at aircraft, set to explode in the vicinity of where the enemy plane is to find itself a few seconds later. Said fuze is set just before loading by a complex system, which begins with the AA directors, the AA gun plot and ends with a fuze setter embedded with the mount at the mouth of the gun. The radar proximity fuze, an invention that was to find its way into the Fleet in 1943, was not available yet in 1942 to the US Navy, so back then it really was a matter of getting timing right, or get the odd lucky direct hit that would set off the impact fuze. In TFA these shells will be what they were in action: an ubiquitous sight on both sides when aircraft attack, but a mostly harmless display of pyrotechnics save for that one shell in a thousand that will manage to connect.
Medium Anti Air mounts are a category the Imperial Japanese Navy never really managed to get quite right. These intermediate calibres attempt to retain the best characteristics of both worlds: powered mounts managed by AA directors, with several automatic guns bundled together so as to reach a critical, uninterrupted volume of fire. Thanks to their redundant feeding systems, these pieces usually don’t have to stop firing for a long period, and as such can put up an actual barrage of shells. As their ammunition is too small and their range too limited to warrant further fine-tuning, all the projectiles are set to explode with the same delay, setting up killing zones in the trajectory of approaching attack craft. The U.S. quad 1.1in (28mm), British 2 Pdr (40mm) and 40mm Bofors are among the most common systems of this kind you will encounter in TFA.
Light Anti Air, finally, is a category made of all manually-trained, manually-fed and manually-aimed guns. These can be found in single, double or even triple mounts in the case of the IJN Type 96 25mm. They do not benefit from the input of a AA director, and their short range only allow for short duration bursts on a given target before said target leaves their firing arc. They end up being primarily psychological or even revenge weapons, but in the latter case, they still serve a purpose, as a damaged or destroyed aircraft, even after it has delivered its payload, is still one less threat to worry about in the future. On the US side, the Oerlikon 20mm and water-cooled .50 AA mounts are part of this category.
Naturally, all these different weapons and their mounts have their own technical specs, which will result in varying base accuracy and dispersion values, acquisition time, reload time, etc... Their base performance might or might not be improved by an additional layer of control offered by AA directors if these are available to them. As you can see in the screenshot above, we keep on deploying the relevant edition tools along with the new features they serve. As these are designed so as to allow everyone in the team to contribute to the integration of new devices, down the line they might prove handy for all those who wish to customize the in-game specs and tweak them to their liking.
The Air Plot
Those who have been reading our previous update (click here if you haven't just yet) will remember that we had mentioned the Ouija board, or aircraft management screen, as one of TFA’s carrier-centric feature. This month, we fleshed out the other modes of what we call, in short, the “Air Plot”.
The Air Plot is an array of air-focused management screens which are here to provide the player with a complete panorama of the air activities in his task force. The different screens and their uses are as follows:
The Aircraft Management Screen (which is the new, more practical name for the Ouija board) remains unchanged this month, besides the few functions left & right which were not there yet last time: it is used as an interface that allows you to check effortlessly the status of all the aircraft aboard a given aviation ship under your command.
Using the same top-down layout of your carrier, the Deck Timeline will retain the upper part that displayed the flight deck and provide you with an extensive schedule of deck operations, indicating in details which aircraft are about to be spotted, launched or recovered. It is a more thorough version of the information always available on the air ops timeline at the bottom of one’s screen.
The Mission Roster is a specialized table that goes the extra mile as far as commander awareness is concerned: all the air missions are there, with a number of buttons which will allow you to easily follow them on the map, edit them, or read their log and final report.
The Squadron Roster on the other hand focuses on the air groups aboard your ships, giving ample details in regard of their readiness, their equipment, and their statistics since the beginning of the scenario.
Finally, the Aviation Stores tab, not depicted here, will give you a complete brief about the allocation of aircraft loadouts. As bombs and especially torpedoes are in limited supply, we needed to make sure that you would have the ability to follow ammunition expenditure closely.
To those who might wonder about the effects of all these contents of the game’s complexity and accessibility: worry not. All these screens are mostly of an informational nature, with little in way of actual interaction – so no mandatory micro-managing hell is involved. Going through them is only necessary for those who want to make sure to know each and every detail of their on-going air operations. The same way one can play through a Paradox game without ever opening the ledger screen, one can succeed at Task Force Admiral while not giving a damn about which pilot is flying which plane, or which is the next flight in line for recovery. But considering all these information were there already floating around anyway, we had to think of a way to make them available in a centralized & exhaustive fashion for those who like to run a tight ship, so there you go.
Pearl Harbor Art
December is like every year, finally, the moment when we can commemorate the event that started it all, that is the Dec.7 attack against Pearl Harbor. Over the last few years, our artist Julien has contributed quite a number of original pieces dedicated to the battle proper and to the events surrounding it. They will undoubtedly be an important part of the posters or postcards line-up in any physical box edition we might come up with during our launching phase.
Mentioning the said launching phase, I will happily use the opportunity offered by this update so as to reiterate that our plans are to have something playable in your hands certainly by the end of next year. Can’t say just yet which approach we’ll be using so as to reach this goal, but I take you as witnesses here and now stuck between Christmas & the New Year to claim that we’ll eventually get there. I hope that the progress shown over the last few updates has made clear that we know where we’re going, and that our deliberate pace is mostly the result of us trying to do the things the right way. Watch out for more exciting contents over the next few months!
That's all for today Folks! Although the day wouldn't be complete without the traditional season greetings by Taffy - so there she goes, along with a nice view of a very cute, illuminated Yorktown, waiting calmly for the release of Task Force Admiral like a good girl.
As always, if you aren't too fond of Discord, Facebook, Twitter or else, don't forget that we have a mailing list here specifically made so as to keep you updated of all our Steam updates and other announcements which might be big enough to deserve a special treatment. Click on the pic below to access the form.
Cheers & take care, all of you! Happy New Year to you and all your loved ones!
(Sound On) No new screenshots for this week because of writing dialogues. I brought music instead. I thought the dialogue flow was almost done yesterday, but I started it over again today. Anyway, happy new year!
Tommy Bargains is celebrating the New Year with some unmissable hypercar deals in the Forzathon Shop happening from 2:30 PM UTC on Dec. 31 until 2:30 PM UTC on Jan 2.
If you’ve been stacking those Forzathon Points, this is the time to log in to Forza Horizon 5 and spend them so you can start the New Year off behind the wheel of an incredible new car.
The high-performance cars on discount include the 2016 Pagani Huayra BC Forza Edition for 200FP, the 2013 Ferrari 458 Speciale for 150FP, the 2010 Jaguar C-X75 for 100FP and the 2016 Audi R8 V10 plus for 50FP. That’s a sweet collection of rides right there.
Secret Santa remains active in Forza Horizon 5, so be sure to spread the love. It’s the final week of Horizon Holidays, so give that car via the Forzathon Shop while you have the chance – and be sure to check the Horizon Wonderland in Mulegé in case there’s a present with your name on it.
Another great event that will allow you to earn great rewards if you get reward seats before the end of the event. With this event you will become even stronger.
Upgrade your generals and troops, enhance your equipment to increase your ratings instantly.
