The Spring Sale has been extended! You can still purchase Prince of Suburbia - Part 2 (paid DLC) for 10% off through April 3. Buy it today!

Here are some questions we get frequently from our players on Steam!

• The first beach update (V0.9) was already added to the game last month. This update was free for all players who had previously purchased the Part 2 (paid DLC).
  
• The second beach update (V0.95) will be the second free update to the Part 2 (paid DLC). It will also be free for all players who have previously purchased the Part 2 (paid DLC). It's estimated release on Steam is late Spring 2023.
  
• The last update to the main story (V1.0) will be the last free update made to the Part 2 (paid DLC). It is estimated to release in the second half of 2023 and will be free for all players who have previously purchased the Part 2 DLC.

Once all of the remastered art and voice acting has been added to both Part 1 (free demo) and Part 2 (paid DLC), the game will move from Early Access to full release. Our plan is for the game to leave Early Access later in 2023.

A price increase for Part 2 (paid DLC) will likely happen at this point, more details to follow as we approach this transition.

After we wrap up the main story with the V1.0 release, we plan to have additional DLC content with all of the characters, including pregnancy content. These DLCs will not continue the main story, they will be standalone scenes that take place outside of the main story. No Part 3 of the main story is planned.

Stay tuned for more information about additional DLCs later in 2023!




Art for the second beach update (V0.95) of Prince of Suburbia - Part 2 (paid DLC) is progressing on schedule!

With the writing wrapping up for the next update of our other game, A Shot in the Dark, our team will be able to shift focus to Prince of Suburbia so we should see more progress on the writing in April. We are also looking to hire an additional writer or two to potentially help with this and/or future updates.

One of our team members who works on Prince of Suburbia has had a health emergency and will be taking the month of April off. If this causes any delays with the V0.95 development cycle, we will keep players updated. We did not anticipate releasing V0.95 in April anyway, so it's too soon to say if there will be an impact beyond that. We wish our team member a healthy and speedy recovery!

We are already planning ahead for the artwork and remastered scenes in V1.0 (the last update of the main story). Ideally, we'd like to get ahead on art so that our artist and animator can take a much-needed break to rest and heal his hand between the main game and the pregnancy/epilogue content we have planned for later this year or early next year.

If there are any delays with the release of V0.95, a silver lining is that it will likely allow us to include some of the remastered art planned for V1.0 in the V0.95 release so that we can sooner reach our goal of a fully remastered game and moving out of Early Access!

The V0.95 update includes the most complex art we've ever attempted, and we are certain it will be worth the wait! Attached to this post are some previews to whet your appetite. ;)

For more updates about the development of Prince of Suburbia, join us on Discord or check out our website.

In February, our developers took part in a special Q&A session on our official Discord server on the topic of ship modeling and design in World of Warships. We’re here to deliver the results!

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1. What software do you use for modeling ships?

The exact set of programs depends on the particular team and task, but our "go-to kit" is Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop, and Substance Painter.

2. To what extent is physics involved in the ship design process?

We have a professional team of constructors, most of whom have solid experience working in shipyards and designing real ships. Virtual ships are designed on the same principles as real ships.

Since the designing of a whole ship from keel to mast is a topic worthy of a separate publication, we will only look at the example of designing the hull:

During the early stages of the design process, we accommodate the key equipment on board the ship: the main and auxiliary propulsion plants, armament and magazine sections, armor layout, aircraft hangars, catapults, lifeboats, etc. To do that, we create sketch plans for the ship's decks, holds, superstructures, and inboard profile. Those sketch plans are subsequently supplemented and finalized to be later used as the basis for final plans and drawings.

We need to do this in order to ensure that all the equipment fits within the hull we've designed. For that purpose, we calculate mass loads and verify the correspondence between the weight of the equipment and the water displacement of the hull.

The ship's hull is designed taking into account all the equipment to be placed within it. If the data doesn’t match, we either make changes to the composition of the ship's equipment and its characteristics or, if that’s not the best available option, we change the hull.

In the case of aircraft carrier Hakuryū, for example, we had to make the ship 20 m longer and 5 m wider compared to her prototype, G-15, so that the carrier could, in fact, "carry" her entire air group. The resulting increase in water displacement forced us to adopt a different propulsion plant—one that we had to find.

We figure out the seafaring characteristics of the ship's hull, its water displacement, the position of the center of buoyancy, and other hydrostatic parameters.

3. When creating new Tech Tree ships, is there some sort of "budget" related to the modeling of historical ships? Like, "this upcoming Tech Tree should have this number of historical ships at the very least."

We have no such "budget," but there is a general rule of giving priority to historical ships if they fit the planned gameplay of the branch.

4. When modeling obscure "paper" ships or even fantasy ones, do you put any thought into how their superstructure model will affect their turret angles and, subsequently, their future state of balance?

When designing a ship, there are many factors that affect gun angles and gun placement. The key ones are the requirements for ship balance from our game designers and the prototype designs on which the ship is based on.

We never intentionally make a ship worse in terms of angles, quite the contrary; however, this is always a back-and-forth process and a search for compromises.

For example, Plymouth: This is the original version of the improved Town class. She is, in fact, a Town-class ship with quadruple-gun turrets, which were developed for that specific ship. By installing a larger turret on an existing ship with set superstructure dimensions, you automatically get cut horizontal aiming angles. In this case, we chose the most optimal design because there were other variants that had even worse aiming angles.

5. When you design your own ships from scratch such as Celebes and Haarlem, why is there no system in place to ensure the designs are not without cases of missing directors or directors without guns to direct? And why aren’t they fixed?

On Celebes, the number and type of directors are inspired by De Ruyter's. Additionally, a director was added in front of the bow superstructure to control the АA guns located on the platform between the funnels.

About Haarlem: She has the original Dutch gun fire-control system, and it is assumed that it was modified for the German main battery guns. As for AA gunnery, while working on the ship, we considered the fate of HNLMS "Willem van der Zaan." Upon arrival to Britain, this ship had her Bofors guns and Hazemeyer gun mounts with their fire-control system removed for study, and they were replaced with British pom-poms. Haarlem (in her version of the story) got the Bofors back, but there was no way to get a new fire-control system from the occupied Netherlands.

6. Roughly how much effort is required for the various types of ship models? For instance, a battleship is large and complex with many animated features like AA guns, while a submarine is just a cylinder. Is there a rough ratio for design time/effort for carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines?

Submarine, destroyer, cruiser, battleship, aircraft carrier, hybrid ship—the design time increases exponentially in that order. The more complex the ship in terms of structure, the more time it takes to design her. Hybrids are the most complex. On average, it takes 3 to 6 months to design a ship.


7. Where do you get ship plans from?

We’ve collected blueprints and photos from archives and museums around the world. For this purpose, we organized research expeditions, the purpose of which was to collect materials that in the future could be used to create several branches of specific nations. During such trips, we would visit museum ships, archives, and naval museums; order and copy drawings and photos; and purchase professional and academic literature. We are constantly working to find and purchase the latest publications on naval history and updating our database with contact details of private collectors. A few years of isolation due to the pandemic, of course, forced some changes: We had to reduce the number of trips and shift to working more with local professional historians. In addition, every year, archives provide more and more exhaustive lists of services to order materials remotely.

In previous years, we organized expeditions to the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands. We cannot list all of our sources, but as a notable example, it is worth mentioning the Bundesarchiv in Germany, which we regularly order materials from. The Ship Modeling Society of Bologna also helped us a lot with excellent quality blueprints during the collection of materials for the Italian branches. We are very grateful to the staff of archives and museums for their help and extremely friendly attitude to our inquiries.

8. To what extent is research done on the naval philosophies and design tendencies of the country of origin in order to determine themes for a custom ship, retrofit, mechanics (e.g., Airstrike), or the overall flow of a researchable Tech Tree line?

Any ship of any nation is designed with the general trends of the nation's shipbuilding school in mind. Accordingly, research is done in full, and trends are taken into account in the whole model's appearance. However, gameplay mechanics can be designed and developed independently of the creation of the ship model itself.

9. Where did the idea come from to model the funnels of Eendracht, Haarlem, Johan de Witt, and Gouden Leeuw into more rounded shapes, as well as to remove Gouden Leeuw's forward superstructure and introduce Celebes' "forehead"?

This shape was chosen because a lot of actual Dutch ships also had a rounded funnel shape.

As for Gouden Leeuw's superstructure, the ship was based on Project 1047, which was abandoned before the superstructure design phase began. So, we applied our own superstructure design. In such cases, we create designs based on actual ships of the period or at least viable blueprints.

About Celebes: The German roots of the project influenced the design and architecture of the ship. The original plan was to have a superstructure of the type later realized on De Ruyter, but as a tribute to her roots, she was designed with some influence from the German school—in particular, the Deutschland class.


10. Are there any plans to remodel older lines in a similar fashion to the remodeling of the American destroyers that happened in 2022?

There will be no major ship model updates this year. In the future, we will most likely look at doing this, but we will focus on individual ships rather than whole branches at once.

11. Is there a reason why the Japanese Premium ships (except Mikasa) don't get a nameplate on their aft like the other nations' Premiums?

These ships were added to the game in the early days of our project. Back then, we had a rule—add a nameplate only if it was present on the ship in reality; however, very few photos of Japanese ships from the period have survived, so at the time we did not know if name plates were placed on certain Japanese ships. Our processes have changed since then and we now add nameplates to most Premium ships if nameplates were present on them at least in some historical period.

12. Would it be possible to enable the rotating funnel on the A Hull of Richelieu, Alsace, and République?

This feature is in development right now. In fact, we already made some tech changes in the game code to support this functionality, but there's still work to be done.

13. What determines the number of benches added to a French ship design and why doesn't Jean Bart have any benches on her?

On real ships, the benches are installed based on historical references, such as photographs. For paper ships, we install benches of our own taste as a kind of "signature" of the nation. In the case of Jean Bart, there were no benches in her photos, so there are none in our game.

14. Why did De Ruyter get fictional AA guns that weren't in use by the Dutch navy?

This was done for balance reasons. In our game, we sometimes change the armament for the researchable ship to be more appropriate to its gameplay and tier, even if it is not exactly historical.

15. Why is the superstructure of Zieten so extremely ugly and completely out of line compared to the other German battlecruisers?

For Zieten, we used an adapted version of the superstructure from pocket battleships. From a design point of view, it was quite suitable for this ship.

16. On Tokachi, what was the reasoning behind modeling the ship with 127 mm guns instead of the 140 mm guns from the original scout cruiser design?

Tokachi was not based on any real scout cruiser designs. It is our interpretation of a rearmed version of Furutaka; the caliber of the guns was chosen for gameplay reasons.

17. What was the thought process in using Nakhimov, a what-if conversion for a Sovetsky Soyuz hull, as the Tier X Soviet carrier instead of basing the Tier X off of Project Konstrominov or one of the many different designs of the era?

The main problem with most of those designs that have survived to this day is that they are extremely incomplete, which makes it difficult to create an entire ship based on them. So, we decided to use current Nakhimov's design, which perfectly suits the general progression of the branch.


18. Will you be releasing more models adapted for 3D printing on Printables like you did for St. Louis?

So far, there are no such plans; however, if there is big interest from the community on this topic, we will consider the idea.

19. Where do the plane models come from? Are they coming straight out of World of Warplanes or are they custom-made for World of Warships?

We make our own planes for World of Warships, since our game contains mostly carrier-based aircraft.

20. What are the criteria for ships to receive Easter eggs? If a decision is made to add a little fun reference within a ship model, when does that happen? Is it at the beginning or end of the modeling process?

We have no clear criteria. It's just that sometimes while designing a ship, someone on the team will come up with an idea for a little joke to please the curious players. Then it is coordinated between colleagues and brought to life.

21. Will you animate the lifts of other aircraft carriers or will Béarn be the only one to have this?

We have the ability to add animations like this, so we may do so in the future; however, right now, we cannot tell you if and when it will happen.

22. Are there any plans to add unique ASW animations and models for ships that have a helipad on them, like Petropavlovsk?
Are the anchor chains modeled as part of the ship mesh or can they be moved without affecting the rest of the ship? It would be very very cool to have your ships with a dropped anchor while they're in Port.

We do not have such plans, but it is quite possible that we will implement something similar in the future.

23. How do you determine when and whether to do a line split? We now have the 3rd American battleship line and, as an example, no Japanese battleship or American destroyer line split. Does the popularity of a line/nation have an impact on when to do a line split?

When choosing a new branch to develop, our main priority is to maintain the variety of nations and ship types. At the same time, there are already a lot of nations in the game, but the number of branches we release per year is limited. So, situations like the one described in the question may sometimes arise.

Nevertheless, if we see that a certain ship type or a certain nation is lacking ships, it's more likely that a new branch may appear there in the future. At the same time, the presence or absence of splits in a branch is not a priority factor. For example, in the case of American battleships, we wanted to add researchable hybrid ships to the game, and among several candidates for the branch, the American battleships were the most convenient to refit into hybrid battleships and versatile in terms of gameplay, which made them a good choice among other branches.

- Added Color Assist mode
- Added a new optional Helper Sidebar to show used letters
- Added "Now Playing" popup when song changes

- Fixed Options Menu Buttons to show which tab is selected
- Fixed Slideshow speed slider that was previously inverted
- Fixed a small issue in the "Word of the Day" mechanics

- Added Color Assist mode
- Added a new optional Helper Sidebar to show used letters
- Added "Now Playing" popup when song changes

- Fixed Options Menu Buttons to show which tab is selected
- Fixed Slideshow speed slider that was previously inverted
- Fixed a small issue in the "Word of the Day" mechanics

More comfortable and horrible to play and enjoy with increasing the FPSs especially after fixing all of the problems please be patient wait to the next big event in this game....
Hope you enjoy it without any obstacles and if there problems let us know.
Thanks and keep enjoying.

Hey Everyone,

We have another big update today that brings a number of new features like camera centering, greatly improves GUI and adds a number of other important improvements across the board - from performance to world map AI.

We also focused on fixing last remaining bugs and balancing. In addition this update includes a lot of work on the Dead Rising DLC that is not currently enabled.

For our next update we are bringing you Dead Rising DLC. With performance finally on a decent level after over a year long delay we can finally deliver on this. Though please keep in mind - to properly experience Dead Rising DLC you would need at least a mid-range system with SSD due to an extremely large number of undead that the game keeps track of and controls. We are expecting Dead Rising to launch next month.

Meanwhile, lets take a closer look at what our 26th update includes:

• Added new Center View button to armies and towns under attack
  
• Center View button allows to center view on a selected army or town before battle
  
• Fixed some issues with campaign quest rewards not being given to player
  
• Rebalanced all campaign quest rewards – they are much higher now
  
• Various balancing improvements to world map AI
  
• Additional stability improvements – fixing last remaining crash bugs
  
• Reduced the use of visual memory by additional 30%
  
• Reworked diplomacy window - it doesn`t reload all the lord portraits
  
• Reworked various other windows - so they don`t reload unity portraits again and again
  
• Various other GUI improvements across the board
  
• Fixed some windows having scaling issues on 4k resolution
  
• Reworked cheat console window with a new look
  
• If player plays campaign with Plague disabled it will no longer show Plague icons on armies and towns
  
• Reworked cheat console with new codes that actually work
  
• Using cheat codes marks campaign as sandbox with no achievements gained or stats recorded from that campaign
  
• Improved the look of the chat window – better visibility and easier to use
  
• No infected icon in resource bar in RTS mode if plague is disabled
  
• No infected icon in resource bar on world map if plague is disabled
  
• In Skirmish/Co-Op Sieges menu, players set to "None" won't show a portrait

It’s time to SPRING back into action with our next playtest!
From March 30th - April 2nd we’re opening the doors to our latest playtest weekend! This is a strictly time-limited playtest with new content so be sure to sign up to claim your steam key.


With the turn of Spring, we’re springing back with our latest new character…Bunny!

Choose from the bouncing Bunny, the madcap Monkey or crazy Cat and take down those grumbles!
We’ve reworked our character models for a more modern and flashy design. It’s taken a while updating the gang with all new animations and physics, but we hope you will agree it has been worth the effort, giving them a new shine and adding a whole host of new outfits to boot.



This month we’re headed out into the forest, so keep an eye out or those prickly blocks will get you! It’s all well and good swinging from bungees, but you’ll have to contend with swinging blocks too!



Play modes on offer over our March playtest:
Take your chosen character on an adventure in the first chapter of our one-player story mode.

A new challenger has been added to Battle Mode - Battle against pro-blockbuster Millie in the Stadium arena.


Want to play by your own rules? Make them up in Party Mix, either solo or play with up to 3 friends.
Challenge Mode
Do you think you’ve got the blocks to clear your way to the top of our leaderboard in our new Forest levels? Over the playtest, reach the top of our Hall of Fame for eternal TopplePOP glory!


Did you just clear a section in record time? Have you nicked the win in the last second? Whatever your game, save your replay and share with us over in our #replays channel on Discord. The best will feature in our monthly wrap up video, shared across our social channels!
Whilst you’re over on Discord, if you have questions, ideas or want to let us know what works or doesn’t work, please do so . We want to make each monthly playtest bigger and better than before.

SIGN UP FOR MONTHLY PLAYTESTS

Are you a content creator?
Over our playtest weekends we love to tune into streamers and creators playing TopplePOP and will share your streams with our audience too. Those who bounce together, grow together. Head over to our Discord and send us a message telling us your channel and when you’ll be streaming!

Finally, all you need to do to be involved with our playtest is head to TopplePOP.com and enter your email to receive your Steam key.

We look forward to seeing you bounce!

Hi everyone! And welcome to all the new players.
I've been working hard on the next update. The new hero design is looking promising and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. It still need a bit more work and balancing done but it should hopefully be ready in a week or so.
Next update will also contain a bunch of new challenges, each with a new unlockable relic. As always I try to make sure the relics have interesting design, don't hestiate to join the Discord if you want to make suggestions. It's always fun to see what ideas the community can come up with.

In the meantime:
I've also been fixing bugs and doing some small balance changes. I wasn't expecting to patch the game until the next update is ready, but I feel like the amount of changes made and their importance now justify a small weekly update.

This patch also include one new challenge to help you with the wait. I'm sure this challenges will be unpopular, but it was just too funny to watch a certain streamer having his ball go wild and bounce from one curse to an other against the Cursed One. Who needs maxHp anyway!
(The reward for the Hydra challenge has been changed, and its previous reward is now the reward for the new challenge, sorry for the inconsistent change but it just makes so much more chance thematically to have it that way.)


I wanted to talk a bit about the most important balance change of the update:
The Primal Essence fight got his brick layout slightly changed. With the addition of the Rocket Brick in the previous update the fight got indirectly harder, and it would more often result in an unccontrollable chain reaction.
To counteract this I added more bricks on the board and increased the overall hardness of the present bricks, the fight should now be a bit easier. It will get tweaked some more if needed.

For anyone curious I'll take this opportunity to talk about the Primal Essence and how the fight works, because I can't put so much info in the in-game fight description:
This Elite has a list of spells, and every time an upgraded brick is destroyed the Primal will use a spell that depends on the brick's upgrade.
So destroying a pyrobrick will always trigger the vertical fireballs attack, destroying a poison brick will always trigger a confusion, etc.
All the offensive spells of the Primal Essence are triggered by bricks that are upgraded to destroy other bricks (Pyro, Explo, Multi, Rocket) so watch out about those and try to slow down the fight so it doesn't start a chain reaction. Good Luck!
If you are interested in these kind of details, don't hesitate to come talk about it on the Discord. I love talking about the intricate parts of the game design but I always tend to cut it short to avoid getting too nerdy with explanations ^^
But I'm happy to talk about it and share any info you might be interested in.


Here's the complete list of changes:

-----------

Tweaked the number of bricks and their hardness in the Primal Essence fight

New Achievement: Reach a combo of a 100 with the Shade

Challenges will now always give their relic reward on first time completion.

Changed the Hydra Challenge relic reward

Relics price range reduced from 90-120 to 85-110

Fixed the Watering Can displaying an incorrect value of 75 thorns (when unlocked)

Storm Level 5 Description changed to : "Fewer Chests on the map but more Elite Fights"
Fixed the chances of a chest event appearing

Added an "Experimental" disclaimer next to the mouse control options (it will receive more work in a future update)

Fixed the paladin blessings not triggering the pavise when collected by the nebula clouds

Fixed trebuchet tooltip to indicate the correct amount of damage dealt

Added a crash prevention to the Elementalist Earthquake spell. (If you ever experiment an earthquake not destroying any bricks, let me know the circumstances, it means the game was expected to crash but instead decided no to)

The goblins on the first world map are now twitching their ears from time to time

Welcome!

We're excited to announce that our Public Beta is available!

The Beta will be live from 03/31 through 04/10. This is a very important milestone for us since we made lots of improvements and added many, many features. We'll list some of the new things you can expect on this Beta Version:

- New contract: IQD Game Company.
- New tasks: install cameras, doors, clean puddles and trash piles and more!
- Improved design and behavior for new monsters.
- Performance improvements.
- New sound effects and music.
- New tutorial.
- Overall graphics and lighting improvements.

Please keep in mind that this is an early beta build and thus it may contain bugs and it will not reflect the quality of the final release. If you encounter any bugs or have any suggestions you can press F11 during gameplay to submit a bug report or join our discord server to talk directly to us. Hearing your feedback and building the game with our community is extremely important to us.

We hope you enjoy our new Public Beta and, if you have the time, please leave us your feedback and join our Discord channel.

Enjoy!

Changes:
The frozen hammer now counts as a melee weapon

Bug Fixes:
Fixed the retry button
Fixed some items that were spawning incorrectly (empty cups for example)
Fixed scratch from dealing half damage to rough hide
Fixed some items that wouldn't spawn in custom runs - e.g. Small Paws
Fixed an issue with some button images on Dual-Shock controllers
Fixed the issue where the user's quality would not set and save properly
Fixed a typo on the explanation for "Freeze"