The Witch of Fern Island’s Early Access is live now on Steam! 🥳
Thank you all for your support so far from our Kickstarter, to now and beyond. We wouldn’t have made it this far without it. And if this is your first time finding us, welcome! We couldn’t have made it this far without you, and we can’t wait for you to explore Fern Island with us!
You can follow us on Twitter to interact with our amazing community! 😉 Don’t forget, you can leave us a review, share part of your journey, tell us about a bug you’ve found, or just to give some feedback in our Discord.
Hello everyone! We hope you’re all doing well. It’s been a month since our release day, and we could not feel more grateful for everyone’s support, patience, and feedback. We appreciate you taking the time to report bugs, suggest new elements that could improve the experience, and read your comments on what 9 Years of Shadows has been for you.
In fact, because we’ve seen many people in different countries willing to play a game that wasn’t localized in their language, we wanted to get Europa’s story to as many people as possible. That’s why we worked with a localization team for 9YoS to be accessible in German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as making adjustments in Spanish and English.
We hope this makes the journey more appealing for our community and that everyone can travel alongside Apino.
Furthermore, we have been fixing many reported bugs that affected the overall gameplay. There are other bugs we continue to work on, which will be solved in future updates so we keep on improving everyone’s experience. Our newest patch covers the following fixes:
Fix for crash due to main character entities memory leak
Fix for elevator bug allowing to to jump or shoot in the background
Fix for the jelly-fish type enemy for its collider
Fix for the Horned God rays collider causing damage in the anticipation stage
Fix for some buttons alignment in the Main Elevator menu
Fix for the background movement for Elevator cinematics going the right way
Fix for Hibino's answer when trying to upgrade the Grace of Auriel
Fix for the Shadow of Demise additional collider to prevent the player getting locked on the left
Fix for the Shadow of Demise hit SFX not triggering
Fix for the map layout for special rooms
Fix for the additional distortion effect when killing an enemy with strong attack
Fix for Big Kitty and Fully Equipped achievements to be unlocked retroactively
Fix for the missing cursor inside the gameplay when using KB+M
This months State of the game will be a little shorter as we are still hard at work on the High Tech Update.
Roadmap:
Here is a look at the current roadmap:
As you might have already noticed the High Tech Update sadly won't release in April but in May instead. We didn't get quite as much done as we anticipated. Currently we still need to finish up a couple of buildings as well as the special weapons and a couple of smaller things.
Current state:
QoL and Bug fixes from last SotG:
Again we only managed to push out one patch for the game since last month so not much has changed.
There is a hard to debug desync that can cause colony items to go out of sync and trigger a desync - This one should be fixed now and we didn't receive any more reports of this since last month but we are continuing to moniter the situation to make sure that we didn't miss anything
There is a very rare bug that can cause multiplayer games to go horribly out of sync without triggering a desync - We addressed this with 0.4.6 and we also added additional sync checks so that the game can actually find this desync in case we missed something
Big TODOs:
Faction flags - Planned for the Victory Update
Terraforming - We had to move this to the Victory Update, sorry!
"Large planets" world type - We are currently investigating if that technically possible or if it will cause any problems / negatively impact the game in any way
Modding support (No ETA for that yet)
(Multiple star systems) - Maybe after Early Access
Quality of life:
Here is a list of QoL changes that are in the works or on our TODO list:
Show hotkeys in tooltips
Auto upgrade mode for the city center
A research queue / Ability to select a technology to be researched and the system will automatically research each technology towards the target technology
A world option to increase or decrease the amount of resources generated in if limited resources are enabled
Bugs:
The last patch (0.4.5) has actually been the most stable build we had since release and we did manage to finally find and fix a desync that was in the game since release which was extremely difficult to reproduce! But we are not quite done when it comes to multiplayer desyncs:
There are a couple of diplomacy related desyncs that can happen but are relatively rare
That is it for this months SotG! As always we love to hear your feedback and thank you for your support!
This update comes with more UI improvements and refinements. In particular the Stores interface.
- New unit: Fire Punches! Missiles sent by the Dragons that push the player when they hit the ship.
- New colors in the COM interface: Now the UI has specific colors for each panel!
- Full Controller Support: The game now detects what controller is being used on the start screen, including the Steam Deck!
- Mothership invasion mechanic now happens automagically, just destroy one of the Engines. - First encounter with Mothership of Dragons has more turns available (7 > 9). - EMP damage is now always capped at "1". - Damage from explosions is now always capped at "1". - Improvements to the shop interface whenever a "store block" happens. - New icon for Clandestine stores. - Various minor interface and text improvements. - Unit stats now have different colors. - Several improvements to the unit stats UI. - Revision of some more texts of the game. - "Overloadr Capacitors" card no longer generates negative impetus if you have spent all energy using it. - Minor bugs fixed.