Small Patch Fixing

• Fixed issue in weekend conversations when Eve is at tier 2

In this dev blog we are going to dive into three topics and upcoming changes that we will be making to them. The three topics are the Mission Board, Crafting, and Currencies/Resources within Darktide.

All the changes that we will be discussing in this dev blog have been in development, and are being prepared to launch in Patch #12 (1.1.20). These changes mark the next step in our support to the game, we will keep on monitoring feedback and evaluate future changes.

For clarity, these changes are not the only changes currently in development and being worked on by the team. We’re also still hard at work on Darktide for Xbox!

We’re making some key changes to how the mission board generates its missions, while also expanding upon the available content. We are going to cover the details further into the dev blog, but for those of you who want a high level summary here are the changes that will be made:

We will be introducing Maelstrom missions, which are a set of new Conditions with a mixture of new modifiers and existing ones in many different variations. Most of them will be explained through a string of modifiers. For example: waves of Specialists, hunting grounds, waves of mutants and players have 20% reduced ability cooldown.

These Maelstrom missions should be approached with caution as some of them can be quite challenging! As a reward for completing these challenges, both XP and Ordo Dockets will have a higher payout than usual. They will be accessible through a unique slot on the mission board, which is available at all times so that they are easy to find and try out.



We are introducing an additional mission board for players that will consist of a set of high difficulty missions that will always have a condition applied to them. You must be level 30 to play these missions (sidenote: the numbers of missions available for Auric-level operations in the above screenshot could be subject to change). This board will also sport Maelstrom missions, a few of them will have unique conditions variations that are inherent to the Auric-level board.

With the changes we made to the dynamic system we have made the Auric-level operations favour High Intensity conditions, there will be no Low Intensity conditions active in these missions.



We are adding bonuses through use of Quickplay as we want to ensure that you are rewarded, should you choose to lend a helping hand by filling an empty spot in a strike team.

Experience, Ordo Dockets, Diamantine, and Plasteel will be bonuses upon receiving these rewards when a mission concludes (sidenote: quickplay bonuses numbers displayed in the screenshot could be subject to change by the time we deploy this patch).

For further flexibility with the matchmaking system we have added the ability to set the servers used to matchmake with. Darktide has always used the best latency servers you can connect to for matchmaking, however we realise that some players in the world may need to connect to different servers in order to find a larger pool of players. In addition, we regularly review and update matchmaking rules to provide an improved matchmaking experience.

Changing the servers can have an effect on the gameplay experience through the added latency, and we’ll present the latency values in the server selection so that you can be aware of them.

The mission board on the Mourningstar shows the emergent threats throughout Tertium Hive. Functionally these threats are uncovered by the board through use of two systems, a dynamic system and an event driven system. The dynamic system generates content based upon a set of rules, meanwhile the event system acts as an overriding system that will then substitute its ruleset over the dynamic one.

We have made several changes and added functionality to the dynamic system to give much more refined controls over the content generation. The dynamic system refreshes far more frequently (approximately every 10 minutes) and we can now set an individual weighting to each condition per difficulty level.

For you the players, this will mean a more varied amount of conditions available across the mission board. There is also now control for us to weigh certain conditions for certain difficulties differently. As an example, you will see much less frequent occurrences of Low Intensity conditions on Damnation, while lower difficulties like Uprising will have less frequent occurrences of High Intensity conditions. The intent is for new players to have a smoother experience at the start while also providing a challenge to advanced players with harder conditions.

Our aim in these changes is to refine the emergence aspect of the mission board with further variety and the ability to adjust the board as needed.

Let’s now talk about crafting, and some of the upcoming changes you can expect. Item Refinement, or previously known as Perk re-rolling is the main focus of our changes.



You can now select the exact perk at any tier that you wish for an item (weapon or curio). There is one direct cost to be made for each refine action. This cost will remain flat throughout refining and will be reduced for lower level characters

As with the other actions at the Shrine, the amount of required resources will scale both depending on the base item rating of the weapon and on the tier of perk being selected to refine into.


You can now modify two different aspects of your weapon (be it perks and/or blessings) locking out the other options, that being said, you’ll be able to change the two aspects you have selected as many times as you want. This means that you can choose to modify a perk and a blessing, or two perks, or two blessings. This increases the potential permutations of the item that you want to modify. The perks or blessings that you have chosen to modify will be indicated now in the item card.


We have extended the ability to make two modifications to Curios, specifically you will be able to modify two Perks.

We are aware that the changes mentioned above do not give unrestricted freedom to all aspects of an item. To do so would have a big impact on item acquisition in Darktide, and we want to explore different paths further down the line.

And for the final chapter in this dev blog, we’d like to discuss the changes we will be making to the currencies & resources in Darktide.
In short, all character bound currencies are moving towards an account bound wallet where access is shared across all characters.

After careful consideration and review of how these systems are working and what value that you the players receive out of them, we decided to opt for moving everything to a single unified account wallet. Now you can choose any character you have created and with the currencies you get as rewards, you can now choose how to spend those freely.

With the next patch, after you login to Darktide you will go through an automatic migration process where the character wallets of Ordo Dockets, Ordo Ingots, Plasteel, and Diamantine will merge into one unified account wallet. These currencies will no longer have any character based wallet anymore.

An explanation of this process will be presented at the Main Menu / Character Selection screen, as well as a “Receipt” detailing the balance of the wallets for your characters and the total merged result for the account.

Additionally, the Account Wallet will now be displayed on this menu and show all the aforementioned currencies & resources as they are now shared.



All of the above changes are being prepared for our next patch to Darktide, which will release around mid-August. As part of this patch there will be a maintenance period in which you will be unable to log in into the game, we expect it to last 3 hours.

We will continue to iterate on these features and more, in part through community driven discussions and topics that are presented to us by sharing your thoughts and comments on both our Official Discord or Forums.

Thank you for reading, and watch each other's backs down there on Tertium.

I am still chasing that sweet green checkbox for being fully verified on Steam Deck. Although those in the know can tell you it plays beautifully on there already, there are some sync issues that could make it annoying to switch between deck and PC and downgrade us to only "playable".



While I was tackling that, I went through all the bug reports you lovely, lovely people have sent through the game's feedback menu (thank you! ːexoflexː) and fixed some small issues with particular cards and rare errors. Here's the list:

• Typos typos teh-zypos! ("only" 20 of them)
  
• Make Small Skills Boost perk and Clear Minded status roll their chances separately instead of adding them together in a confusing way
  
• Fix Bravely Helping to Fight and other +1 to total cards showing bonus beside the total, but not actually adding it to the total on rounds 2 and 3
  
• Fix Tracking the Airsquid card text to explain it only affects physical cards
  
• Confirmation dialog when forgetting or not forgetting a card while relaxing, so it's much harder to skip by that option by accident
  
• Warn in a popup the first five times any file fails to save during each play session
  
• Slightly speed up first game boot after install or update (stop unnecessarily recompiling story files)
  
• Fix controllers not closing text input popups on Steam Deck
  
• Hide resolution and quality settings on Steam Deck and stop syncing them between deck and pc, just default to what works best on that specific hardware

- Sarah ːnyaaː

As you may know already, En Garde! will release exclusively on Steam on August 16th, 2023!
Only a couple of weeks left!

You’re aware of our release date, but the hour? At the stroke of 17:00 CET the world shall bear witness to En Garde!’s release.




En Garde! will be yours to claim for the price of 19.99$.
You will be able to buy it with a launch discount for a few days after release!


Our sensational Original Soundtrack (OST), featuring more than 40 minutes of orchestral music by composer Jean-Claude Charlier! Enjoy the adventure’s melodies beyond the game with these mastered tracks, available in a bundle on release as well as on your favorite music streaming services!





Discover Adalia's tales in a series of story episodes!
Each of the 4 episodes tells a self-contained adventure, much like in an old-school TV series! Each episode features a unique story, themes, set pieces, locations, characters, enemies, combat situations and challenges to complete!
Meet Adalia's formidable rivals and precious allies on your way to stop the shenanigans of the nefarious Count-Duke, and free the City from tyranny!
In-between fights, you can learn more about the game's backstory and lore by finding points of interest and secrets scattered through the levels.



Arena mode is a re-playable arcade experience, for you to enjoy En Garde!'s combat to your heart's content!
Here are the rules: survive a series of randomized combat arenas filled with surprising environmental setups and deadly waves of enemies.
Between each arena, a new gameplay modifier will buff your enemies and make your next fight a bit more tricky... But you'll be able to pick between 3 positive modifiers to counter it and maximise your chances of triumph. Choose wisely!
The game features more than 60 modifiers that can all be combined, leading to a huge variety of fight situations!
The fight banter dialogue system will keep playing during the arena mode to keep you in the mood of a true swashbuckling adventure!



The game features 30 achievements, tasking you with completing combat challenges, finding all secrets, completing the arena mode, and more!


Gather your excitement, my friends, for the magic is about to unfold!

Add En Garde! to your Wishlist now and be ready to draw your blade and break some furniture, in the name of justice and panache!

Thank you once more for your support, we can’t wait for you to experience the full game,

Fireplace Games



https://store.steampowered.com/app/1654660/En_Garde/

Our third devlog video is live on Youtube. We talked about guild meeting scene, new map, music and sound effects.



In Arcane Revolt, we want our players to be able to make choices on the storyline and see their consequences. One of the best ways to achieve this is through the dialogues of our character and the dialog options. The main character of our story, mage "Eldoragius", yes he has a name now, is one of the most powerful mages of a mage guild, and throughout our story he will try to overthrow the tyrants with his guild, reclaim the resources they have taken away from the people. In this process, we will also experience ideological conflicts, intellectual clash with corrupt mages in the guild. For this reason, guild meetings will occupy an important place in the game. At certain points of the story, we will have scenes where the six mages gather to make collective decisions, and there will be plenty of dialogue options.



We got rid of boring slime enemies which you know from our previous videos. Now, all our enemies have their own unique sprites. Our melee enemies are now waiting at a certain point, if we get close enugh, they follow us , and if we leave their following range, they return to their original points, our shooting enemies now have very cool looking sprites, enemies who damage us on contact have turned into creatures with sharp spikes. Check out our boss. Now rather than a fat slime, he's become a pretty cool demonic beast.



One of the features that will add variety to the gameplay is traps. There are traps that shoots fireballs constantly in a certain direction and require you to use the shield or dash skill if you don't want to be damaged.



We have another trap type that is triggered by a button you press. Combining these shooting traps with different ground surfaces which we updated their appearance is also one of the elements that diversify and complicate the gameplay.



We created an orange and brown heaviness world that reflects the state of the devastated and miserable people. The evil ones really need to be stopped. The people are trying to live in these ruined houses, among forests full of dry and scary trees and skeletons.




Our game is still very far away from being juicy enough but we worked on the attacking feel a bit. Our character and enemies now flash red when they take damage and splash blood particles. I can not tell you how much such a small changes have an impact on gameplay. Now it is much more enjoyable to throw fireballs at our enemies.



Unfortunately, we don't have a friend working in the field of sound and music. We have added Leohpaz's amazing sound effects and music from various free music packs to our game.

We added simple main menu and pause menu. For now, they are only there to implement the basic mechanics and they need a lot of improvement. In our main menu and pause menus, we can adjust the volume of sound effects and music.



We designed a logo that highlights our mage's main skill, getting rid of this ugly thing that is just a plain color behind the Arcane Revolt text written with a pixel font. I worked on this type of logo for the first time, and I would love to hear what you think and get some advice. I have already started using our new logo in our Steam visuals but I can always make changes based on your comments.



These were the most important features we added, and besides that, we dealt with a lot of small changes and bug fixing. The game expo we mentioned in the previous video has been postponed to September, giving us more time to bring our game to a level that will satisfy us before we showcase it to players. By a level that will satisfy us, we also mean that there will be a few significant changes in the game. For now, I can't say much about it, but I recommend you to wait for our next devlog.


Please consider wishlisting Arcane Revolt if you are interested in what you see and want to help passionate students in their indie game dev journey.

Hi everyone!

This update doesn't have any balancing or new content yet, for this we will need some time – we want to get this right and deliver you a content update that makes as many of you as happy as possible. But we're very happy to release a new update with an completely reworked Chinese localization and some bugfixes in the meantime:

CHANGED
- Completely reworked the Chinese localization
- The Vegvísir button on the winter screen now has a confirm dialog to avoid misclicks
- Default music volume is now at 75%

FIXED
- The pause button now always has the correct state at the start of a settlement
- The exploration time cost no longer displays negative values but the correct value of 1 month

Thank you for your support! <3

Mathias, Michael and Mario a.k.a Sonderland

Hi!

We've prepared a new update with some fixes and QoL additions.

You can now move camp tents and flowers. We are trying to make greenhouses movable as well, but the plants and trees inside don't want to cooperate with us, we will keep everyone updated on that feature.
We fixed build mode errors when pets were near you;
Special Shop won't crash the game anymore;
Staff won't show up in Special Shop in build mode;
Fixed Monster Hunter achievement;
Fixed Dungeon Crawler achievement IDs;
Fixed Megapolis achievement IDs;
Fixed a Farm to Rule Them All achievement (it was working, but we were counting Super Seeds too - we removed this requirement).

Fixes for DLC only:

Fixed wrong treasure places when treasure chests were placed under the terrain.
Fixed problem with duplicating letters from the NPCs.

It’s hard to write a DevLog, considering I’m not really used to it. In the past, I updated my followers through Kickstarter, since I’ve developed all three of my previous games thanks to crowdfunding. But “Three Minutes To Eight” is the first game I’m developing without the support of a Kickstarter campaign, and due to the mysterious nature of the game, I kept the development very secret, until the announcement we made in early June.


Glitched Three Minutes To Eight teaser

So now it’s about time to tell you more about this project, and its particular nature. I had the original idea in late 2021, I can’t remember exactly the month, but it was cold. It was during the moment before you fall asleep when your brain is a bit foggy, and you can’t really distinguish dreams from reality. Usually, I forget the morning after what I thought before falling asleep, and most of those ideas are trash anyway. But I was lucky enough to write a few notes on my phone, right before closing my eyes. And when I woke up the morning after I was pleasantly surprised. So much so that I decided to keep using that method for the first part of the game development process, which is working on the idea, concept, and gameplay.



I’m not writing about this because I think I’m cool or anything like that. But because it’s exactly what happened and how this game was created initially. I’m not even sure if this will do any good to the final product, but I hope at least it’ll make the game experience a bit original.
For about a month during that time in late 2021, I kept writing notes on my phone or on a notebook with a pen, forcing myself to stay awake even if I was super tired and my eyes were half closed. Once I had put all those ideas and concepts on paper, I started the actual development of the game, during normal working hours.

I first hired a few pixel artists (Andrea, Yasin and Normal Neighbor), to start designing and animating the characters then I brainstormed my ideas with a writer, Irina, to better define the multiple narratives that co-exist in this mind-bending game. In the meantime, I also started designing the environments where the game is set, which are created in voxel art. At a later stage, since I was too busy with coding, I also hired a voxel artist, Ksenia, to complete the rest of the scenes. While for the dialogue, I asked for help from another writer, Peter.



Talking about the visual style of “Three Minutes To Eight”, it’s a mix of 2D pixel art for the characters and 3D voxel art for the environments. Everything keeps more or less the same scale, so the player has the feeling of being inside a 3D pixel world. The characters and their animations are made in a truly traditional way, frame by frame. Furthermore, having the whole environment created in 3D allows us to use sophisticated lighting and create an appealing look that is modern and classic at the same time.

The gameplay has its roots in the classic point-and-click games which, thanks to the new Monkey Island, gained worldwide attention lately despite the fact that they never disappeared and they always had a pretty strong niche. However, since the game is also releasing on consoles, it supports a gamepad controller. So rather than “pointing and clicking”, players can move the protagonist directly and interact with the environment without moving a cursor. Also, the game is mostly a 2D side-scroller and somehow works even better with a controller than with a mouse.



But what makes “Three Minutes To Eight” truly original, is its gameplay. Contrary to what happens to most adventure games out there (especially the classic LucasArts ones), in this game, the player will die. To be precise it will always die at 19:57 (hence the title). But after the Game Over death screen, the player can choose to “wake up again”, and restart the game, with enhanced elements (I can’t reveal much to avoid spoilers), which will help players to understand more and more about what’s going on.



The protagonist is locked in a loop, where he always dies at 19:57, and players must find a way to escape death, choosing (or finding themselves) in one of the ten different narratives, which lead to different endings and yet co-exist at the same time. Each run is unique, with randomized elements or pre-arranged ones, which change all the time. The more you play the game the more things you’ll discover while bizarre things will start to happen. Therefore it’s a game with a high level of replayability.

I don’t want to spoil much about the storyline(s), but overall the game is set in the near future, 20 years from now, in a city close to the player’s current location.



In terms of the technical aspects, besides the already mentioned mix of pixelart and voxelart, I can say that it’s developed with Unity engine and it uses, as a bare core, the Adventure Creator asset and Dialogue System by Pixel Crusher, but more than a hundred custom scripts have been written by myself to handle the intricate amount of variables and extraordinary events that happen in the game.

Sounds are done by Anecoia Collective, and the music is by Yann Latour, who also wrote the acclaimed soundtrack of ENCODYA, my previous game. “Three Minutes To Eight” is also entirely voiced in English, by a group of professional and highly skilled voice actors.

We are now at the final stages of development. The release is planned for a few months from now. “Three Minutes To Eight” is developed multiplatform, for PC (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Steam Deck), Consoles (Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series), and even Mobile (iOS, Android), in eleven languages (English, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese), and at this stage we are testing that everything is working nicely for all the languages and all the platforms, polishing the last details.








I’m truly looking forward to releasing the game and getting players’ feedback!

I wish you all the best,
Nicola

We're happy to share that Update 2.301 is now available for all Homeworld Remastered Collection players. Your game should update automatically, but if you’re having trouble, try restarting your Steam client.

• Fixed instances of lag occurring during some online matches
  
• Fixed issue where Spark would fail user authentication check
  
• Restored option to disable automatic lobby refreshing
  
• Fixed localization not displaying in launcher
  
• Fixed localization bug in Classic non-English games
  
• Updated game credits to include additional departments and individuals from Gearbox who contributed to the game

As always, if you encounter any issues with this update, please file a ticket with Gearbox Support.

We thank the Homeworld community for its continued support. Please stay tuned to Homeworld social channels, as well as http://homeworlduniverse.com, for more information on Homeworld 3 as we approach launch in February 2024.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1840080/Homeworld_3/