This is something I get multiple questions about nearly every day. Before this I'd always give basically the simple answer that 'It is coming & nothing else about it'. That changes today.

I'm happy to announce that multiplayer / co-op is now being actively worked on & current features are being reworked & cleaned up to work in a multiplayer environment.
Also, I have an active trello page that will show the current progress of features/content as they get worked on to be multiplayer ready. (As linked below)

https://trello.com/b/yds2wUAz/surroundead-mp-trello


Another thing I know people will want to know is when will this be available?
At this moment I am not going to announce any date or time frame for multiplayer but I'd rather just show people progress as it gets expanded.
The first version of multiplayer will as well be a sort of test where players can join a world and do random activities, although these will not save between joining and leaving it. (Something that will come after 'test' release)

As progress continues, I will update the Trello board & start to release actual gameplay videos of players in a multiplayer environment.




Finally, will have another small-ish patch soon and thank you everyone, for everything.

In this devlog, I showoff the first two Cutscenes for the game!



This is my first attempt at developing Cutscenes, and they are utilizing in-engine mechanisms to handle all of the dialogue and actions!

As these are a first pass at storyline integration, I would love to know your thoughts on them, and how I could improve them.

These cutscenes were essentially developed as a proof-of-concept, and will be integrated as part of the next major update to the game. In the future I would love to be able to really increase the production quality of these cutscenes, getting better cinematography, character action, voice acting, and so forth. But for now, I think these do quite well, and I quite enjoy them. They certainly have a feeling and pacing like an old JRPG title, which is what I'm going for.

As far as the storyline goes for the game, it follows the leader of the Mystic Race, Grandmaster Knulxevra. The Mystics are a proud race of spellcasters, formless beyond their long flowing robes and strong horns. The story starts off with the aftermath of one of Knulxevra's most tragic creations, the Fragment. This Fragment was created when Knulxevra split its soul in half; Knulxevra believed it was creating a pure Mystical essence, however that plan went awry and all that was left was destruction. After a failed attempt at destroying the Fragment, Knulxevra now has to wait 1,000 years for another opportunity to destroy it, and so is forced to lie dormant until the time is right. Upon awakening 1,000 years later, chaos has consumed the world, and its Knulxevra's task at fixing the wrongdoings of its past.

The two cutscenes shown in the blog above begin with the intro to the story, and then head into the part where Knulxevra attempts to destroy the Fragment. There's quite a lot of dialogue, and I'm certainly going for a rich philosophical approach to this storyline, so I hope that comes off as intended! I do certainly enjoy deep, well-thought out lore, and want to integrate that into the game in an interesting way. The introduction to the game is certainly being overhauled to be fairly cutscene-heavy, but I think that's okay- more storyline and lore is better than less, in my opinion. (Plus, well... there's always the skip button, LOL).

---

Now, to update you all about the state of the game! Right now, I'm still in-progress developing the last handful of Cutscenes for the game (another devlog to come about that soon-ish!). Beyond that, I have a handful of extra major features to integrate (more to come soon!), and then of course plenty of clean up and rebalancing to do. So there's quite a lot of work to be done! But quite a lot that has been done as well. I'm really trying to get the introduction to the game greatly overhauled to be the exact experience I want first players to the game to, well, experience, and these cutscenes are probably the biggest overhaul that will be coming.

While I'd really like to give a more grounded release date, I still believe the next major update is a few months out. I feel like once I get these cutscenes completed, I'll be able to give a more solid time estimate, but I appreciate the patience of everyone who's enjoying the game!

Hello Escapists,

We're back with another Steam Public Playtest of our free update, Escape Academy: Tournament of Puzzles! Take a look to see how you can get involved.


Escape Academy: Tournament of Puzzles, takes the Academy’s students on the road with Coach Yoach to showdown at various arenas across the globe and compete for glory in multiple Escape events.

The playtest this weekend will take place at the Egyptian themed arena, The Tomb of the First Escapist, and feature three PvP modes, two of which are brand new to the Tournament of Puzzles!

Escape Race: First player to solve all the puzzles, unlock all the doors, and grab the trophy wins!



Tic-Tac-Toe: Solve puzzles in order to unlock your team color gems, then place them on a 3x3 tic-tac-toe grid. First to connect three wins the match!



Scavenger Hunt: Throughout the level, trophies have been hidden in plain sight. First player to collect the majority of the trophies will claim victory!



And if you wanna take the update for a whirl but don’t have a buddy (or just want to play in sweet, sweet solitude) then check out the practice-race mode available for solo play!

For more information on the power-ups and to-be-released arenas, strike up a conversation with Coach Yoach in the lobby. He’ll give you the lowdown on everything you can expect to find in the full update!


Installing the playtest build is as simple as stopping by our store page and pressing the green “request access” button under the playtest header. It will install a separate build of the game that just includes the update and will playable for a limited time only. Launch this from your Steam library and you’re on your way to puzzling!



Once in the build, play through the very first level (if you haven’t already) in order to gain access to the main campus map screen. Once here, press tab to bring up the “Level Packs” screen and select the Tournament of Puzzles.



Now you will be in the Tournament of Puzzles lobby where clicking the trophy cabinet will allow you to choose your game mode and arena track. Each mode offers a new way to engage with the puzzles and your opponent while track selection will effect your route through the massive arenas.

NOTE: For now, the only arena available will be The Tomb of the First Escapist. The full update will contain two other full levels, The Hackannery, and The Showman’s Studio. This playtest does however feature all the modes that will be available in the full update, so give them all a try!


Wow! You are a super cool fan. We would be honored to hear your feedback and have you partake in making this update as good as it can be! For those ace Escapists who would like to go that extra mile, please fill out this brief Google survey so the dev team can continue to improve the experience.

If you encounter any bugs, please feel free to drop by our Discord and visit the #🐛-buglogs channel so we can track the issues on our end and get to work on a fix.


And don’t forget to have fun out there on the Puzzle Pitch with your fellow Escapists! We’re pumped about bringing you guys in to our development process and can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

As always--

GLHF,

Coin Crew Games

V1.0.2

• Fixed an issue where you could walk on Sludge.
  
• Fixed an issue where Star Pages would not grant completion.

With (a bit of) a delay, I have finally uploaded the new tutorial for 0.8 to the experimental branch. I’ll take today to talk about what that includes.

First of all, the size of the tutorial may have gotten a little out of hand. I did mention that I was going to have a longer tutorial with open play after, but I did not expect that it would come out to: 210 tutorial steps, about 1500 lines of explanation, and about 2 hours of actual gameplay. Once again, I feel like this is a good blueprint for any future quests we will implement, so even though it is currently the only “guided task” in the game, there will be more of them in the future.

The tutorial follows along 6 chapters (FPS survival, FPS construction, basic village interaction, advanced village interaction, village expansion, and military command), and you can save any time after finishing chapter 1 (load your game from the singleplayer menu). Chapter 5 (village expansion) is mostly teaching you just how much your logistics are getting bogged down by trying to expand, but you can consider it to be a placeholder for when the pioneer wagon gets added to the game.

As an added change that will affect the regular game, I have re-enabled purchasing for ammo only. This means that you can supply your ranged units at the wood tier with ammo as needed, though it will come at a relatively steep cost.

Now considering how far into the week it has taken me to upload this:

Until... tomorrow!

Hi everyone!

Soul Stalker came out today and we're SO thankful for the incredible support! We've already gotten tons of feedback, and acted on it too! Thanks to your help, we have a pretty concrete idea of where we want to take the game, but we're going to wait at least a week before we announce anything.

Before I go on to talk about today's Beta 1.0.3 and 1.0.4 patch notes, I wanted to say that if you're enjoying the game, leaving a review is the most helpful thing you could do! Anyways, to the patch notes!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1714240/Soul_Stalker/

- Fixed a bug that made some players unable to cap framerate.

- Fixed bug that made it such that weapon/trinket tooltips were sometimes selected by an invisible cursor in combat.
- The shrinking Elite bounds' smallest size is now double the size.
- Made it such that Penny has a minimum movement speed, no matter how many coins she has.
- Made it such that Act 1 enemies yield approximately 30% less currency.
- Made it such that Act 2 enemies yield approximately 55% less currency.
- Fixed bug that caused dashing Elites to receive knockback.
- Fixed bug that caused Third Eye not to heal on crit if you have the Overcrit trinket.
- Increased Act 1 Elite Health by 33%.
- Increased Act 1 Boss by 100%.
- Fixed bug that made Cloud Saves not work properly.
- Fixed bug that made it such that achievements would sometimes unlock improperly on reload.
- Made it such that cursor speed on controller is no longer dependent on screen size, and moves just as quickly on all screen sizes.
- Made Frozen Fish increase Critical Chance by 11% instead of 15%.
- Made Frozen Fish 40% more expensive.
- Made Frozen Fish 25% more uncommon.
- Made Furyhelm increase Power by 12% instead of 15%.
- Made Furyhelm 25% more uncommon.
- Made Furyhelm 12% more expensive.
- Made Gold Crown 25% more uncommon.
- Made Infected Explosions 50% more uncommon.
- Made Overcrit 5% more uncommon.
- Made Overcrit 100% more expensive.
- Made Profit Chest 25% more unncommon.
- Made Profit Chest 100% more expensive.
- Made Stinky Cheese 40% more unccommon.
- Made Target 100% more common.
- Made Third eye 40% more uncommon.

As you can see, there are tons of substantial technical fixes, and lots of balance changes as well. The balance changes are primarily made to make the game slightly harder since some players have felt that it's a bit too easy, but if the community decides that the previous difficulty was better we can revert the changes!

Oh, and remember to leave a review if you're enjoying Soul Stalker!

Anyways, that's it for this update and I'll see you for the next one!

- Conrad, Lead Developer

[ENH] Improved the design of Museum UI
[ENH] Enhanced Monsters Selection UI and Combat UI
[NEW] Introduced 4 new initial monsters (2 Earth and 2 Water) to allow Water Monsters to evolve faster in the early game.


[FIX] Fixed issues related to Auto-Planting.
[FIX] Fixed issues related to Auto-Farming Lotus Seeds.

[NEW] The game is now more Idle-friendly.
[NEW] Automation added for collecting Elemental Lotus Seeds.
[NEW] Plant automation is now functioning properly.
[ENH] Monsters now drop more Elemental Essence.
[FIX] Removed notification when auto-planting.
[FIX] Corrected auto-recovery life amount when in battle.

• Some abilities can now receive Attribute Upgrades (Summoned Flame, Shield of Frost)
  
• Partial rebalancing of various perks and weapons
  
• Summoned Flame retrigger bugfix
  
• Spawn right to Hall of Relics (no more separate Shop main menu item either)
  
• Shorten death animation delay for enemies (faster loot!)

Special thanks to all of the kind playtesters on the Discord!

• Removed some debug printing that might slow the game down at unnecessary points
  
• Re-optimized some functions to be more efficient
  
• Among those is the auto upgrade checks that wasn't very well optimized.
  
• Fixed a big oversight on the weapon charge times. (This special effect may be changed to my original idea, but we'll see how this works out)

Just a few fixes to improve a little performance while I fix the upgrade values

Hi all,

Firstly, thankyou for your patience. Our dedicated small team continue to work on our next update which includes VR implementation, 4K, trueSky and TFS 6.0.

We hope to have a major announcement soon.

Here are a number of great new WIP images and a look at the build of a new fighter coming to TFS 6.0.


























Regards,

TFS team