Next in our character lineup is Nozone–the high-flyingest, sneeziest, most reliable wingman any Toxic Crusader could hope for!

Taking inspiration from his original cartoon design, Nozone appears wearing his ace pilot vest, his airman goggles, and, of course, his razor-sharp landing gear leg! Comic artist Steve Gregson shows off how Nozone will look in the in-game cutscenes:


And here’s another concept art rendition by our art director, Xander!


And let’s not forget about the original action figure of Nozone for inspiration! But…he’ll most likely NOT have those weapons in-game…


Nozone takes the fight up close and personal as he dishes out punch after punch, followed by a good ol’ uppercut to finish his regular combo! And if an enemy happens to come up behind him, Nozone can beat them back with an elbow to the gut!




For his special attack, Nozone will sneeze some radioactive snot! When enemies get too close for comfort, Nozone can clear the way with another one of his highly useful sneezes! Just…don’t let any of that get on you!


When idle, Nozone retains a constantly ready stance–keeping his fists up at all times and prepared to rough up some Radiation Rangers!


For his jump attack, Nozone will do a nosedive at a downward angle–a callback to his time as an ace pilot!


Nozone raises his landing gear leg upwards, knocking back any common enemies in front of him when doing his dash attack! Use this to your advantage and follow up with either a Jump Attack or a regular combo!


Not only does Nozone excel with his close-quarters regular combo attacks, he is very versatile in “juggling” enemies in the air! And, to top things off, his signature sneezes will surely clear out the space around him–probably not his nasal cavities, though…

We’re excited to share more as we continue development!

Wishlist Toxic Crusaders and play the free demo available NOW!

Today is finally the day Plebs has been released for Early Access!

I already have the next Nation in development which I hope to release in the next couple of months. The update will contain another fully playable Nation plus a new Campaign


With this release the play-test has been closed - during the play-test a few changes were made:

• A 'Help' page has been added which has an overview of the basic features of Plebs, and can act as a starting point for new players looking to find their way in the game.
  
• The help page can be opened with the 'H' key, or by clicking the button by the minimap.
  
• Resolved a crash that sometimes occurred when first loading a level
  
• Fixed the AI behaving slightly differently when a level was loaded a second time in some cases
  
• Resolved some crashes when loading save files
  
• Better handle cleanup of some objects when returning to the main menu
  
• Resolved the AI not being able to harvest all of their resources in some levels
  
• Resolved Plebs not being able to carry resources that harvester buildings place close to the edge of their land
  
• Stop the AI from attempting to place buildings too far away from their land, or too close to enemies

Hello heroes, 🤗

1. Inventory management view 🥬🍅
   
2. Pricing view 💰
   
3. UI asset templates and standards

1. User Interface guidelines 🎨
   
2. Events view 📰

Started building initial UI prototype. 🛠️

Looking for a unique blend of intricate strategy and classic tycoon gaming? 🎮Join our community and dive into a world where every burger flipped is a step towards your tycoon dream. 🍔👑

It’s Brawl Out time! Everyone’s favorite theme mashup event has returned to LEGO Brawls! For the month of September, experience a different Brawl Out level each week plus limited time mystery bags!

(All times UTC)

WEEK 1: Castle vs Western
Start: 8/31, 7:00 AM
End: 9/7, 11:59 PM

WEEK 2: Ninjago vs VIDIYO
Start: 9/8, Midnight
End: 9/14, 11:59 PM

WEEK 3: Pirates vs Hidden Side
Start: 9/15, Midnight
End: 9/21, 11:59 PM

WEEK 4: Jurassic vs Space
Start: 9/22, Midnight
End: 9/28, 11:59 PM

So what are you waiting for?! Choose a side and BRAWL OUT!

Upper Echelon Community Notes
Agents, welcome back for some community notes as we discuss the hot topics around the Upper Echelon update. We’ve received a lot of feedback in a short period of time and we wanted to tell you a bit about what we will be doing in the short term and where our focus is right now. Let's get to it:

Echelon Issues
We are aware of issues with inconsistent behaviors between players regarding echelons. Some players seem to have had an XP overflow, making them skip many ranks while others did not. We are currently investigating the situation and will have clearer news as we get a better understanding of the issues surrounding this. We are deeply sorry that this occurred and we are actively looking for the best path forward for everyone affected.

Balancing
Let’s not beat around the bush: The reaction to the lack of Yu-Mi changes and the spyglass change has been very strong. We wanted to talk a little bit about why it happened, and what we are doing on that front.

Let’s start with Yu-Mi.

Yu-Mi has been our worst performing character for every single update for a very long time. While she was perceived as strong since Catalog 2, we wanted to let her breathe a bit and not be too reactive with a character that suffered for as long as she did on the power scale. Another major aspect that leads to this is the timeframe on which we work on updates. We’ve been working on upper echelons for a while at this point and while finishing up updates, we can sometimes lose track of more recent development in the meta. This can lead to a situation where decisions we made many weeks ago are no longer the right call in light of current information. Because of all this, we simply did not weight the frustration of the community on Yu-Mi correctly for this update.

We will be tweaking Yu-Mi in the very short term to make her less oppressive and we will also bring a major fix for her healing bubble that did not make it in the initial update. We will look at how to better avoid situations like this in future updates and we thank you for bringing it to our attention.

And now for the spyglass. We knew this change would be controversial: The spyglass is the most picked gadget by an extremely wide margin in the game. Our original thinking was this: The Spyglass is a big contributor to speeding up games. You not only hack safely, you save travel time in between intel. We wanted to introduce a balancing factor to this equation and we were confident that time saved by moving between intel would still make the spyglass extremely useful while slowing down game speed.

It’s very clear at this point that this was the wrong call. We will restore the spyglass to its past glory in an incoming hotfix. We value the place of the spyglass in the meta as a stealthy tool and a good entry point for newcomers to avoid risks and do not want to remove this from the game. We will focus our future efforts on making other gadgets more appealing rather than nerfing the Spyglass.

While these two items have been a few notches above the rest, there are other items we are looking at including the still overbearing presence of umbrella shield quick drop strats and expected fixes of long standing agent related bugs. We are looking into those and will review priorities on agent bugs that are more disruptive to overall gameplay to make sure they get looked at.

As always, we thank you for your continued feedback .

Health UI
This one is going to be very simple: The reaction to the updated health UI has been strongly negative and we will be tweaking it in the upcoming hotfix. We are bringing back the notches and the bigger numbers to make it easier to read at a glance.





We will keep you updated on our next steps on all fronts as soon as we have more news to share. Please keep your feedback coming and we will do our best to look into addressing the biggest issues around Upper Echelon as soon as we can.

Hello everyone!

Let's discuss the main game mechanics and how they were created.

The following video includes and demonstrates all of the core mechanics:

This information would be particularly interesting for those who would like to dig deeper into the background of the development:

Since the game is largely based on dialogues and conversations, I wondered how I could add dynamic elements to the plain text? Obviously, I realized I couldn't do anything radically different and started thinking about other games I know, their elements that might work well for my game...

A few rules were immediately set for myself - the controls should be as simple as possible, with a comfortable way to play with just a keyboard, while also being easy to adapt for smartphones.

Making choices
This example illustrates a moment in the game when you need to convince the boy to open the door. The portrait at the bottom of the screen displays the face of the speaker while also displaying various emotions. Currently, there are more than 100 different portraits available.



The most obvious mechanics that instantly came to mind have been used in various RPG/Adventure games for centuries, such as choosing between multiple answers in a limited amount of time. Persuading other characters when you can clearly see their attitudes (like in Deus Ex: Human Revolution).

I added another narrative technique to this list: the ability to lie. The player may find it more profitable to lie than to tell the truth, but they may also get caught if they exercise some of these choices. Many dialogue branches revolve around the choice of lying or not lying. I wanted to convey the sense that the world itself does not accept lies, and that deceiving can negatively affect your destiny.

Casting the incantations



An idea that emerged fairly quickly was to make the player maintain a rhythm when going through lines of dialogue. A spellcasting gameplay evolved from this idea - spells are chanted rhythmically word by word.

It was important to allow the player enough time to read the words, so the timer was made quite forgiving. Additionally, it was placed close to the text to make the reading easier.

Health mechanics - marker to the left of the portrait



This gameplay mechanic caught my attention a long time ago, while playing a 2D platformer called Celeste. There is a point in the story when the heroine has a panic attack. Keeping the heroine calm is achieved by holding a feather in a moving frame up and down.

I decided to implement something similar in my game - the heroine, due to a inborn disease, becomes physically ill during rituals. In order to monitor her condition, you must keep a marker constantly moving up and down.

The main benefit of this mechanic is that it adds the necessary degree of tension to the text. In addition to being very easy to learn, it can easily be made more difficult by making the movements more abrupt and making the marker less responsive. Meanwhile, the player can keep track of the heroine's condition without taking their eyes off the text, watching the moving marker with the side vision and orienting by sound (if the marker reaches a critical point, the accelerated heartbeat rate and tinnitus could be heard).

Casting spells successfully with declining health. Persuasion level is the marker on the right.



As all mechanics are simplistic enough from a gameplay perspective, they can be combined to create tension without overloading the process.

As an example, the combination of dialogue choices and incantations creates situations where you need to choose between several options quickly.

By casting the incantations while the heroine is unwell, you are tasked to keep an eye on both rhythm and condition at once.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! Hope this information was helpful to you.

Lots of AI tweaks to continue balancing after defensive AI patch:
Increased importance of STR in breaking tackles
Decreased chance for tackle to hit slightly
Increased the minimum tackle hit chance
Increased the minimum tackle success chance (after hit does it take the player down)
Increase the chance to hit and succeed when attempting to tackle exhausted players.

Added about 1000 more names to the name pool

Changed presentation of playoff and champion record on the stats screen

Hopefully fixed most bugs related to forcing player positions on the roster

Hello, I am a developer.
Three years have already passed since this game was released.

We have developed and released many other games in the meantime, but we would like to express our sincere gratitude to everyone who has continued to play despite the long period of 3 years. This game is also meaningful to me. thank you

Although this game has completed a large-scale content update in version 1.6, we are working hard to continuously maintain it.
However, perhaps it is the fate of an old game, but the number of people around me who enjoy this game is decreasing, and as a result, it has become difficult to obtain the information needed for balance patches.

So, I am writing this notice to recommend the Discord I run to all of you who love games.

https://discord.gg/RuddFqF


We would be grateful if you could share information about various combinations, balance-related inquiries, bug reports, etc. through this Discord.
Of course, you can also leave your comments on the Steam discussion board or in the comments section of the notice as before.

Dear everyone who loves Hero Allstars,
Thank you so much again for loving my game.

If I get a chance someday, I would like to see you in the next installment of the Hero Allstars series.


Posted by developer DakeCraft.

I realise that I am uploading this post quite late, so you will get more or less of a double-post with tomorrow’s update again.

While the majority of our players have been interested exclusively in single-player and co-op play, there is a small minority of players who are still very excited (and insistent to tell me) about the possibility of competitive gameplay for PtP. Even though this is a minority, I still think that there are ways of making some competitive gameplay work, and my holiday has given me some time to think about how this could be realised in the (far) future.

One of the main issues I’ve had in adjusting from our initial competitive gameplay to the coop modes have been balancing and timing. In general, competitive gameplay lends itself more easily to quick matches (or at least somewhat contained timeframes), with fast, predictable, and balanced progression. For 0.9, I am intending to move away from this even further by embracing random resources and adapting to what you find even more - which makes competitive play yet more difficult.

However, I think that there is a possibility for a sort of player vs player vs environment gameplay. Rather than simply pitting the players against each other with randomness potentially allowing one to beat the other early on, pitting two players against each other in getting the artefact from a well established pirate fortress may be a better bet. In this situation, players will both be slowed down by having to overcome the AI, and both players will have enough time to adapt to what they find and make the most of it.

This could lead to rather interesting gameplay, where a dominant player needs to consider not only how to advance against the AI, but also how to protect themselves against their human opponent. Likewise, the player who is lagging behind may get opportunities to disrupt the dominant player, or to simply steal the artefact away from them as they are weakened by the AI.

Of course all of this will be far in the future, after creating a fun and balanced gameplay loop for singleplayer and coop - but I think the possibilities for competitive play are still there in the long run!

Until tomorrow!

Behold, Creatures of the Night!

We have thrilling tidings from the dark domain and wish you to join us for this lavish luncheon of our au courant additions.

We shine some moonlight on the features that make Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood special and the fresh blood they pump into the genre. Join us as we peek behind the curtains and see incoming machinations and innovations the team has planned for Major Content Update #3.

---

We have such sights to show you! Here are our content and feature highlights for Content Update #3, which is just around the corner. The visuals posted here are subject to change.


We don’t just look for new ways to squash, crush, blast, and dismember our enemies, but we’re also doing evolutions! Once you attain the highest level of a specific weapon, you can evolve them into stronger and meaner versions, all to destroy your enemies with.

Here are some examples of what is to come:



Coasting Guillotine
What’s next after chopping heads and limbs using a decorative platter? Well, it’s the Coasting Guillotine. Of course, it’s always fun to dismember parts in five different directions!



Critical Cutter
Turn those Positive Thoughts into razor-blade musings! Tear through enemies with this cloud of blades.



Unholy Conduit
The upgraded version of Devil Breath has you melting enemy faces in four directions!


Familiars, or summoned creatures, are companions players can acquire in any stage. Familiar Summoning Rooms will appear as part of the random level generation. If you can survive the special challenges here, you’ll unlock one to follow you for the rest of the level.

Like you, they can receive damage from enemies, but they attack incoming opponents as well. They can also be upgraded at the shop!

Without further ado, here are some of the incoming Familiars coming in for Content Update #3:



The Shadowcat
A creature borne from the shadows, the Shadowcat sends out beams of destructive energy from the front and back. Its powers also enhance your Projectile Range. Just don’t rub its belly, and avoid putting glasses on the edges of countertops.



The Hellhound
A beast from the depths of hell itself, the Hellhound will bite anything in front of its master. It also leaves a curse called Hell-Mark, which causes enemies bearing this curse to receive additional damage. Its innate malice enhances your base power as well. Unlike the Shadowcat, this one loves belly rubs.

We have new additions to the Nightmare Mode for daring players who yearn for more. You can activate challenges in exchange for lovelier rewards. For Content #3, here is a sneak peek into the new modes:



Exterminated
Can you even finish a run without the bugs you dearly love eating, Renfield? Power-ups will not spawn at all in this mode. That said, stay hydrated and don’t skip meals, players!



Talentless
It might seem like we’re describing you, Renfield, but that’s not the case at all. In this mode, all talent upgrades are banished from your reach.

Also added to the random level generation, a Challenge Room is a specific area that tests the players’ innate strength and mettle. Each room has its unique design and rewards.



Vault of Valuables
Would you dare enter its doors in exchange for a chance to good fortune? Gold collected is nonrefundable or transferable to any modern currency.

We’ve got new places, and we have new faces, too! We’re dropping new characters, each with its distinct playstyle and challenges!



Mark, our beloved group therapy leader!
This trusty support group leader puts his words into action. Stop the cycle of abuse!



Sun-kissed Dracula
Is he OK? No.



Cheerleader
Damsel-in-distress? Midnight snack? She’s neither, not with these deadly pom-poms!



Sister Charlotte
She brings divine retribution to the forces of darkness.

We’re ecstatic to reveal two new stages for players to explore and conquer.



Murder Room
There’s no escaping this time. With no exit in sight, the only way forward is through your ultimate opponent!



Dracula’s Castle
It’s every gothic fan’s dreamland. Aged flagstones, intricate candelabras, and lingering creatures around the corner waiting to suck your blood—yes, it’s Dracula’s dominion. Enjoy this throwback level if you dare!

---

Ever your servants, we’re more than happy to entertain you to your heart’s content. Nothing pleases us more than the contentment of the Dark Lord, Dracula, and our dedicated players of this humble game. The team expresses their absolute gratitude for trying out Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, and for the critical and relevant insight you’ve provided so we could improve this title.

If you have any questions or suggestions, hop on to our Discord and let us know. We’d be more than happy to see you there! Happy slashing, everyone!