Oct 11, 2023

Everafter Falls Playtest - squarehusky

Gameplay

Giant Lotus now in game. Setup a 9x9 grid of the same colored lotus for a 3% chance every day to turn into a giant lotus. Giant lotus flowers can regrow indefinitely every 10 days and sell for a high price (500g-900g depending on color), since it probably takes a long while to be able to get one.
Removed HPUP as a craftable potion
Added HPUP position as a Pink prize cabinet prize at Dawn’s (new saves only)
Reduce prize cabinet key redeem amounts from 90,300,900 > 60,200,900 to better match lower eco game.
Dawn now offers a selection of 3 uneaten GOLD cards again after each pillar unlocked (except the first). The purchasable ones from print shop are not included as offers. If no uneaten gold cards are left, you will get a random selection from ALL gold cards (including possibly ones offered for sale at print shop).
Increased BottleOfLightning move speed from 2>3
HP stats on equipment increased all around.
Gwen’s light HP bonus increased from 45>64.
Flash ring movespeed down from 27>24
Added Bottle of starlight, moonlight, lightning to redeemable prizes in snow fest bottle hunt.
Water drone speed increased by about 2x.

Bugs Fixed

Water drone is no longer bug for real realz T_T
Lotuses were not being generated correctly on each new day is now fixed
Moonstone correctly removed from important items once Dawn takes it
Control input issues steam deck tentatively fixed (awaiting more confirmation). Keyboard input delay may have returned (will need to hear feedback on this). Solutions will be looked into further.
Pepper signature now properly displays
Card Lightning Hands now works reliably with machines
Card Lightning hands also works with root vegetables skipping pull up animation
Trees no longer fruit outside of season (mulberry tree), or if leaves are gone.
Various spelling issues

Known Issues:

Atlas remains submerged during a later cutscene.
Healing bond inconsistently proc
Reported instances of farm animals disappearing and only reappearing on restart
Animal random disappearance until restart
Bed sheets aren’t showing up for sale
Critter Terrarium has issues with correct insect spawning from juvenile form

Oct 11, 2023

A Sneak Peek into the Early Access Launch Content of Forgive Me Father 2

Forgive Me Father - FQ_Dom

Greetings Cultists,

With the Early Access release of Forgive Me Father 2 getting close, we thought it would be a good time to share a few more details about the insanity that you'll be able to dive into next week.

There will be 10 levels for you to explore and battle Lovecraftian horrors in - you can only experience the first two in the free demo that's available right now (and will be right until the game launches on October 19), so let's start off with a preview of what awaits you in level #5, the Cathedral, shall we?

But we are here today to share, so here it is - the full list of levels available at launch of Forgive Me Father 2 Early Access!

Level 1 - Asylum

Level 2 - Port

Level 3 - Shipyard

Level 4 - Sanctuary

Level 5 - Cathedral

Level 6 - Trenches

Level 7 - Front Line

Level 8 - Villa

Level 9 - Abandoned Tunnels

Level 10 - Sinking Station

But what kind of a boomer shooter would it be without a varied weapons selection, right? Not to worry, we got you covered! Take a look at the 10 awesome instruments of destruction you will be able to wreak havoc with:

Knife

Axe

Revolver

Pistol

Pump Shotgun

Double Barrel Shotgun

Rifle

Grenade Launcher

Rocket Launcher

Mortar

Can you feel all this new knowledge gnawing at your mind? Can you taste the oh so sweet sensation of Madness creeping in? Good! Give in, don't resist, and just imagine, in a precious few days you will be able to tap into your insanity and unleash absolute mayhem on your foes with the following special abilites:

Resistance - Madness makes your pain go away, making you almost indestructible. Significantly reduces incoming damage from all sources.
Haste - Makes you the fastest gunman in the universe. Significantly boost your fire rate and reload speed.
Lifesteal - Who needs med kits when you have this? A percentage of damage you deal heals your wounds.
Might - Makes you feel more powerful than ever, but at what cost? Madness fills your body and weapons, causing you to deal additional damage to enemies.

We hope these insights into the nightmares that await you soon have NOT sated your curiousity, merely piqued it. If you haven't yet, try the DEMO that's available on Forgive Me Father 2's Store Page, perhaps that will increase your cravings for Madness even more!

Make sure to wishlist Forgive Me Father 2 to always stay up to date on all related news, and don’t forget to drop by our Discord to chat with us and other players as well!

We are looking forward to seeing you in the game soon!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2272250/Forgive_Me_Father_2/

Oct 11, 2023

New Building - Artificer's Workshop

King Arthur: Knight's Tale - oeregharcos

Noble(?) Knights of Avalon!

We already detailed the news about the new season titled Rising Eclipse that's coming to King Arthur: Knight's Tale this December with a Sidhe theme. Aside from new missions and mechanics (like Rifts), this season also comes with a new Patch 2.0 that overhauls the base game.

One of these permanent additions to the game is the Artificer's Workshop which you will be able to use even outside of seasonal content.

After building up the Hospice, you will be able to unlock the Artificer's Workshop. This building's function is simple but useful: here you can enhance your items or gain new ones. To do so, you will need various crystals that you can find on missions in three different rarities. You will use these in the the Artificer's Workshop to either modify or enhance an item.
With modification, the item you offer will be transformed to a new random piece of equipment, but only within that category (so for example, a one-handed sword will be replaced by another one-handed sword). This is a lengthy process, and you will need to go on another mission until your new item is ready. You can either modify the tier or the rarity of the offered item by applying the corresponding crystals.
Enhancing an item happens instantly, but it will also cost some gold. By doing so, the stats of the item will improve with an increment, and the item will not be replaced by a new one. You will get a visual feedback on this empowered status to know which items you have improved previously.
At its default state, the Artificer's Workshop will only accept one item per turn, so make sure to be smart about it. However, the building can be upgraded to offer you more slots and options as you progress in the game.

Patch 2.0 and the free seasonal update Rising Eclipse are coming on December 2, 2023 to the PC version of King Arthur: Knight's Tale. Previous season will be accessible from a menu. Also look forward to our announcements of the console versions and the next expansion.

Oct 11, 2023

Build Update 8 - Controller Support

Towers of Thana - build-machine

Whenever we start to work on something, we like to think about the possible challenges that may come our way and plan accordingly. You know, doing some planning and thinking ahead of time can save a lot of effort in the long run. It’s usually better to put together a plan of attack then move forward than try to rush things and have to adjust mid-flight.

But what happens when the plan doesn’t hold up? Well, life gets hard. The controller support was such a project for us and we’re more than happy to share with you all the struggle we went through.

Past Experience

It’s not the first time our team has added controller support to a game. We actually did it a couple times before and it went smoothly enough. I think this past experience led us to build some confidence in our ability while, at the same time, take a couple things for granted.

On top of that, we had integrated some controller support to the game early on but eventually decided to focus on keyboard/mouse only to avoid spending time supporting multiple input schemes when we were not sure if a feature would stay in the game or not long term. Here we can interpret this reality in 2 different ways when considering the task ahead: we could think “well if we dropped it, it was probably somewhat challenging to support”. Unfortunately, we took the other route: “oh we already have some stuff in place, it will probably save us time”.

With our hearts filled with confidence, we decided to dive in. This was our first mistake. We didn’t challenge much our approach early on, which made things harder in the long run.

Aiming

This is where resides most of the challenges, and they are many. Sending a projectile at the right place in a game like Towers of Thana is not as easy as it seems because of the camera perspective. Here’s a side by side picture of the same projectile, seen from 2 different angles. I added a sphere to indicate the trajectory of the projectile:

As you can see, the sphere and the cursor are on top of each other in the left image, which is the perspective seen by the player. But in the right image, you can see that the sphere is actually above the ground. This set of images showcases fairly well the solution we went with. The cursor is always on the ground, we then identify the position of the sphere in the world by using a projection of the cursor on the ground and the height of the projectile. Then the projectile travels in the direction of the sphere.

This setup is not exactly new and has actually been in the game for a long time. We did have a couple issues with it though where the VFX may not match the collider (mostly visible with melee attacks), or where the projectile may fly up in the air instead of following the ground. Those were fixed as well in the latest update.

Moving With The Left Stick

In our implementation, the player can move around with the left stick. Optionally, they can use the right stick to aim. Using the right stick to aim should be fairly straight forward since it’s mostly the same than shooting with the mouse. You just do the same perspective tricks with the sphere we saw above and you’re good to go.

But what happens when you simply move to the right by holding the left joystick in the correct direction, leaving the right one alone, and want to shoot at the same time? You’d expect to shoot perfectly to the right. What actually happens?

In the previous image, the yellow arrow indicates the direction the character is moving.

You end up shooting in diagonal. Looks like our strategy of sending the projectile in the sphere’s direction doesn’t hold up anymore! So what do you do? You discard the sphere and simply shoot in the direction the player is facing. This results in the projectile NOT going through the cursor, but it’s a small price to pay for the projectile to go where you actually aim at. Plus, the player isn’t really aiming with the cursor in that situation, so in the end it feels quite natural.

Notice on the next image how the sphere is no longer on top of the cursor.

Camera Pan

Sometimes you implement a feature in a quick and dirty way. You know you’re playing the lottery. If it’s a win, it didn’t take a long time, it’s self contained and it works well. If you lose, the shortcuts you took bite you back. This is what happened with the Camera Pan. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the camera moves slightly as you move your cursor around, allowing you to see further away on the map. This is what I am referring to here.

This feature was not using the cursor’s world position but instead the raw mouse positions on the screen. Since there’s no mouse involved when you play with a gamepad, the feature wasn’t working at all. Luckily, it was not a big time sink to move things around so that it uses the cursor position instead, along with fixing a few other things along the way, but it was a friendly reminder of what tends to happen with the quick and dirty implementations.

Translation VS Stick Mirrors

I think that this one we should have seen coming, had we spent a bit more time thinking through about what a proper controller support meant. When you use your right joystick to aim, how do you want the cursor to behave? Should the cursor be dragged in the direction you’re pushing? Meaning that if you release the joystick, the cursor should stay there. Or maybe you want the cursor to be as snappy as possible and be locked within a circle around the player. You move the stick half way to the left? The cursor goes there instantly and stays there. You release the stick? It moves back to the center.

As it turns out, we needed both functionalities. When you aim to shoot, the second option feels just right. It’s snappy and allows you to shoot left and right at will. But when you want to place a tower on the ground, activate a combo or chose a teleport location, you want to be precise. The “dragging” behaviour is a lot more forgiving and allows you to find the exact spot you want, albeit slower.

Icons

In theory, that one should have been really easy to implement. This is THE controller-related feature we made sure we kept around throughout development. Early on, we created a small tool to show input icons. It’s quite nice really: if we ever change our input configuration (let’s say I want you to attack with Space Bar instead of Right Click), I just change the general implementation and don’t touch the icons. They should all just work!

On top of that, we had already implemented dynamic input switching. Meaning that if you were using your keyboard/mouse combo and picked up your Xbox controller mid-game instead, all the icons would switch automatically. A really neat tool that made this process a lot easier! Until…

The Unity Bug

Once we plugged in a PS4 and a Switch Pro controller, we ended up having a really weird behaviour. Turns out that there is currently a bug in Unity’s implementation with these gamepads (and probably others). If I plug in a PS4 controller, Unity will tell me that I have a 2 gamepads connected: a PS4 and an Xbox. If I press a button on my gamepad, Unity will fire an event for both.

This is highly frustrating and, as far as we can tell, there is no way for us to reliably tell if we are in a scenario where the Xbox controller firing event is a ghost/duplicated PS4 controller, or if it’s really just an Xbox controller. There are probably some strategy we could implement to try to figure it out, but since this is a bug on Unity’s side and that it will probably end up being resolved at some point, we opted to move forward with a workaround.

The Workaround

Because of the previously mentioned bug, we can’t reliably differentiate between a real or a ghost Xbox controller. For that reason, we decided to let the player decide what icon set they want to use when a gamepad is in use.

If you are using your keyboard and mouse combo, we’ll show you the correct icons. But if you use a gamepad, no matter what we detect, we’ll use the configuration you set there. Simple enough!

That’s it for this update! It was a lot more work than we anticipated, but in the end we’re really happy to finally get it out there for you to try. As always, let us know if you encounter any issues! You can find us on Discord.