Hi Everyone!

Welcome to our October devlog! First we'd like to invite you to join our Discord. We plan to increase the number of teasers and other smaller updates about the development there. We also aim to do more polls to gather feedback from our community. Your presence there would help us a lot! ❤️




- We received multiple feedbacks regarding the movement speed of characters while walking on the map. We've then prototyped a mount system and we'd like to hear your thoughts: Do you like this system and would you like to see it in the game? What kind of mount would you like to have? Leave your answers and suggestions in the Steam comments below! 🐎


Some heroes will have their own abilities as mount as well


- Here's Yura's gameplay teaser, one of the 20 playable characters. We intend to include a hero teaser in every devlog so you can get a glimpse of each hero. Feel free to share your thoughts on this format in the comments.

Learn more about her backstory/lore on our discord.

- We've completed another boss, along with its introductory cutscene. With this, we've now finished 12 out of the 20 bosses we planned for the game. Although we dialed back our focus on bosses this month because we needed to finish their respective scenarios/boss room first, we're already developing two more, aiming to complete them by next month. Below is an image of the Druid Temple in Ereluna, the setting for one of these confrontations.


- We've finished the artifact system and have completed the creation of around 20 active artifacts, but there will be many times more than that.

For those who aren't aware, the game will have various playable heroes, each with their skillset. Two interesting systems we're developing, Orbs and Artifacts, will further diversify your gameplay experience with them:

• Orbs: They are rare items that change what your skill does, they work like talents, but, being items, you have things to chase in the endgame, look for new 'builds' and rare drops. We can also release new orbs with each update, which means that even an old hero can get new skills, different 'builds', or mechanics after their release.
  
  
• Artifacts: Each hero can equip up to 4 artifacts, 2 active and 2 passive. The actives are basically two extra skills, and combined with the passives they will provide a possibility of different combinations and combos, so you can create different "builds" that adapt to your playing style.

- We are updating the character art for menus and icons, and we have finished 8 heroes. While the previous art was in "Chibi" style, we opted for a more "mature" style, as we noticed that, although some like the chibis, most prefer the "traditional" art.



- We produced dynamic videos of skills, Orbs, and Artifacts of each hero that illustrate the attacks in action. This way, you can view each move as you delve into its description.



- About the Hellgate we briefly mentioned in the August devlog, we are making assets/sprites for the bosses. They are more complex because the battle against them will be with lots and lots of players together. We have already finished the animation of two of the main demons and are finalizing the third. We want to do 4 of them, so we are almost there.🔥

- We've finished the art for over 10 pets, even though it's not our current focus. For those who adore having a unique pet companion, expect a range of collectibles and companions🐾


Liam's Gryphon Pet

We thank you once again for all your support! We will continue to keep you updated on the game's development here and on our social media channels! ❤️

See you next time!👋

As we start moving towards a map editor and custom scenarios, we have added the first step -> custom games. You can now edit multiple components of your custom games including:
+ Starting storm level
+ Number of Ruins
+ Number of alien shields
+ Number of turns to complete
+ Map Size

There are a few things we didn't like about the map generation that have been addressed in this patch to make games hopefully more fun and more consistent
+ You can no longer spawn along the edge of the map. The closest you can be is 2 tiles away so you always get the full value of your 5x5 base reveal.
+ The clearing the base starts in has been expanded to be 3x3 instead of a plus and is guaranteed to have a supply drop in the vicinity (not necessarily always within vision though). This will hopefully smooth out some of the RNG of starting areas.

+ 3 new achievements relating to winning games under certain turn limits.
+ Win a game on insane in under 10 minutes.
+ 2 new achievements for the new desolation levels.

Fixed some significant stutters related to clicking on cells, especially when using certain abilities or having certain augments active. Clicking in general should feel a lot smoother. There will be further performance improvements including to idle FPS as we get closer to launch.

+ Unstoppable Fissure now reveals all exploded tiles
+ Explosive growth secondary effect (+ shaped grass left behind) wasn't working
+ Fixed bug with Sustainable Architecture where it wasn't always applying the correct effects to adjacent storage buildings

Fixed general bugs;
Changed the resolve puzzle effect;

In the wake of the devastating events in the Gaza region, it's impossible for us to sit by and merely observe. The numbers themselves are heart-wrenching – as of today, October 27th, 2023, over 3,000 innocent children have lost their lives due to Israeli bombings. But these numbers only scratch the surface of the pain and suffering endured by the Palestinian people. Beyond this staggering loss of young lives, the region has witnessed countless civilian casualties, the destruction of entire residential blocks, and debilitating shortages of essential resources like food, water, electricity, gas, and first aid. The recent halt in Internet telecommunications further isolates the people of Gaza, cutting them off from the rest of the world.

These ruthless attacks came following the Hamas organization's indiscriminate kidnapping and mass murder targeting hundreds of innocent Israeli civilians, many of whom were young men and women attending a nearby dance party.

We understand that we are just a small entity in the vast digital landscape. As an applied cryptography consultancy and software publisher, our immediate influence might seem minimal in the grand scheme of things. However, we firmly believe in the power of collective action and the ripple effects of individual contributions.

In light of this, we are proud to announce a special initiative: From October 27th, 2023, to October 31st, 2024, 100% of every purchase of our flagship puzzle adventure game, Dr. Kobushi's Labyrinthine Laboratory, will directly support the people of Gaza. The full revenue from these sales will be donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency's Gaza Emergency Appeal.

We understand that not everyone is a gamer, but we encourage you to share this initiative with friends, family, and your broader network. Spreading the word can amplify our collective impact. Furthermore, for those who wish to contribute directly, we recommend donating to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or other trusted organizations working tirelessly on the ground. This contribution comes on top of independent contributions that Symbolic Software and its staff will also make to UNRWA's Gaza effort.

In these trying times, let's come together as a global community and prove that compassion, unity, and action can make a difference. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Gaza, and we stand in solidarity with them. Your support can bring hope and much-needed relief to a region in desperate need.

We understand the importance of trust, especially when it comes to charitable contributions. Therefore, in the coming months, we will periodically publish official receipts and acknowledgments from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to confirm the successful transfer of funds. Our community deserves to see the tangible impact of their support, and we pledge to keep you informed, engaged, and confident that every cent is going directly to those in need in Gaza.

Together, let's game for a cause and play our part in rebuilding Gaza.

Hail!

A fairly large patch was recently applied to Meridian, the 3rd one in the span of a year.

The contributors, many new, worked hard to put this together. I'm excited to share these notes to help shed light on what was updated.

Thank you all for being a part of Meridian 59, your passionate support and continued interest has helped keep it alive for 25+ years now!

This marks the first time since the 90's that we've had this number of active contributors (4+ programmers!) help and work together to further develop our beloved M59.
__


October 2023 Update: Release Notes

**Client Updates and Quality of Life improvements**

* There's now a VOLUME SLIDER FOR AMBIENT SOUNDS in the preferences menu - this allows players to independently adjust the volume of the various ambient sounds in the game. In particular, this should make building outside the guard house on the island less noisy.

* CHESTS and storage boxes are hidden throughout Meridian and many guild halls have huge storage chests. Players can now withdraw a SELECTED AMOUNT of any item from these chests while leaving the rest for later use.

In addition, a SHELF was added to the chests for food and reagents in order to encourage a well organized collection of items!

Now when you look inside your storage boxes you will notice the food and reagents appear at the top of the list of items while armor and weapons appear in the depths below.


* Pants, shirts, and skirts no longer break through normal use. They should last as long as the wearer desires the outfit. This was done to encourage players to customize their appearance as much as possible and removes the need to repair or rebuy articles of clothing every few weeks.

*SOLOMON, who operates Solomon's Edibles in Cor Noth, will now buy reagents and foodstuffs from adventurers.

* After SYSTEM SAVES the player's most recently used stat group is restored - if you were using your inventory prior to the system save the inventory should now be active after the system save (before, it defaulted to your spell tab)

* FONT COLORS; Dark green, orange, and pink text can now be used by players in their text communications with each other.

* The LATENCY WINDOW now updates a player's current latency in real time with updates occuring once per second. There is also now an option to turn on the old-style spinning latency cube in the preferences menu.

* The system MESSAGE to a player accidentally trying to attack themself has been changed from: "You can't see your selected target." to "You can't attack yourself.”

* Piles of dropped LOOT are now correctly rendered by the client: each item is given an apparent depth away from the player - this resolves items flickering and disappearing from view when fighting numerous monsters in a single room.

* Edges of objects in the game used to automatically blend towards the background of a room - this resulted in the appearance of a white outline around objects, particularly noticeable in areas with a lot of trees. Now, the apparent outline is removed, enhancing the appearance of the art with the world around it.

* Meridian's MOON now goes through PHASES of WAXING and WANING. The passage of time in a meridian year can now also be marked by changing sunspot activity on the SOLSTICEs.

Updates to rentable rooms:

* Added a new command, "change lock", which allows you to destroy all existing copies of your room key - no matter where the keys are stored or in whose possession.

* Added additional information to the room key descriptions, allowing you to check the remaining time and how many copies of your room key (if any) are in circulation.

* Innkeepers will no longer daily spam your mailbox with updates on the time you have paid out towards rent. Instead, they'll send a tell when you log in to remind you when your room rental is close to expiring.


Spell/Skill/Item Changes:

* Jala's spell Restorate has been reworked to have more of an effect on players with high vigor. Previously, Restorate had no effect on players with vigor above 160. Restorate now increases your rate of hit point regeneration at all vigor values. The size of the effect and the slope of the effect relative to the singer's spell power has been adjusted to maintain a healthy balance.

* The Chalice of the Rain shows how many sips remain in its description. It'll also give new message feedback to the user when dropped in a room where it can be refilled.

* Spell wands and magic rings track durability in their description similar to weapons and armor.

* Freshly dropped disciple robes will appear in a color signifying their dedicated school, instead of all of them dropping and appearing as blue. These robes return to this default color when unequipped. This improves identification of robes in piles of loot and in storage boxes.

* Riija's Blink spell has a new success message after the completion of the intensive focus required to cast the spell.

* The appearance of some food items have been adjusted to differentiate the various edibles that have similar appearances.



Bug Fixes and Improvements:

* Node Attacks: Xeo'chicatl invasions have been fixed: specifically the bug in their timer that was allowing for multiple back-to-back attacks. With their controls working as intended, expect to see more invasions from the Xeos to challenge everyone and steal your mana nodes - and more chances to get valuable heartstones.

* Removed graphic resource distortion - the large, distracting black boxes - that appeared when a user had two or more clients open.

* Arrows fired from bows (in the hardware rendered graphics, on by default) now appear correctly and will project from the center of the bow, instead of from the players head (this affects 1st and 3rd person view)

* PvPers take note: Fixed an incorrectly applied spellpower modifier that was intended to vary spellpower and casting when using all long-range weapons. (All equip-able items have a spellpower modifier - weapons and armor generally reduce spellpower...) This fix affects each bow in their own specific way: common Practice Bow, Battle Bow and Long Bow; rare Nerudite & Magic Bows.

* Fixed a bug with disarm that allowed players to disarm and knock to the ground an opponent's bonded weapon, or to disarm an event character or DM (you don't drop a bonded item on death, and a bonded weapon is supposed to only be droppable manually owner). The disarm skill will still stun and cause the weapon to unequip from an opponents grasp.

* Fixed the bug causing brand new weapons (mace and short sword specifically) to appear to have been repaired before.

* Numerous potions and wand bugs resolved:

- Purify potions no longer erroneously fail.

- Removed unintentional Karma Checks on non-distilled potions, reducing the number of times Remove Curse, Cure Poison, and Cure Disease flasks sold by Lady Aftyn fail to have the desired effect.

- Players can no longer consume a spell item when a condition prevents the item from having any effect (example: you can't drink a remove curse potion if you're not cursed), saving accidental item waste. This also helps players who drink unidentified potions (dropped by monsters) from wasting stomach space.

* Creating and placing decorative items, art and ornamental objects has been improved for Administrators, as well as the the potent ability to create new custom descriptions. This allows for creative and efficient custom additions to environments, lore, better storytelling and communication with players.

* The F10 keyboard button can now be used as a hotkey when the inventory is active - previously this hotkey only worked when the gameplay area was the active element of the game.

* Fixed a long-standing and major visual bug when recovering from the blind effect, which often resulted in significant display and lighting artifacts that hindered gameplay in intense PvP combat scenarios.

* Closing the client will now immediately end the game music - removing the delay where the music would continue playing after exiting the game.

* Frogmen are now smaller in size.

* Dark Angels were made larger - along with their new audio effects and loot table, they're now 'complete'.

* The Chess Boards were updated to show the side you're playing as facing the direction you're in (patched by Zaphod himself!)

Behind the scenes game improvements:

* Numerous improvements made to the game engine and hardware rendering for its graphics - though subtle or invisible to players, they'll improve overall game maintenance.

* Code cleaned up with the removal of a chunk of unnecessary duplicated entries.

* Numerous typos fixed in the dialogue and descriptions of the Brax Arena Watcher, Goad.


"In addition to Zaphod’s hard work and Mayhem’s ongoing support, this release included contributions from Si, Aesica, Reborn Hero, Toko, Hektic, Grok, Essun and Gar."


------



Thank you to everyone who worked on this most recent patch and the previous two this year!

I'm personally enjoying feeling out all the improvements, especially the polished gameplay, graphics and QoL updates for players and those of us maintaining servers or creating content.

A special thanks to Zaphod for his steady guidance, time, patience and for creating Meridian 59 in the first place, then releasing its code to allow for all of these great updates from fans.

A lot was learned. The work has already begun for the next patch...

We hope you all continue to have fun playing here and calling Meridian your home.

May you suddenly feel a little tougher ~

It's been a slew of hotfix over the last few days as we address issues.

• Reverted Java 21 to Java 20 (21 was causing issues integrating with a library we use).
  
• Fixed starting the quest "The Collector" causing save files to be corrupted. Unfortunately, if you already started this quest before the update your save file cannot be repaired (if you are in game before this latest update downloads, keep playing until you beat the quest).
  
• Fixed weapon experiment quests giving the player a lump of coal, instead of the experimental weapon.
  
• Fixed non-active passives showing tooltip sources display.
  
• Fixed skill bonuses appearing twice in the tooltip sources display.
  
• Fixed issue with fullscreen mode in WIndows 11.

• Drastically reduced the XP gained when using magic abilities.

In a world gone mad... one egg stands alone against the fowl horde! Can your dual-wielding ovum outlaw survive against an endless army of zombie chickens?



Interested in playtesting the NEW Steam release of our browser-based smash-hit Bad Egg?

Bad Egg is a single player survival game where you play as a lone egg that must outlast hordes of zombie chickens! Choose the best weapons, power-ups, and upgrades to fight your way through throngs of pecking poultry who are out for yolk. Be one of the first to play and find out if you are bad enough to survive!

We are rapidly making updates here before we release it to the public and need your feedback!

To sign up, click the link below to head to the Steam page, look for "Join the Bad Egg Playtest" and click "Request Access".

We can't wait to hear what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2397630/Bad_Egg/

In a world gone mad... one egg stands alone against the fowl horde! Can your dual-wielding ovum outlaw survive against an endless army of zombie chickens?



Interested in playtesting the NEW Steam release of our browser-based smash-hit Bad Egg?

Bad Egg is a single player survival game where you play as a lone egg that must outlast hordes of zombie chickens! Choose the best weapons, power-ups, and upgrades to fight your way through throngs of pecking poultry who are out for yolk. Be one of the first to play and find out if you are bad enough to survive!

We are rapidly making updates here before we release it to the public and need your feedback!

To sign up, click the link below to head to the Steam page, look for "Join the Bad Egg Playtest" and click "Request Access".

We can't wait to hear what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2397630/Bad_Egg/

In a world gone mad... one egg stands alone against the fowl horde! Can your dual-wielding ovum outlaw survive against an endless army of zombie chickens?



Interested in playtesting the NEW Steam release of our browser-based smash-hit Bad Egg?

Bad Egg is a single player survival game where you play as a lone egg that must outlast hordes of zombie chickens! Choose the best weapons, power-ups, and upgrades to fight your way through throngs of pecking poultry who are out for yolk. Be one of the first to play and find out if you are bad enough to survive!

We are rapidly making updates here before we release it to the public and need your feedback!

To sign up, click the link below to head to the Steam page, look for "Join the Bad Egg Playtest" and click "Request Access".

We can't wait to hear what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2397630/Bad_Egg/

In a world gone mad... one egg stands alone against the fowl horde! Can your dual-wielding ovum outlaw survive against an endless army of zombie chickens?



Interested in playtesting the NEW Steam release of our browser-based smash-hit Bad Egg?

Bad Egg is a single player survival game where you play as a lone egg that must outlast hordes of zombie chickens! Choose the best weapons, power-ups, and upgrades to fight your way through throngs of pecking poultry who are out for yolk. Be one of the first to play and find out if you are bad enough to survive!

We are rapidly making updates here before we release it to the public and need your feedback!

To sign up, click the link below to head to the Steam page, look for "Join the Bad Egg Playtest" and click "Request Access".

We can't wait to hear what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2397630/Bad_Egg/