The December Mid-Season Update for Halo Infinite arrives on December 5, just a few short days from now, and we’ve got the details of everything you need to know right here.



Firefight: King of the Hill, the new Repair Field equipment, Forge updates, Ranked and Custom Game Browser improvements, and much more are prepared to drop—let’s get you briefed!

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Bip. Bap. Bam! Firefight is coming to Halo Infinite next week.

Over the years, Firefight has taken many forms across various Halo games. From its traditional survival mode in Halo 3: ODST to its more arcade-inspired incarnation in Halo: Reach, to Warzone Firefight in Halo 5: Guardians, along with Blitz Firefight and Terminus Firefight in Halo Wars 2 – it’s a mode that has evolved across games, and the time has come for it to arrive in Halo Infinite.

Firefight: King of the Hill will see you and three other players facing off against waves of Banished baddies as you fight to capture hills on nine maps when the playlist goes live – including the House of Reckoning from Halo Infinite’s campaign and three community-made maps.

We’ll have a full, detailed blog on Firefight: King of the Hill going live on December 4, ahead of its in-game debut the following day.

We can’t wait for you to get your hands on it!

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Need to conduct some repairs while out in the field? We’ve got the perfect Equipment item for you…

Introducing our latest sandbox addition to Halo Infinite, the Repair Field!

Similar to the Regenerator from Halo 3, the Repair Field is a neutral piece of Equipment that heals allies and enemies within its radius. It’s also capable of repairing vehicles, and it can be attached to them (as well as most environmental surfaces). Additionally, the Repair Field can also revive downed Spartans in select modes such as Firefight: King of the Hill, Attrition, etc.

Are you the kind of player that prefers to provide support for the team? The Repair Field is a great complement to that particular playstyle and, used strategically, just might help give your team an edge in a firefight or vehicular showdown.

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The Ranked experience is getting some improvements in this December Update, starting off with updates to Ranked Extraction and CSR.

At the moment, you can hear that your Extraction point is being converted by the enemy team from anywhere on the map. This meant players were able to leave the area around the Extraction device and use the global audio queue to tell them when to peek back out. With this upcoming audio change, the device itself will emit the audio, meaning you’ll have to be in close vicinity to hear it’s being converted. As a result, teams will need to pay closer attention to the Extraction device.

Right now, you can see in your UI when the Extraction point is being converted. Similar to above, this allowed players to leave the area near the Extraction device and only peek out when the UI showed it was being converted. With our upcoming change, this will go away almost entirely. The UI will no longer indicate to you when the Extraction point is actively being converted, and it will also no longer indicate to you how much time is remaining. It’s going to play a bit old school and hardcore, as players and coaches will need to time the Extractions like timing weapons and powerups in previous Halo titles.

There are some further improvements also coming to rank loss protection and teammate quitting. Once you rank up a tier, you will get three games, win or lose, before a loss will rank you down to the previous tier. Additionally, if a player in the match (who is not on your fireteam) quits, you will not lose CSR if you decide to quit as well. You can read more about these updates in our most recent Ranked Update blog!

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When Season 5 launched back in October, the Forge AI Toolkit quite literally changed the game for community creators, allowing players for the first time ever to place campaign enemies into multiplayer maps to build PvE experiences.

In the December Update, we have some more improvements to share with you that will enhance this feature even further…




In Halo Infinite’s campaign, there are various boss enemies that can be encountered on Zeta Halo, such as the High Value Targets that can be hunted down, each one rewarding the Master Chief with a powerful special weapon variant.

All fifteen of these HVTs will be added to Forge with the December Update – from the almighty Bipbap the Vanquisher to the very hungry Ik’novus the Devourer, and beyond.

Major bosses are also included in this line-up as well, such as Jega ‘Rdomnai, Escharum, and the Harbinger. The potential for what the creative cartographers in the community are going to make truly is endless (heh!)


With Firefight: KOTH on the way, enabling Skulls to modify difficulty is a notable part of the experience. With this update, Forgers will be able to use Node Graph to enable or disable any of the twelve Skulls, from Bandana to Black Eye.

Notably, Skulls are not just limited to the Firefight game variants. These difficulty modifiers will work in any game mode, allowing creators to use them to spice up ordinary multiplayer matches or extend their Season 5 PVE experiences.


The Global Material Allow list gives the player the ability to access all swatches contained in swatch groups added to the global allow list in all regions. This functionally gives the player access to a much larger pool of swatches for each region, and allows regions previously disallowed from using tiling swatches to access them.

Because hugs make everything better, we have also added the Trigger Grunt Hug node to Forge’s Node Graph. This will allow creators to make any Grunts in a squad pull out two plasma grenades and run toward the nearest enemy until the grenades explode. We sincerely hope this addition will make your Custom Browser experiences with Grunts more loving and friendly.

Scalable Blockers allow the player to place a single blocker object and scale it to the size they’d like it to be. This will help you save on object count and help clean up maps.

Auto Turret Allegiance has been updated, meaning the Auto Turret will now respect the Team setting it receives in Forge. When placed on a team, the Auto Turret will treat units (players & AI) as allies and will not target them. If placed on Neutral team, the turret will remain hostile to all units.

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When Season 5 launched, we introduced Custom Game XP and the addition of the Forge AI Toolkit opened up the floodgates for countless hours to be spent jumping from custom game to custom game – whether you’re looking for some of that classic Infection fun you’ve been enjoying since Halo 3, or the vast range of exciting new experiences that folks have been creating.

The team has been working on a variety of improvements to the Custom Game Browser which should make for a smoother ride for you and your fireteam.


As long as there are enough slots available, the Fireteam Leader can bring their entire party into a CGB session. Upon joining the session, all members of your Fireteam will join together and merge into the Custom Game leader’s Fireteam.

While working on this, the team also made sure that it was enabled for lobbies. If you are playing with a friend and want to join another friend’s lobby, you can choose “Join with Fireteam” to bring your entire Fireteam into their matchmaking/custom game lobby.


Several improvements have been implemented to the Custom Game Browser, resolving issues that block players from joining CGB sessions that were open when a backend change occurred; issues around unclear messaging when attempting to join a full session; and instances where attempting to join a session that was no longer active would not deliver any failure messages.

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Along with all the additions and quality-of-life updates above, this update is also focused on increasing the game’s stability by addressing crashes and improving our online experience via updates to our networking.

Season 5 added more reporting information in the game, which helps us better detect when and why crashes happen. Using this data, the team has knocked out multiple crashes across PC and consoles, including the top crash on Xbox Series X|S devices.

As for improvements to networking, we’ve been working on a more comprehensive overhaul of the system. The first glimpse of this updated networking model will land on December 5 with the December Update. You’ll be able to jump into the Firefight: King of the Hill playlist and try out the new networking model in a safe environment. Enabling it in a PvE experience gives us a safe testbed to see how it behaves at scale before enabling it in a PvP mode, where the stakes would feel much higher for each player. Please be sure to dive in, blast the Banished, and let us know how it feels in Firefight: King of the Hill. If the results are promising, we’ll look to host a PvP experience in the Combat Workshop in the future.

While there should only be improvements in these areas, please be sure to report any crashes or networking related issues to us by using the Halo Support site.

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That closes us out for this preview of 2023’s December Update for Halo Infinite. Stay tuned for a deep dive on Firefight on December 4 ahead of the update dropping out of slipspace on December 5!

Very small bug fix to the way enemies spawn in Archival Survival.

Fixed scouting status not saved
Improved recruitment American league
Fixed saving of value for players after creating a new career
Fixed state of the bookmark icon when switching between players
Improved saving of arena name when creating a new team in the dataeditor

📜 We can't wait to hear what people think, let us know which scenario is your favourite 😍

🪲 Going forward we intend to fix bugs as they are found, but you should know that this is all of the content that we have planned for Quest Giver. Enjoy!



-Darzington & Zalinius 💖

Purchasing the software for any platform entitles you to use the software on any other platform. Steam will manage which versions are downloaded based on the platform.

Note that adventurer files can be moved between the two platforms.

To report any issues, please email us at DungeonSoftwareUS@gmail.com.

Oops, I missed my monthly devlog post for November. On the plus side, I've been doing a lot of good work over the past few weeks! I've found that my time and motivation for Rhythm Quest tends to oscillate a little bit over time -- sometimes it's because other parts of my life are busy, other times it's because I'm working on something that's tougher to get motivated about. But I do my best to just keep plugging away slowly and steadily...

It's a little crazy to think that ~3 months ago the Rhythm Quest level editor didn't exist at all! Now we've got an entire editor tool palette UI, notifications, undo/redo, saving and loading, input timelines, waveform displays, animated preview sprites, automatic beat detection, level validation, ... There are like, infinity different things that go into custom level support, which is why I initially wanted to put it off until post-release...but I'm actually having a lot of fun developing it all, so that's great!


Most recently, I've been doing a bunch of work on a custom level browser that will let you navigate through the custom levels you've downloaded:



A lot of it is already working pretty well! It's able to parse all of the song files in the custom level folder, show them as options, and even allow you to drill down into subfolders in case you want to organize your custom levels into various different directories. Since the menu is dynamic (can have any arbitrary number of buttons), I decided to go with a scrolling menu layout. It works simply enough with keyboard/gamepad, but if you're using a mouse you can also scroll to a given song by clicking it (or even use the scroll wheel!).

You'll notice on the left panel that selecting a level brings up a bunch of details about the level, including a stats display of how many obstacles of each type are in the level. These weren't too hard to derive and save as part of the level metadata, and they should hopefully provide a nice way of judging the flavor of a chart, or in case you want to just avoid any levels that have speed zones or green enemies or whatever. It's a little busy, in terms of the visual look, but I do think that it's useful information to display. (Maybe there could be a toggle for it?)

There's still some additional work that needs to be done here...for one thing, I'm not a huge fan of the way that folders are handled...instead of drilling into separate submenus, it would probably make more sense to just have all songs be listed as one (indented?) list and then be able to open and collapse folders from there. I also don't have a way to access the shop or change characters/speed settings easily from here yet. =(

I also need to think about handling music previews...the easy thing to do would be to just load the entire song on-demand and start playback, but that's really slow, so I'll have to instead stream the music from disk. Of course, ideally you'd be able to edit which region of the song gets played in the preview...


There's a new "estimated difficulty" scale from 1-100, which is automatically calculated based on the density of actions required for the level. Of course, it's hard to be very precise in determining how much trouble any given player will have on different levels, but I figured it would be nice to at least have some rough estimation available.

Having a difficulty scale go from 1-100 is actually an interesting conundrum because there's no theoretical limit on how difficult a song can be (you can just add obstacles on every half beat and increase the tempo higher and higher). Right now the primary heuristic I use for determining difficulty is the number of button presses required per second, which ranges from 0.86 for level 1-1 all the way to 3.79 for level 5-5 (and probably a little higher through the end of world 6).

I could of course just pick an arbitrary maximum limit (5.0?) and then come up with a linear scale, where 0 presses/second = 1 and 5 presses/second = 100, but I don't think that would be a great scale, because the differentiation within the low and high ends of the scale would be pretty useless. Does it really make sense for level 1-1 to have a difficulty of 17/100? It feels like the lower numbers below 15 would just never get used. Also, perceived difficulty isn't really linear based on presses per second either -- the jump between 1 and 1.5 presses per second isn't nearly as big of a deal as the jump from 3 to 3.5 presses per second.

So instead of a linear mapping, I tried to find some sort of non-linear function that I could use to estimate difficulty. Ideally I wanted something that would ramp up very slowly from 0, then increase more rapidly toward the middle end of the range, and then taper off so that the crazy charts with 5 or 6 presses/second can just all be lumped in the 90s or whatever. In other words I wanted something that kind of has horizontal asymptotes...

If you've studied enough trigonometry (sorry, yes, math is back) you'd remember that the graph of y = tan(x) has vertical asymptotes. Which of course, means that the inverse, y = arctan(x), has horizontal asymptotes. The inverse tangent function graphs like this:



Which is pretty much what I was envisioning! All that was left was to apply some scaling constants to shift and scale everything around, and then I had my non-linear difficulty curve from 1-100 (currently caps out at around 4.8 presses per second):



Here are some values and what they map to, so you can get a sense of how this non-linear difficulty compares to what a linear mapping would provide:


Of course, this is just a first attempt, so it's definitely possible that it'll need some tweaking or shifting around...


I also put together this screen for inputting all of the metadata that you see in the level browser:



Not too much to say here except that I had to program in the ability to load in a custom image that you provide, and then automatically crop it to the right dimensions when displaying it. This image will also be used for if/when you upload the level to the Rhythm Quest Steam Workshop (have to implement that at some point, too...).


The new level browser was the main exciting piece of work, but I've also been doing a ton of other things as well...for instance, I implemented a blur filter for the background that you'll be able to enable in the screen filter settings:



In general this sort of quick and simple post-processing effect tends to break the clean look of pixel art, but I won't judge you if you just think it looks cool and want to just enable it for normal gameplay. It does tend to help with foreground/background readability, for sure.

I also implemented the ability to drag obstacles around using a move tool. This is a little less straightforward than you might think...you're essentially doing a delete followed by a new action, but you need to validate that the new action will make sense after the delete and handle the preview accordingly.



The same tool also lets you resize flight paths, water zones, and speed zones, by dragging the left or right side of them. Of course, the other obstacles need to all adjust based on the change...



The level end object automatically moves when you insert new obstacles past the end of the level. You can also move it around now!



Water zones and speed zones will now automatically merge together if they overlap or are placed end-to-end:



The jump tool now features multiple subtools for specifying whether you want to prefer (when possible) placing winged air jumps, grounded jumps, or grounded jumps with a vertical height difference:



What else...? I'll preview this in the future, but I also added an initial set of editor sound effects, so you can hear a nice little [pop!] when you place something. There was also a ton of work done on minor things with level validation logic, as well as general UI polish (the way that grid snapping worked, etc.).

I still need to release this in the next patch, but I also finally implemented the ability for separate keybindings to work independently instead of being summed together, which means it'll work if you press a second attack key without releasing the first one -- this one should help players out with faster charts or if you're playing with a high speed mod.


As we approach the end of 2023 I want to thank anyone who cares about my game enough to keep reading these devlogs. I may or may not take a little break from updates over the holiday season, but either way I'll be continuing to chug along as always with slow progress toward the mountain of work to be done. Sometimes I start to get really self-conscious of all of the expectations people must have about the game -- like, ~18,000 Steam wishlists and ~700 Discord members, that's a little ridiculous for my little project, isn't it?

Cultivating an active community presence is really not a strong point of mine, but I'm optimistic that when the time comes the level editor will be able to inspire a lot of new content and excitement. We're still a long ways from that, though, so I'd best not count my chickens before they hatch...

Hey Shapers!

Things are shaping up pretty great! While we continue through Early Access and remain committed to our goals of working on Battle Shaper’s balance, optimization and features, we also want to make sure Steam players of all kinds get their hands on our game and contribute to our journey. With that being said, we’re so, so happy to share that we are OFFICIALLY verified for Steam Deck! For those who have already been playing on their SD, this is great news, and to all our new players who will be joining us, welcome! Happy to have you join our quest to make our FPS roguelite an incredible experience for all.

Best,

Metric Empire

Missed the latest episode of REDstreams because you spent the day saving presidents in distress? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered!

Travel around Night City with ease thanks to Night City Area Rapid Transport metro services. Stop worrying about the traffic and enjoy the view thanks to the 5 metro lines stopping on a total of 19 stations spread throughout the city. Service available only after V receives the text message from NCART.

This one is for all of the travelling audiophiles in our community! We’ve added a radioport that allows V to listen to the radio while exploring Night City on foot or riding the metro. It comes with adjustable volume and it will automatically turn off when game audio is crucial — for example during conversations.

We’ve introduced a number of improvements to boss fights, most notably to the one with Adam Smasher. It is now more iconic, as Smasher will better adapt to the tactics used by players, will be much more relentless and will use Sandevistan — much like he was in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

We’ve got a lot of new stuff for all motoring enthusiasts out there!

• New vehicles, including new motorbikes and a real classic: a cabriolet version of Porsche 911!
  
• Replayable car races, available after the race with Claire is finished.
  
• More immersive motorbike riding — including ability to throw knives while riding, leaning, doing wheelies and even flips!
  
• New car chases — if you mess with the gangs while doing gigs, they might hunt you down later!
  
• Newly opened highway.

We’ve moved all of the existing accessibility options and added a handful more to a new Accessibility tab in game settings. Would you like a simplified UI? Or maybe larger fonts? We’ve got you covered! You can read more about our accessibility features here:
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/49591/update-2-1-accessibility-features


Remember: those are just the highlights of the changes coming in the 2.1 Update on December 5th. For more, stay tuned for Patch Notes that will be shared closer to the release. You can also rewatch the stream for more details on the changes described above:
https://youtu.be/Th0_Q8_6UOU

Replays involving Aida (and the one in Demon and Mage that is the last scene was playing after the first one in replay...weird. Anyways, fixed.)

Instruments of Destruction takes place on small islands, mostly for technical reasons. I've been thinking about adding something to the islands since 2020, but didn't find the time to do it until now. That something is the animal you see/hear on basically any island or near most large bodies of water: Seagulls. Islands without birds seem lifeless, which they literally are (sorry plants).



Seagulls aren't the only new lifeform, as sea turtles are also now chilling on beaches. Both new ambient creatures are generated/placed procedurally when you start playing, so you won't see them in build mode. I may still tweak how they behave/react, but they are pretty interactive right now. There's a set number per island, and that can be adjusted in the map editor (along with a couple beach parameters relating to turtle locations). There can be up to 400 total creatures, though nothing comes close to that currently.

[At first the turtles were going to be crabs, and they were kinda working, but they were just too creepy. Turtles seem to fit much better.]

Though these creatures have no real impact on gameplay currently, that may change with some bonus missions in the future. And even without a true gameplay impact, the game/world feels a bit empty when I load up an island that doesn't have any spawning (especially seagulls).

In terms of things that will definitely make a gameplay impact, lets take a quick look at the full changelist:

Changed how the Kraken works in a few ways
- Damage to tentacles no longer matters, only hits to head
- 1 hit = enraged, 2 hits = game over
- Change a bunch of details and UI elements to fit new design
Added new turret entity and better support for destroyable objects
- Not currently used, but can be placed in Sandbox/Editor
Added new ambient animals (seagulls and turtles) with automatic placement
- Turtles spawn on the shore in groups
- Seagulls spawn on (mostly) edges of structures
- Control spawning count and beach limits in editor
Added a damage flash to parts and objects
Added Bonus Vehicles to the Vehicle select menu (old vehicles from previous missions)
Made a potential fix to logic part issues, particularly with toggle parts
- Also fixed issues with toggle parts and dropship, as seen in Mission 8
Fixed a few other minor issues

The big things to note:

The Kraken works a bit differently, with it now being a two-hits-to-die system. It moves a bit slower, the tentacles no longer matter for damage, and when it hits a structure with it's head, the structure falls down. The rage meter is replaced with a "danger level" that shows how close the Kraken is to something it can take damage from (either an explosive or large structure).

There's a new enemy turret and improvements to the entity destruction system to support it. This isn't used on any campaign missions yet, but it will be (you can place them in Sandbox mode to try them out). More turrets and other enemies will be coming soon. Now that I've got one working, the rest should be a bit easier/faster.

Bonus Vehicles resurrects a bunch of the older vehicles that were available previously. Note that this list will change in the future, so if you want any of the vehicles in particular, you may want to load-and-save them locally.

I also fixed an issue with Mission 8's vehicle (Dragonfly) that was caused by the helicopter drop. It may have also fixed the issue with toggle logic sometimes breaking, but that's a more difficult one for me to test/confirm.

UPCOMING WORK: ANOTHER SLIGHT DETOUR

Many people have asked for mouse controls over the past 1.5 years, and until recently I didn't see a good enough reason to worry about it. Controlling physics-based vehicles with a mouse is tricky, as vehicles have rotational inertia, and mouse controls are a weird kind of analog control (compared to a joystick/trigger). Plus other vehicle building games (like Besiege) don't have mouse controls.

But with the recent new campaign, the difference in controls between a gamepad and keyboard-only is more noticeable. Quite a few vehicles in the campaign, particularly those where you need to use/aim a weapon, control much better with a gamepad than keyboard. So I need to do something about that. I don't know exactly how things will work, but I'll add some kind of mouse support for controlling parts.

My initial thought is to let you assign the mouse to override four buttons (such as the arrow keys), and use an analog value for each axis that can go well past 1, but also centers itself over time. You'd have control over a couple speed values for each axis, and it'd be easy to invert the axis/speed. These values would be saved with the vehicles, and it'd be easy/quick to change. Perhaps there would be something for marking the Y-axis as auto-invert (so it could be inverted by player's options if desired).

But I'll have to try it out and see. Along with the mouse-control thing, the other major task for the next update is adding more turrets/enemies. I'll probably look more closely at adding more objective types as well. I'm anxious to get back to making/improving a bunch of missions/vehicles. There will likely be one more (significant) update before the end of the year with the enemies/mouse controls, but new missions are unlikely to arrive before early January.