New Features and Second Official Update Unveiled for Muffins On Stream
Today, we at BatteryCake are thrilled to unveil our second major update that will enhance the gaming experience in Muffins on Stream; our interactive engagement game live on Twitch.
Highlights:
AFK Mode for Streamers
New Level and Boss Fight
Community Links
AFK Mode
Today we introduce an new AFK System in Muffins on Stream, allowing streamers let their viewers compete while they themselves take a quick moment to themselves for a delicious pastry break. Let your fans face the challenges of the perilous world of Flourden while you rest and recharge.
We built this for streamers who wanted to inject a little work life balance into their routines, letting you step away from your computer for a moment while still keeping your audience engaged.
Check out the interface below:
Molly's Shop and Tragic Mistake:
Here we revisit the moments after Molly unleashes magical mayhem in the middle of her shop, animating her cauldron as a fierce foe, and creating a portal that is unleashing evil pastry forces into the world of Flourden!
Spilling the magical vial of Bakers Dust into her cauldron has caused it to come to life, and we see the first moments were the forces of Bear Claw try to make their way into the otherwise peaceful city. Unfortunately for Molly this will cause quite a bit of damage to her shop. Beware of falling pastries and other things falling off the shelves!
Marvin in Action:
The ancient baking hero and author of the Baking Legacy, Marvin the Magnificent, arrives just in time to Molly's shop to fight off the malevolent forces manifesting. All in a days work for a mythical legend!
Launching doughy magics from his legendary golden spatula, arriving in a puff of magical smoke, and wielding powerful defensive spells, Marvin has a deep skill in magic that he has mastered, wielding it in many battles over the ages. Will he prevail in this next battle?
Our Community
As always we invite you to join the community on the Muffins on Stream Discord server and to keep an eye out for more thrilling updates there, or say hello over on our other social communities. Your voice will help shape the content we are building.
With the new level and AFK feature we hope that this brings a little more joy to your streaming experience. We hope to continue to deliver updates and have more in store upcoming over the course of the next year.
The game is available on Steam for 4.99 USD, building out yet another piece of the world of Flourden and getting us one step closer to supporting Muffin Tour Legacy.
This update brings some highly requested improvements to the game, as well as some new features. Lots of new items have also been added to the Merchant Pool.
WHAT'S NEW
- NEW Curse Mode setup. When defeating the end boss of any level you now have the option to begin curse mode for greater rewards, or end the run and keep your current rewards. Seek out a new NPC named Hitch. She resides at a bonfire once the final stage boss is defeated.
- NEW Merchant Rerolls. Now you have 1 free re-roll per merchant instance. Any purchased item slot is not eligible for a reroll.
- NEW Merchant Item (Uncommon): Shadow Essence Vial - Critical strikes have a 10% chance to summon a shadow minion that temporarily fights alongside you.
- NEW Merchant Item (Common): Thunderstruck Gauntlets - Critical strikes have a 10% chance to burst lightning, chain attacking nearby enemies.
- NEW Merchant Item (Common): Ring of Serpents - Any attack has a 1% chance to spawn an AOE poison cloud
- NEW Merchant Item (Common): Celerity Veil - Receive a temporary 30% movement speed boost when collecting a healing shard or using a healing flask
- NEW Merchant Item (Common): Dreadroot Tonic - poison abilities inflict 20% more damage and last 20% longer
- NEW Merchant Item (Common): Voidshroud Scroll - Renders character immune to slow and stun. Boosts slow and stun ability duration by 30%
- Merchant menu will now be opened manually by pressing the action input when the player is in close vicinity to the merchant. This helps avoid unwanted activation of the menu. Input will be shown to the player when the merchant can be activated.
- Adjusted text descriptions for character classes on the character select menu. Descriptions have been simplified to help clarify the style/attributes of each class
- Ghosts of Behelit can no longer be feared or slowed and their materials will not change based on status effects
- Necromancer: Skeletons now target Soulus
- Necromancer: Auto Flail spawn in visual has been improved to account for proper rotation
- Bogatyr: Shieldwarden - shield will no longer be lost when accepting a blood sacrifice
- Bogatyr: Stunning Blow: added a slight delay to the stun/KB to match the animation frames
- Ranger: Fixed some collision issues with Burst Shot being affected by colliders it should not have been affected by
- Nightmare Cloak is now exempt from mystique vial rewarded items
- Sporelord Rotwood: healing shrooms will now be disabled on death
- Soulus: if Soulus is left alive for longer than 3 minutes, it will now enrage and seek to destroy the player
- Bug Fix: Fixed some disabling of environment assets on spawn checks
- Bug Fix: Toast notifications should now properly disable at all times. Modified the class structure to prevent unwanted disabling of logic during a notification
- Bug Fix: healing animation should not play while dead. added additional checks to prevent animation from playing
- Bug Fix: Shadow monk can no longer teleport to the left of Chancellor Autlaic's hand position in the boss fight
- Bug Fix: Shadow monk teleport will no longer get stuck if time scale changes during the sequence
- Bug Fix: ghosts of behelit were not disabling properly due to incorrect animation reference. fixed
- Bug Fix: Usvit Castle props/destructible collision issues with some props such as tables/chairs not properly destroying
- Bug Fix: Rain Particle Droplet FX is now properly disabled when loading back to Castle Usvit halls from the Ebon King's arena
- Bug Fix: Sporelord Rotwood will no longer get stuck in his summon animation
- Nibbler: the rat's deactivation timer will no longer count down while he's stunned, and he will only disable when running off screen
- Disabled treasure chest icon when loading into a boss arena if the treasure hunt is active
- Mystique Vial no longer rewarded from Challenge Event. It's now only available to purchase via the shop
- Level End Screen: Bonus Gold only displayed if a bonus has been earned from entering Curse Mode
- Boosted gold rewards for surviving curses
- Updated Game HUD and menus for displaying gold count
- Updated Game Engine
COMING SOON
We are working on a new event for Linden Forest, as well as some secrets. These will likely be going live in the next update.
Our primary focus is building the Pyromancer class. We are planning to launch him in the game next month, which will transition KT to version 0.8.
As always, we welcome and appreciate feedback. If anyone has any suggestions for improvements, additions, or bug fixes, please don't hesitate to share with us.
Thank you for your support and following along as we continue development. Lots more to come!
Last week we touched upon the economy in Cities: Skylines II, how it works now, and how it might be subject to change based on your feedback. This time around we’ll answer some of your questions about the citizens, education, and public transport.
Could you talk about how citizens are simulated in the game? You have noticed that sometimes citizens don’t behave the way you might expect. Sometimes citizens vanish or they might stay at home for a day. So let’s talk about when that can happen and why. A citizen can despawn in some circumstances: for example, when there is a dead-lock with other agents, such as an overly long queue of cars, or there is no reasonable path to their destination. There is still the rule that a citizen cannot teleport to their destination. If they despawn, they teleport to their previous destination so they can’t just skip bad traffic by teleporting. Some of you have also noticed that when the city grows bigger there is a probability for whether or not an agent will travel to work or school. This is intended, and citizens become a bit more passive to reduce traffic, but there is no limit to the number of moving agents. This choice was made to keep traffic manageable because reducing private car ownership didn't help as city centers were filled with pedestrians. Performance gain from the reduced pathfind load was just an extra benefit.
How do citizens choose which products to buy? When a citizen goes shopping for their household, the game picks the type of goods through a weighted random check. Products that citizens should need more of or more often have a heavier weight and are roughly based on real-world consumption statistics. Additionally, each age group has certain products they “prefer” which affects the weighted check. As an example, citizens are more likely to purchase food over media, and a household of seniors is even less interested in media than the other age groups. Once the products have been purchased, they’re added to the household’s resources and eventually consumed.
How did you balance the education system? The citizen Education system closely follows the same system we had in the original Cities: Skylines. When a citizen is educated, they will get a job with a better salary which gives them more opportunities to live in different places. While we have made some improvements to it to encourage more High School students, the Education system still needs some balancing, as we feel it’s currently not working as well as it could. For example, the number of Elementary Schools needed in the city is quite huge because the percentage of the population that goes to Elementary School is big.
The children don't have a choice between studying and working so that also raises the number of students compared to other education levels, where a portion of the eligible students will choose to work instead. The Elementary School’s student capacity has been balanced around how many students the building could reasonably hold, and while it might improve the situation, a small school building with 1000 students is quite unrealistic. Currently, we are checking the factors that need to be considered to balance this issue. This includes, for example, how long it takes to graduate from different types of schools. Additionally, each school type has its own Graduation check curve that determines the probability of graduating. Elementary School has the highest probability and University has the lowest probability.
Is there a system to “unbunch” public transportation vehicles? Public transportation vehicles can get “bunched up” due to traffic or most often when a new line is created and the vehicles spawn. We have a system that spreads out the vehicles on a singular line by extending stopping times when necessary. This helps the vehicles to move at regular intervals, so your citizens can get where they need to go and you don’t have all buses arriving in one long line, but it may take a little while for vehicles to spread out properly on a brand new line. We have received reports of public transportation vehicles getting stuck for too long at a stop and we are investigating what are the reasons behind this.
Feel free to send more questions our way and we’ll be answering them in future Words of the Week!
The mayor lost the keys to his safe. He asked you to find the keys and open the safe. During this event, at regular levels and in Challenge mode, you can collect Green Keys. If you collect the required number of Keys within the allotted time, you'll get a big reward; if you don't manage it in time, you'll get a consolation prize.
The time of the event is based on the time on your PC, and the duration may vary slightly from the duration of this announcement.
Hey friends! I made another quick update to fix issues. Sorry for the inconveniences!
Changelog - 2.0.4 Fixed an issue that caused the sex simulator to not work properly sometimes Fixed an issue that caused the sex simulator to spawn custom enemies when it didn’t need to do so Fixed an issue with a sex position calling the wrong animation Fixed an issue in the ending dialogue displaying a wrong name Fixed an issue with the background on the Dark Road stage Fixed an issue with the talent “Archon Mode” not being able to be learned Fixed an issue that causes the villain creator to have no music Added Area 7 bundles. They unlock after completing the DLC content Added a failsafe to prevent the character mixup issue
It's been about a week since the first version of Having a HARD Time was released on Steam. And it has been truly amazing to see so many new players enjoy my game. I have seen a lot of love and feedback for the game so far, which only inspires me to create even more and better content going forward.
I started this whole journey around a year and a half ago, at which point I could not possibly imagine that my game would ever end up on Steam, yet here we are ^^. For those that don't know me yet, I go by Quadruple-Q and I am developing Having a HARD Time on my own. This is my very first game, and I have no prior experience in game development, so this has been an incredible learning experience for me. You can probably notice the improvement in quality going from episode 1 all the way to episode 3 and I hope to continue this upward trend.
Currently I am hard at work on Episode 4, though obviously development is still in its infancy. So, I must ask for your patience while I make sure that the episode ends up being an incredible experience. I will of course keep you guys up to date on the progress.
Those of you that know me, know that I don't like to spoil a lot about future content, and much rather keep most of it as a surprise. So, I won't be showing a lot of future content, but please trust that I am doing my best to make Episode 4 an unforgettable experience. One thing I will say is that we will be learning a lot more about a certain cute but mysterious blonde.
In the meantime, thank you so much for playing my game! If you enjoyed the game and want to support me some more, consider leaving a review for the game. It helps more than you can imagine, especially for a first-time developer. Thank you!
For a long time, we have had two important design goals:
To place players in a richer and more varied strategic environment, with lots of permutations to take into account and counter.
And to provide you all with more means to solve strategy problems arising from more factors present on the battlefield
The most recent 0.7.42 update is also a product of these goals. Over the past three weeks, we collected a lot of data and feedback, and after analyzing it, we decided to introduce some balance changes, as well as new features related to the free unit card system in the upcoming 0.7.45 update. Let’s get into what you can expect from the 0.7.45 update:
Update Launch Time:
This update will be carried out at 6:00 am on February 26th, 2024, UTC. At that time, the server will undergo update maintenance for about 120 minutes.
New Features:
There is now an option to auto-save replays in the settings.
There is now an option to set players' HP when practicing with bots.
There is now an option to turn off free unit cards in custom lobbies.
There is now an option to set players' HP in custom lobbies.
New Equipment:
Mustang Production Line: [Giant Units Only] Produces 4 Mustangs every 11 seconds.
Steel Ball Production Line: [Giant Units Only] Produces 2 Steel Balls every 16 seconds.
Balance Adjustments:
When calculating the score after the battle, the units controlled by hackers will only deal a quarter of the original damage to the enemy player's HP.
The single-round budget for free unit cards after 5 rounds has been reduced:
We will now of course continue to monitor how the game performs after the next patch and adjust again if more balance updates are needed.
About how we communicate:
Finally, we also want to acknowledge that we should have done a better job communicating a major update like 0.7.42 to you. In the future, we’ll give you a proper heads-up when rolling out an update like that. We’re also exploring some additional options on how to better involve our players in our early access period. We can’t say too much now, but be on the lookout for more news soon!
