Mar 1

Goo Gladiators - Sfs Studios

Another goo update just went out. This update has tons of balance changes and bug fixes and even a few cool new features. Lets get right into it.

Balance changes

The area has been reset as many goos have been buffed or reworked. Firstly heres some nerdy stats brought to you by nerdy birdy

All Goos last Arena (expect intermediate goos like seed, tadpole & burning) Got some wins in the arena!
Here are the one who had the most luck:

Top 6:

(1) Flirx
(2) Meow
(3) Snaim
(4) Swampy
(5 -T) Nerdy Birdy
(5 -T) Frumptun

With all the recent buffs to fire goos in recent updates it seems to have paid off for the Flirx as it had the most luck in the arena with the highest win rate of all goos!

Most of the rest of the goos were pretty close in the middle of the pack, however there were some goos who fizzled out at the bottom!

Bottom 6:

(0) Cha-boom
(1) Chomper
(2) Yolki
(3) Mooshy
(4) Bubble
(5) Jack
(6) Kite

Cha-boom even with its recent re-works only won in the arena ONCE since the last balance update (with around 15k matches happening since then, that's not a good look) We decided to give these goos a little bit of love in this update.

Bubble and Mooshy are both goos that come into play in the mid - late game. They used to be painfully slow at 3 speed so upping their speed to 4 and giving them a bit more attack and health should help them be able to catchup with some of the other goos at that stage of the game! As well Mooshy's Mushroom summons will be a little faster and have a little more attack!

Kite, Chomper, Yolki and Jacks all had buffs to their abilities buffed as their stats are not bad. Kite now will also give +5 ATK to Flying goos as well as Electrik goos after being hit. Jacks as well now gives 13 HP to fresh summons instead of the 10 it did before! (This will also help Mooshy be more viable when they are combined) Lastly Chomper and Yolki's abilities got better giving slightly more HP for both of their abilities.

And for the big bomb in the room, Cha-boom got a major buff and now starts with 40 HP (up from 30) , 20 ATK (up from 16) and also now starts with 1 Defense! So it will now have an easier time staying alive long enough to go off in later rounds!

Ease of Use updates!

We added a ton of community suggested 'ease of use' improvements to the game this update! You can now see the type and starting stats of goos in the Goopendium, as well we now have a special section in the item list for Items got from goos (bubble, sap, ect)

As well we have made it easier to join friend's private matches! Adding a 'join game' button below them if you have them on your friends list.

Ever been in a match and forgetting how many wins or losses you have at that point? Worry no more! as we now show your current run stats on the battle menu as well.

Lastly we have added a Global replays to the replays menu! It will show the most recent Arena wins and the Teams they have won with, Go here to gloat or try to get some ideas from Teams that are winning in the arena!

Final Thoughts and new update

The next update is going to be the biggest update in the history of the game! We will have over 20 new goos, 4 new goo types a new game mode and TONS of new content :) Thank you guys so much for the support that you have shown Goo Gladiators the past Year and a half the love and support you have shown these creatures means the world to me <3 I'll leave you with a sneak peek at someone who you will be seeing a lot of soon...

Full(ish) patch notes

1.14

Added Global Wins view
Added goo type and starting stats to the Goopendium
Added special Items to item list in Goopendium
Added join friends button to group play menu
Added current run wins/losses in the top left in battle menu
Update goo Balance
Fix some small typos across the game
Fixed bug where buying DLC pass wouldn't show you had all goos right away
Fix some UI positioning that was off

Balance update

Cha-boom

ATK 16 -> 20
HP 30 -> 40
DEF 0 -> 1

Mooshy

Speed 3 -> 4
ATK 7 -> 10

Mooshy Summon

Speed 2 -> 3
ATK 4 -> 5

Bubble

Speed 3 -> 4
ATK 14 -> 18
HP 16 -> 18

Yolkie

Ability Update: Gives +4HP (was +3) to goos behind each round
ATK 2 -> 3
HP 17 -> 20

Jacks

Ability Update: Gives +13HP (was +10) to all summoned goos upon summon
ATK 3 -> 7
HP 6 -> 7

Kite

Ability Update: +5 ATK to Electrik and Flying goos when hit (was just Electrik before)
ATK 2 -> 5
DEF 2 -> 5

Chomper

Ability Update: +7 HP when KOing another goo (was +5)
Speed 5 -> 6
ATK 9 -> 10
Speed 5 -> 6

Swampy

ATK 5 -> 8
HP 5 -> 8
DEF 5 -> 0
Speed 2 -> 1

Mar 1

Level Update 1

Endure or Perish - shaneorchard4291991

Greetings, gamers. We have some exciting news for you. The latest feature update for Endure or Perish is now available after a rigorous three-week development period. We appreciate your patience and support during this time, and we are sure that you will love the result of our hard work. The update brings many improvements and new content to the game, so don't miss it.

Throughout the last few weeks of development, we have implemented various enhancements to enhance the quality of life. However, we would like to center this announcement on the key highlight of the update, which is the upgraded and brand new map. For those players who have been actively engaged in the game and are not yet prepared to embark on a new map, there is no need to feel discouraged. Your existing world will continue to function, albeit with the removal of certain features like enemy waves and aggressive animal mobs. Nevertheless, fundamental activities such as construction, crafting, inventory management, and the overall map structure will persist and remain fully accessible for gameplay.

To start this announcement properly we'll focus first on the biggest most noticeable change a brand-new map. This update boasts a brand new map. There are certain things players will notice on loading a new game.

The new map is about twice as big as the original map providing more ground to explore and more options for base building
There are more POI's (Points of Interest) to explore
- This was a common request for the original map, there weren't that many places to explore and what places there were to explore the POI's were quite small.
- There are now 4 POI's visible on the main map
- There are also 5 hidden aircraft crashes scattered around the map that has lootable chests scattered about the crash. Some are fairly easy to find others will be hidden
The map also has new biomes
1. A mountain Biome which is visible on the main map in the middle of the map. This is where all the ore producing nodes will spawn
2. The map also has a large swamp biome on the bottom right of the main map as well as smaller swamps scattered around the map. This is where all the clay and sand producing notes will be spawn

In addition to the new map we also made other improvements and additions to the game as well.

[AI]
We made some improvements to both the enemy/hostile animal AI tracking, as well as how peaceful animals spawn

Improved Player Tracking
- In the old map the AI was a lot easier to elude
- The improved AI makes eluding the AI much more difficult adding another layer of challenge and strategy to the game especially when exploring POI's where enemy's tend to congratulate.
Improved Peaceful Animal Spawning
- The Peaceful animal spawning system is now more uniform and balanced

[Resource Gathering]
We also made some improvements and changes to how resources spawn.

We increased the distance that food plants such as cucumbers, corn, and watermelon plants spawn in relation to the player.
- Players will now have to plan trips to gather these resources when they begin to run low.
we also increased the distance that sticks and stones will naturally spawn in relation to the player.
- Meaning that the player will need to employ some strategy while gathering these early game resources
- Due to the distance being increased with the stones and sticks we doubled how many sticks and stones will spawn as well.

[Maps and Navigation]
We also made some changes and improvement to the minimap as well as the main map

Due to a new level being released we created a new main map that matches the terain and landscape of the new level.
We also introduced a new minimap.
- The new minimap will no longer display enemy markers but a sharp eye on the map will reveal not just enemies approaching but will also show animals, as well as hidden items that can't be seen from the ground.
Location marks will also now appear on the main map.

[Inventory]
We also fixed a few bugs that were found in the inventory during the testing phase of this update. We also added a way for players to drop items from the hot bar. Before players would need to drag the item from the hot bar into their inventory then drag and drop the item to the ground.

[Player stats]

We added fall damage to the player
players will now need to be cautious when jumping off of items and places to avoid injury.

[Build System]
We also added a couple of new items to the game that players can build to enhance game play.

Added a dead fall trap to provide an alternate source of meat.
(NOTE: While the trap is free to reset, a future update will see a cost associated with resetting the trap)
We also added a new half wall to the game with its associated upgrades
We also added a new roof corner piece to provide more options for roof layout and pattern

[Crafting System]

Fixed a bug in the sawmill that prevented the mill from working once its inventory had either filled up or been emptied.
Also increased the size of the sawmill inventory

[Tutorial System]
This update includes a new in game tutorial along with an option in the tutorial menu of the pause menu to disable the tutorial.

[Player Controls]

Fixed a bug in which items that can be consumed such as food, when the entire stack is moved, one item is consumed during the movement of the stack.
Changed the use item key from [CTRL] to [Shift]
Updated the instructions in the player inventory

[UI]

Improved the UI that gives players info on builds such as walls, foundations, ect
Before the builds are complete the UI will display the resources and hammer required to complete the build and quantity required.

We again want to express our appreciation to our fans and am grateful for your support. While it did take a while to get this update out, we have many more ideas and updates that we are eager to work and push out to you guys, so expect to see many more additions to the game.

To see this update in action purchase the game and play it now!!!

Mar 1

Lumber mill props! v5.12

Rolling Line - Franks

This update adds a ton of lumber mill themed props, like new modular buildings, moving log chain, smoke stacks, log piles, and more!

You can find all of these new props in the "buildings -> Mill (1 & 2)" drawers:

Log chain

One of the new moving parts of a lumber mill, the log chain! This is used to pull logs from the log pond into the inside of the mill. There are a few different sizes and style variants.

Green chain

The other new moving part for a lumber mill is the green chain, this is a conveyor which takes the freshly cut planks out of the mill so they can be sorted into sizes.

Log piles

Lots of new log props! Including individual logs and big log stacks:

Also various drying stacks of planks:

Smoke stacks

A new set of modular smoke stack props, as well as some roof details:

Sawdust burner

Reeds

Modular rail sheds/mill buildings

The largest part of this update is a set of new modular buildings! These can be used for rail sheds (witch openable doors) or any building made with planks:

Flat tables (water)

A very simple feature that's incredibly useful, there is now a full set of tables that have no sides, so they are just a flat surface. These are excellent for making water effects:

Other features

Some props (like the log chain and openable doors) now have an arrow visible when placing them on the ground, to help make it clear which way they are facing:

There are also a few bug fixes:

level crossings no longer trigger from cars when they are set to "automatic" mode
the "packaged mods" and "packaged assets" options are now visible when uploading a main menu map scene to the Steam Workshop (these were missing before)
Fixed bugs with turntables being included in grouped track. A turntable can no longer be the first item in a group (it can still be included in a group, it just cant be the first piece of track selected)

You're probably wondering why the sudden lumber mill theme?
That's because it's part of the next major map release I'm working on, the "Sierra Logging" expansion!
This map is set in California during the historic logging boom in the Sierra mountains. Specifically the towns of Tuolumne, Jamestown, and the West Side Lumber Company!
There will be lots more info released about this map in the future, but it will involve a ton of new props being added into the game (just like these ones).
I'll be releasing props like these in updates as they are made, instead of waiting till the whole map is finished, since this will be a big project.

These props especially were all made to re-create the Tuolumne mill:

Mar 1

[Archive] Infested, Pestilent and... #2

REMORE: INFESTED KINGDOM - REMORE

Hello, fellow Survivors.

Last week, we talked about our original intentions for the monsters at the core of our game, and how the concept of "Plague-ridden Corpses" came about from a narrative and art perspective.

However, as you'll see in the current Early Access version, the narrative and art concepts for these Infested have once again undergone major changes, and today we're going to show you how and why.

Third Setting: The Journey of a Knight who Vowed to Reclaim a “Holy Relic”

I mentioned earlier that we wanted to give the characters a sense of purpose, and that this led us to the idea of a pilgrim's journey to the Holy Land.

The idea of traveling to a specific location in an apocalyptic situation is a trope that's been borrowed heavily from zombie media, most notably Death Road to Canada, and we thought that if we could create a sort of "Medieval Road Movie" type of setting, we could create a pretty unique narrative experience.

After making the initial stages of that version, we also worked on a rough trailer to show at exhibitions and such. At that time, the title of our game was "Before the Dawn".

However, as we started to flesh it out, we started to get feedback that the experience was a little more bland than we hoped.

We had a long discussion about why it wasn't feeling as emotionally engaging as we initially thought and came to the conclusion that unlike real-time survival games, the stage-based, turn-based tactical genre expects more meaningful objectives to be presented "on every stage".

Whereas in survival games, where things keep changing over time even if you remain still, the environment itself keeps you on your toes without the need for a strong “scripted” crisis.
In turn-based tactics, where you experience each stage in isolation, the experience becomes more repetitive when you feel like, “The enemies change over the course of three stages, but all I'm doing is the same thing: gathering supplies and staying alive.”

To create a little more intrigue in the characters' journey, we came up with the idea of giving them an intermediate goal to collect something a little more “special” along the way to the final ending.

In keeping with the “Medieval” and “Holy Land” themes, we decided to create a “Holy Relic” that would be the only thing in the game with “Supernatural” powers.

At this point, we were implementing the Choice system for expressing humanity that we shared in the previous archive, so we needed a “Protagonist character" who would be the "Agent of Choice".

So naturally, the whole narrative went from being a “road movie of ordinary medieval people” to a “journey of a knight sworn to recover a holy relic.” We wanted to tell the story of a knight in an apocalyptic situation who has to retrieve a holy relic, meeting various companions and facing various dilemmas along the way.

The knight would later become the inspiration for the main character "Willam" in the Early Access version.

Fourth Setting: Remore Struggles Against a “Medieval Unknown Species”

We've talked about this in past Archive posts, as we realized that the cost of implementing an options system was much higher than expected and decided to focus on tactics.

This decision naturally had a huge impact on the narrative foundation. Because whereas in previous versions, "Combat" was a sort of narrative "Means of Survival" and secondary to the overall gameplay experience, in this fourth version it is now the core of the game.

Previously, only the "Protagonist" had a "Combat-specific" class called "Knight" to serve the narrative goal of the vow and to give them more differentiated combat abilities, while other characters were “Generic Medievalists" such as "Monk/Nun," but in the new direction, each class needed to have unique combat abilities...

This led to a design concept for the starting classes that would give the traditional Knight a One-handed weapon specialization with a Shield, the Outsider a powerful damage dealer with a Two-handed weapon, and the Militia a support attack role who used a Spear or Bow.

There was also a need to make the end goal of the game more “Active.” This was because the previous version was a kind of "Storytelling Survival Game" that used turn-based tactics, but the new direction was focused on "Combat" and "Killing Enemies.”

In fact, it wasn't as easy as we thought it would be to come up with a "clean, satisfying ending that the player can choose," while still maintaining the feel of a "Zombie Movie", because we felt that in a world where most people have already been turned into zombies, it doesn't feel natural to have the world go back to normal because you did something, unless there's some sort of convincing setup.

So, it seems that in a lot of zombie-centric narratives, the "Main Antagonists" of the story turn out to be the humans themselves. Whether it's a leader of a group of survivors who takes advantage of an apocalyptic situation to oppress people, or a villain who unleashes his inner psycho he's been hiding when times were good, it's often a "specific group of humans" that drives the story.

The Cultist group we revealed in Early Access was designed to be just that: a group that was "discriminated against by the people of Remore and now taking advantage of the situation for a chance at revenge," with evidence of their brutal "Rituals" to create a sense of crisis and pose a threat to the player base...

However, setting the Cultists as the "Arch-enemy" of the entire game felt out of place - they were good enough as "Supporting Villains" to add variety to the overall experience, but if they were going to be the end goal of the game, they needed to have some sort of appeal or intensity to them.

We believe that creating compelling villains is just as difficult as creating compelling protagonists, if not more so, and we were concerned the cost of narrative expression needed to achieve what we had in mind would be too much, given our "Tactics-focused" direction.

The idea was, "Since this is a game where the creatures are the primary enemies, why not create a new creature setting that doesn't necessarily have to be tied to the zombie sensibility, but could be big enough to be the final boss?"

It doesn't make sense for monsters to have their own intelligence or goals when they're still "Zombies," so a story that says, "You defeated the final boss zombie, and the world went back to normal" feels awkward and forced.

But if there is a separate species of monsters that are not “Zombies” but somethings capable of a kind of “Volition,” and they are “Turning” the humans of Remore into monsters, then it seemed that it would naturally lead to the conclusion that by killing them, we could at least prevent the apocalypse from getting any worse.

However, we felt that it would be good to have an entity that was “Different from Humans” and felt threatening, that couldn't communicate directly with humans, but could still have its own “Rules of Engagement,” so we came up with the idea of an “Insect” concept, an unknown species, focusing on the swarming behavior of ants/bees/etc. We jokingly and half-seriously said, "This is going to be like medieval XCOM...".

If you've been paying close attention to the dialog following Alldris' rescue in the monastery, you'll recall that he mentions something called "Land Eaters" after fleeing the capital city of Broken Rock. These are the ones that must be "Finally Defeated," an insect-like unknown species.

This unknown species emerged through a "Tear" in the sky - the one that "suddenly opened up one day," as the intro suggests - to make the land of Remore habitable for themselves, and they would capture the Remore people and turn them into "Cocoons”. The idea was that these cocoons would hatch and become "Infested" - insect-human fusions like the Knawer, Blister and Skulker.

To express this “Insect-human Fusion” concept, a sort of upper-layer skin texture was adopted, and a design adopted that would maintain the overall human “Body Shape” but express insect features, mainly in the jaw area.

This is how the narrative and art of the "Infested" you see in the Early Access version came to be.

However, as it turned out, this direction would have its own problems! So, along with the current big gameplay changes the narrative concept itself is undergoing its own transformation!

We’ll explain the next step of the concept change in a future post but next week, we’d like to give a little insight into our narrative representation of the Middle Ages, since we have yet to set the stage for our current keywords "Medieval" and "Monsters".

Thank you for sticking with us, and a special big thank you to those of you who commented on our last post for being so supportive!

We feel it is imperative to share our progress and intention in this way as we're about to make some big changes after a long period of no live updates since releasing the game in Early Access, but seeing the players' reactions is very motivating (Because we feel ultimately that these changes are for the benefit of the player!) :)

We'll be posting tirelessly until we can implement and showcase this new direction!

As always, thank you so much!
REMORE