A small PC update on April 5th brings quality of life and upscaling improvements. Stay tuned for more info on HDR for PC and FSR 3 updates for all platforms coming soon.
Key Fixes:
On PC, we’ve made improvements to temporal upscaling and reduced instances of ghosting
On PC, we’ve made a small quality of life adjustment to the mouse sensitivity and mouse smoothing default settings based on player feedback
The mouse sensitivity value will default to 0.25 instead of 0.5
Bad menus get really annoying really quickly. So - prompted by one particularly irate customer - I have tried to make dealing with the War and Composer in conjunction with the Workbench a lot more pleasant. Let me know what you think.
You could be the next to make VA better! Send feedback!
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Update Patch 177-181 Build 20240405
- War and Composer menus no longer require you to exit out of the selected mission/fleet to transition to a different screen. ( Way less menu nav to get places and do things ) - Fleet ships can now be easily updated to your latest design with the "Update Craftprints" button. - The Block Palette is now organised hull and utility blocks alphabetically. Weapons and Controls are still grouped according to family. - New armour block. "Spear Armour" - Armour Plate renamed to Adapter Armour.
Bug Fixes - Fixed an oversight with the way local ships are stored, changing your player name will no longer cause saving a ship to not override a previously existant ship with the same name but made with a different player name. - Misc fixes
Welcome to Love Exalt 8372, update 0.5.0: the end of act one.
We went completely bananas for this update!! With the death of [character] at the end of Scene 4, the gang was left in limbo… but immediately, upon the start of Scene 5, they launch an investigation into [character]’s death. Is there really a killer hiding among them? If there is… who killed [character]?! And WHY?
Please take good comfort and enjoyment in this luxurious swath of free content!! Now that the game is almost certainly double digit hours of playtime, we plan to raise the price to $10 or so. For now, though, buy it up at the $5 price while you can!!
Act 1 Scene 5: Deductive Frenzy
Ended Act 1 with a massive, sprawling finale scene– 5,826 lines long, more than double the length of Act 1 Scene 4
New interlude with three mini-scenes
12 new lore bits
New 3D Game Mode
Massive new way to experience the story, with a new game mechanic tied directly to character dialogue!!
IKIKIKIKIKI
Audio
8 general story sound effects
7 new sound effects and three sfx sets for the new game mode
21 new music tracks!!! Thank you very much Leonovsky, Tay, and Johnie
Animations
New story animation (about two thirds into the new scene)
New “Clue Get!” animation
Tons of new assets and animations for the new game mode
Art
4 new Chef & Healer duo sprites, plus a ton of edits, found at the end of the new scene
4 new CGs
9 new backgrounds
Added sprites for Chef’s mom, Seer (she appears in Act 1 Interlude 1)
Added a new sprite for Tank, Guardian, and the Officiary
Added 5 sprites for Imp
Added 9 sprites for Chef
Added 12 sprites for Healer
Alternate spriteset for Healer
Alternate spriteset for Mimi
Alternate spriteset for Dancer
Alternate spriteset for Pet
Most of these are edits of existing sprites, but there are lots of totally new ones too!
New Rainbow Mage badge, and two badge edits
Minor Changes
New secret achievement in the Inventory!
Added some more music to Scene 1, Scene 2, and Scene 3
Added Discord and Steam rich presence: shows which chapter you are reading, progress in some minigames, and how many badges you dropped in the main menu
Added the ability to return to your place in the story if you accidentally open the Scene Select menu, added save support for this too
Refactored save files without breaking old saves!
Doubled the speed of emotional effects (flowers, spirals, etc)
Fishing minigame has been balanced to be a bit more forgiving, you will now lose progress 30% slower
Updated Godot and GodotSteam to 4.2.1
Softened the extremely loud and obnoxious slider sound effect in the settings menu
Increased the size and alignment of the nameplate to fit some new, longer names
Made the Veil labyrynth lenght random
Adjusted item drops to be more frequent
Added a teleport that puts you directly at the three-way in A1S1 (thanks Askareth for noticing this)
Fixes
Fixed a golf minigame bug where the ball could fly through the wall (thanks @kemonopriestess on Discord! <3)
Fixed some missing/stray pixels on Healer and Imp portraits
Nerfed Guardian’s booba
Fixed extra finger on one of Guardian’s sprites
Fixed many small text errors (missing X’s in Deadghost’s dialogue, missing character name highlights, mentions of hands instead of paws)
More Play style Modes! To access these new mode utilize the Advance Options in the New Game setup. This is a smaller update, but one that was requested. We hope community things like this show that we are listening. Thank you for all of the feedback, testing, and bug reports.
Updates
Play style Modes - Wear & Tear Mode - Enables Ships taking hull damage over time - Disaster Mode - Minimum chance for a disaster to happen has been increased a small amount - Pacifist Mode is now exposed - be kind if you disable this mode
Ship repair is now enabled
Balance
Star Explorer V2 has been moved to later game and given a Stardrive
Let me open this first of (ideally) many logs by saying thanks for reading!
First up, what stage of development is Ghoul Fort at? As it stands right now, Ghoul Fort is fairly feature complete, with all (demo) character dialogue written, and all (demo) level dialogue written. What does that really mean? I want flexibility to add more features in the future. However, I feel that right now Ghoul Fort is in stage where people can play it and get a feel for what I'm making.
I uploaded the first proper build and I was curious to see how Ghoul Fort felt on the Steam Deck. To my surprise, it played pretty well. Only two flaws significant flaws, firstly that some GUI text was far too small, and secondly, the screen scrolling felt too fast. Two issues that can be somewhat easily resolved. Overall, Ghoul Fort played far better than I figured it would.
So, naturally I set out to make it play even better. I'm unsure if we can reach the vaunted "Verified" state for Steam Deck compatibility, but there's no harm in trying.
Next up on the docket! Now, the next SteamFest starts in June, and that's when the public demo for Ghoul Fort is planned to go live. Prior to that, I have a small batch of playtesters who will play and test the demo build, and write back up with their plans. If you're interested to join this group, hit me up on Twitter (@AgarthaTrapdoor) or Discord(same thing).
That's all for now, thank again for reading, and stay peeled for... BIG REVEALS?!
