Apr 12, 2024

Peglin - Luke

v0.9.54 Patch Notes

New Content

[New Cruciball Level] Cruciball 16 - Start with a Horriball. A new big -1/-2 orb that cannot be removed from your deck.
[New Forest Boss] Betsy the Leshy - The third and final boss in the forest. Betsy effects the pegboard with a unique mechanic that will make you think hard about where to fire your orbs!
Run Summaries - The game now displays more interesting stats on finishing a run. This is laying the groundwork for us to do more with this in the future. Take screenshots and show your friends how awesome (or terrible) your run was!
Seeding - Runs are now seeded. You can share seeds with people, and do custom runs with specific seeds! You can paste seeds into the input UI with Ctrl+V on PC (seeds are written using numbers 1-9).
New Forest Map Visuals - A visual overhaul of the Forest map, and some updates to the other maps too.
New Item Indicator - An exclamation mark icon will now show up on orbs and relics you haven’t unlocked yet.
Shop Orbs Price Reduction - Haglin has reduced the prices of orbs in their shop!
New Cursor - The game now has a cute custom cursor! It should help you know when you’re hovering over an enemy or about to fire your orb. There is also an option to turn it off if you prefer.
[New Achievement] New Leshy on Life - Defeat Betsy the Leshy.
[New Achievement] In a Prickle - Get three Bramballs stuck in the Leshy's vines at the same time.
[New Achievement] Eggstravaganza - Win a run with two eggs in your satchel.
[New Balladin Class Relic] Balladroit Rework - Start each battle with Ballwark equal to the number of orbs in your deck, or 2 x (your orb's largest base damage), whichever is higher. We hope this opens the floor up for more variety of synergies and builds for Balladin.
[New Common Relic] Added Advantarge - Whenever an effect causes you to gain Muscircle, gain 2 Ballwark.
[New Common Relic] Training Tabard - For every 10 Ballwark you gain, gain 1 Muscircle.
[New Common Relic] Shield Basher - Makes shielded pegs able to be activated.
[New Common Relic] Debuff Distractor - Gain 1 Ballusion for every stack of negative status effect you apply to an enemy.
[New Rare Relic] Spinsepsion - Enemy Spinfection will increase each turn instead of decreasing.
[New Secret Relic] Aliensrock - ???
[New Secret Relic] Miniboss Meetup - ???

Balance Changes

Cruciball 12 now only reduces regular bomb damage by 10 instead of 15.
Cruciball 14 now only reduces Max HP by 15% instead of 20%.
Knight Shields have been nerfed. They are no longer immune to transpherency, take 30 damage when one of their shield pegs is destroyed, and shield health has been reduced on Cruciball 6+.
Transpherency now works on 10% increments.
Haglin's Hat Changed to Common.
Grubby Gloves Spinfection reduced from 2 to 1.
Betsy's Hedge base damage bonus has been increased to +2 for each crit peg on the board.
Thesaurosus (Dragon Boss) health increased by 20%.
The slime boss’s board now has extra slime pegs at the bottom of it. The boss’s health has increased a little to balance this, but the fight should be easier overall.
Avogadro (Mole Boss) and plant minions' health has been increased. This should hopefully make all 3 forest bosses more similar in difficulty.
Ballestra has been reworked! It now gives more Muscircle at higher levels and pierces all enemies, but does less damage and still gives all enemies 1 Muscircle. It has also been removed from Roundrel’s orb pool.
Best Orbfence has been majorly buffed. It now grants much more damage per Ballwark and has higher stats.
Forbification and Chopping Ballock now get buffed by shield pegs that are upgraded.
Orbrasion’s Muscircle gain increased, self-damage increased at level 1 but decreased at lvl 3.
Rubborb now gets bouncier at each higher level. The amount of bounciness at level 2 is equal to its old level of bounciness.
Critiball and Replenishorb are no longer attracted to the crit and refresh pegs they cannot activate when you have Electropegnet.
Kobanorb damage increased.
Evasive Maneuvorb Damage and ballusion gain buffed.
Leaf the Rest for Later now refreshes 8% of the board with a minimum of 5 pegs, rather than just a flat 5 pegs. Should still be a downside if you have no refresh synergy, but shouldn’t kneecap you completely if you don’t have synergy for it.
Cookie healing has been nerfed to 1 per Refresh instead of 2.
Recombombulator no longer reduces bomb damage.
Essential Oil Ballwark gain increased to 2.

Bugfixes and Small Changes

Fixed a bug where you could skip the last enemy in a fight by spamming fire.
Fixed a bug where Replenishorb could convert a refresh peg into a temporary refresh.
Fixed a bunch of bugs related to the Resistance Knight miniboss’s pegboard.
Fixed bug where slime added by Subtraction Reaction wasn't triggering A Good Slime.
Fixed Gamblin scenario no longer appearing.
Fixed Haglin’s Hat not working when you had Molten Mantle.
Peg upgrade text now shows above shields.
Peg upgrade text is now easier to see on the slime boss’s slime pegs.
Orbs now appear overtop of peg upgrade text.
Mauliflower’s art changed to have a unique silhouette when compared to Brassicaceae Knuckles.
Double Trouball now changes into new sprites when it splits into Multiballs.
Rubber slime now becomes more bouncy when upgraded.
The orb minigame skip button now says “skip”, instead "back".
A bunch more tiny bug fixes and polish!

Apr 12, 2024

[Lab] The Art of Constructing Maps #3

REMORE: INFESTED KINGDOM - REMORE

Hello, once again Survivors!

Over the past two weeks, we've talked about how we've been experimenting to create a new standard for making maps. We talked about how we tried to make "Outdoor" style maps to further reinforce the theme, but the playtime was overly long, and how we went back to "Indoor" style maps, but there were divided opinions on the difficulty level.

One of the key things we wanted to deliver in the Early Access combat experience was to "encounter a large number of enemies that feel intimidating" and then "be able to kill them all if you understand and utilize the game's mechanics well enough" - in other words, the "excitement of getting through a seemingly difficult situation" was one of our main goals.

In our earlier experiments, we removed the Caught Mechanic, which made it much easier for players to navigate situations, and the concept of surprised and surrounded increased the amount of unit firepower available to player characters.

While we all agreed that we had created a "simpler, more fun" system, we were divided on what kind of combat experience we wanted to build on it.

The Battle Debate: “Bland vs Difficult”

The argument from those who felt the combat experience was bland was that unless the number of enemies you encountered (assuming you understood the system) was 1.5-2x that of the Early Access version, you wouldn't feel really threatened.

Due to the damage bonus of the surprise system, mobs such as Knawers will not have a chance to react if they are successfully surprised.
High HP enemies can still be killed within the same turn if they are surrounded by pushing, pulling, etc.
Since there is no caught mechanic, if you don't think you can finish an enemy off, you can simply move out of their line of sight and end the turn.

The argument was that given the combat environment above, it's not that hard to clear a stage without taking a single hit with a full understanding of the system, and it's hard to call it "fun" if that's the base experience.

So, the argument was that in order to feel thematically "Threatened" in this situation, there should be a quantity of enemies that you can't possibly take out in a single turn, and that the main combat experience should be how to evade their pressure while still accomplishing your mission objectives and escaping (in fact, the gameplay of the board game Zombicide is close to this feeling).

On the other hand, the "it's still hard" side of the argument was also well-founded.

Removing the caught mechanic and introducing the surrounded/surprised systems was to lower the barrier of entry, so making the level design harder to compensate just seems like going back to square one.
It takes until mid to late game to fully understand all the mechanics behind surprised/surrounded/out-of-sight to not feel threatened, that shouldn’t be set as the “Standard experience.”

So, we decided to expand the number of testers to get to the bottom of these two issues!

We had limited testing of our experiments to those directly designing the combat system and content, but we decided to bring in others from narrative design and art teams to test the “Real-world” difficulty of our “Threatening" indoor maps.

Since all of our new testers had beaten the Early Access version all the way to the Manor House, they had some idea of what the game was going to be like. We decided to use their ratings as a baseline to see if they thought it was "too hard" or "too bland".

And all 3 testers declared... I wanna throw my pc out the window!

More precisely, the feedback was that there were too many enemies in too small a space, and that the system descriptions they were given in manual form (assuming the place of a tutorial), were not enough to reasonably deal with these battles.

The system for evading enemies once you're out of sight was not intuitive to use (even though it was in the documentation), and even then, you had to create space on the map to utilize it, which was not easy to do when you had a large number of enemies to deal with.

We agreed with the argument that enemies should be less dense and started making a number of maps for "continuous play" based on this.

The question remains: Is this good enough??

Reflecting the shocking (?) results of our last test, we've started mass production of the map with a similar enemy spawn density to the Early Access version.

In total, we created three “Small Size” indoor maps and one “Large Size” map to test the sense of “continuous play” with new character skills and meta-games.

The focus of this build wasn't really on level design or combat experience. Rather, it was a situation where the standard experience of level design needed to be determined quickly in order to test other elements (more on those elements in a separate post!).

The enemy spawn density was scaled down to avoid the "unreasonably large number of enemies making progress seem impossible" situation and was expected to be an appropriate level of difficulty for the maps we would initially offer, with playtime of around 20 minutes for smaller maps.

However, there was still a sense of "is this really going to be good enough?".

The initial approach we tested was "kill as many of the enemies as you can, then move out of their line of sight and avoid attacking this turn", and the problem was that giving players this many enemies right from the start felt too harsh if not used to it.

The problem was that if the game starts with only enemies who are simple to kill, there was no guarantee that they would learn the patterns by the time we got to the mid- to late-game.

This raised a more fundamental question: "Isn't the rule that you can't be attacked no matter how close you are, as long as you're out of the enemy's line of sight, counterintuitive in the first place?", which led us to rethink our system design direction and enemy population criteria.

Then, a simpler solution was proposed: "What if we made the enemies appear in large enough numbers to be a threat, but easier to kill?"

Let's make lots more come out, and lots more die!

Up until now, the HP of the most basic monster object in our level design, the Knawer, has changed a lot. Let's say a one-handed ax with WP 1 has an average damage of 3.7,

To make them even more zombie-like and difficult to beat, there was also a version with a base HP of 40 (!), so you had to really hit them with all your might or run away,
In the early access version, the “Despair” difficulty had a base HP of 15 (which could be killed in 5 attacks on average),
After several tweaks, the final "threat test” (version that was deemed too difficult for inexperienced players) had a base HP of 9.

As we watched the testing up to this point, our level designer thought, "Why don't we just make the number of enemies greater and shrink their HP to make them easier to kill?"

The new maps were based on the following principles.

Bring back the concept of the abandoned Outdoor Map and organized it into something closer to Medium size
Re-utilize elements such as "roamers" and "windows”
Introduce as many enemies as the “Threat Test” version, but adjust the HP of the Knawer to 4.
"Roamers" will have the same health as the original Knawer (HP 9), with some additional stronger enemies (HP 25+)
Varying spawn behavior across buildings, with some buildings spawning tons of enemies and others spawning a small number of stronger individuals

When we removed the out-of-sight evade system from maps designed with the above philosophy, the game surprisingly(?) became much more fun.

Enemies are more numerous but easier to kill, making them less unfair.
The ability to kill two or three Knawers simultaneously with an AoE skill without necessarily surprising/surrounding them has increased the number of options in combat.
At the same time, the value of surprise has increased, as it is now a guaranteed way to kill a Knawer.
The threat and risk of not getting the kill has increased, as enemies still deal the same damage and cannot be evaded.

Since it brings the pros of the outdoor theme while greatly improving the drawbacks of being "time-consuming and frustrating" (the average playtime is around 30 minutes, which is longer than the existing "indoor" maps, but a difference of 10 minutes or so would be a more fun experience), the consensus was that this direction was better suited as a standard.

We also wanted to make sure that it wasn't just people who were already familiar with the system that were giving us positive feedback, so we asked people who had dropped out of the initial "Threat Test" version to test it again, and we were pleasantly surprised to get a "100x more fun than last time" rating.

The art team also told us that the outdoor theme was much more appealing and had a lot more room for expression, so we were able to unanimously set the standard for the new map.

This is the end of a long journey of experimentation that we went through to set the standard for our new maps. There were many points along the way where we wondered, "Do we really need to go this far?", and it was hard when the feedback wasn't great, but I'm proud to say that the results were worth the time we invested.

After this, it's time to introduce other elements that build on this standard combat experience, and after this post, I'll be adjusting my posting frequency to every two weeks instead of once a week for the time being.

The first and foremost reason is that the parts I'm going to be talking about are the meta-game and character parts, which are ongoing trials and errors that we've been going through alongside the map changes.

We’ve been enjoying sharing these posts, but now as we get cracking on putting all these changes into the game, there’ll be less time to dedicate to the dev notes. But fear not! We'll return to a weekly post once we're more organized enough to focus on parts of the game outside of the combat experience.

We'll do our best to bring you more polished content and a more compelling look at what we've been working on as soon as it’s ready to rock.

Thanks so much for your patience and trust in us, and we'll see you back in two weeks for another installment!
REMORE

Apr 12, 2024

Screenshot Competition – Mad Thunder!

War Thunder - Blitzkrieg Wulf

Welcome to the 115th War Thunder Steam Screenshot Competition!

Excellent work capturing the beautiful mountain ranges in your screenshots from last week! Of all of the mountains in War Thunder, which one is your favorite? The three most popular and three selected by us will get 300 GE. See the winners down below!

Let’s begin the 115th edition of our competition!

Create a stunning screenshot and submit it on the War Thunder Steam Community Hub with the tag #WTscreen115. You have time until the 19th of April to submit your screenshot.

After that date, 6 winners will be selected (3 of which will be the highest rated by the community and 3 selected by our judges), each of which receive a reward of 300GE.

Terms:

Your screenshot must include a player vehicle and be from the “Mad Thunder” event.
You must add the #WTscreen115 tag (title cannot have any other text in it).
Artists may only win by popular vote once per four screenshot competitions.

[/b]

Screenshots need to be compliant with the War Thunder rules.

You need to be the author of the screenshot.

Screenshot needs to be new. You cannot use those which have previously been published or used in other competitions.

We will only accept raw screenshots from the game. You cannot use any editing software nor any other visual enhancements (like Nvidia Ansel filters).

You can use filters and settings built into War Thunder.

You can use the replay functionality built into War Thunder.

Rewards will be delivered to the author's account within 14 working days.

[/list]

And now, time for the winners of the competition’s 114th edition - Mountain View!

Winners selected via community votes:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3214624794
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3214049929
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213853612

Winners selected by our judges:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3215777844
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213979681
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3215026984

Each winner will get 300GE! Congratulations and see you next week!

Apr 12, 2024

Update 0.0.1 is Live! All kinds of fixes and some new things as well!

Sketchy's Contract - Dimensionless Games

Updates

The Main building sign now spells out the world “Building” instead of “BLD” to help prevent miscommunication to players especially new ones.
The “Point Emote” not points the up and down directions as it was intended to do!
Interacting with locked security doors now displays a message indicating to the player that the door requires a security access code of its corresponding level.
Removed collision on the TV wires at the Drop Off as it was constantly blocking players as they were dropping items off into the quota box.
The Suit Upgrades interaction message has been renamed to “Suit Modifier”.
Removed the Teleporter Base duplicate located behind the store droids as this was an old map design and they have been moved into the medical buildings.
Door Update:
1. Locked Security level doors now display a user-friendly message to the player when attempting to access them saying: “Requires Security Level 1“etc. This will help reduce confusion to players attempting to access these doors but not necessarily knowing how to access them if they haven’t read the introduction tablet at Sketchy’s or the visited the Ship Computer.
2. The Level 1 and 2 doors (orange and red) physical light source color is now the same color as the security level itself to help this visual aspect pop out even more.
3. The lighting on ocean, bilumin, and lava map doors has been updated to better illuminate the environment making them much easier to see which I hope will help players navigate better especially for those who experience extra challenge in seeing with low light scenes.
Teleporter generators must be used at the specified security level they belong to. A new user-friendly message will be displayed to the player informing them “Requires a Level 1 generator” and of course level 2 for the other. This will help reduce confusion of how generators work and if they can be cross shared between teleporters. In addition, the scanned information of each generator now lists the level that that generator belongs to for better clarification.
Updated the Shrink ray to properly detect the entire mesh of the actor when shrunk. This will fix the annoying issue of wasting shrink ray shots when trying to hit the exact perfect spot on the dead body.
The scanner information display not only shows the name of the object scanned rather than “Name: {name of object}” format as this was misleading players to think they were to name something they were scanning. DON’T WORRY. The actual ability to NAME YOUR SHIP might be getting added in because I know you guys want it! Lol.
The doppelganger movement speed has been nerfed as most players found him to be too fast for how strong he is. However, his health has gone up a big so that he wont be gunned down in a second.
Pool Noodles now do as much damage as the Flamingo so have fun!
Large outdoor creatures have had a significant buff to health to make them more terrifying and more “End-Game” like. However, this means that the price of their dead bodies if killed has gone way up. Killing big bad creatures should give good rewards, right? Obviously, I will keep tweaking these numbers as you all keep playing and continue providing the feedback/numbers to me.
Mine Update! Mines have had their volume increased, their volume radius widened, and there ticking audio sound set to repeat every 1 second instead of 3 seconds to help make determining where mines are much easier as I have seen players struggling with them and it was clear that they needed to be update. I hope that this helps you all out. Please let me know how the new mines feel!
Lava fire debuff damage has been reduced to 5 damage per second down from 10 damage per second, however, the lava debuff now lasts for 5 seconds after existing lava and can now be SPREAD TO YOUR FRIENDS!! Yes, that’s right. Step in the Lava then go run at your friend and pass the fire along to them for a nice warm hug!!
So, there’s this mechanical thing that you guys tend to use on a day-to-day basis... All I want to say is that this mechanical thing is realistic now and you may want to be cautious when using it (laughs evilly)
AI Update – TOAD in the Biolumin map has been completely redesigned as it wasn’t working in the first place. New Design:
1. Now shown in Sketchy’s Data so scan the toad when you see it next time!!
2. There are 2 variations of the toad: small and big.
3. Name: Canker
4. New Strength
5. New Weakness

NEW

Added 3 new plush to win at the arcade: Bear, Puppy, and Turtle!
Added 2 Easter Egg plush to find at Sketchy’s! I'll get you started. You can find 1 somewhere around the Burger Shop and another somewhere at the Drop Off... can you find them?
Added a new AI called “Chompy” a man-eating plant located at the Biolumin map who is mainly outdoors.
Added a creature to the back of Sketchy’s Drop off! Go ahead COMMUNITY and see what’s behind those doors now (there might also be something secret hidden there….) lol.
Added a description to pet UI to explain to players how eggs are found as there was no reference especially for new players to possibly knw this information.

FIXES

Fixed an issue where the burger shop Boombox was spawning multiple times causing audio overlap.
Fixed an issue where Audio settings for Master, Ambience, Sound Effects, and Music volumes were not applying at all.
Fixed an issue where Crouch in the pilot seat then ragdoll causes an extreme loss in FPS across all clients. To prevent this, crouch access into that specific spot has been blocked. Plush can still be decorated onto the dashboard so don’t worry! lol.
Fixed an issue where placing dead player body onto the medical bed was deleting the currently equipped slot of the player that pressed the button to resurrect.
Fixed an issue where Infinite keychains were spawning when players were holding boombox and putting it down/swapping it out.
Fixed an issue where the Biolumin store droid was not delivering bought player purchased items planet not spawning store droid.
Fixed an issue were digging up eggs during night shift was providing the wrong egg for that planet.
Fixed an issue where players that hit zero Oxygen from the Oxy slime Debuff, were not losing health.
Fixed an issue where research enemy spawn points weren’t properly spawning AI.
Fixed an issue where staying overnight was providing infinite stamina to players leaving certain buildings.
Fixed the button on the right elevator at Sketchy’s Drop off that was extremely frustrating to press.
Fixed text for suit level pop up to say “Suit Level Increased” rather than reputation (deprecated name no longer used).
Fixed an issue where any décor cosmetics that were placed on the dashboard in the front of the ship were not attaching to the ship and flying off into space as players landed.
Fixed the detection as it was not lighting players on fire in certain areas.
Fixed an issue with shrinking the following creatures not working:
Hell Hound
Lavasaurus
Big Crab
Big Toad (now named “Cankers”)
Fixed an issue where the Night Walker’s dead body did not require a shrink ray to be looted. Yes, that was a bug I am sorry for you speed runners, but you must use that shrank ray now lol.
Fixed numerous AI navigation areas found in the Ocean and Biolumin Maps causing AI to get stuck and/or pat back and forth unable to attack the player.

I have been listening as much as possible and have made many adjustments and fixes and I hope this update will helps lots of players. I appreciate everyone who has been playing and has supported and look forward to getting more updates out so you can continue having even more fun!

-Forsakenhalo