May 3, 2024

Junkyard Simulator - RebeliaGames

Hello, scrappers! We are adding another change to our game, be sure to check out the bidding mechanics in the pawnshop - all suggestions are welcome.

As you can see, we are constantly updating our early access game.
We still have a few updates ahead of us, so we know you're waiting for more cars to be restored and the ability to drive them - we're working on it. We are also working on further optimization of the game code so that each of you can enjoy the game.

Hotfix list

Fix Large truck - when we unlock the 24 slots the vehicle cannot move. Select another slot from the upgrade panel and the vehicle will return to normal operation
Added bidding mechanics to sales in the Pawn Shop
Changing the location of the quest "Quest 11 - Find an abandoned motel on Lucy's orders". Now the Gold Bar is in the trunk of the car and the Sculpture is in the motel room
Changing the item that we have to deliver for "Quest 12 - At the end of one of the branches". Now instead of Sheet Metal there is an Engine Element
Changing the minimum number of items required to complete "Quest 12 - At the end of one of the branches" when delivering items to the conveyor belt from 3 to 2
Creating a passage for the player's character at the second entrance gate to the Large Scrapyard
LOD repair for the trunk in the vehicle we transport during Quest 4 - Transporting Wrecks
Increased the duration of the Stock Price on the left side of the screen by 3x
Unlocking the Stock Rate widget in Sandbox mode
Changing the amount of money obtained in lockers. Now there is a 75% chance to get $5 to $55 and a 25% chance to get $75 to $110
Fixed looking at the trunk when searching for a Gold Bar for Quest. Now, when looking at the trunk, we only see the [E] tooltip, and only after opening the trunk and looking at the Gold Bar item, we see the [LMB] tooltip with Quest subtitles
Fixed [E] disappearing when looking at the trunk and moving the mouse left and right, at the height of the middle of the mask
Added missing translation for the "Valve Cover" quest item in the backpack
Adding a gold bar to the trunk at Grandma's Campers
Corrected the word "Maneggio" to "Gestire" when managing workers on the lot
Fixed the number "-10" remaining and the Combo Bar being skewed when renovating a lot on the Gamepad
Fixed counting for items thrown onto the conveyor belt during the Scrap Collector's Bounty
Fixed counting for items thrown onto the conveyor belt during the Scrap Collector's Bounty
Add a dissatisfaction system after overbidding during a pawn shop auction. Now the player has a -20% penalty to the amount if he increases the price too much and Grandma interrupts the bidding. The penalty ends after a positive bid

INFO - After Update

New version Key bindings not working or other problems?
Please follow the steps below. In most cases, downloading the settings again will fix the problem.

1. Close the Junkyard Simulator and copy your savegame folder (make backup)
2. Close the Steam app
3. Delete the directory:
C:\Username\AppData\Local\JunkYard
4. Open Steam App

After starting the game, check if everything works. If it's okay, then put your save game folder in place

5. C:\Username\AppData\Local\JunkYard\Saved\SaveGames

If you don't know how to do it, write to me in the Steam app or on the discord on the Junkyard channel - you will find me / Adrian_RebeliaGames

Thank you for reporting the discovered errors. Many of them have already been fixed based on the error reports provided by you.

We appreciate your assistance, feedback, emails, and private messages. ❤️❤️

Also please support us in the review section ːsteamthumbsupː 🙂

May 3, 2024

Patch Notes version 0.6.3

Quasimorph - Supertehteh

Hello, mercenaries!

This is the third patch to the major update of The Dragon Reborn.

In this patch, we've gathered MANY different gameplay improvements: added the ability to speed up animations, made mission difficulties more logical and understandable, added graphical settings, and improved interfaces for several game systems.

Also, don't miss our answers for your questions! There's a lot of information about the future of the project and our plans.

We'll be back to you soon with details about the Magnum upgrade patch. Stay tuned for news!

And now, to the patch notes:

GENERAL

Adjusted the difficulty curve for the first missions towards smoother difficulty progression.
Rebalanced mission difficulties; hidden parameters such as the number of floors/items/monster points per floor now directly depend only on the mission difficulty rating. Reward point ranges have also been reworked.
Revised reloading mechanics for more understandable behavior. Reloading now doesn't consume action points instantly, and enemies in line of sight don't affect reloading logic.
Makeshift batteries can now charge auto-docs and scanners.
Auto-doc now heals all wounds instead of one random wound.
Stun status will now force the character out from Stealth Movement Mode to Normal Movement Mode.
Marauder perk no longer applies to allied creature corpses (no skill increase or extra loot from them).
Weapon durability now decreases when amputating limbs.
Added a limit on reputation change with corporations to 20 units as a result of mission completion.
Faction tech level will no longer drop below previously reached thresholds (rounded to the nearest whole number). For example: if a faction's tech level is 3.54, it won't drop below 3.
Minor wounds of any type will no longer trigger wound-receiving perk triggers.
Robots and turrets now have immunity to stun, and their remains cannot be used to resurrect corpses via the Pact of Unlife ritual.
Throwing melee weapons at enemies will now only activate by Shift + Left Mouse Click combination; a simple click will move the character towards the enemy for melee attack.
On defense missions and during peaceful station visits, the map will now be fully explored from the beginning.
Change in shooting mechanics: hitting a target outside the effective range of the weapon will NOT apply additional weapon effects: stun, pushback, ignition.
AI enemies now consume weapon durability during melee attacks. If a melee weapon is broken or has no charges, the attack will be considered as an unarmed attack.
Minor fixes to storyline missions, displaying additional messages.

UI / UX

Reworked the help section, now accessible from the main menu:
Updated text in the "General Information" tab.
Added a tab with all tips from Jane.
Added an F.A.Q. tab.
Improved the weapon and armor comparison interface in the tooltip.
Added instructional tips from Jane about acid pools and jammers. The tip will appear when the player first encounters a jammer or acid pool.
Added a post-mission statistics screen, showing rewards, reputation gain, faction tech level, and strength level.
Added new options in settings:
Character animation speed (x1 - x2 - x4 - x8).
HDR toggle.
Chromatic aberration toggle.
Camera centering toggle while player is moving.
Additional item comparison toggle.
Added new metrics to the Magnum statistics section.
During missions, tabs with items not yet opened will be marked with a star next to the number.
Interactive objects (workbench, stove, auto-doc, level scanner) now appear on the mini-map, and elevator icons on the mini-map indicate the direction in which the elevator operates (up or down).
In the context menu for splitting items into stacks, the logic of selecting a stack for splitting is inverted.
The tooltip for an item will now also display its average market price and quantity in Magnum's inventory.
Key functionality of Left Control, Left Shift, and Left Alt keys is duplicated for their right counterparts.
The resistance tooltip will now also display the combined damage resistance value.

FIXES

Fixed: Enemies with ranged weapons could move and shoot in one action point.
Fixed: In some cases, enemies and players could attack a door after its destruction, blocking passage through it.
Fixed: Shadow change option was inaccessible in the main menu and in space mode.
Fixed: Quest items were sometimes destroyed in fire.
Fixed: Item prices were not displayed on the price graph screen in some localizations.
Fixed: It was possible to resurrect a corpse using the Pact of Unlife if a character stood on the cell with the corpse.
Fixed: Calorie expenditure in the walking mode tooltip was incorrectly displayed for Mercenary Mirza Aishatu.
Fixed: Some weapons did not appear on quasi-morphs (especially on the Lunar Servitor).
Fixed: Some types of footwear were not displayed on characters.
Fixed: When forming a pile of corpses, corpse sprites also appeared in the bottom left corner of the map.
Fixed: Spamming the Shift key when throwing melee weapons led to the creation of multiple knives (visual bug).
Fixed: In some localizations, the wound type was incorrectly translated.
Fixed: Heartbeat sound spam when the player has many wounds.
Fixed: In some cases, it was impossible to pass through a just-evaporated poison without taking any action.
Fixed: If you start switching to your turn while running and then receive a wound that prevents running, the mode switch still occurred.

Join our community on Discord to be the first to know game news! Also, follow us on Twitter!

Good luck in battle!
Best regards, Magnum Scriptum Team.

May 3, 2024

Dev Diary #53 - Agencies (3.0)👁️

Espiocracy - Rafal Grochala

What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.

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Who is the player in a game? Who you are?

(Linguistic disclaimer: this dev diary usually replaces "player" with "you". Apologies to readers who detest "you" form)

Video games of old didn't ask this question. You're firing at asteroids, who cares. Then, as games became deeper, a slice of this depth came from trying to think who is the player - with the exception of many strategy games. In most of them, you're a god, a spirit, a Rube Goldberg machine, just play the game.

Espiocracy, as stated in the very first diary, completely rejects vague-player approach typical for strategy games. The game is rooted in finding, defining, and constantly using the answer to "who is the player". Playing not "as nebulous France" and instead "as defined organization(s) in France" is the secret sauce to making the best possible game out of the Cold War (and beyond), in my opinion, backed first by a few prototypes and now by three years of development.

However, it may be more profound than just nailing the setting. Across many forms of art and entertainment, you can observe historical progress from ">you< doesn't matter" to "actually >you< is very important". Whether it's the development of perspective in painting or the evolution of narration in literature, asking "who are you" and thinking deeply about answers (even if there is no good answer) enriches not only the piece but sometimes even the entire form of human expression.

This dev diary will continue our journey through the alleys of "Who Is The Player" town. Its topic has been chosen in a poll by people who want to read even more about it on top of three full diaries (https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1670650/view/3003321589573476182, https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1670650/view/4822784632067408300, https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1670650/view/6080450349271586674, and many more partially touching it). Perhaps it's not a mere interest in the main idea behind the game but more of a testament to the yearning for answers, new angles, and wider progress of this form of entertainment.

Intelligence Community

Much like other grand strategy games, you begin a new campaign in Espiocracy by choosing your nation.

You are inherently tied to a nation - and most interesting areas of the game, such as nuclear brinkmanship, rely on the power of a state - but you're not a nation.

To be technically precise, you are playing as an intelligence community. You can customize it just after choosing the nation.

(Similar screenshot appeared in previous agency-related diaries, it's posted in current form here for clarity.)

"Intelligence community" encompasses all organizations and individuals tasked with espionage. Out of practical logic and pure necessity (eg. current American intelligence consists of 18 organizations!), the game joins and abstracts away many of them to form two layers of player persona: community-wide (this section) and agency-wide (next section).

On the level of the entire intelligence community, you command budget (more details in later section), important parameters (such as trust and need), and wide forms of progression (primarily capabilities and intelligence programs).

Actors

In terms of actual objects in the game world...

...an intelligence community is just a "mental concept" - an idea, incapable of acting in the world (!). It has to be embodied by active entities on the ground: intelligence agencies, implemented as actors, existing between other actors in the game.

All your actions are carried out by a particular agency and often by a specific section inside such agency.

(Lack of player-controlled agencies means that no actions are possible! This nominally leads to a game over screen. However, all game-over conditions can be turned off, and in this case player spends a short period actor-less, and therefore without ability to act, until new actor(s) are established by the government.)

For many playable nations, both "you play as an intelligence community" and "you play as an intelligence agency" are true - when the community consists of a single agency. This is usually the case for two extremes, either very small communities (such as a department in police forces) or very large communities (usually monolith ministry).

In many other cases, you control up to 3 actor-agencies. If you recall old DD#8, the game at the time had community-wide models - that is no longer the case and now it's flexibly agency-based. An agency is defined by:

Responsibilities. Any of these in any agency: domestic / foreign / civilian / military / signals intelligence. Among many influences (more on that below), most importantly it affects operations as battles. Attacking vs defending sides are not defined by communities (not American vs Soviet player) but by agencies. If you, as an American player, target the Soviet government, it will be CIA vs KGB operation, but if you target Soviet military installations, it will be CIA vs GRU - and in the late game, if you try to hack Russian networks, it may be NSA vs GRU (if Russian player made GRU responsible for signals).
Organizational form. An agency can be: independent / ministry / military / police / foreign / religious / secret organization. Every form differs in costs, incentives, legal boundaries, and possible actions (details evolve during playtesting). Their availability is defined externally and may be a goal in itself, for instance players in occupied countries usually start with pretty limited "foreign" organizations (eg. Arisue Unit in Japan 1946), try to advance independence of the country and progress to more influential & independent forms (eg. PSIA in Japan 1952, a ministry organization in terms of game mechanics). On the other end of the spectrum, after a significant loss of trust and need your community may be forced to be reformed, and resulting agencies may have a less optimal form (eg. in Austria, after independent BVT failed to prevent the terrorist attack in 2020, it was replaced by a ministerial DSN).

The choice between one or more intelligence agencies is a strategic decision, a'la building wide or tall: spreading or stacking responsibilities, diversifying forms or focusing strongly on one organizational form, higher peaks or a higher average of certain traits. In addition, since agencies are full actors in the game world, the number of agencies significantly affects direct player-vs-player operations. 3 agencies mean 3x different targets - on one hand, more targets for the attacker, and more places to defend for the defender; on the other hand, a breach in one agency usually does not spill over to other agencies, and the attacker has to expend more resources to attack more than one agency. If the second hand is more appealing, it's no coincidence. As mentioned above, both in the real world and in the game, a single agency is either very small or very large, with everyone in the middle preferring multiple agencies.

Example: Two Germanies

For any new intelligence community in the game, you can use "Historical" or "Popular" preset:

"Historical" proposes historically accurate community and agencies as of March 1946, while "Popular" gives you well-known agencies of the Cold War. Both options have their place beyond simple personal preference - in some countries, historical agencies were very interesting in 1946 (such as Arisue Unit in Japan), while in other countries they were more confusing and less exciting (eg. historically, in 1946 instead of CIA vs KGB there was CIG vs MGB). Beyond simple numbers, these two also define many other initial conditions. Both sides of the Elbe River provide a good example of differences between playable intelligence communities (IC):

West Germany, Historical IC: Gehlen Org. A small unit of (mostly) Nazi veterans funded by the USA. High experience, tradecraft, capabilities in areas such as military, access to already existing intelligence structures - but also initial low trust, reliance on another country, many internal secrets, and low morale.
West Germany, Popular IC: BFV and BND. Respectively, independent domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. Larger, with a government-supported budget, partially cleaner slate, lower various skill-adjacent parameters, and much higher vulnerability to eastern infiltration attempts.
East Germany, Historical IC: Volkspolizei. Intelligence section in police forces. Mostly controlled and financed by the USSR. Many sections with low skills and almost no ability to conduct espionage abroad.
East Germany, Popular IC: Stasi and HVA. Two ministry organizations (in the real world HVA was under Stasi but the game currently separates them to better simulate their historical activity), respectively domestic and foreign responsibilities. The former with many averagely skilled sections and almost unlimited legal powers, and the latter highly skilled. Both deeply infiltrated but no longer funded by MGB/KGB.

Deeper Funding

Speaking of financial gameplay, let's take a quick look at its current iteration at the end of the dev diary.

Multiple contributors described in DD#32 were proved to subtract more than add to the game. Instead, now the player can:

Receive monthly and yearly transfers from the government based on State Power Index x trust and need (if the community is funded by the government)
Find customers (intelligence term), governmental or otherwise, who subsidize certain activities and buy intelligence
Develop less-official sources of income, anywhere from extortion (a story as old as any intelligence agency, especially in autocratic countries) to middleman cut (eg. CIA received 5% of the Marshall Plan funds)

These feed into three main accounts:

From left to right (first value is the number of available sections): official (spent on anything roughly legal), transferable (can be moved to another entity, usually used to fund various actors), and illicit (spending without oversight, not available for official expenses such as hiring).

Behind The Scenes

► Some strategy games introduce obvious and very intuitive embodiment of the player as a single individual - a leader, a manager, a king, a director - in the game world. There is no director in Espiocracy. The idea was considered seriously and even partially prototyped but it failed (as I like to say, it subtracted more than added). In small part, this can be attributed to the ephemerality of a director of the entire intelligence community - many countries don't have one, and those which do, usually assign very limited powers to such a person. In larger part, implementing a director (even of an intelligence agency instead of a community) anywhere near the real world (as is the ambition of the game in all mechanics) is surprisingly mundane, administrative, and political. For instance, George Bush senior was the director of CIA, in between working in a US-Chinese office and in a Houston bank... And in the largest part, it failed because it can be implemented only in two equally bad ways. Either as a very weak flavor/vanity player persona (and then we're just wasting an opportunity to associate the player with something strong in the game world) or as an illogically influential player persona in the world of Cold War intelligence agencies (and then we're lowering immersion, which is the opposite of what we primarily aim for with good player embodiment). There is a middle ground for some places for some time (eg. Markus Wolf) but it's too finicky / local / short-lived to meaningfully chase in this game.

► This diary does not mention domestic conflicts between agencies (eg. CIA vs FBI) because they do not exist in the game. While it is a frequently requested feature, I see it as a slippery slope into a bureaucracy simulator - and a world map would be pretty bad interface for bickering between Langley and Washington, they are just a few pixels apart! On a more serious note, it is one of the few rare cases where implementing realism / historical accuracy is in conflict with the player as an intelligence community. If you control both CIA and FBI, a turf war between them is just an exercise in anti-player frustration. There's only a tiny single "red tape parameter", with very limited influence on the game (higher value primarily leads to slightly longer actions, eg. it takes more time to establish an intelligence station) - which I introduced on purpose to avoid implementing domestic inter-agency conflicts and instead distill any such cravings into a little silly number.

► "Customers (...) who (...) buy intelligence" - yes, it's a new thing, intelligence mechanics at the heart of the game received new layers of depth and this will be probably the topic of the next dev diary.

Final Remarks

The next dev diary will be posted on June 7th!

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If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/

There is also a small community around Espiocracy:

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"This country wants no Gestapo, under any guise or for any reason" - Harry Truman in 1946