Jun 8, 2024

Seven Cities - Hoxydav - SevenCities

Hello Outsiders,

We have an exciting new update for the Seven Cities playtest available now! Building on our recent weapon reworks, this update includes three major improvements:
- Shotgun specialization overhaul
- Revamped HUD
- Enhanced VFX

Stay tuned, as we'll be publishing a roadmap soon detailing what will be available at the start of the Early Access in October.

Your feedback is invaluable, and we still need your help to grow our community. Spread the word and invite more players to join us!

Here’s what’s new in today's update:

Shotguns:

- Added/updated a total of 30 specialization nodes, including costs of 2, 4, and 8 points.
- New specializations include explosive bullets, homing bullets, increased bullet shot quantity, and elemental damage.

Rifles:

- Added a node with exploding bullets.
- Clean some nodes descriptions

Melee:

- Fixed alterations for the melee category. Now, you can stun with an axe and cause bleeding with a baseball bat.
- Ensured that bonus alteration chance and duration stats are working properly.

HUD:

- Began implementing a new HUD design for better readability and alignment with our art direction. More improvements to come, including the minimap and quest display.

GUI:

- Polished the checkbox for auto-looting secondary weapons.

VFX:

- Added VFX feedback for most alterations and digital elementals, including bleed, data corruption, and screen freeze.
- New bullet trail VFX, with different trails for enemies.

Sound Design:

- Added sound FX feedback for most alterations and digital elementals.
- Added sound effects for passive and specialization panels when hovering and clicking.
- New sound for the taxi's arrival.
- Updated sounds for the handgun and AK47; more weapons will get sound design updates soon.

Level Design + Level Art:

- Increased floor detail on each map.

Quality of Life:

- Items now drop on the floor if you don't have enough space and you should receive an item from any source.
- Added Shift + Left Click to drop items.

Roberto the Boss:

- Status effects are now displayed under Roberto’s lifebar on top of the HUD.

General Fixes and Improvements:

- Fixed issues where the roll sometimes stayed in place instead of moving in the mouse direction.
- Fixed rolls that sometimes kept the character in place.
- Increased the quantity of bullets in magazines for each weapon category through passives, items, and specializations.
- Cleared and fixed many specializations across all categories.
- You can no longer apply the same alteration on the same enemy repeatedly, resolving display and real duration issues of status alterations.

21:9 / Wide Screens:

- A major check for wide screen support was completed, fixing 90% of the issues.

Gameplay Adjustments:

- Reduced movement speed for melee enemies.
- Reduced bullet speed, especially for enemies.
- The start popup will now always appear.
- Added more tooltips, with more to come!
- Temporarily disabled public chat in-game to avoid numerous issues.
- Added a wishlist button everywhere – wishlisting is key! Help us spread the word about Seven Cities.

**Additional Information:**
- We’re currently displaying item category icons in the HUD to show the remaining bullets in your magazine. Proper icons will be created this week.

Outsiders,

Thank you for reading this patch note. We hope you enjoy this update and the amount of work put into it. This is what we've accomplished in the last two weeks, and our team isn't even full-time on the game right now. Just imagine what we can achieve together for the Early Access in October!

We need you more than ever to create the funniest build customizations for your character and share them with us on social media and Discord.

JOIN US :

IMV Studio <3

Jun 8, 2024

Portland update - Auctions, Financials, Efficiency and Focus

Horse Racing Manager - Sheep Meadow Road Games

In our last devlog, we mentioned focusing on visuals and UI, and while this remains true, we also dove into a deep efficiency rabbit hole. How fast can we make the game? This became an obsession, but more on that later.

Auctions

In our last devlog, we mentioned developing the auction system. While the system is still in it's early stages, the visuals for the auction houses came from the artist, and they look stunning. We wanted different tiers of auctions, so as the player progresses, they can access more expensive auction houses. The visuals represent this progression, and the final result is pretty cool.

Example of the different auction houses.

Financials

We also worked on the financials page, mainly line charts. The charts are custom-built since ready-made solutions didn’t work. We plan to add bar graphs for more informative visuals and to make data "glanceable" in the game. The charts still have bugs, like negative numbers performing oddly (lines going out of bounds).

Currently, the financial page is simple and a bit barren. For now, it serves its purpose of giving the player a picture of the stable's current financials. We plan to improve this page later but believe our time is better spent elsewhere for now.

The financial overview.

You can make a deep-dive into the income and costs.

The assets and liabilities, the option to take loans are now in the game.

Efficiency (skip if you don't care for nerd stuff)

We went deep into optimizing efficiency. Previously, a year took 30-40 minutes to simulate, meaning a day took 5-6 seconds. By moving many functions to pure SQL, we drastically improved this to 1 second a day, or 6 minutes a year. We handle bulk transactions rather than individual ones, reducing thousands of transactions to just a few.

This required rewriting some custom logic, and while the code isn’t as universal, it’s much faster. For instance, paying all employees monthly in a large stable now takes 1-2 transactions instead of thousands. However, our first round of optimizations broke many functions, so it took a long time to fix these issues. It's also very tedious to code stuff like this, since you don't really see any "new" progress.

You can see where some of the optimizations were made.

Our goal for a day simulation is under 500ms, but we’ll revisit this once the game is finished.

Here are the current execution times for daily functions:

Daily training: 359 ms, 36.56% of total
Daily race register: 154 ms, 15.68% of total
Monthly salary payments: 102 ms, 10.39% of total
Monthly breeding: 94 ms, 9.57% of total
Horse value calculation: 90 ms, 9.16% of total
Need to liquidate horses check: 82 ms, 8.35% of total
Hiring daily process: 35 ms, 3.56% of total
Role-based stars daily update: 22 ms, 2.24% of total
Get stable economic factors: 22 ms, 2.24% of total
World economics: 9 ms, 0.92% of total
Births daily: 5 ms, 0.51% of total
Horse death daily: 5 ms, 0.51% of total
Monthly loan payments: 2 ms, 0.20% of total
Racing daily: 1 ms, 0.10% of total

Game Balance

We also improved the data tracking in the game, developing 121 different metrics tracked daily. These include metrics from the average cash of the stables to the total prime racing age horses. This foundation will make balancing the game easier in the future. We can now generate a 300-page PDF on the game world’s performance in under a minute. This will be improved further during actual game balancing.

Example of a graph that tracks the number of foals and yearlings in game.

Focus

We received mail from a fan about the game’s complexity, suggesting we focus on creating a working product before adding complexity. We agree. We’ve discussed many features still in the pipeline: countries, trotting, steeplechase, breeds, jockey mode, and more.

Last devlog, we spoke about the grant application and the game design document. A game design document is a detailed document describing the game in detail, that helps to scope the game to avoid scope creep. It's a living document, but the "frame" should not change. We also submitted the grant application, we will get the information if we got the grant or not on July 1st. Let's keep our thumbs up!

It made clear that we are making a horse racing managerial game first and foremost. It should be made clear, we want to make this the most realistic horse racing simulator in the world. But we have to be realistic, we don't have the resources to make that in the first iteration of the game. As a comparison, Sports Interactive Inc. (the developers of Football Manager, a huge inspiration), currently employs around 300 people. In contrast, Sheep Meadow Road Games currently employs one (1) part-time employee, me.

So it's clear that we can't reach that level, yet.

We have been discussing with a Swedish game development school about a possible intern, but nothing has been decided yet. While the intern would work for free, one of the company ethos is to pay everyone fairly for their contribution. Since the company bank account is close to zero, we will probably pay them with a revenue share programme, if they do a good job. But as said, nothing has been decided yet.

Real-Life Racecourses

Speaking of the level of detail, one of the top wishes from the fans is realistic scheduling and racecourses. But as they also point out, we can't just put whatever we want in the game since we would then have licensing issues. Just for fun, we tried contacting 10 world-renown racecourses. None of them has yet answered our emails, and there is a slim chance that they will, but let's follow up on this in the next devlog.

If anyone has contacts with a racecourse or brand interested in being featured, please reach out to help@sheepmeadowroad.games.

Summer & Video Devlogs

With summer vacation approaching, devlogs might be less frequent as we take some time to relax. We’re also considering video devlogs, despite lacking experience in making YouTube videos. It’s a learning curve, but it might be more relaxing to consume than text. Let us know if this is something that you would be interested in.

StayAtHomeDev featured our game in one of his videos, I would recommend you to check him out, he has fantastic content!

What’s next

Our next update will likely continue to focus on the interfaces for buying and selling horses and the auction system. The next new key feature will likely be the news system, after that a overhaul of the race simulation system. Once these two systems are in game, the game should be ready to be playtested. We will inform you more about this in the future.

We are continuously working to enhance Horse Racing Manager, and your feedback is invaluable. Don't forget to add Horse Racing Manager to your Steam wishlist! Your support is crucial for us and greatly appreciated.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2740170/Horse_Racing_Manager/

Jun 8, 2024

Update 0.0.5.5 is here! The Initial Stage of Progression rework has begun.

Sketchy's Contract - Dimensionless Games

I’ve decided, since the progression update will take some time, to release some progression updates and features NOW. This update brings to all of you some critical updates and changes that I believe (based on player feedback) will make many of you very happy.
Let’s get into it!

UPDATES

- Weapons/Items

Weapon Resource is now stored and will load up to the value it was when previously saved. HOWEVER, this means that all current weapons you have that require resource will need to be replenished at the Replenisher Station on the first login of this update sense the system has no data to load it in with.
Weapons that are left in the ship are NO LONGER LOST on team wipe. YES, as long as your weapons are in the ship when you died, they will be retained. Items on your action bar will still be lost, and all scrap is still lost.
Pricing - Since weapons are permanent once purchased, their base price has increased.
Night Bot REDESIGN – Night Bot has been removed. Instead, “Night Vision” has been built into the player’s suit becoming part of the Flashlight! Night Vision can be toggled by pressing “Z” while the Flashlight is active. The Flashlight must be on for Night Vision to activate. This will allow players to use Night Vision even while holding items, making it way more versatile.
Weapon/Item Resource UI update – the resource bar is now a horizontal bar similar to health and stamina rather than a circle and changes color to match the type of resource it corresponds to.
Shovel and Pickaxe weapons now reduce physical damage taken by 20% and 35% respectively. This change is an attempt to make melee builds more viable at high quotas and to help create more playstyle options for players. The hedge knife remains the same due to its very fast attack speed making it a glass cannon melee build.
Shovel Attack speed slightly increased.
The Replenisher Station now charges credit cost based on how much resource is in the current weapon. For example, each charge of Shrink Ray Energy now costs 10 credits. If the player puts a shrink ray in with 5/8 energy, the cost will be 10 x 3 energy for a total of 30 credits rather than the current system which charges the full price of the replenish even if it’s just for a single energy.

- GENERAL

The credit penalty for failing a Quota has been reduced from 75% credit loss to 50% credit loss.
The Planet Store Droid no longer has shipping time options and instead has a baseline 3 second wait period and a 25-credit delivery fee. The wait system for orders doesn’t significantly drive the gameplay and feels more of an unnecessary inconvenience if anything.
Reworked Mine spawn code to prevent mines from spawning in awkward locations such as tucked beneath a staircase (I know how much you all loved hidden mines).
Healing Boomboxes will now only play the song that has been active the longest, preventing multiple songs from overlapping while healing. i.e. if boombox #1 is placed down and then boombox #2 is placed 1 second later, boombox 2 will be muted so that only boombox #1 music plays. Boombox #2 will unmute if boombox #1 is picked up because now boombox #2 is the only actively healing boombox.
Reworked the level 2 laser layout for all Maps.
Updated session privacy to stop advertising to steam servers. This should make it so that private sessions do not appear on search lists.
The Session ID is now blurred in the Menu Screen, with a button toggle allowing the blur to be hidden.
Updated Collison in the back of the Meat Freezer to help prevent items from being clipped into it.
Updated the Claustropede interaction Collison to make it easier to grab when placed into the Meat Freezer.
Updated the egg collection UI to display the icon of pet progress and sound effect indicating collection.
Removed the negative value displayed on the boombox when scanned.
Texture improvements to AI to further help with performance.

FIXES

Fixed an issue with the replenisher that could allow for item duping.
Fixed an issue where the Boombox was not healing if placed down rather than dropped.
Fixed an issue where dying while using a weapon such as the pulse rifle would not cancel the state of the weapon e.g. if the pulse rifle was picked back up, it would continue shooting without the player activating it.
Fixed an issue with the Jetpack where hitting zero fuel would prevent interaction with the world.
Fixed an issue where sometimes, players that died in the water and were resurrected at the med station were still in the swimming state.
Fixed an issue where infinite swimming states could trigger from different events.
Fixed an issue where item resource value was not properly saving, causing the item to load with the incorrect amount of resource.
Fixed an issue where the player camera would clip into the ground whenever using certain emotes while actively shrunk by the shrink ray.
Fixed an issue where the Globule did not always despawn properly if the player was debuffed right before being teleported to the ship.
Fixed an issue where items that were held while the ship transitions could be detached or set invisible.
Fixed an issue here the mouse cursor would disappear when returning to Orbit while the player was still in the UI, forcing them to press escape and re-enter the UI.
Fixed multiple descriptions for collected egg progress.
Fixed various broken AI Nav paths in Port Lumin.
Fixed an issue where ship items were not hidden during night shift when the ship leaves for the night.
Fixed an area in Port Ragnar Level 2 with inaccessible entrance to an access crate.

What's Next? Progression

Progression is a huge part of this game and I feel right now that players are bottlenecked by the suit level which is capped at level 30. Therefore, the Progression Update will rework the system and introduce an new levelling system allowing players to push their limits way further by earning a much higher suit. Failing to push a certain quota should be due to mistakes made by the player rather than due to the system limiting the player's ability to succeed despite the fact that they have maxed out everything in the game.

I will be hard at work with the next update, so there most likely won't be any hotfixes happening between now and then. Of course, I will continue to monitor bugs that come up and communicate with you all regularly, which I primarily do through discord.

-Forsakenhalo