Sep 12, 2024

Future of Town of Salem Games Announcement 📢

Town of Salem - Sydney | Digital Bandidos

Hello Townies!

We have important updates to share with you regarding the future of the Town of Salem games. Our commitment from the start is that we are invested in making sure we take care of the games & the community. We appreciate everyone’s patience in this process as we have been “heads down” to get teams spun up, feedback reviewed, plans decided on & more.

We are very excited to share with you that Curtis & Tuba will be continuing to work on the Town of Salem games 🎉 We are grateful for their passion & insight as both developers on the games & as deep rooted members of the community.

”Hey everyone! I am very excited to share that I have returned to working on the Town of Salem franchise. I'll be dedicating my time to designing and implementing various content updates and improvements to the game. I can't wait for everyone to see everything we're working on 😄” - Curtis

”Hey everyone, it's great to be back, I'm looking forward to working on the game once again, to make the game better once again.” - Tuba

Tuba's Announcement Video

Regarding Game Updates:

We have been diligently working on our plans for the games in terms of content, new features, balance changes, bug fixes & more. At this time we aren’t quite ready to release an official roadmap, BUT we have a list of some of items you can expect to see on it. Please stay tuned for the roadmap release soon.

Partial Roadmap Points:

QoL improvements for ToS1 & ToS2
- Block system, backend updates to the reporting system

QoL improvements for ToS1
- UI updates & other ToS1 mod implementations (chat effect tags, best friend system, font size picker, UI recoloring, expanding chat size, colored nametags on map, will templates, chat names colors matching role color, refreshed endgame screen, town traitor clock, etc.)

QoL improvements for ToS2
- Discord integration, game modes revamped, reputation system, achievements & stats

Other Key Points:

Suspending ToS2 Battle Pass System
- We are bringing down the Battle Pass until we can get the right content plan, pricing, and strategy to support the effort while bringing the most value to players. We are actively listening to the community, mods and dev team, regarding these changes.
- Please note that the UI/UX may be wonky, because we decided to just rip it out, due to this.
- The current Battle Pass rewards are not exclusive to that Battle Pass (Please don’t panic buy!!).

ToS2 Season 4 delayed for Review
- Looking at balance changes, opportunities for a new role & more. We will share as soon as we have an update here.

Traitors in Salem
- TiS is still being reviewed by our teams. We will share as soon as we have an update here.

ToS2 Mobile
- ToS2 Mobile issues including store issues are still being reviewed by our teams. We will share as soon as we have an update here. We are looking to get ToS2 mobile available again ASAP.

ToS1 Facebook Issues
- ToS1 Facebook Login Issues issues are still being reviewed by our teams. We will share as soon as we have an update here.

ToS2 Server Issues
- The latest server maintenance was partially related to working on these outages & giving us tools & more information to resolve them. We are hoping to use these tools & information to reduce outages to only planned outages.

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In the meantime - soon we will be distributing a community survey for players to fill out if they wish. We’ll share information on this as soon as we can.

Again, we want to thank everyone for their patience as we are getting settled in here. We really appreciate all of the feedback & ideas that the community continues to share.

- Digital Bandidos Team 🦝

Sep 12, 2024

Future of Town of Salem Games Announcement 📢

Town of Salem 2 - Sydney | Digital Bandidos

Regarding Game Updates:

Partial Roadmap Points:

Other Key Points:

Sep 12, 2024

Temtem: Swarm – Patch Notes v0.4.9 (Beta Playtest)

Temtem: Swarm - mmmmaria

Important Notice

Even though progress from the previous playtesting has been maintained, due to balance changes in some of the Skill Tree nodes, some players could see some pansuns deducted from their accounts. This has been reworked for future patches so no pansuns or progress are lost.

New Stuff

Skill Tree’s economy has been reworked.
- We’ve introduced Pansuns wallets for each Temtem, so now players will have a common wallet and another wallet for each Temtem.
- Earned Pansuns in-game or with Kudos, will be sent to the common wallet, which can be spent on any Skill Tree.
- However, refunding a Skill Tree, while still possible, will generate Pansuns linked to the Temtem, which you will only be able to use inside that Temtem Skill Tree.
- When a new Temtem is captured, you’ll receive a bonus of Pansuns linked to that Temtem so you can start their Skill Tree with some progress.
- Having the same currency for all Tems while also having the possibility of doing Skill Tree refunds, forced players to refund the full skill tree of their most advanced Temtem each time they captured a new one, in order to put all the Pansuns in the new Skill Tree. This effectively kills all the progression per Temtem and forces users to use this strategy in order to optimize the runs. With the new changes, we aim to give more relevance to each Tem and their progression, while also boosting their initial progression when captured and starting fresh and still allowing for changes inside each Skill Tree.

Added Steam’s Rich Presence.

The Temtem selection UI has been reworked, now it’s prettier and easier to use with the mouse.

A glossary of synergies can now be accessed from the Pause and Level Up screens.

Improvements

We’ve improved the UX on capturing eggs.
- When an egg is ready to appear, the selection UI will now indicate the instructions for capturing it.
- Also, the marker for the capture Spot will now feature an egg.
Spots (in-game events) will be triggered faster when the player is inside the activation circle, 3s ➜ 1.5s.
Gameplay items (magnets, status condition chips, etc) have been removed from Chests.
- This effectively makes chests better overall and makes them give more reliable rewards (perk upgrades, health items and pansuns).
All chests will now always feature a perk upgrade (+1 level to one of your perks).
Gameplay and healing items are now not attracted by the player’s magnet.
- Following player’s feedback here, there were multiple occasions where players weren’t able to decide when to pick these items to suit them better due to the default magnet being too strong and picking them the moment they were spawned. With this change, you’ll be able to decide if you want to pick the item now or leave it for later.
Healing items are now repelled if the player has full health.
Healing items now are displayed with location markers.
Evolution levels are now displayed with a + symbol in front.
- Same as in Temtem OG, instead of evolving at a specific level, Tems evolve after getting that amount of levels. So for example Platypet evolves at +10 and then Platox evolves at +15. If you evolve Platypet at level 20 (you can always skip to evolve), then Platox will evolve at level 35.
All health bars (powerful Tems, bosses, spots…) will now smoothly react to health changes. Previously this was only added to the player health bar.
The Invulnerability Item now has a visual cue before it ends.
Your latest selected Temtem and Stage will be kept between runs.
Perks that reach maximum level are now displayed with a star icon.
We’ve added new tutorials to explain Spots and the Ghost mode in coop.
Selecting the Temtem at the center of the Skill Tree will now display its stats, trait and Ultimate.
Tems frames in the UI will now always display their Skill Tree progression, on all UIs.
Gears will now display their modified value when upgrading them, so players can see the specific changes.
Removed the rerroll and block options from the Level Up menu. Now they will only appear if the player has those available (currently impossible to get on the playtest due to missing progression).

Balance

Temtem

Innki
- Base Speed has been reduced.

Bosses

General
- All bosses’ HP have been increased.
- Deniz minibosses’ HP too.
- We’ve reduced the duration on all the bosses’ charges.
- We’ve also reduced the time some of them spent walking around.
Oceara
- Sanative Rain heals Oceara faster now.
- Sanative Rain will proc now with higher percentages of lost health.

Techniques

Tsunami (Platypet’s Ultimate) ➜ Now does damage even when not upgraded.
Mechanical Heat (Oree’s Ultimate) ➜ Cooldown has been reduced and added 2 more projectiles.
Electric Storm (Innki’s Ultimate) ➜ Reduced 2 projectiles and added them as upgrades to the Skill Tree.
Ghost’s technique ➜ Now does damage.
Data Burst + ➜ Pierce has been reduced by 1 and damage has been reduced.
Toxic Ink ➜ Reduced cooldown and increased duration.
DC Beam ➜ Cooldown has been reduced.
Crystal Spikes ➜ Firerate has been reduced and Cooldown has been reduced.
Thunder Strikes ➜ Cooldown has been reduced.
The maximum values related to critical hits have been reduced all over the place.

Gears

The maximum values related to critical hits have been reduced all over the place.

Items

Invulnerability and Velocity items ➜ Duration has been doubled 5s ➜ 10s.

Spots

Added some more Spots per map.
Added some more possible locations for Spots to spawn.
Improved some of the rewards.
- We want to do a deeper rework of the Spot system to make it more dynamic and randomized. We also want to add more types of Spots and rework some of the current ones. However these deep changes will take some time, so we decided to do some minor changes for now that will improve the experience with them.

Fixes

Fixed an invisible collider in Cipanku.
Fixed the “Starting in …” text in coop lobbies not appearing centered.
Fixed Oree’s and Pigepic’s rendering appearing with transparent areas while displaying them after being captured.
Fixed being able to receive damage right after doing a dash while you were supposed to be invincible.
Fixed pickups spawning in inaccessible areas.
Fixed some chests in Coop that weren’t properly tied to the player of the same color.
Fixed a softlock occurring when the host closes a lobby and another player was trying to enter it.
Fixed Hologram+ icon.
Fixed some UI prompts not being clickable with the mouse.
Fixed Platypet being able to double evolve in some cases.
Fixed Ultimates being able to be used before their cooldown bar was completed.
Fixed players being spawned in inaccessible areas if being resurrected near them.
Fixed losing mouse input after using Reanimation Kit for the second time during a run.
Fixed incorrect knockback icon in Tsunami’s description.
Fixed Ultimate appearing in the passive techniques UI under some circumstances.
Fixed UI focus when selecting Join Party in the Play menu quickly.
Fixed evolution portraits appearing in black even after being discovered in the game.
Fixed centering in the “Upgrade” button on Skill Trees.
Fixed pause menu opening when opening the Steam overlay during the Victory/Defeat screen.
Fixed some areas where players could get stuck after dashing through them.
Fixed the prompt “Hold to Upgrade” not being translated.
Fixed Pigepic being vulnerable before Divine Inspiration was totally dissipated.
Fixed Victory/Defeat texts not being displayed in asian languages.
Fixed Ukamas being stationary under some circumstances.
Fixed Platypet second evolution being triggered one level before it should.
Fixed Play screen not being centered.
Fixed perks levels not being displayed correctly in the end of run screen while playing in co-op.

Other

Simplified how techniques, ultimates, and gears are referred to in descriptions. We’ve removed the icons associated with them and they are now simply referred to as Techniques (all passive techniques), Gears, and Ultimates (previously active techniques).

Sep 12, 2024

Dev Diary VI - Interview with the composer

The Precinct - JordanC

You're going to want to tune into this!

We sat down with Gavin Harrison, one of The Precinct's composers, to discuss the music in-game and how he got inspired to create such an impressive 80s inspired soundtrack.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/490110/The_Precinct/

When did you first know that you wanted to pursue a career in music?

I’ve always had an interest in music, from the days of sitting as a young child at my grandparents out of tune upright piano, through to playing guitar and keyboards (probably badly!) in many different pub bands in my late teens. I guess like all creative pursuits it was, and still is, something I feel compelled to do. I worked quite a few different jobs through my twenties, mostly admin-based but I was always writing music in the background, before finally being able to devote myself fully to composition and sound design in my early thirties - it’s never too late to start!

Did you study music at university or college? Or are you self-taught?

I’m generally self-taught in terms of playing the piano and guitar, along with the theory. I did however study music GCSE followed by music A-Level, which certainly when I studied was very much based in the classical sphere. I quite enjoyed delving into the compositional styles though and especially learning about some of the rules imposed on music of the time - and the effects of breaking them. Following on from A-Levels I went to a regional college to do an HND in music technology, of which I completed a year before heading to Australia!

What initially got you interested in retro musical equipment?

Weirdly I’m not sure I can pinpoint an exact moment! I was always into the more electronic-based side of things when it came to music, being a fan of scores and albums by Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre. In fact, I taught myself a fair amount from several Jarre songbooks! I do remember always reading the equipment listed within the album cover that had been used and wanting to own these fantastic machines that made the sounds I enjoyed.

Can you remember which was the first piece of retro equipment/instrument you bought? Do you still have it?

I can! It was a Juno 106 which I bought around 12 years ago and I’m pleased to say I still use it currently.

What is your favourite piece of retro equipment to use and why?

That’s a tough one, it changes from day to day/project to project. I think in terms of sheer enjoyment it’s probably either the Roland SH101 or the Oberheim OB-Xa. I also have some vintage outboard and quite enjoy using the Eventide H3000 - you never know quite what sound is going to come out of it!

What unique challenges do you face when using retro equipment compared to modern equipment?

Lots! The main one being are they going to turn on and then work as they are meant to - though of course isn’t that part of the fun?! I’d say with synths, other than the aforementioned actually turning on, the main issue is making sure they are in tune before doing any recording. Also, some don’t have MIDI, which is something that allows them to connect easier to a computer for sequencing and playback. That being said, I tend to favour playing in live where I can - they are real instruments and as such I try and treat them that way. Other issues can be things like heat, again it can affect the tuning and something like the Prophet 5 which is over 40 years old doesn’t have the most efficient power supply, I’m always a bit concerned it may catch fire…

One of the other challenges is recall. Some of the older synths have no ability to store sounds, so you either have to make a note of all the settings you’ve used or make sure you don’t use that synth for any other sounds for the duration of writing a track. For this reason, I do tend to demo up sounds entirely in the box then once a track idea is approved, I’ll record all the sounds using the vintage gear.

Describe what your career has been like so far.

I want to say varied but that feels a bit broad! I think like any career in any field there are various challenges along the way. From first starting out and having to establish yourself, to finding consistent work on interesting projects and then later on to balancing work as a freelancer with family life - all whilst maintaining a high quality in your work. I know it’s cliche, but I count myself lucky every day that I get to do what I do and consider myself fortunate to have worked with some great creative people.

What challenges do you face as a musician?

Staying original, meeting deadlines and paying the mortgage! Seriously though, I think maintaining creative energy can sometimes be hard and one challenge, particularly when freelancing, is knowing how and when to take a break to recharge.

What would you say has been your greatest achievement as a musician to date? What are you most proud of?

Having a piece recorded by an orchestra at Abbey Road has to be up there as a career highlight! Otherwise, I genuinely feel like reaching the end of a project successfully each time is always an achievement. It doesn’t matter how big or how small, doing work you’re proud of AND meeting a deadline is always something to be celebrated.

What types of games do you like to play in your free time?

I tend to find these days this depends entirely on what my eldest is playing at the time! Currently, there’s a fair bit of Super Mario Maker 2 being played, plus he’s enjoying the original Sonic games - which suits me as I’ve discovered I’ve still got most of the muscle memory from when I originally played them!

What are your top 3 favourite games of all time?

I’ve thought this one over for a while and genuinely can’t pick three…some of my best gaming moments have come playing with friends, does that make them my favourite? I’m not sure…I’m going to pass!

About the project so far

How does working on The Precinct compare to other projects you’ve worked on?

I’m not sure it’s ever possible to compare projects, you’re generally working with different people each time, with different ways of working and each project has individual needs. That being said I’ve worked with Fallen Tree Games before and so I think we have a good established working relationship which I hope makes things run smoothly - it certainly does from my side.

What artists, TV shows, movies, or other media do you draw inspiration from when making music for The Precinct?

I began by creating a playlist of songs I wanted to use as a basis for inspiration for The Precinct. I then took this list to the team and we chatted through each track and what elements would work and what perhaps might not fit so well in terms of the mood and atmosphere they were going for. There were also some pieces of music that had already been licensed for the game and I was able to use these as a good basis for the world we were created, after all my tracks have to work with what’s already there. Generally, I’m pulling elements from things like Miami Vice, Bladerunner, Beverly Hills Cop and even some John Carpenter - so quite the mix! However, it’s all about exactly what elements you’re pulling from each reference, for example, we’re not in a setting like Bladerunner in terms of space but I think there is a similar noir element.

The other thing I always try and keep in mind is whilst we are looking for the synthwave-styled sound, the track production still needs to sound current.

Do you have a clear idea of what you want each track to sound like? Or is it an evolving and iterative process?

I think there’s a bit of both. I have a clear idea of perhaps the type of sounds or elements I want to use, but at the same time if a track takes off in a different direction and is still working then you’ve got to go with the idea regardless. Sometimes a song will have a clear path in terms of its arrangement, sometimes you’ll need to run through loads of different ideas to hit the one that works. That can be the fun part, turning on an old effects unit and jamming some synth lines or guitar parts through it, playing around with some settings and seeing what happens!

Generally, once I’ve got the initial arrangement of the song down and most of the ideas in, I tend to not work on it for a period of time so I can come back to it with fresh ears. Sometimes I end up deleting whole sections when I do work on a track again, or coming up with completely different parts. Ultimately I find that for me the only thing that makes a track stop evolving and being finished is a deadline - which is why I like having them!

What has been the best part of working on The Precinct so far?

That’s an easy one - writing in a style I enjoy and using ALL the synths! As mentioned before, there are also a lot of vintage outboard effects being used across all the tracks too which has been fantastic to do. I’m well aware that the quality of in-the-box synths and effects are superb, but there’s just something more hands-on and fun about using the real thing…

The Precinct is definitely a world with an aesthetic I’ve enjoyed writing for so far, the only downside has been not being able to write as much music as I have ideas for!

Got a burning question about The Precinct's soundtrack that you want answered?

Comment down below!

Then don’t forget to wishlist The Precinct, join our Discord server, and follow us on social media at @theprecinctgame 🚨

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