Another small-ish update to the game. All major problems should hopefully be fixed now, along with some QOL and Polish changes.

• Improved Liquid shader

• Reverb now transitions smoothly

• Slightly delayed starting Voiceline for a THREE seconds

• New audio processing for dialogue (sounds more like its coming from a speaker, also quieter in general)

• Moving Platforms have better SFX now

• Subtitle toggle is "live" now (you can toggle it on and off while a subtitle is being displayed)

• Visual fixes / Polish across all scenes

• Less stutters during gameplay

• Fixed bugged / corrupted lightmaps in a few areas

• Fixed multiple occlusion problems.

• Fixed some LOD issues

• Fixed bugged secret

• Fixed bug with area overlap in Final areas of the game

• Fixed visual glitch with bottles

• Fixed not selectable pause menu items

• Fixed stuck with saving icon

• Fixed camera FX not playing when activating statue

• Fixed Volumetric Lights not updating properly when switching to and from High / Medium setting.

• Fixed sliders in pause menu not visible when dying

• Fixed weird controller navigation

-Stefaaan

• Set Ai healthbars on default only visible for quest givers and vendors.

• Added a female player character

• Added a DJ to the club

• Added a sprayer NPC to the lobby

• Added a video player to the player home computer, updated the music player app.

• Added another part to the town, including a police station - work in progress

• The player stats page now shows maximum values where applicable

• The quest panel now shows all quest item objectives

• Updated the default keybinding for crouch to Left Mouse + CTRL

• Updated the placement of styles, now takes into account the player camera perspective, instead of only the player character positioning

• Fame, once achieved is now displayed on the player stats page

• Fixed: Stamina not updating

• Fixed: BeeLow's second quest

• Fixed crouched movement, working again

• Several minor updates.

[carousel][/carousel]

Fixes:
- reduced the interaction area of the trash bins which made picking up nearby leaves difficult
- changed it so the objective of hitting the basket with 3 different things starts as early as it makes sense to count all the hits
- refreshing global stats when getting to the game ending so it doesn't display an outdated value of the Subject number on the player's photograph panel
- fixed leaves inside the greenhouse clipping through the floor
- thickened garage wall from the Swings side so the leaves cannot pass through it
- added slopes to places where balls could get stuck, e.g. on the hedge between Court and Swings area
- adjusted the animation of leaf bag dumping into the trash

Happy gaming,
Eternity Team

- Removed Debug console
- Fixed Table registrations
- Fixed Chair registrations
- Fixed Customer stealing cups after sitting in cafe
- Fixed Dirt Stat escalating into the hundreds

more coming soon!

Hey, everyone!

Giannis here and with the November 18th release of BIRDCAGE fast-approaching, Barry and I would like to take a look back on the development history of our sword action shooting game.

The concept of a shoot ‘em up called “BIRDCAGE” can be traced all the way back to 2017. At the time I had started prototyping a shooter as a way to learn the GameMaker engine and although this project faltered, a few core elements would carry over to the future iterations of BIRDCAGE:

The player ship would have a sword, the player’s shot color would be blue, the game would be “vertizontal”, the title would be BIRDCAGE, the aesthetic would carry a 32-bit era influence.

Around this same time our correspondence with Barry had started over DM’s on Twitter. It was obvious that we shared common influences and tastes, and finding something to work on together became an oft-repeated goal of ours.

Over the next few years, I would dabble in game development as a hobby. I learned a lot by working on a few different prototypes, slowly building an understanding of what making a game might be like. Around 2021-2022, I started to feel confident enough to take game dev more seriously.

The BIRDCAGE idea was revisited in September of 2022. It was meant to be a quick learning project that would be finished within six months.

BIRDCAGE prototype from 2022.

Within days of getting the basics of BIRDCAGE down, Barry and I started collaborating on the project. At first, Barry was mainly going to compose some early stage music, but it soon became obvious that we shared a common vision, work ethic, interests and design goals. We decided to set off on full production of BIRDCAGE as partners and co-directors, and POLYGON BIRD Games was born.

Logos for POLYGON BIRD Games and EXCEL Framework, the name given to our set of tools within GameMaker.

Our first major milestone came in March of 2023 with “DEMO ZERO”, essentially a polished prototype that we sent out to friends and family to play and gauge their reactions. At this point, the game was pretty rough, but the essential core of BIRDCAGE had been established. And, with the positive reaction of early playtesters, we set out to flesh out what the full game would be.

Early version of the -BIRDCAGE Demo Zero- title screen (late 2022).

The boss fight against THESIS as it appeared in Demo Zero (2023).

Early 2023 to late summer of 2024 was, I think, the most agonizing part of development on BIRDCAGE for me. We had the base of the game, and now we needed to add the content, which turned out to be more of a grind than I had anticipated. The relative monotony of the grind led me to a variety of dangerous thoughts: “What if we added this or that weapon? What if we changed the aspect ratio of the game? What if the graphical style was completely redone?”

The fact that BIRDCAGE made it past this stage is definitely owed to Barry’s involvement – having a collaborator who was as invested in the game as I was and believed in the project when I didn’t was crucial.

I don’t remember too many specifics from this time – all I know is that we came out the other side with the "minimum viable product" content of the game in a relatively stable and polished state.

Thankfully, things would improve considerably in the next stretch of development.

Toward the end of August 2024 and after some time off, we started firing on all cylinders.

The majority of the game was playable and polished, and over the years of constantly replaying the game, we had developed an intuitive understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and how far we could push certain elements. Stages 5, 6 and 6b were developed at this time and earlier stages were polished to tie the whole together.

A lot of fun work happened over the next months – figuring out the final difficulty curve, balancing the density of the experience, writing in-game dialogues and lore, directing the cutscenes, polishing the assets and code, adding more options, menus, explainers and tutorials. The final year was a time of rapid progress, every little task making the finish line a little clearer ahead.

Stage Select Training menu, an example of the kind of work that took place in the final year of BIRDCAGE development (2024).

First pass at adding Local Leaderboards to the game (2024).

That brings us roughly to today, a couple of weeks out from the release of BIRDCAGE. The past few months have been a lot more business-oriented, trying to get word out about the game, cutting trailers, creating the Demo for Tokyo Game Show and NextFest, polishing marketing assets and playing whack-a-mole with any remaining bugs.

Now felt like a good time to look back on the history of the project and take stock of the process. We hope it gives you some insight into how BIRDCAGE came to be.

We’re extremely proud of the game we’ve made and how we made it. Even after what must be thousands of hours of testing, it’s still fun for us to just fire the game up and play through BIRDCAGE, trying to perfect our routes and scores.

We hope you’ll enjoy playing BIRDCAGE as well!

Thanks for reading,

Giannis and Barry

POLYGON BIRD Games

Greetings everyone, @rageair and @egghorse here!

It’s been almost a week since All Under Heaven went live, and it’s really humbling to see how many of you are playing - and we’ve been having a blast following your reactions and reading your comments! We’ve also seen plenty of suggestions, requests and inspiring mods from the community in the past few days, which made us want to shed some light on our post-release plans for All Under Heaven. 

Last Thursday, we launched the first post-release patch for All Under Heaven (you can see the changelog for Update 1.18.0.1 here), where we tackled a few key issues such as crashes. I’m happy to report that this was the first of many more to come. Let’s take a look at what we’re currently working on! 

Update 1.18.0.2 is releasing tomorrow on Steam, with a grab bag of bugfixes, crash fixes, balance changes and improvements to databases. The full changelog will be released alongside the update itself, but for now we want to cover some highlights from this update as well as the updates still to come. 

We’ve seen many players report that your immediate family is a bit hard to wrangle when it comes to getting their credentials. To make this less frustrating, we’ve added a decision called “Command Family to take Exams,” which will be available to House Heads. Taking this decision will make your unlanded family members independently go to local exams (if they need to pass the local exam) and Capital Exams (if they need to pass the Metropolitan or Palace exam) without the need for you to take them there. As long as they are within the same top realm as you, they will create their own travels, and you will be notified via Feed Message if they pass. Additionally, when playing as a Governor in a realm with Merit, courtiers will now always move to your new location when you gain or lose a title; If a courtier gets 'lost' in a location they should not be in, they'll return within a year.

A few balance changes have been made to address ongoing frustrations when playing in China: 

• Removed the MaA Maintenance and Army maintenance penalties imposed by the Dynastic Cycle on the Huangdi; the Celestial government already had increased maintenance from the Treasury defines, and didn't need more. This should make China more resistant to going bankrupt during revolts.

• Removed some excessive men_at_arms_cap modifiers from the Celestial government, as this is handled through the Army Command Structure laws instead.

• The Grand Campaign war will no longer result in China gaining additional tributaries. Instead, it will always give contested titles directly to the Hegemon. 

• The Chinese Emperor will now be able to use the “Consolidation” CB on within these De Jure Empires: Zhongyuan, Jingyang, Lingnan, Liangyi and Yongliang (with the exception of the De Jure Kingdoms of Xia, Hexi, Dali and Viet - we don’t want Song to immediately fight Xia in 1066) regardless of the era the Dynastic Cycle is in. 

• The Hegemon can now reject tributary missions in the event where they come bearing tribute. This allows you to not get tributaries sworn to you that you do not want (for example if you’d rather attack them).

We are also continuing to improve our databases and localization based on player feedback we’ve been receiving since Tuesday. For example, consorts of the Chinese Hegemon should now be correctly called Húanghòu, if female, or Húangfū, respectively, if male. 

If a fix you’ve been waiting for is not included in 1.18.0.2, it’s very likely that it will be part of the larger updates coming soon, such as 1.18.1. Oftentimes, if it’s a tricky bug to solve, we need more time to test to ensure we haven’t broken other things in the process. Content that requires new localization also needs a bit of time in the oven to be translated! 

That said, we will also have a few slightly bigger patches for All Under Heaven coming out in the next few weeks. What is and isn’t included in these patches is, of course, subject to change - we keep an eye on community sentiment, suggestions and bug reports, and try to juggle between severity, impact, and risk.

 

We’re planning for update 1.18.1 to go live sometime next week. As usual, the changelog will be available once the update rolls out, but we’ll try to give you a sneak peek in the section below. 

Some visual improvements will be coming to South East Asia, with several new headwear pieces and clothing being added. In total, we will be adding 4 clothes, 7 hairstyles and 4 headgears. 

\[Some examples of hairstyles and headgear being added to Southeast Asia.]

For a small touch of realism, we’re also adding blendshapes for long ears. 

\[Screenshots of the new long ear blendshapes in Southeast Asia.]

Here’s also a work-in-progress screenshot of something one of our character artists is working on for Japan: a new mask for Disfigured characters. 

\[A work-in-progress screenshot of a Japanese mask.] 

Our character art team is also looking at improving character lighting, as we’ve gotten reports of it looking vastly different (and not necessarily better) on various machines. 

This update is also adding various fixes to the map and terrain: shoreline fixes, making sure all lakes have water where they should, adjustments to the heightmap etc. 

\[Bugfix: Rotated Heian-Kyo city and added the Palace model to it.] 

Our environment team has also been trying to add a bit more mood to the Chinese courtroom. Based on community feedback, the team has added more candles and carpets, pillars and drapes. The imperial tent has also been updated.

\[Updated lighting in the Chinese Royal Court.] 

This update also includes a few minor interface fixes. For example, House Relation icons have been added to the House Coat-of-Arms to improve usability: 

\[House Relation icon on the House CoA.]

A new Legend skin for Asia has been added to improve flavor and consistency: 

\[New Legend Chronicle skin.] 

We’re also adjusting the AI to better utilize Legends.

Besides updates from our artists, we also have some new bits of content. Below you can see a new decision to “Found a Ryukyuan Empire” which you’ll be able to try out in 1.18.1. For our world conquest enthusiasts, the decision to establish a Ryukyuan Empire presents a formidable challenge due to its Realm Size requirements. However, we all know this was your destiny to begin with if you choose to play as a Ryukyuan! You will also get to choose a family heirloom as a reward to solidify your achievement of showing the world the power of the Three Mountains. 

\[Screenshot of the “Found a Ryukyuan Empire” decision.] 

We’ve also added a decision to “Found the Siam Kingdom,” which is meant to represent the Tai people's ambition to unite under a single banner after their flight to the southern lands.

\[Screenshot of the “Found the Siam Kingdom” decision.] 

Closer to the end of November, we plan to release another update: 1.18.2. One of the main focuses, next to a batch of bugfixes, will be improving gameplay as a Minister, adding content variation to that playstyle. 

We plan to continue addressing bugs in All Under Heaven beyond the updates shared above. You shouldn’t be surprised if you see a smaller patch drop in-between or after the ones already listed.

If you want to know more about the post-release process generally works for us at Paradox Black, Trinexx did an excellent job at describing how our post-release support process usually works a few dev diaries ago, back in May when we released Khans of the Steppe: Dev Diary #171 - Post-Release Support. 

Stay tuned for the coming updates! 

Hello everyone! We're back for another small update, addressing bugs (can't help but doing the joke, but we are really addressing bugs though), Unity safety issues, and more!

Please find the full patchnote below :

• Added the possibility to relocate entire floor tile selections
  
• Improved performance with many floor tiles
  
• Command trails no longer snap to floor tile grids
  
• Updated material requirements for iron decorations.
  
• Unbuild floor tiles no longer show their progress billboard.
  
• Updated the Unity build version in reaction to the recent security risk.
  
• Fixed being able to cheat with catapults using paste actions.
  
• Fixed being able to create illegal building assignments using pipette.

Hello Deathliverers!

Today again a small patch to fix the disconnection bug.

• Fix: Whenever someone (other than the host) grab an object and drop it then disconnect before someone else touched the object, it becomes invisible and "un-grabbable" by all other players

As always, if you feel like this doesn't cover everything or worse, bring new bugs, please contact us by mail or discord!

Going back to fix other bugs, especially the ones related to the optimization we made last Friday!

See you very soon !

Hello Everyone,

The new update is almost ready. It turned out a little shorter than I originally planned, but this time I focused on add the new repetitive events during free roaming.

When it comes to the story route, this update continues the "Sharing Wife" path. Meanwhile, Alex’s part is currently blocked and will return in a future update.

We’re moving toward the final phase of development, and the general plan is to complete the game within the next five updates. Including this upcoming release, here’s the roadmap:

• One more update for David’s route

• Two more updates for Alex’s route

• And one final update, which will include all endings

Schedule:
5.11.25 - Patreon
9.11.25 - Steam

Change Log:

• One new yoga scene for Tasha

• One new shower scene for Tasha

• One new sauna scene for Tasha

• Two new summer house scenes for Tasha

• One new laundry scene for Alla

• Two new summer house scenes for Alla

• Three new scenes with David, Alla, and Jack

• Three new setup scenes with Alla, Tasha, and David (leading into one big upcoming scene)

- Fixed glitches when loading scenes with multiple display setups.