Greetings, Kings and Queens!
It’s the most wonderful time of the year — and to celebrate it we’re rolling out the Christmas Update!
Christmas Event
First up is the Christmas event. Just like with the Halloween update we’ve prepared a special in-game event, where you can get a new artefact, spawning Christmas trees on every map! Build a castle close to them or station some units underneath and they’ll be presented with a powerful buff.
It also looks like Santa’s sleigh had a little accident with orx archers — dropping presents and christmas decorations everywhere!
Neutral Buildings and Aura Vaults
Even with new map decorations from previous update, we felt like the maps can be made even more interesting. So we’ve added Neutral Buildings and Aura Vaults! They randomly generate on each map and provide useful buffs to units and castles in their vicinity. Reach them by building nearby and reap the bonuses they provide.
Along with these buildings we’re introducing a quality of life change allowing you to build on the tiles adjacent to vaults — so when you reach them you don’t need to reach around and get a good chunk of Kingdom with the buildings.
Enhanced Action Log
Information is crucial in ORX, and previously action log just wasn’t showing enough of it. Now it not only displays messages about more actions taken by both player and the orx, but also allows scrolling to see older actions!
We’re always working on making ORX more clear and accessible, so you might expect even more QoL changes like this in the future.
Full Changelog
New Content
- Christmas event — decorations for the Main Menu and maps, Christmas Tree event and Christmas themed artefact.
- Side buildings — new neutral buildings, which grant bonuses upon unlocking them by building nearby.
Gameplay
- Upon reaching and unlocking a Vault or a side building, neutral tiles adjacent to them will be unlocked too
- Selected cards will be deselected after pressing Esc
- Upon the mission start the effects of the ORX Commanders will be shown via special cards rather than a small buff icon
- Improved action logging — now a lot more actions are shown in the log and it’s possible to scroll through them to see the older ones
- Reworked the card pool for card choices from another faction.
General Performance
- Switching shader animator for sprite animator
- Implemented a Screen Indicator Controller
- Improvements to the animation system
- Improvements to memory allocations and fixes for memory leaks tied to it
- Implemented AutoMapper
Fixes
- Fixed cannon balls and trebuchet projectiles staying for too long after hitting a target
- Fixed the description for Memory of the Fallen buff tooltip
- Fixed the Abdandon run\Restart buttons staying visible after abandoning a run and immediately pressing ESC during the transition
- Fixed Esc Menu covering the Abandon Run confirmation window and softlocking the game
- Fixed Settings menus staying open when opened while loading into a mission
- Fixed the cursor staying as a magnifying glass when going back to the main menu
- Fixed wrong display order for the Memory of the Fallen sprite
- Fixed Sharpshooters and Snipers guilds having wrong icons in castle descriptions
- Fixed the dawn sometimes failing to start after defeating a wave
- Fixed a rare crash occuring after pressing Restart
- Fixed the animation for orx from Curse of Doom sometimes being extremely slow
- Fixed the game showing descriptions for locked curses when highlighted
- Fixed the info window not opening for units buffed by Shadow Amulet
- Fixed the issue of red crosses appearing on already placed roads after you remove the infinite road cards and use up all the road cards with charges.
- Fixed the cards in Campaign Results screen sometimes appearing as if they’re behind a dimming filter
- Fixed the Deathgrow effect appearing twice upon triggering
News From Northen Planes
The work on 3rd playable faction — Boreal Nomads, — continues! This time we have a very first faction building to show. Inspired by scandinavian and slavic architecture, it perfectly conveys the mix of cultures between the giants and the humans.
Like any other faction, Boreal Nomads have to have economy cards. Stepping away from farms and orchards, we’ve decided that the nation of northerners will have Pastures as their main source of income.
From the gameplay side of things we’ve started iterating on main mechanics of the faction — fortification formations and hero management. This part is the most complex and time consuming, so at the moment we don’t have actual footage to share — but rest assured, we will create a dedicated devlog about Boreal Nomads once we feel happy with implementations!
Merry Christmas From Johnbell
Finally, we wish everyone Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! This year was very busy for us with ORX releasing in Early Access and all the updates we’ve added so far. We’re very thankful for the feedback we’ve received — we couldn’t make it this far without you!
Of course, ORX has a lot more updates coming up next year, and we’re committed to make the game the best it can be. Thank you for deciding to support ORX in Early Acces and may the new year bring only happiness and warmth to your life! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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