SALUTATIONS, VILLAGERS!
We have a new update ready with a lot of new features and things to do during the day.
Below is an extensive list of added and updated features in addition to a number of bug fixes. For those of you who can't be bothered reading this wall of text, we have conveniently put together a video that summarizes everything.
The Quest System
The residents of Eville moved back to town, now that you are there to protect them.
A lot of them need your help and offer you quests whilst providing rewards such as coins to spend at the local market or items, such as potions and other helpful gadgets.
Doing quests also restores the order in Eville if you’re a villager or increases the chaos if you’re a conspirator. You can see the current progress oin your HUD. If you manage to fill the bar completely your faction will gain control over Eville and win the game. This is very difficult, but if you manage to fill the bar halfway you will trigger an event that helps your faction.
Currently there are 11 Quests for you to explore. We will be adding more quests and more variety for the objectives in the next updates.
Some quests also teach you basic mechanics, guiding you to certain locations on the map for crafting, shopping and gathering herbs.
Quest-Events
These events offer advantages for conspirators or villagers. The Full-Moon event lets the villagers wake up at night and hide and run from their killers. The Fog-Event impairs the vision of everyone during the daytime and lets the conspirators secure some easy assassination skill. Grouping up may be the only way to stay safe now… just be careful you don’t stay with the wrong folks.
Other Features
Axe-Murderer be gone - all hail the Barbarian:
Thief interview excerpt: “... We’ve replaced 🔪 the Axe Murderer, after he taught everyone of us how to use the axe. In his place we hired the Barbarian who can chase people with his Sprint-Skill and slow them down with their intimidating shout, making it easy for us to get those villagers fleeing from us. Also some of us were confused as to why some of us suddenly became Axe-Murderers should one die. Well, that doesn’t happen anymore…”
Barbarian Skills:
- Intimidating Shout: Slows down players close to you.
- Sprint
- Axe Cleave (night)
- Assassination (day)
Corpse Reporting 2.0
When you report a corpse it works similarly to a regular emergency call. Everyone will be notified of the found corpse (as before), but after this you will have 15 seconds to get to the center of town. You will not be transported there anymore as it interrupts your current actions and could disrupt what you were doing, meaning you can decide if you want to participate.
Dead bodies also do not show the reason for their death anymore. It will be revealed after you report it.
Changes and Balancing
- Increased inventory size from 4 to 6
- Detective [Sneak Out]: Increased the vision range a little
- Detective [Sneak Out]: Reveals the first person’s name you stumble upon
- Detective [Search Desk]: The desk is selected automatically if you stand close.
- Detective [Search Desk]: The 3rd search already crosses out the first card (instead of the 4th check on a player)
- Guard [Pike Stab]: Cooldown for attack was decreased by half.
- Guard [Bulwark]: Damage protection increased by 50%, you now need four Axe hits to die instead of two.
- Guard [Bulwark]: The protection is now only triggered once woken up by the [Secret Protector], but then stays forever.
- Thief [Pickpocketing]: Now you steal 10, 15 or 20 coins instead of a random number between 10 and 20. Making it more difficult for the victim to notice it.
- Conspirators: All conspirators can now Axe-Kill at night and Assassinate during the day.
- Barbarian: Replaces Axe-Murderer and has an Intimidating Shout to slow down players. Can also Assassinate during the day.
- Conspirators: You now see the roles of other conspirators above their characters
- Conspirators: Conspirators win if they’re the majority of living players (as in 2v1).
- Conspirators [Axe Cleave]: Reworked the hit detection so you don’t have to worry about not hitting people while they sleep anymore.
- Conspirators: It is no longer necessary to have an Axe Murderer (now Barbarian) in the game.
- Conspirators: Roles are no longer switched if a Barbarian dies
- Conspirators: Everyone has the Assassination Skill during the day and Axe-Cleave during the night. One kill is shared across all conspirators for each Phase.
- Accusation Vote: I’ve the person voted for dies during the vote (for whatever reason e.g. Poisoning) the vote will end.
- Timers: Increased default Guilty-Vote duration to 20 seconds (from 15)
- Player starting positions are now randomized.
- The emergency bell can now be rung only once per day outside of corpse reports.
- The voting wall is now unpassable
- Tripwire: You can’t enter other players' homes anymore if woken up by it.
- Role Assumptions now show all players in the list instead of the living to hide potentially unidentified victims
Economy Changes
- The Herb Vendor has now an infinite stock of herbs.
- Herbs now cost 15 coins each instead of 20/30/50.
- The income was reduced to 10 coins per day (since quests give you rewards now)
- The starting coins were reduced from 100 to 50.
- The Trip Wire now costs 50 coins instead of 80.
- The Lock & Key now cost 65 coins instead of 70.
Performance and Lighting Improvements
We completely changed how the lighting works during the day and partly during the night. Short range cascading shadows allow us to have dynamic shadows for vegetation and players, while on the medium range we use distance fields which dramatically increase the performance and quality over the static shadows we used before. Another improvement is the game size since we could remove a lot of precalculated shadows in the world.
During the night it looks the same for the most part, but we also have some significant performance improvements of around 30% more FPS.
We also replaced a lot of old assets with new more efficient assets, reducing the game-size even further. Eville now needs 1.6 GB of disk space (down from 2.2 GB).
Visual Improvements
- An all-new Witch’s Hut
- Improved main menu visuals
- Recreated and prettied up the Grey Death and Mage’s Blossom
- New cliffs and stones on the whole map
- New Smith character / UrbanBravo (our Community Man!)
- New ritual circle
- New lanterns, torches, lights
- New grass, moss and such
- A new area you don’t get to see yet 😈
- Improved wind effects on foliage
- Replaced a lot of assets with more performance efficient assets
- Fireflies at night!
- New voting lockdown effect
- Variations of the Magical Goods vendor as a playable character and NPCs
- New paths behind the graveyard to the lake
- New playerhome door effects showing the player color
- Improved footprint visibility
- New Role-Claim and mayor reveal FX
- Glitter FX on items that can be picked up
User Interface / HUD
We have reworked a lot of our HUD elements in a new condensed style. There are a lot of reasons behind this.
Our goal is to have a clean and consistent style, while communicating a lot of info to you, using the little space we have for it at the same time.
If you take a look at the new player and role list you will see some new unique icons for each role as well as numbering for colorblind players. But we also removed some parts such as the text in the timers and avatar pictures in the player list, so the idea is to provide more important info and remove unnecessary clutter.
We were also not happy with the old style anymore, since the look of our game changed completely over the last year from low-poly flat-shaded to stylized PBR. Yet the UI stayed the old cartoony way with wooden planks and bold cartoony fonts, that didn’t fit in with the rest of the game anymore. The old style also used publicly available graphical assets, but we want our game to be unique.
It will take a couple updates until the UI will be fully done, but we focused on the main HUD elements first. The new HUD also shows buffs and debuffs, such as poison and trip wires.
Currently redesigned: HUD (Timers, Minimap, Player Unitframe, Role- & Player Lists, Abilities, Status Effects, Health, Inventory, Role)
Other UI changes are:
- Timer: Now always shown to all players (vote timers were only shown to participating players before)
- Game Start: Your Steam-Name is auto-filled (instead of a random name)
- Game Start: Moved the “randomize” Button, because some people 👀clicked it by accident, as it was positioned like a “confirm” Button
- Map: Updated the Map to the current state
- Hosting a Game: You can now configure the duration of the Guilty-Vote timer
- Main Menu: You can now redeem item codes, if you have any.
- In-World: The player doors are now redesigned and colorized in the player’s color.
- In-World: The player door now shows icons on it for disconnects, deaths and locks
- In-World: Improved the readability for player name plates
- Interactions: You now see the key you have to press for interactive objects.
BUGFIXES
- Ghost Whisperer [Find Corpse]: The effect was kind of broken, not showing you where the corpse is.
- The guard’s bulwark sometimes didn’t work, so the guard got killed in one hit
- Global lights sometimes didn’t render at night, causing a lot of areas to be purely black
- The seer’s tracking footprints were pointing in the wrong direction
- The seer’s tracking footprints were sometimes not visible at all
- Axe Cleave had some hit detection problems
- If you had duplicates of an item, those weren’t removed on death
- Assumed roles were shown above players heads - even at night, making it easy to identify players if abused
- Role claims were shown at night, making it easy to identify players if abused (for example by the seer)
- Paintings sometimes were placed in mid-air
- Reporting shortly before the night starts would cause a vote happening… at night 🙈
- Ghosts could place paintings
- If a disconnected person left before becoming a ghost the host would see the ghost’s abilities in their HUD
- The camera showing a corpse report was sometimes stuck in the floor or in the wrong location on the map
- The wings of the watchful eye were sometimes visible while being in the eye
- If the seer died while in their watchful eye the items wouldn’t get removed on death
- Paintings couldn’t be properly placed for clients
- Conspirator [Axe Cleave]: Ability stayed active rarely, killing everyone stepping “inside” the axe
- Conspirator [Axe Cleave]: Sometimes the axe stays visible after use (still happens but more rarely)
- Ghost Whisperer - Finding corpses was bugged as soon as someone disconnected
- When the role assumption is active and a player disconnects you couldn’t use the window anymore
- Idle animations were skipping
- Player name plates could be white on the first day
- The Game Guide now closes properly when the game starts
- Seer could sometimes see the player’s names at night
- The host could sometimes see a ghost player
- After a body report the day could be skipped by a vote
- Ghosts could be killed by Smuggler-bombs
- You couldn’t active an emergency bell anymore if a slanderer faked one shortly before the night started
- The seer’s watchful eye removed all icons from the map
- If you died while typing in chat the area indicator was visible forever (for you)
- Fixed the random restock rates, not being calculated correctly
- Herbs could spawn on trap doors
- Sprint with shift was removed since it caused a lot of unintentional uses
- Item selling sometimes sold the wrong item
- The vote window would be shown for dead players when a vote ended for a short time
- Trapper’s traps could be stacked on top of each other
- When no difficulty was selected it showed “1-4 players” instead of the easy player counts
- If you spammed the report button, the report animation would restart over and over
- Player nameplates did cast shadows
- Fixed some general typos
- The game guide had some typos
- The vote could be restarted by players under some circumstances
- The Guard kills didn’t show up correctly on dead bodies and the end credits
- Very rarely player models didn’t load in and that player stayed invisible
MORE FANCY STREAMS AND PLAYTESTS
We're currently planning additional streams for ya'll! Also if you're one of the alpha testers you can join our community playtest session tomorrow at 8PM CEST.
Make sure to follow us on social media, and on Discord to ensure you don't miss 'em.
WISHLIST
You can wishlist Eville and show us some love and by doing so, keep up to date with our development process.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1220170/Eville/
HIT US UP
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