Today is a big day! With patch 3.2.0 Town of Salem's web version of the game will be updated to use the same client as Steam and Mobile. This means our web players will be playing with our latest client UI with all of its bells and whistles.
The new User Interface is more sleek. It provides quality of life features such as a Notes feature that lets you take notes in-game outside of your Last Will or Death Note, Player Numbers in chat, graveyard, and player list, and filters to easily search through the chat log.
What this update means for BlankMediaGames
For our team, this update means that Town of Salem is officially on one codebase and technology. Originally, Town of Salem was built using a technology called Flash using ActionScript3 as our coding language. Some may know that Flash is set to be deprecated at the end of this year, meaning browsers will no longer support it. This is why we have been tirelessly working on changing our technology over to the Unity engine. Town of Salem was completely rewritten in a different technology, using a different programming language in order to make sure the game can live on for years to come. Finally we have reached the end of that long road.
Working on this rewrite over the last couple of years has been challenging for our small team. Splitting work with adding new content to the Flash version of the game while also continuing our development with the new engine, and also supporting the new content on mobile meant that not as much content could be made. Now, we can work on features without delay. We no longer have a looming deadline over our heads for the death of Flash, and we do not need to duplicate work on two platforms. Hooray!
What does this mean for you, our players?
New content, new features, new cool stuff! Like any launch, there will be a period where we will be focusing on making sure the new client is as bug free as possible before starting on anything huge BUT with this launch you can already see the fruits of our labor with the new game mode: Town Traitor
Players who haven't used the new UI yet should allow themselves time to get used to the changes. Anytime a change is made, it is easy to want what you are used to even if the changes made are good ones. We think with time, you’ll come to love the new UI as much as we do.
We hope that everyone is excited for the future of Town of Salem!
Patch 3.2.0 Notes
In addition to the new Town Traitor game mode, this release completes our multi-year effort to transition our platform-specific products from multiple languages and game engines onto Unity, a modern game engine with a bright future. Read more about this below.
IMPROVEMENTS
• General (Web) - As many of you know, our web version of Town of Salem ran on a dying technology called Flash. Porting our game to a modern game engine was critical because Flash is reaching its end-of-life soon. While we had previously successfully transitioned our Mobile and Steam products to Unity, with this release the final piece—our web-based game—has been ported to Unity using WebGL. This new, revitalized web version benefits from the many visual and technological improvements that we developed while porting our mobile and Steam products. If you play Town of Salem on any of our other platforms, the new look and feel should be very familiar. Coding to a single game engine with one code base allows us to be more agile, and we’re looking forward to bringing you some cool new stuff in the near future.
• Game - New Town Traitor and Coven Town Traitor game modes. Figure out which Town member has gone over to the dark side!
• Game - Performance improvements when opening the Chat Log.
• Game - Performance improvements to the Judgement Menu.
• Game - Improved resolution of some additional character skins.
• Registration - To prevent frequent mistakes when typing email address during registration, added a second email confirmation input box requiring the email to be entered twice and match in both entries.
BUG FIXES
• Game - Notepad has been fixed to appear in front of the Judgement Menu.
• Game - Fixes to ticket system.
• Game - Crystal Fighter hanging animation fixed.
• Game - Fixed Stargal skin sometimes not displaying.
• Game - Fixed Player Already Reported issue.
• Game - Fixed issue where clicking Last Will or Death Note button in graveyard could close an already-open will or death note rather than open the newly selected item.
• Customization - Fixes to placement of items on screen.
• Party - It is no longer possible to accidentally start a 1-person game by spam clicking the Start button.
• Lobby - Fixed Psychic description.
• Featured Items - Restricted users can no longer purchase the Winter Wonder taunt from Featured Items.
• Backgrounds - Fixed stretched background images on Login, Home, Lobby, and End Game screens.
• Various crash fixes.