Hello everyone! This update was supposed to be our 1.0 release. However, a few factors forced us to move our launch date to April.
The main issue is the Base Builder Sale which goes on for this entire week. As this coincides with our target launch week, our publisher recommended to reschedule as it's detrimental in terms of visibility to launch during a sale. Since we're already a part of the Base Builder Sale, the next time we could do a launch discount as per Steam's rule is 30 days later so around March 1st. However, a Steam rep informed us that it's not a good idea either to launch shortly before a regional sale. March 1st is unfortunately too close to the upcoming Spring Sale. So, that gives us late April as the next earliest window.
This does have some positives for Ruinarch's development. Instead of moving most of our development to our second project by February, we now have a few more months to add more milestone updates to this game! We also have more time to reach out to press and influencers which should be helpful for the launch's success.
Our update this month is not as big as usual due to the long holiday vacations around Christmas and New Year but there are a lot of small useful tweaks that most players should appreciate:
Achievements
We've made Steam Achievements linked to our Side Goals! There are a total of 18 Achievements for the game.
Traps
The three Traps (Freezing Trap, Snare Trap, Landmines) serve as the introductory way to earn Chaos Orbs. Previously, the process was too slow as you only get 2 orbs on their initial trigger. We increased this to 5 Chaos Orbs to speed up the early game. However, this is going to be easy to exploit later on so our novel solution is to put a Chaos Orb cap to them - meaning that after producing a certain amount of Chaos Orbs, it will no longer produce any. We set the value to 25 for all 3 traps.
In addition, if you place traps on sight of a non-Cultist Villager, they will be able to avoid and remove them unless they were in combat at that time.
Updated Trailer
Our trailer has been updated to reflect the changes in gameplay and UI!
Tweaks
- Whenever a Chaos Orb is spawned offscreen, a purple arrow icon will show up at the edge of the screen pointing to it. Clicking on it will center on the Chaos Orb. These arrows only last for 3 seconds.
- Special Cultist player instructions like Booby Trap and Poison now have increased priority over many other actions. This means they will prioritize this job over actions like eating, sleeping and entertainment.
- Added a World Gen Setting to adjust Corrupted Tile charges. Options include Normal, Double and Unlimited. This also affects the number of Demonic Walls and Decorations available.
- Only Resource Piles will have their personal ownership cleared when seized or snatched by the player. This should allow players again to frame other villagers of theft by transferring non-resource objects to another Villager's dwelling.
- Villagers will slay pets of wanted criminals on sight.
- Stalkers will no longer hunt Cultists, Lycans and Vampires that are already imprisoned by a faction if they are restrained inside that faction's Village.
- A Villager that has been wrongfully punished for a fabricated crime may gain a Grudge towards either the punisher or the one that reported the crime.
- A Villager that has been expelled from the faction or forced to leave due to an exclusive Ideology may gain a Grudge against the Faction Leader.
- If opened by a Villager, Treasure Chests may now drop Weapons.
- Moderately slowed down base Villager migration speed.
- Slightly reduced chance to stumble and get injured due to Accident Prone trait.
- Log related to injury sustained due to Accident Prone will now show the action that caused it.
- Witches and Clerics have a slightly increased chance to Preach.
- The time when the first Witch and Cleric will spawn in the world will now widely vary from game to game.
- Added a new bookmark entry that shows the player how many remaining Chaos Orbs are still needed to upgrade the Portal to the next level.
- A Villager always used to be accused of trespassing when it's passing through another faction's Dwelling. Since this is just a quirky limitation of our pathfinding, we adjusted what's considered as trespassing. If the Villager's starting and end points are both outside the dwelling they are passing through, they wouldn't be considered trespassing.
- Increased cooldown of Lightning to 5 hours.
- Bully a Villager task now requires 10 negative status effects to accomplish.
- Slightly lowered maximum factions and villages for all map sizes. Also adjusted world generation to reduce the likelihood of villages being too close together.
- Adjusted Villager's response text when the player shares an intel regarding a lover's infidelity.
- Removed Portal prefix.
- Updated texts on the Game Over screen.
- Added flavor text description for various objects.
- Some text related performance improvements.
Bug Fixes
- [FIXED] Game crash related to Spanish accented letters.
- [FIXED] Villagers cannot build blueprints when game is in Japanese.
- [FIXED] Migration may still sometimes occur even though it was already turned off in World Gen Settings.
- [FIXED] Players can spawn unlimited Skeletons from Tombstones using Raise Dead.
- [FIXED] Duplicate entries of Cowardice power on Ravager's upgrade path.
- [FIXED] Villagers still report crime to ex faction leader.
- [FIXED] A Villager may be accused of trespassing when moving through a landmark owned by another Faction.
- [FIXED] A friendly villager will not help if a Villager becomes Unconscious while they are within vision.
- [FIXED] Prism UI is not centered on Ultra Wide Screen.