UPDATE: Version 0.8!
Howdy bricktrons!
Since 0.7, times have been pretty intense at the studio! We’ve expanded our team and released several updates such as the Workshop & Steam Integration update (0.7.5) and the Halloween Update (0.7.10)! We also finally got the coffee machine to stop chanting demonic incantations when it runs out of water. Neato.
We’ve worked super hard on 0.8 and we’re introducing a considerable amount of additions, changes and fixes – hopefully they’ll keep you entertained for a while! The wait is now over – here’s what’s new.
Highlights
Resources & Vegetation
An often requested change was a bigger visual variety for the game and we’ve been finally able to tackle this task. True to ourselves, these changes are not purely visual, but add a new layer of gameplay on top of the base game; objects on the surface can be harvested for resources, providing player with easy to obtain precious resources for an early game speed boost.
Your Bricktrons will find stone boulders, patches of iron and brimstone (that’s the new official name for orange crystals!), all of which can easily be harvested for a quick supply of resources. As for visual variety, plants can be placed on the surface to add some foliage to the maps and trees can vary in size from very small, to very big! All of these new additions can, of course, be placed and sized however you’d like in the World Editor!
The World Editor has also received a graphical update, making the UI a bit sleeker and modern looking.
Another major change is the improvement of the distribution of underground resources with an advanced noise system which has allowed the removal of magic mines! Yes yes, no more unwanted stockpiles of iron and brimstone, which was the result of simply randomizing the resources you obtain through magic mines. Besides patches of ores on the surface, you can also find veins of the precious resources in the ground and selectively mine the stuff you need.
The Harvest Task
We’ve introduced a brand new task labeled the “Harvest Task”. Its selection radius is a circle and Bricktrons assigned to that task will gather any surface resources they can find; trees, boulders, brimstone and iron! It’s also possible to toggle which resources Bricktrons assigned to that task will harvest via the toggles at the bottom right of the screen, in the taskbar. The logging tasks now function on the same system, so it has been merged into the harvest task.
Group Movement
We’ve considerably improved the locomotion of Bricktrons and Corruptrons traveling in groups. They’ll now react in a much more fluid manner when bumping or crossing paths with other units. This allows for quicker reactions, easier building and smoother combat.
We’ve considerably improved the locomotion of Bricktrons and Corruptrons traveling in groups. They’ll now react in a much more fluid manner when bumping or crossing paths with other units. This allows for quicker reactions, easier building and smoother combat.
Responsiveness has been dramatically improved. Ordering a unit to move or change destination will immediately cause it to interrupt what it’s doing and begin moving. This is a huge help when trying to retreat from a fight.
Combat Revamp
We’ve made some interesting additions to the combat and rebalanced most of its aspects. The general effect of these changes is to increase the duration of battles. This has the effect of enhancing the importance of strategic positioning which encourages terraforming and building defenses. Slower combat makes it easier for players to maneuver and retreat. Battles are no longer a kill or die situation.
- Archers and Workers can now melee fight! They don’t hit as strong as Knights, but in a pinch, it can turn the tide of battle.
- The health of pretty much everything has been increased, this means units will last longer in combat, structures will withstand attacks for longer, etc.
- Archers can now fire farther the higher they are.
- Right-clicking an enemy while an archer is selected will cause it to move within range and shoot.
- Added move-attack hotkey: Shift + Right-Click
- Archers will no longer friendly fire.
New Brick: Plug Brick
We’re introducing a brand new building element; the Brick Plug. It’s half-brick sized with a gap in the sides to allow hooking beams and braces to it. It comes in four different iterations; one side with a gap, two opposite sides with gaps, two cornering sides with gaps and all four sides with gaps.
We believe this brick finally links together the wood and brick building block systems. Until now, they existed in a strange equilibrium, but structures can now be built with wood and stone without making compromises.
This new brick really makes building rooves and ramparts a breeze! Yes, I Googled “rooves” to make sure it was a real word.
New Task Handles
The visual, feedback and functionality of all the tasks’ handles has been redesigned and improved. Certain tasks such as the landscape are a lot easier to use and understand. It’s now possible to diagonally extend square tasks such as the quarry and circular tasks, such as the clean up and harvest task can now be extended from anywhere on the circle, rather than specific handle points. The feedback on what is included in a spherical volume is now crystal clear and allows users to finetune the tasks’ dimensions.
The visual, feedback and functionality of all the tasks’ handles has been redesigned and improved. Certain tasks such as the landscape are a lot easier to use and understand. It’s now possible to diagonally extend square tasks such as the quarry and circular tasks, such as the clean up and harvest task can now be extended from anywhere on the circle, rather than specific handle points. The feedback on what is included in a spherical volume is now crystal clear and allows users to finetune the tasks’ dimensions.
Conquest Remastered
We’ve heard your feedback and have heavily iterated and improved on the Conquest gamemode, to the point where, internally, we’ve forked the code completely and named it Conquest V2. We’ve playtested the game mode extensively and focused a lot of our efforts to make the gamemode more fun in multiplayer and these changes translated very well to the singleplayer experience. The idea for Conquest was to encourage players to slowly expand their territory while defending the areas they’ve conquered – we hope the improvements we’ve made to the Conquest gamemode achieve this purpose successfully.
- Captured shards will generate Wisps and send them to the Home Crystal, encouraging the players to expand and defend their shards.
- Only knights and archers can capture crystals and shards, however workers can stop a crystal from being captured by the enemy.
- In multiplayer, crystals and shards capturing is locked in the first 15 minutes. This encourages people to gather resources and build defenses in the early game instead of rushing and neglecting their bases.
- Wisps of dead Bricktrons will always return to the player’s home Crystal where they’ll automatically respawn after a short cooldown. This solves the meta where players would worry about losing their Bricktrons due to their wisps going to the nearest captured crystal, which could be undefended. It also eliminates the exploit where a player would suicide all his workers and spawn knights in order to rush his opponent for a quick win.
- In multiplayer, you only need to capture your enemy’s Home Crystal to win – the shards aren’t needed for a victory. In singleplayer however, you will have to entirely capture all the corrupted crystals and shards.
- Complete remake of the scoreboard – it’s much sleeker, the feedback is clearer and it supports bigger maps with a larger amount of crystals.
Wiki
We’ve developed a brand new official Wiki available on wiki.castlestory.net – we want it to be your main source of information for anything Castle Story related. We’re introducing the wiki with a four parts Beginner’s Guide that will teach new players the basic steps from the beginning of the game to building their first wall. This allowed us to withdraw the tutorial from the game which dated from 2014 – since then, the game has evolved immensely and the tutorial had become obsolete.
Editorial note; the Wiki will be available first thing in the morning on the 23rd.
Noteworthy Features
Wisps Rework
Wisps, also known as souls or fireflies, have been improved. First of all, you no longer need to mine blue crystal to obtain new wisps. We wanted to make sure getting new Bricktrons was as consistent as possible from one gamemode to the other.
- Wisps that are yellow now represent a wisp that can be spawned into a Bricktron.
- The Home Crystal now generates blue wisps over time. Once it has gathered several blue wisps, they will merge into a yellow wisp.
- Captured shards will now generate blue wisps and send them to the Home Crystal.
- Dead Bricktrons will generate a smaller, yellow wisp to the Home Crystal and automatically respawn the Bricktron after two minutes.
- Dead Corruptrons will send purple wisps to their killer’s Home Crystal. Purple wisps are worth as much as blue ones.
- New visual shaders for the wisps to better provide feedback on what state each wisp is in.
New Stockpiles Visuals
Lots of returning players were confusing iron for stone and wondering why they weren’t turning into bricks. We’ve remastered the looks of stone, iron and brimstone to make it much more obvious what’s in the stockpile.
Threaded the Voxel Engine
In layman’s terms, we’ve improved the speed at which the terrain is calculated through various performance fixes. This will improve loading times of maps and savefiles while considerably reducing spikes during terraforming (landscape, quarry, etc.).
New Map: Orosi Valley
Orosi Valley is a new official map intended for Conquest 2v2, although playable in 1v1 and Invasion. It features a difficult to defend central point. It’s a symmetrical map with several sharp cliffs, offering a unique gameplay based on elevation and shortcut creation.
New Map: Riverains
Riverains is the second official map presented in 0.8 – it’s been designed for 1v1 and team 2v2 fights in the new, remastered Conquest gamemode. The chokepoints are designed in a way that encourages confrontation. It’s the first map since Pineburg that offers a pre-built construction; an old, ruined guard tower, granting any brave Bricktrons willing to capture and rebuild it a strategic advantage.
Map Redesign: Plateau Mont-Royal
Plateau Mont-Royal was not initially intended to be a competitive map, or even a conquest map for that matter. It is also not a symmetrical map and doesn’t have an even number of spawn point. So this map is technically “unbalanceable”. Our focus this time around, was to gather as much information as possible during playtests, and remove obvious unbalances and common frustrations. There is no doubt still a lot of improvements to be done, so this is not the final iteration. But hopefully this version is a lot more fun to play than the last, while maintainting the experience.
Various Improvements
- Bricktrons can now run while carrying bags, allowing for much quicker construction.
- Bricktrons walk slightly faster while carrying bricks and planks.
- Farther-away trees now look better.
- Trees LOD smoother switch.
- Trees LOD uses less memory.
- Included detailed multiplayer crash/failure logs. This will allow us to better troubleshoot connection issues.
- Invasion has received a balancing run to adjust the gameplay according to the new Wisps system.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed cases where victory window would not appear in multiplayer.
- Fixed the displayed hotkey for duplicating blueprints. It used to say D, when it’s really ctrl + D. Dirty lying hotkey, begone!
- Fixed Defend Position and Defend Areas being too big for the radial menu.
- Fixed issues where Archers and Knights would take too long to attack nearby enemies.
- Fixed issue where warriors would attack enemies’ bear traps, even though these should be invisible.
- Fixed an issue where explosions wouldn’t break trees. Them some stroooong trees, bruh.
- Fixed issue where Archers could shoot directly through bricks. I know right?
- Fixed issue where corruptrons would attack beartraps instead of triggering them.
- Fixed multiplayer crashes when several explosions happened in short succession.
- Fixed an issue where X-Ray mode wouldn’t update unless the camera was moved.
- Fixed an issue where moving a spawn point in the world editor wouldn’t save its new emplacement in a new game, although it seemed saved in the world editor.
- Fixed an issue where saved games were sorted by day first, then month second, meaning all the 1st of any month were sorted together, 2nd of any months were sorted together, etc.
- Fixed an issue where the Biftron would freeze for a few seconds if the minitron it was about to pick up would die. We tried playing it off as a deep, inner sadness its baby-corruptron was dead, but the QA team wouldn’t let us. :(
- Fixed an animation issue where Bricktrons would play unneeded animations if a block was placed in front of them by another Bricktron.
- Fixed an issue where Corruptrons would try throwing their rocks through bricks, despite having no line of sight.
- Fixed an issue where Knights would lose their formations when asked to move attack as a group.
- Fixed an issue where Bricktrons would continuously try to reach a stockpile they needed, even if it was impossible to reach.
- Fixed an issue where Bricktrons would continuously try to clean rubble on bricks they can’t reach.
- Fixed an issue where saving with an Archer set to Hold Fire would stop that Archer from holding fire ever again.
- Fixed a crash when attempting to duplicate built planks and beams.
- Fixed an issue where reflections on assets looked different in X-Ray mode.
- Fixed an issue where archers’ direct attacks didn’t work as expected.
- Fixed an issue where clicking in the radial menu while hovering over the taskbar would break the selection.
- Fixed scenarios where you could have selected Bricktrons while being in Edit Mode.
- Fixed an issue where selecting multiple blueprints and deleting them at once would break handles.
- Fixed an animation glitch where Archers would twitch before they started aiming.
- Fixed an issue where Biftrons would sometimes walk into an occupied voxel.
- Fixed an issue where wisps (aka souls/fireflies) would react to cursor clicks.
- Fixed an issue where stockpiles’ overheads would block blueprints placement.
- Fixed an issue where the blueprints’ shaders showed another blueprint’s sides when it shouldn’t.
- Fixed an issue where Corruptrons would take too long to target enemies after jumping off.
- Fixed an issue where the HP bar would flicker.
- Fixed an issue where Bricktrons would continously try to grab resources blocked by Archers or Knights.
- Fixed an issue where Corruptrons wouldn’t attack a crystal if there were no nearby Bricktrons.
- Fixed an issue where bricks built on invincible voxels (such as near crystals and shards), the bricks became unbreakable.
- Fixed an issue where you didn’t see cracks on bricks when you were in X-Ray.
- Fixed the missing stun animation.
- Fixed a missing cursor feedback when you selected different Bricktron classes at once.
- Fixed an issue where Corruptrons would stop before attacking when they reached an enemy. They now attack while stopping.
- Fixed an issue where jump off would appear when you opened the radial menu on the Bricktron itself.
- Assigning Knights to defend an area won’t put the player in Edit Mode by default.
- Totally just broke the “Fixed an” combo.
- Fixed an issue where detonating two barrels with the same Knight would break the Knight.
- Fixed an issue where you couldn’t drop resources on modified terrain.
- Fixed some errors when hovering cursor above falling trees.
- Fixed several missing audio cues.
Aaaand that’s the rundown of this update! What are you waiting for? Boot up the game and check out the awesome for yourself!