The Dwarves of Glistenveld (tuxdb.com)

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Name	The Dwarves of Glistenveld
Developer	Nysko Games Ltd.
Publisher	Nysko Games Ltd.
Tags	Indie Strategy Singleplayer Early Access
Release	2019-10-18
Steam	€ £ $ / %
News	39
Controls	Keyboard Mouse
Players online	n/a
Steam Rating	Need more reviews to generate a review score
Steam store	https://store.steampowered.com/app/805520

LINUX STREAMERS (0)

Easter Eggs & Runestones (Patch Notes 30)

Fellow Dwarves! A new exciting technology 'Runestones' as well as manned ballistas, and a myriad of bug-fixes come with this year's Easter patch!

[h3] Easter Mode [/h3]
In Easter Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The environment has a different look and feel.

Mobbits - Mobbits are larger than normal, and provide more meat!

Easter Eggs - You will find easter eggs sprawled about everywhere, even hidden in the walls! You can harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals. How many can you find? (Find out at the bottom of the Stats window)

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

Runestones - Runestones are a new unlockable building that, when placed, can be marked with one of four effects: Forging, Growth, Resistance and Warding. Forging speeds up forges and can reduce the amount of ore required for smelting. Growth creates moisture which speeds up mushroom & sapling growth, and can also trigger the power-slider combat ability. Resistance reduces incoming damage dealt to your dwarves and buildings. Warding prevents undead creatures like Draugr from reawakening. As Runestones are used they will charge up energy which will eventually release and spawn an elemental!

Elementals - In this patch elementals only appear in caverns mode or as a result of Runestones charging, but they will feature more in future patches. Each runestone triggers the respective elemental: Fire, Water, Rock & Wind. Each elemental has its own special ability unlocked when it reaches level 2.

Manned Ballistas - This one is a game-changer in our opinion! Now when you select an engineer or warrior to interact with a ballista, they will 'man' it and remain in position. Then whenever enemies come close, your unit will automatically rotate the ballista around and fire at them! Your dwarves are smart enough not to fire at allies in the way, but sometimes their shots might not meet their mark. Their accuracy is determined by combat level, so if you use a high level warrior, fewer shots will miss.

Spiders - Rebalanced and redesigned some behaviours. Level 1 spiders can no longer lay eggs. Spiders will now only flee if their hitpoints are very low, which means harder-hitting dwarves have greater chance of defeating them without having to chase. Higher level spiders will flee sooner. When a spider mother is attacked, it calls for help. If it then dies, all nearby spiders will flee from battle for a while.

AI Territory - Allies in caverns mode will now avoid building, mining or gathering resources near your buildings, based on a new territory system. This system is hidden but essentially each building is given a weight based on its type and distance, and nearby buildings are counted up to determine whose territory a particular hex belongs to.

Draugr Heads - Draugr can be a thorn in the side, especially in caverns mode. Well, now you can roll their heads around and move them out of your way! No, you can't play footie with them, but you can hide them in the closet!

The small stuff:

Schematics & Barrels - You can now obtain these resources using the gather instruction, rather than having to select a dwarf and interact with them manually.

Call for reinforcements - This button used to be hidden away in the escape menu, since it only applied in the campaign and would only be used rarely. Now the dwarf button in the instruction panel on the bottom left opens up a sub-menu which provides the dwarf-list, by-laws (if it is unlocked) and call for reinforcements. To maintain previous UX click patterns, you can double click the dwarf button to open up the dwarf-list without having to move your mouse into the new menu.

Build Wall - If items are in the way of a wall instruction, a pickup instruction will now be automatically assigned and executed before the wall is built.

Engineers - Fixed some behaviour where they refused to build a building that they clearly had access to without putting it back in storage first or trying to build a new one. This may still occur under certain circumstances, further testing is necessary to confirm this.

Repair - Increased engineer's priority of repair instructions.

Guide - Updated with a new look & feel. More entries have been added and some have been rewritten for clarity.

Various other fixes including ambient SFX panning, some voice lines not triggering, removing random dwarf complaints from the dialog history.

We've also been hard at work on Chapter 3 assets and content, some of which we cannot reveal yet, but we will continue to trickle in updates regarding Chapter 3 in future patches & blog posts!
That's all for now, stay safe out there, and Happy Easter!

[ 2024-03-31 21:16:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Christmas Patch (Patch Notes 29)

Fellow Dwarves! Glistenveld is getting wintery as Christmas Mode is enabled (until Jan. 7th)!
Patch Notes

[h3]Christmas Mode[/h3]
In Christmas Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The place is looking wintery with a change of colour palette and mist!

Christmas Roots - Roots have now been decorated with Christmas lights! Unfortunately there are no blink patterns you can change...

Presents - Random presents will appear in each map, some buried in cave walls to be mined out, others in water to be fished for and some just laying around! Each contains one of six small random gifts!

Chests - Chests are now decorated as 'locked' presents!

Snowprints - All units will leave prints in the frosty dirt, giving you insight into their habits!

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

Configure Farming Plots - With a Farming Plot selected, you can now configure what the plot will choose to harvest by toggling each item on/off, like mushrooms, roots, etc.

Instruction Assignment UI - Revamped this UI. Before it had a secondary panel which looked unintuitive. Now you can assign workers, see who is currently working on the job and prioritise them immediately in the same panel! This panel is now sorted by distance, so you can see who is nearest/farthest from the job.

Minecarts - You can now choose whether minecarts prefer traveling right or left at a Y junction! Also fixed an issue where clicking 'drop items' with a minecart selected wouldn't drop items properly if they took up too many tiles.

Mining / Harvesting FX - New 'breakage' particles appear whenever your units mine cave walls or rocks, or harvest mushrooms, roots etc.

The small stuff:

Fishing - You can now tell a forager to fish a specific location by right clicking the water, or tell them to prioritise a fishing instruction.

Picking up items - Unlike most other actions, there was no pop-up menu when you right clicked a pile of items on the ground. Now units will still default to picking up, but you can tell them just to move, or to pick up specific items instead.

Mining cave walls - Similar to picking up items, right clicking cave walls will now present a pop-up menu if there is something else that can be done besides mining. All actions should now have the same consistent behaviour.

Building Walls - Fixed an issue where you could build normal buildings over the top of certain entities, but not walls.

Map Table - Selecting an object to find in the minimap would render all buildings you owned, sometimes obstructing areas of the minimap.

Accomplishment counters - When you mine gems or harvest wood, a little stat number appears showing you how many you've collected in this map!

Unit Portrait - Clicking a unit or object's portrait multiple times will now cycle through units or objects of that type.

Hit Effects - Reworked the maths for hit effects like bleed, poison and splash damage. Before they were tied to individual hit cards, which meant the chance reduced as units leveled up in combat (and gained new cards). This is no longer the case. A bleed effect with 33% chance will now always hit one every 3 attacks.

Battle Lines - Warriors should no longer claim the same battle-line tile at the same time.

Various other improvements, including new selection SFX & when a storage is selected, clicking on the item button will now open that item in the guide.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2023-12-17 19:17:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Minimap Overhaul (Patch Notes 28)

Fellow Dwarves! We've worked out how to utilise a Map Table! Dwarves can now catalogue their sightings on the minimap for you!

Patch Notes
[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

Map Table - A new tech that unlocks the Map Table. Once placed, this building reveals friendly and enemy units moving around in the minimap. More importantly however, it also enables you to mark (within the radius of the table) any visible occurrences of a chosen resource or object! Build multiple around the map to make the most of this feature!

Minimap - In some maps this wasn't centred or maximised, and clicking wouldn't always centre the camera correctly. This should now be working in all cases.

Fleeing from battle - Units fleeing from battle would sometimes get stuck due to another friendly unit also being in battle. If they are desperate and need to rest or are low health, they will now be able to scoot past that unit anyway!

Green mushrooms - Any class can now destroy green mushrooms. The gather button however will be disabled unless you have the Farming II tech.

Objectives List - Fixed a number of rendering issues regarding this UI, including the description not updating. Also, objectives that are not within a group/category will now appear above groups/categories to avoid confusion.

The small stuff:

Game-speed controls - Right-clicking the cog in the bottom-right corner will now 'toggle' the speed, instead of always setting to fast-forward.

Caverns mode - Waterfalls now spawn at the source of (almost) every long river with flowing water. Also fixed a bug where Redhammer's meet encounter might not always finish.

Feedback form - Fixed the jank in the feedback form input field. This should now function more like a proper multi-line text field.

'Send Home' - The send home option when an ally dwarf is in your base is now also a button when that dwarf is selected. You no longer need to right click them.

Skirmish Mode - Fixed a bug involving getting stuck on the select spawn-location screen, sorry about that! This screen should also no longer have any visual artifacts.

Guide - Added more sections to the guide, including bones and old stone structures. Some tips were also added to saplings to improve yield when farming.

Carroots - AI teams and farming plots will no longer automatically harvest the roots of carroots, but you can still use the gather instruction to do it yourself.

Performance - Improved some performance where some UIs were rebuilding when they didn't need to.

Big-picture UI - Simplified the indicator of how many dwarves you can spawn. It now just tells you the dwarf count you have and the dwarf count you can reach. More details are given when hovering over, as usual.

Dynamic Tutorials - Fixed various bugs & added a camera tutorial. We're working on making these the official tutorials and are hoping to remove the 'Tutorial Adventure'. This will mean you will see new tutorials pop up every now and then, but you can still remove them by pressing the X button beside them.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2023-11-21 16:57:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

Hot-fix for linux builds not being able to run the game. Should be working now!

[ 2023-10-17 23:44:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Chapter 2 Launches! (Patch Notes 27)

Fellow Dwarves, it's here! We've been working tirelessly to deliver this update, and now proudly present the long-awaited: Chapter 2!

As mentioned in our previous announcement, the release of Chapter 2 unlocks the next 6 levels of the Campaign, which take you to the mysterious underground Ruins of Heckler! A new region unlocks for Skirmish Mode, as well as a myriad of final improvements to the user interface, AI, quality of life and performance! For more details see the patch notes below.

Also, if you want a summary of everything that's changed since The Dwarves of Glistenveld first released in Early Access, we wrote about that in our previous announcement: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/805520/view/7132068756348695686

Now without further ado, let's look at what's changed since the last patch:
Patch Notes

[h3]The big stuff:[/h3]

Campaign: Chapter 2 - You now have access to Chapter 2 of the campaign, featuring the defence of My Fort and 5 new unique maps!

Skirmish mode: Ruins region - A new region is unlocked for skirmish mode, taking you amidst some abandoned ruins. Mind your step, you never know what you might reawaken in those old tombs!

Caverns mode - Caverns mode is now a bit more guided early on and polished. Your first objectives now have markers pointing to the nearest spring, roots and mushrooms, and some intermediary objectives now appear to help you to find your second spring and schematic!

In-game tutorial improvements - A new button now appears next to objective-list tutorials that allow you to ignore/skip them. You can always reset the tutorials in the options menu if you want to revisit them. New tutorials have been added and some wording has been revised to try to better explain the mechanics of the game. We'll be adding to these in future patches to explain some of the later mechanics such as the farming techs.

Game-speed control - You can now right-click the cog in the bottom-right to fast-forward as an alternative to holding down the left button or space-bar.

Smooth camera panning - The camera now 'moves' rather than snaps to focus on units or locations, for example during dialog. This can be toggled in the options menu, for those of you who might get motion sickness from this change.

UI & general performance - Hovering over UI buttons should no longer feel laggy/jittery, and panning the camera should appear smoother (for best results, you can try switching off the FPS cap). Also a small performance boost for cave-ins and reduced the occasional lag spikes. There will still be some reduced FPS as a game is first loaded since some elements are still being generated.

Crash fixes - Fixed 2 independent causes of game freezes, both of which seemed to have obscure conditions. Hopefully they're the only ones!

The small stuff:

Low-health behaviour - You can now set your dwarves to persevere / flee when low health from their selection UI. Originally this was only adjustable after unlocking the By-laws tech.

Stone-chipper Ability - The miner's level 5 ability Heavy-hauler has been replaced by the new ability Stone-chipper, which grants bonus stone when mining cave walls. Heavy-hauler's effect was very similar to Rock-tosser, meanwhile stone would sometimes be in short supply.

New passive buffs - Sound-asleep and Well-fed are two new buffs that your dwarves can have. Sound-asleep speeds up regeneration and applies if you have at least one bed per dwarf. Well-fed further increases movement speed as long as your dwarf's hunger bar is completely full!

Buff / debuff FX - Visual particles now appear when your dwarves are experiencing certain buffs or debuffs, such as exhaustion, hunger or the two listed above.

Frenzied dwarves - The dwarf-list now shows any dwarves you have that have become frenzied along with their last known locations.

More responsive dwarves - While a dwarf was selected, they wouldn't carry out any actions for a few seconds to give the player time to give manual orders if they wanted to. This was an unintuitive behaviour however, and has been limited to specifically move and pick-up actions.

Class descriptions - The class-change UI now shows descriptions of what each class can do.

Doors - When setting to team-only, doors will have a distinguished outline around them making it more obvious what their setting is.

Blood trails - When a unit is low on health, they leave a subtle trail of blood behind them as they move around. You can use this to your advantage for example to follow an injured goblin back to their base.

Stubborn trait - Stubborn dwarves that reach level 10 will be able to finally switch class. Note however that if they reach level 3 in another class they will remain in that class until they reach level 10 again.

New ability icons - Similar to the level 2 abilities, the level 5 abilities now have upgraded icons when you reach tier 2 and 3 of that ability.

One-button mode improvements - Clicking and dragging while an instruction was selected would place multiple of that instruction, but this did not match the normal behaviour of one-button mode. Instead, dragging now pans the camera as it should do, and a new button was added to toggle dragging instructions.

Cracks indicating cave-ins - Cracks have been made more obvious to make it easier to tell when a wall is going to cave-in, and fixed an issue of them sometimes not appearing.

Skirmish mode: Objectives - Skirmish mode now has some starter objectives to help remind players what is needed to build their initial base!

Skirmish mode: Ordered teams - When you choose camps of different sizes, the larger camps will spawn further away from you, and the smaller camps closer by. This should create more of a build-up as you progress through the map and should feel less unfair.

Fishing - Fixed an issue where fishing in shallow water would never yield fish, since the fish couldn't swim to shallower waters. They can now.

Equipment - There is now an option specifically to drop the equipped item in storage, instead of having to set to 'None'.

UI positioning - Class change and interaction UI will no longer be hidden under the selection UI at the bottom of the screen.

More & improved tooltips - Made some tooltips more understandable and added tooltips to more buttons.

Various bug fixes - Fixed various issues including mobbits' flee behaviour, dwarves getting stuck instead of moving out of the way, and streamlined the sound-system to exclusively use OpenAL.

This release also coincides with halloween mode, which appears this time of year to help get you in the spooky mood! If you choose to enable Halloween Mode, you will also experience the following changes to the game:
[h3]Halloween Mode[/h3]

Atmosphere - The atmosphere of the game is more dramatic with fog and a change in colour palette!

Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves treat as equipable meals!

Webs - You will find random webs that stick to units and slow them down, or feed the spiders!

Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!

Bubbling waters - Water has turned greenish and bubbles.

Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.

[h2]So what's next?[/h2]
Onward to Chapter 3! Does this mean we're done with working on Chapter 2? While we need to keep moving forward with the content we produce, we will continue to refine and improve as we go along. Sharing your feedback and experience will help guide us with any revisions that need to be made to existing content!

We'll also be working on the learning and on-boarding experience of the game, and trying to better streamline it. We're going to continue working on visibility and create an internal plan for producing Chapter 3's content and release in good time.

That's all for this update. As always, feel free to give us your thoughts and feedback, we read it all even if we don't reply! Until next time, stay safe out there, and we hope you enjoy the new chapter!

[ 2023-10-13 15:00:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Chapter 2 is coming! (13th October)

[h3]It has been a long wait, but it's finally here! We will be releasing Chapter 2 on October 13th at 13:00 UTC![/h3]

What's coming with the Chapter 2 update?

The release of Chapter 2 unlocks the next 6 levels of the Campaign, which take you to the mysterious underground Ruins of Heckler! A new region unlocks for Skirmish Mode as well as a myriad of final improvements to make this the most robust patch to date!

We are putting The Dwarves of Glistenveld on sale for 2 weeks starting on the 13th (the day of the Chapter 2 launch), as well as releasing a demo for the first time. Our goal here is to try to get more visibility for the game.

What else has changed since the first release?

To prove to everyone including ourselves that we haven't been sitting around idly all this time , we're going to look at the more significant changes that have come since the game entered Early Access:

[h3]Campaign (Chapter 1)[/h3]

The introduction level in the campaign was first introduced in Patch 12 (Oct '20), and is an important addition because it bridges the gap between the backstory (introduced by the first cutscene) and when you arrive in Fisher's Cove. Windy Rivers saw an overhaul, which was a level originally released with little purpose. The other levels have also seen many improvements through development, based on player feedback and our own testing, with Bridge-it Lake topping the list at 53 revisions!

[h3]Technology Tree[/h3]

Originally the tech tree was less of a tree and more of a list...

Now we have multiple tiers with currently 15 techs to unlock, and the promise of many more! With this comes the many new buildings that can boost your defences or economy, or beautify your bases! The aim by the final chapter (if all goes well) is to have 4 tiers and at least 30 techs!

[h3]Greater Player Choice[/h3]

Originally dwarves received random abilities, but we quickly realised that players should be able to choose them! The ability selection UI has been around ever since Patch 6! Dwarf abilities have gone through many revisions, some were replaced while others were buffed and balanced.

Patch 12 saw the introduction of the difficulty options, allowing you to choose a more casual or hardcore gameplay experience, and more recent patches introduced mechanics like Tinkering and the By-laws tech, giving you more power over your playstyle!

[h3]Quality of Life[/h3]

One of the most requested features was being able to change the game-speed, and was first introduced in Patch 16. A few more examples of quality-of-life improvements include being able to move storage with items together, the introduction of one-button mode, new instruction options, configurable storage, improved game save UI and much more!

[h3]More Informative[/h3]

Along with the addition of the Guide to Glistenveld (an in-game wiki / bestiary that unlocks entries as you explore the game), we've been adding more notifications, visual aids for effects, and a lot more information to help players understand the mechanics behind the gameplay.

[h3]Enemy Quantity & Quality[/h3]

The Dwarves of Glistenveld is still a little light on enemy variety (which we will be addressing as we work on Chapter 3), but initially there were only 2 enemies, and they weren't too bright either! Not only does Chapter 2 feature one of the most intimidating enemies in the game (the draugr), the other enemies have also received a variety of perks and quirks, increasing the strategic potential in their encounters. We believe every type of enemy should feel unique, and we have worked hard to make that a reality!

[h3]Environment & Resources[/h3]

We've introduced new minerals like coal and granite, new types of mushrooms and roots, tomes and bookshelves, all meticulously designed with unique mechanics to help make the world of Glistenveld vibrant and mysterious!

[h3]Caverns Mode[/h3]

First released in Patch 7 (Feb '20), Caverns mode has become one of our favourite modes to play due to its procedural nature, expansive base-building potential and replayability. Caverns mode is a challenge to master, yet features some of the most impressive bases:

Since there's so much more that we could cover, we will be re-uploading the original release as a beta option, for those of you curious enough to check out the differences for yourself! To access it go to your steam library, open TDoG's properties, and under Betas, switch to "first_launch". You can switch back at any time.

Acknowledgements

We'd also like to reflect on what we've fallen short on for this chapter release, so that we can learn from them and work on future improvements.

[h3]Time[/h3]
The most significant for us and I'm sure for many of you is how long it took to get to Chapter 2. We touched on some reasoning for this in our blog posts, but moving forward we intend to give ourselves clearer objectives and planning in future.

[h3]Visibility[/h3]
The game has not seen enough promotion through development. Moving forward we will be putting the game on sale during seasonal events such as the Steam Winter Sale, and will be working harder to give it more attention. We have struggled to build awareness for The Dwarves of Glistenveld, and we are grateful for anyone who supports us in this regard.

[h3]Tutorials[/h3]
In-spite of all our polishing, we've heard the tutorials can be a bit of a grind to play through. This will impact our potential to grow, so it is also something that we should address.

[h2]Lastly[/h2]

Acknowledgements aside, we are very happy with how Chapter 2 has turned out. The team has worked tirelessly to bring this chapter to life and we feel a lot more character, lore and fun design has been poured into the game. We can't wait to find out what you guys make of it!

[h3]I hope you're as excited as we are for the upcoming release! That's all for this announcement, see you all in 2 weeks![/h3]

[ 2023-09-30 22:11:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

Hot-fix for suspected issue with 'end of Chapter' trigger, plus we also noticed holding units would sometimes move the unit back to a previous tile.

[ 2023-08-18 17:19:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Cutscenes & Carroots (Patch Notes 26)

Fellow Dwarves! It's been a while, but there's a lot to cover on this one...

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Cutscenes - Should now play in-game, instead of directing you to a youtube video. Note to linux users: you will have to install VLC for this to work.

Carroots - A new harvestable food that grows out of special type of roots! Unlike the other 3 food types, carroots cannot be cooked into a meal, nor replanted, but they do provide a steady supply.

Defend Zone -> Combat - What used to be the Defend Zone instruction has now become a new sub-panel called 'Combat' currently with 2 instructions: Defend Zone has been renamed to Patrol Regions for clarity, and a new instruction called Battle-Lines can be used to make warriors form a line and wait there, rather than patrol around.

Ally/enemy base AI - Many improvements have been made for ally/enemy AI in terms of base-building, defending and attacking, expanding on the existing wall-building update.

Pressure-plate Buttons - The signage on floor buttons in-game has been updated to be more clearly distinguishable between the different types: hold, toggle and lock.

Mushrooms - New placement variants for mushrooms. It was bothering us that every patch of mushrooms looked identical, now they'll look a bit more natural! We also plan on introducing different species of mushrooms eventually, but that's for a later update.

Gem Crystals - Can now appear protruded out of cave walls.

'New Game' Menu - Now when choosing which mode to play, it shows a breakdown of what to expect. Since each mode differs in style, they are rated out of 5 in the following: Challenge, Adventure, Colony-sim, Story/lore and Game length.

Spiders & Webs - Spiders' behaviour has been improved, and they now spawn strewn webs on the ground all around their nest. This type of web has a smaller movement penalty, breaks after a few steps, and also dictates where spiders will place their eggs.

Abilities Selection UI - The UI to choose new abilities for your dwarves has been revamped.

Level Up UI - Any time a dwarf levels up and their notification clicked, you are now presented with a UI that shows the precise improvements of their abilities, so you can see what's changed!

Fish - Fish are now lured by ripples, which are made when the Forager arrives at their spot, by cave-ins near water and when the player clicks the water.

Caverns Mode - Various design updates including chest loot-tables & special item spawns, and the introduction of carroots.

Campaign - Tweaked dialog, added more interjections and reduced confusion around Floody Hell's floating barrels.

Skirmish Mode - Controlling teaming in skirmish mode has been revamped and now features 3 presets: teams by kin, teams by neighbour, or all vs all. Teams by kin means dwarves team with other dwarves, goblins with goblins. Teams by neighbour means dwarves will only team with other dwarves if they are also neighbours. All vs all means there are no teams. Teams can still be configured manually. Also various fixes & improvements to this mode.

Root-puller Ability - This ability has been buffed and now reveals 3 tiles each harvest, and at higher levels can also reveal roots that aren't connected but close by. The description also clarifies that the minerals on those tiles are revealed at the same time.

Low Health - Added a new option in By-laws to set your dwarves to automatically flee and rest when they reach low health. This is also in effect by default in Dwarfling difficulty.

Main Menu - While no item is highlighted, one of your statistics shows, such as Spiders Defeated or Gems Mined.

Fixes & Improvements:

AI for Dropping items - The previous system for when units decided to drop items was too aggressive. Engineers would return dwarf hearts back to storage instead of spawning a dwarf right away, and other classes would return prematurely when they could have continued their work. This has been almost completely redesigned. The new system is not as 'catch-all' robust and may need some tweaks going forward, but is now much more logical in terms of when to drop items off. Units now start an internal clock once carrying items and won't return them unless full inventory, switching jobs or the clock reaches a certain job-dependant threshold.

Tutorials - Various updates and refinements for the 5 tutorial levels. Dialog has been reduced in places to improve pace, and the clickable sign that explains the game-speed control has been replaced with a prompt in the tutorial itself. Also added guide & notifications optional tutorials that appear in the objective list.

First-time usage tips - When certain items such as tomes are first interacted with, a dialog pops up explaining what they do. Also when entering skirmish or caverns mode for the first time, a dialog pops up explaining some of the unique features of that mode.

Harvesting rocks - No longer adds foraging experience to miners.

Combat Abilities - Fixed a bug with their proximities not updating the ability stats correctly!

Eat & Rest - Fixed some logical flaws in how dwarves decide to eat & rest when you tell them to via the associated buttons.

Guide to Glistenveld - Updated some information in the guide.

Goblins - Updated some goblin recipes to improve gameplay balance, such as in skirmish mode.

General AI Improvements - Units will now flee more sensibly, for example only when they're low health and there is a threat nearby. Both goblins & dwarves base-building AI has been significantly improved, and made more competitive.

Scenery - Fixed some rendering-order graphical bugs.

UI Panes - Improved the gradient on many of the UI windows for text to be more readable at the bottom.

Unit Movement - When the player changes a unit's movement they will now switch directions immediately if the target is behind them, instead of waiting until they've reached the next tile.

Instructions - The Patrol Regions (formerly Defend Zone) instruction now has better logic for when to rest, and was ignoring a particular by-law option. Warriors will now go rest at a higher health, but otherwise only if their stamina reaches 0. Foragers will no longer try to harvest tougher roots (i.e. iron roots) if they lack an iron tool. Also minor fixes to building, crafting & mining, and claims on jobs not being cleaned up.

Warriors - Warriors will no longer go to rest or eat until they are both hungry and tired or one of those stats is completely drained. When changing a dwarf to Warrior, they will now stand still for an extended period of time, waiting for you to give them something to do.

End of Level Stats - Amended some missing icons in the end of level statistics window.

Map Editor - Added missing icons and made various improvements to the map editor, including all item types are now available in the quick panel at the bottom.

Various other fixes including tooltips not displaying for certain highlighted objects, and removed all unneeded libraries from the executables, reducing their filesize.

We'd like to apologise for the lack of updates this year. We've had some major hurdles to overcome in preparation for Chapter 2, including finally getting cutscenes working in-game and finishing the new trailer. These took priority over releasing more regular patches, though hopefully we can balance this better in future. We'd set our bar high for the Chapter 2 release in terms of polish and robustness, since we want people to have a great experience with it. Most of these improvements are present in this patch (the last significant patch before Chapter 2 releases), so we hope you enjoy!

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2023-08-14 15:03:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

Hot-fix for a rendering corruption bug that involved the Root-Puller Forager ability.

[ 2022-12-02 19:41:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween Mode (Patch Notes 25)

[h3]Halloween Mode[/h3]
Glistenveld is getting spooky once again with Halloween Mode enabled (until Nov. 10th)!
In Halloween Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The atmosphere of the game is more dramatic with fog and a change in colour palette!

Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves treat as equippable meals!

Webs - You will find random webs that stick to your dwarves and slow them down!

Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!

Bubbling waters - Water has turned greenish and bubbles.

Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.

The scary scenario maps Fishbeard's Mining Operation and The Tomb are both challenges built to test your resolve around Halloween! As usual, seasonal modes can be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

By-laws - A new tech that unlocks the ability to define rules for your dwarves' behaviour depending on the circumstances. You can manage whether instructions are carried out, needs are taken care of, when to engage in combat, or whether to risk leaving the safety of your base. For example, if there are a lot of enemies about, you could switch to more restrictive by-laws to keep your working dwarves safe while your warriors deal with the threat!

Control Groups - Control groups have been updated with UI at the top of the screen and should now save & load correctly. When you have units or buildings selected, you can press Ctrl + 1-9 to create a control group. Pressing 1-9 again later or clicking the respective button will reselect those units / buildings again.

Equipment Slots - Equipment has now been split into 4 types: wieldables such as tools or weapons, armour such as helmets, equippable meals and finally accessories such as potions or rings. Potions used to take up the meal slot, and rings used to take up the armour slot.

New Textures - Stone, iron, coal & gems now have new texture variants, to add to the natural visual aesthetic of the underground.

Tutorial 2 - Fixed a bug where it was possible to softlock the second tutorial.

Smuggle Me Timbers - In super rare circumstances the guard would walk across the map instead of out of your way. This was caused by a flaw in our script engine and required a bit of an overhaul to future-proof this problem.

Fixed various other bugs including the world map zooming into the top corner instead of centring on the current level.

This patch is a little lighter due to our focus on preparing for the chapter 2 release, and also having time off to recharge our batteries. Taking breaks is an important part of a healthy workflow!

Until our next update, Happy Halloween!

[ 2022-10-29 20:01:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Research & Polish (Patch Notes 24)

Fellow Dwarves! Our engineers have discovered how to research new technologies by tinkering with resources, as well as admire their beards & braids from a new angle!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Tinkering / Research - A new feature of the tech tree allows you to unlock techs using resources instead of schematics! Currently only tier 1 techs can be researched. The research takes time and requires a fairly substantial amount of resources.

Water Reflections & Visuals - Improved the visual effect of water and added reflections for any units, buildings, scenery etc. by the water's edge. Deep water has been made more atmospheric.

Wall-building AI - AI dwarf/goblin teams now build walls around their bases, including doors / caltrops at entrances. This features most in skirmish / caverns mode.

Force Rest AI - Now when you tell a dwarf to rest, even if there are no beds available, they will still head to a nearby bed or building and wait. This is useful when you need to quickly take them out of a dangerous location.

Issuing Orders - Changed what happens when telling a dwarf to interact with a scenery or building. If there is only one possible action, it is performed without a popup menu. This also fixes a problem where you couldn't right click to repair a training dummy.

Big Picture UI - Revamped the Big Picture UI (top-left) to be slightly bigger, cleaner and make the buttons looks more like buttons.

Ground Webs - Added a new type of web that covers the ground and will appear in certain modes. Marginally slows units and will break away after several steps.

Skirmish Mode - Balanced quantity of coal and altered the default preset for a more challenging game.

Basalt - A new currently indestructible mineral. Now features in specific campaign maps to prevent certain events happening out of order.

Turtle-Belly - Turtle-belly dwarves will now have a minor resistance to poison, as well as their slower hunger-rate.

Goblin Traits - Goblins now feature traits similar to dwarves, though there are fewer goblin traits available.

Dwarf-list - The Dead Units tab of the dwarf-list has been cleaned up and now shows whether the unit has been buried and in which map (useful in the campaign).

Tutorial - Created research & 'low health warning' in-game tutorials (not to be confused with the tutorial adventure). Also improved various tutorials and tutorial states will no longer be frozen if the game is paused.

Options Menu - Added graphics presets & more options, and re-arranged a few items to make more sense.

Fixes & Improvements:

Loading Screen - Improved the 'cog spin' visual feedback and information when loading maps & save games.

End of Level Stats - Added missing icons & labels to the pop-up stats for the end of a campaign level.

Escape Menu - Reformatted and added icons to the menu options in the escape menu, for visual aid.

Floating Barrels - Fixed a couple bugs with floating barrels, including stacking combat abilities.

Rest AI - Added more conditions when dwarves will automatically go to rest. Also telling a dwarf to rest wasn't always turning off that state after they've rested.

Entity Tooltips - Fixed a bug where tooltips wouldn't always display when they should, for example when hovering over enemy buildings.

Battles - Fixed a bug where units would sometimes still act as if they were in battle when they weren't.

Dwarf Team AI - Improved how dwarves choose which classes they should be at any given moment.

Worker Selection UI - Fixed a bug where turning off one unit working on a job would confuse the check-box states (although it was working properly behind the scenes).

Music - Music would switch tracks rapidly while you sped up the gameplay, also wouldn't always fade-out when viewing the world map.

Instruction Keybinds - Now when pressing keybinds for instructions like build bridge, the page containing that instruction is opened & closed automatically in the UI.

World Map - Fixed some visual bugs with the unit selection / carry item UIs.

Vehicles no longer get selected when selecting a group of units.

Various other bug fixes, improvements and cleaned up a lot of code. Added some sanity checks to ensure dwarves don't get duplicated when saving/loading in the campaign.

We've been working a lot on polish in preparation for the Chapter 2 release. Sorry to say it might still be a couple months away, but we'll see. That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2022-08-09 00:56:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

Hot-fix for a potential game-freeze during Bridge-It Lake.

We'll be releasing a full patch soon with many other fixes & new features!

[ 2022-07-12 16:43:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Micromanagement Improvements (Patch Notes 23)

Fellow Dwarves! Assign dwarves to jobs, and equipment to dwarves with greater ease, and use sprinklers to farm almost anywhere!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Assignment UI - When selecting an instruction zone such as a Defend Zone, a new UI will be attached which displays anyone already working on that instruction, as well as a button to immediately assign the next nearest unit to that instruction. Also the UI will now become a scrollpane if there are a lot of units in the list.

Warriors - Switching class to warrior will now automatically hold that unit, to make it easier to give them further instructions.

Equipment - The slots for Weapon/Tool, Armour and Meal can now be clicked to add available items to them, instead of having to manually tell the dwarf to pick up that item from storage. When the dwarf is next free, they will look for that item in storage and equip it automatically.

Mineral Clumps - The way in which minerals spawn has been revamped. Minerals like gold ore and coal will now be found (usually) in groups, instead of scattered as single tiles. This makes them harder to find, but more rewarding as the overall quantity remains the same.

Soil - Planting mushrooms using the Farming tech generates a soil tile. This soil tile now provides a small amount of moisture.

Allies - In caverns mode, if an ally is in your base, you can now interact with them (select your dwarf and right click) to tell them to return to their own base.

Sprinklers - The Farming II tech now also unlocks sprinklers, which allow you to create radiuses of moisture anywhere by building them within a range of either water or another sprinkler. As a side-note, since sprinklers generate moisture, they can be used to activate the Power-Slider combat ability.

Quick-Save - Added quick-save keybind to the game (F5 by default).

Skirmish Mode - Now provided the option to specify a random spawn-size for a team, which determines both number of units and starting buildings.

Farming Plots - Will now only place instructions for roughly one third of available mushrooms, so that they don't stunt growth.

Thinker - Dwarves with the Thinker trait will now feel 'motivated' rather than gain random exp, which improves the speed at which most tasks are completed.

Caverns Mode v0.62 - Added 'The Vault' start option which sets you up with an abandoned vault surrounded by stone walls. Also features the first version of hordes, which will spawn periodically from tunnels (except with Dwarfling difficulty set, they do not feature). Tunnel spawns are already a mechanic, but spawn fewer enemies. Despite the name, hordes will currently only spawn ~3 times the usual number of enemies, as we do not wish to elevate the difficulty of this mode too much in a single patch. We'll keep an eye on gameplay balance moving forward and adjust accordingly.

Fixes & Improvements:

AI Performance Improvement - Tracked down and fixed a performance issue relating to updating a unit's memory map too aggressively. Larger maps with many units should now perform better.

Mushroom Farming - Multiple foragers would sometimes attempt to farm the same patch of mushrooms.

Behaviour AI - General improvements to idle behaviour. Dwarves equipping items now improved & apply in more circumstances. Also improved logic for when a unit should be able to walk through another unit, or when a unit decides to rest in a bed.

Attacking Enemies - Fixed several bugs in circumstances where units decided to attack enemies when they shouldn't have, and one bug where they should have but didn't.

Vehicles - Attempting to enter a floating barrel should now succeed first time even when issuing the order from a distance.

Assembling Animation - Foragers and worker goblins had no assembling animation.

Building HP Bar - Sometimes displayed the wrong colour until selected.

Skirmish Mode - The quick-start option now provides more resources and buildings at the start.

Saving - Now shows "Saving" at the top of the screen when the game is autosaving, instead of "Paused".

Objectives List - When 10 or more objectives have been added to the list, the list will automatically hide completed objectives. This only happens once per session.

Tile Rendering - Potentially fixed a rare bug where the wrong texture would be matched to a tile, for example gold ore instead of stone.

Resurrection - Fixed bug where a resurrected dwarf could immediately die again.

Sound FX - Different items now have more varied sound FX when dropped.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2022-06-13 18:25:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Easter Update (Patch Notes 22)

Fellow Dwarves! Many more quality-of-life improvements are on the way with this year's Easter patch.

[h3]Easter Mode[/h3]
For the next couple weeks, Easter mode will be enabled, and you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The environment has a different look and feel.

Mobbits - Mobbits are larger than normal, and provide more meat!

Easter Eggs - You will find easter eggs sprawled about everywhere, even hidden in the walls! You can now harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals. How many can you find? (Total is at the bottom of the Stats window)

As usual, seasonal modes can always be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Current Actions - Rearranged some UI for selected dwarves, and better shows what their current actions are.

Mouse Control Scheme - Added two different options under Gameplay to change which mouse button pans the camera and other controls. This is only relevant when One-Button mode isn't on.

Ignore Resource Restrictions - Added a new setting in the Options menu under Gameplay that will allow you to place building instructions even if you don't have the required resources. This may be preferable if you're one who likes to plan their base ahead of time.

Classes - Switching class to Warrior automatically holds the dwarf until you decide what to do with them. We'll be experimenting with this behaviour to see if it is preferable to leaving them unheld. Also added a highlight when selecting a new class for which class is currently chosen.

Tutorials - Polished, improved tutorial steps & explanations, and added other important elements that were missed. Also introduced 'responsive' tutorials outside of the Tutorial Adventure for anything that was missed/skipped. These responsive tutorials can be turned off in the Options menu under Gameplay.

Campaign - Revamped a few levels including Windy Rivers, improved dialog & made the hint signs more consistent.

Skirmish mode - Different goblin teams will now feature different shades of skin. Also fixed some UI bugs, improved AI & removed generation glitches.

Spring Capacity - Added notification if you try to spawn a dwarf but you're at spring capacity.

Accomplishments - Monuments now feature a button that allows you to look at you accomplishments (stats) for the specific map & playthrough.

Fog-of-War - With lighting quality set to high, the fog-of-war now has atmospheric soft edges (see image below).

Fixes & Improvements:

Signs - No longer pause the game when interacted with. Text will also appear immediately regardless of whether right clicking or left clicking, for consistency.

Overriding Decisions - Fixed a bug where occasionally the player's decision to move a unit would be ignored if they were in battle.

Campaign - Fixed some issues with certain maps including a problem with the offering chest in Smuggle-Me-Timbers.

Fishing - Under certain circumstances, Foragers would continue fishing in removed zones.

Tunnels - Fixed some issues with tunnels and entering new levels, and the associated button appearing when it shouldn't.

Fixed various bugs with dwarf & goblin AI, including reducing some stubbornness for dropping items in storage, idleness, and reducing AI units inclination to wander across the map such as in caverns mode.

Various other Quality-of-Life improvements, including a 'Select All' button in the campaign when choosing dwarves to enter the next map.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2022-04-16 23:58:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

While working on chapter 2 content, we discovered a potential issue that may cause certain elements to freeze. Though we're not sure if this would happen for existing content in the game, it's better to be safe than sorry!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

Fixed bug that may cause pathfinding or other elements to freeze.
Holding space to speed up time was skipping the first dialog bubble.
Dwarf clans in caverns mode in some circumstances were spawning injured.

[ 2022-02-23 17:15:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Base Management & Balance Improvements (Patch Notes 21)

Fellow Dwarves! We've been working hard to make your base-building endeavours easier to manage and better organised, among other improvements!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Load Game UI - Load Game has been updated to include a full list of saves in order of recency, as well as filter options to the different modes. Also now shows the difficulty setting (only applies to saves created after this patch).

Farming & Repair Plots - Added a toggle button that allows you to enable/disable these. Note any existing instructions will have to be removed individually.

Dwarf-List - Added Held Units tab to the dwarf-list so you can quickly find your held units.

Storage Arrangements - In the Arrangements UI, buildings have been compressed into a single checkbox that applies to all packed buildings.

Minecart Arrangements - Minecarts can now be given arrangements similar to storage, which restricts what items your dwarves will drop at their pick-up point as well as what items the minecart will pick up along its journey. This allows you to organise minecarts according to specific tasks.

Minecart Show Home Button - Added button to selected minecarts that centres the camera on their pick-up point. Likewise selecting the track at the pick-up point has a button to show the associated minecart.

Guide to Glistenveld - Added search bar at the top of the list that allows you to search for sections by their names or content. More entries are hidden until they are discovered in-game. Added and corrected entries.

Old Support Posts - Similar to Old Tracks, Old Support Posts can be salvaged by Foragers for wood. In the new version of caverns mode, any pre-existing support posts will now be old support posts.

Sculptures - The re-roll button no longer picks a random sculpture, it now allows you to select any sculpture design you want from a pop-up UI.

Engineering Exp - Buffed the exp-gain from assembling buildings, since engineers were levelling slower than other classes.

Survivalist - Adjusted this warrior ability to apply in the vicinity of mushrooms.

Track-Runner - Replaced the Duelist warrior ability with Track-Runner, which gives a movement speed bonus while in the vicinity of tracks.

Caverns Mode v0.59 - Fixed a bug where sometimes the reputation quests would not appear. Features a new option called Massive Mines which will connect many of the caves together with mineshafts, adding another level of danger, but also enables you to explore quicker! Cave spawn & clan strength balances.

Resurrection Hearts - A new very rare item has been added to the game that enables you to resurrect a dwarf buried at a Gravestone. This will feature more in future updates, but for now finding one is the only way to obtain it.

Fixes & Improvements:

Force Rest / Eat - Should now eat/rest immediately even if held.

Building - Can now build over the top of more scenery objects, such as debris and discarded/broken tools.

Deconstruct - Fixed bug where deconstructing certain buildings such as the monument would give nothing in return, instead of their recipe components.

All Items UI - If the All Items UI gets too full, rather than overlapping the Instruction Panel, it will create a second column.

Introduction - Small changes to the campaign Introduction map. Opening the journals now ask if you wish to enable the accessibility modes, rather than doing so automatically.

Tutorials - Updated signs, added more polish, edited dialog.

Game Speed - The keybinds for pausing the game now act in the same way as the cog, and will speed up the game when held.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2022-02-10 00:53:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Combat Engagement & Other Refinements (Patch Notes 20)

Fellow Dwarves! Our messengers are giving us more precise information about battle engagements, and we've made a few new discoveries in the caverns!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

Battle Notifications - Now show you which enemy is engaging you, right on the notification! So you can now decide whether or not it's worth your time depending on what you see.

AI Improvements - AI deciding when units should engage in battle is an ever-improving formula. In this patch units will now still engage even if they intend to rest, provided their HP is high enough. We have also refined how the pathfinder interacts around battles, allowing units to walk around obstacles, walls or other battling units to reach their target.

Caverns Mode v0.57 - New start type: Lone Dwarf. In Lone Dwarf you start as a single dwarf spawning from a lone spring. This dwarf has a Multi-Tool which is a special equipment that allows the wielder to switch classes at will, without needing a toolrack. The first portion of Lone Dwarf is more challenging than other start-types. The reputation objectives have also been refined, as well as the introduction of some new objects (described below) & various fixes.

Vases - Introduced a new type of treasure container with 3 variants, Clay, Iron and Bronze. Currently only featured in the latest version of caverns mode. Similar to barrels, vases can be broken into, but have different loot-tables. The bronze variant provides the best rewards.

Moss - Currently mostly an aesthetic object that grows and spreads of its own accord, but generates moisture similar to stalagmites and water, increasing the rate of mushroom and root-sapling growth. Moss may be harvestable in a future update.

New Icons & Textures - New icons for Eat, Rest & Drop Items. Updated textures for gems, coal, iron ore & gold ore, to stand out a little more in the environment and make them easier to spot.

Farming Plots - Fixed bug where Farming Plots may have stopped working if green mushrooms existed in their vicinity. Note that farming plots will not place gather instructions on green mushrooms, due to their dangerous nature.

Kilns - Altered the design a little to make them more intuitive to use, and will now auto-generate a pickup instruction to pick up the coal left behind.

Tutorials - Dialog and hint improvements for the first, second and fifth tutorial levels.

Save & Load Fixes - Includes a fix for a rare situation where a user-save and autosave occurs at the same time. Also fixes a few objects that were losing some minor data on a load.

We're taking a break for the holidays, but we'll be back in action in January! Hope you all have a pleasant break, don't forget to treat yourselves and stay wrapped up warm if you're in a cold climate!

Until our next update, have a Merry Christmas!

[ 2021-12-21 02:00:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mini-Patch

We noticed in some playtests spiders can get a bit out of hand!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

Fishbeard's Mining Operation - Updated and added a second spring to try to balance the difficulty.
Spiders - Tweaked combat agility & worked on burrow behaviour to stop too many leaving their nest.

[ 2021-10-27 16:24:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween Mode & New Scenario Map (Patch Notes 19)

[h3]Halloween Mode[/h3]
Glistenveld is getting spooky once again as Halloween Mode is now enabled!
In Halloween Mode, you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The colour and atmosphere of levels have become a little spooky!

Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves will treat like meals!

Webs - You will find random webs that stick to your dwarves and slow them down!

Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!

Bubbling waters and mist - Water has turned greenish and bubbles, and you will find mist emerging here and there.

Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.

As usual, seasonal modes can always be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

[h3]Fishbeard's Mining Operation[/h3]

To help celebrate this spooky event, we have released a new map: Fishbeard's Mining Operation. Fishbeard is one of the other clans you encounter in your journeys under Glistenveld, and in this scenario you step in the shoes of one of their expedition groups, but not all is what it seems about this particular venture... Find it in the list of scenario maps under New Game > Scenarios!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]

Various AI Fixes - Includes some warrior AI improvements. We're still not entirely happy with when units decide to rest or fight. This might be worthy of a blog post, we'll see.

Spider AI - Spiders were not properly utilising burrows and would occasionally get stuck. The spider mother should mostly keep to its original nest.

Unit Buried/Drowning - When dwarves end up buried in a wall they will now take damage and jump to a nearby ground tile if able. When dwarves end up in water, they will start losing stamina and then health until a friendly unit stands next to them, at which point they are rescued and jump out. (This update will become more relevant in future content)

Campaign World Map - Polished up the interface for the world map. New/unexplored maps are given an outline. Refined code behind the scenes in preparation for an upcoming feature.

Bats - Should no longer fly through doors.

Ballistas - Which pressure-plates automatically link to ballistas has been improved. Rather than first-come first-serve, they now switch according to which ballista is closest. This is the case unless they've been set by the player or were already existing before the game was last loaded.

Not too much in terms of updates this month, and I know we haven't released a blog post in a while. We've been focusing on chapter 2 content, mostly grind-work and spoilers at the moment, so we don't have a lot to share, but rest assured we're still working hard and making progress!

Until our next update, Happy Halloween!

[ 2021-10-24 21:37:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Storage Arrangements & Fish Lures (Patch Notes 18)

Fellow Dwarves! Our engineers have made two important discoveries in the world of Glistenveld! First, a new technique of organising storage spaces that blows previous designs out of the water! Second, a new technology that reprocesses materials for industrialisation, such as repopulating fish!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Storage Arrangements - Instead of toggling individual resources for each tile of storage, the configure button now takes you to a new UI that allows you to create arrangement templates, configuring what items are permitted as well as the arrangement's priority. You can then easily set which storage corresponds to which arrangement. Newly placed storage tiles copy the arrangement of their neighbours.

Game Speed SFX - When fast-forwarding using the cog, sounds and voices should now play back sped-up to correspond with the game-speed.

Unit Aggro - Warriors should attack enemies on sight more, rather than relying mostly on defend zones or being idle. This change also applies to other classes, but at a much smaller radius. We're still experimenting with aggro cooldowns, so this may be adjusted in future patches, we'll see.

New Tech: Farming II - The first tier-3 technology unlocks 2 buildings: the charcoal kiln and fish lure. The kiln turns piles of wood into coal by burning them under a mound of dirt. Keep your dwarves out of its vicinity however, as it produces lingering toxic smoke. The fish lure consists predominantly of algae that is found on growing green mushrooms, and can be placed near waterfalls to spawn fish. This tech also unlocks the ability to harvest growing green mushrooms, just tread carefully!

Idle Dwarves - When dwarves are idle, they will stop themselves from crowding certain buildings including: tables, beds, doors, tracks, storage and food barrels.

Skirmish Mode - 'Random cave' setting will no longer spawn empty caves. Setting a team number to '0' will now match the species, for example if a dwarf camp spawns there, they will be allied with all other dwarves.

Fixes & Improvements:

Engine Crash Fix - Stability fixes for the sound engine, which includes a multi-thread fix that was causing most of the game's (once in a blue moon) crashes.

Pick-up Instruction - Placing an instruction over storage will stop units from dropping items there until the job is complete.

Move Instruction - Telling an engineer to prioritise this instruction should now work as intended.

Minecarts - Units will now drop all their items on the pick-up location, instead of on neighbouring tiles when the pick-up location has a full stack.

Caverns Mode v0.54 - Enemy spawn balance improvements, and improvements to some cave spawns, in an attempt to ensure every type of cave has a purpose.

Dead Units - The deceased unit tab of the dwarf-list should now correctly show unit portraits, and gravestones should now retain their text.

Windy Rivers - Fixed some soft-lock bugs that were recently introduced at the beginning segment of this level.

Mobbits - Some mobbits were frozen in place after loading a save game or wouldn't leave their warrens.

Assembling - Fixed bug where engineers might build the wrong building on top of another instruction, during major batch constructions.

Building Sprites - Buildings that you own outside of visible light will now still appear opaque, rather than transparent, to be more easily recognised.

Scenarios & Skirmish - Polished up and fixed some bugs in scenario maps & skirmish mode.

Various other fixes including a change to how save-file icons are generated, FPS drops caused by pathing issues with scripted movement, and inconsistencies with selection in one-button mode.

Next month we will be focusing mostly on preparing chapter 2 content. The next patch will feature halloween mode, but probably won't have too much else in terms of features.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2021-09-26 14:44:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Gameplay Balances (Patch Notes 17)

Fellow Dwarves! A small bit of news today. Our engineers have figured out how to use less stone when paving, and our foragers have reworked their food production strategies!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Borderless Window - Added borderless-window mode as a third option alongside full-screen and windowed. Due to occasional issues with fullscreen this is now default.

Cooking Station - The third meal recipe no longer requires fish, it now requires 4 mushrooms and 2 meat instead. This means when fish sources are depleted, you can still make meals using more than just mushrooms!

Farming Plots - No longer harvests all grown mushrooms, but instead leaves at least 1/3 of mushrooms in its radius to ensure re-sporing can continue.

Battle - Units can escape from battle more easily now when clustered together, pushing past other friendly units.

Cobblestone - Rebalanced to cost 2 stone instead of 3. This should cause less of a stone shortage each time you are paving your bases.

Autosaves - Instead of autosaving every 5 minutes, the game will now autosave every 2 minutes using 3 different autosave files. We will eventually provide settings for autosave features.

Fixes & Improvements:

Minecarts - No longer jump tracks on very large track lines, or drop more food than tables / food barrels can hold. Units riding minecarts will now jump out at the end of a track.

Hardware Mouse - The mouse pointer will now automatically switch to a hardware rendered mouse whenever the FPS is low. This means moving your cursor should remain relatively smooth.

Frenzied Allies - In rare situations, frenzied ally dwarves could be unfrenzied but continue to attack your buildings. This should no longer happen.

Warrens - Mobbit & bat warrens were spawning a new mobbit/bat between each load & save, regardless of whether one already existed, causing large numbers to exist.

Textures & Sprites - Updated various graphics including iron ore, iron hammer and some traits.

Saving - Certain creatures like mobbits were getting stuck in a decision loop, which significantly slowed down saving times due to large amounts of retained data.

Recipe Info UI - Should no longer vanish periodically while the game is playing.

Floody Hell - Some data was being lost in the properties of water after a load & save, which could cause this map to be incompletable.

Survival - The survival map under scenarios has been updated with the ability to buy schematics using a trade stall, to reflect the changes to schematics in a prior patch.

Various fixes including screenshot mode not interacting correctly, building sprites disappearing and AI fixes.

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2021-08-10 22:06:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Lubricated Hinges & Gravestones (Patch Notes 16)

Hear ye Dwarves! Our engineers have been hard at work to make your bases into well-oiled machines! Reduced loading times, reduction of lag spikes during gameplay, a lot of minor quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, a snoring sfx for sleeping dwarves and a way to temporarily increase the game speed!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Game Speed Cog - You may not have been aware, but the little cog in the bottom-right corner of the minimap was a button that paused/unpaused the game. You can now click and hold this cog to speed up the game-time! We deliberated on this design a lot, and are happy with our choice for the 'hold' mechanic, but we'll be fully explaining our reasoning in our next blog post.

Support/Lamp Posts - Before placement and when selected, these now show the radius within which they support against cave-ins.

Combat Exp - Non-warrior units now also gain exp while in combat, though to a lesser degree than warriors. Also corrected some errors in combat calculations and abilities.

Claims - Allies were claiming springs too aggressively in caverns mode. Now any springs you've fought for are considered yours until a certain cooldown ends.

Caverns-mode Options - The menu at the start has been revamped to be more flexible. You can now both choose a starting condition and tick extra options like 'more schematics' as well. A new option has been added that prevents other dwarf clans from spawning anywhere near you.

Tech Table - Can now craft schematics at the tech table using 6 old artefacts. This is in addition to being able to trade for them with gold at trade stalls (in certain modes only). The kindlewick trade stall still trades for 5 artefacts.

Skirmish-mode - Smaller update introducing some resource balance changes, updated region design & colour-schemes.

Iron Roots - Now provide 2 wood & 1 iron ore when harvested.

Sleeping SFX - You can now hear dwarves snoring in beds.

Star bars - When a unit is particularly low health/stamina/hunger, that bar will now have a red outline, so you can more easily identify when units may be in need of assistance.

Upgraded Hinges - The ballista part of this technology has changed. Instead of ballistas triggering in groups, pressure plates are now given the option to trigger a second ballista. We feel this is more intuitive, and allows for greater flexibility and strategy.

Gravestones - A new building under Infrastructure that allows you to bury the dead with dignity. This is in combination with a new tab in the dwarf-list that allows you to browse through your fallen dwarves. For now this is only an aesthetic/sentimental feature, there are no mechanical benefits to building gravestones yet. Please note that units that died prior to this patch will not show, as they were not maintained in pre-existing saves.

Auto-Pause - Added toggleable option to gameplay settings that automatically pauses the game when a unit becomes low-health.

Fixes & Improvements:

Multi-threaded Pathfinding - It took a lot of work, but pathfinding now runs on a separate thread outside of the game loop, which should stop many of the fps judders experienced while playing medium-large maps. There may still be some for other reasons, we will continue to track these down. There may also be some new quirks in unit behaviour, for this reason we've provided a checkbox in gameplay options to toggle multi-threaded pathfinding on/off.

Assembling & Prioritising - Engineers should behave a bit more intelligently when assembling, and prioritising buildings should work as expected. Before, when another engineer was already working on the job, the chosen engineer would refuse to do it. You can now select additional engineers and right click an assembling building to assist with it.

Saving & Loading - Fixed UI flickering with the save & load game list. Unit counts for new saves should now work. Also reduced loading time by pushing certain graphically generated content to run later.

Manual Mining - When telling a miner with a full inventory to mine a new tile, they will now drop the items where they stand instead of returning to storage.

Caverns-mode Generation - Balanced mushroom spawning, fixed bug with quests not ticking off, added a couple of new cave types.

Double-clicking - Some mice have an issue where clicking one of the buttons will sometimes fire 2 click events instead of 1. Although this isn't an issue with TDoG specifically, we decided to try to account for it anyway. The game should now detect and ignore double-clicks of this kind.

Crafting UI - The crafting options shown when a building like a forge or claim is selected will now update as items are added or removed from storage.

Doors - Mobbits, fireflies, and other little bugs should no longer be able to interact with doors.

Items - Items on the ground now have shadows. Items carried while in battle are given transparency since they're less important in those moments.

Feedback form - Fixed various bugs involving the feedback form, including unclickable send button, too limited writing box, malformed screenshots and a certain 'socket timeout exception'.

Ballista - Was behaving as if there was a shot remaining even though ammo is depleted.

Dwarf-list - Clicking dwarves in the list no longer immediately centres the camera on them. To centre the camera on them now, click them a second time.

Fixed various other intermittent bugs including a couple involving achievements & stats, and one very rare bug that had a pandora's box of outcomes. If you've ever seen a 'peeper' talk or a unit spontaneously combust, this is the bug we're talking about. I don't know who let Loki into the script engine but he's now banished back to Asgard!

We've also been working hard scripting the levels for the chapter 2 release. We can't give too much detail about that, but we might be sharing a teaser about one of them in an upcoming blog!

That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2021-07-10 19:32:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Notifications Revamped (Patch Notes 15)

Fellow Dwarves! A small bit of news today, our notification messengers have upped their game, and our engineers are finally figuring out how to assemble multiple tracks in a row!

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Notifications - Certain notifications will now persist instead of being removed when clicked on. The battle notification will remain as long as the battle goes on. The level-up notification persists until you've chosen an ability for the dwarf. Once any notification ceases to be relevant, a count-down arc appears indicating that that notification will disappear on its own soon, but you can also click to remove it at this point.

Assembling - When many of the same building instructions are to be assembled in the same region, engineers will now assemble them in sequence, until they run out of parts. This is most notable for tracks and pressure plates.

Instruction Assignment UI - Selecting an instruction zone brings up the assignment UI where you can select which dwarves work what jobs. A new button has been added 'Apply to all' which will set the current configuration to all instructions of that type.

Caverns Mode - Introduced some new quests, and balanced some of the cave generation (only found when playing a fresh game).

Guide - Added many more guide entries, and fixed some bugs including a couple of broken entries.

Campaign - A few small refinements have been made to reduce confusion in the earlier levels.

Fixes & Improvements:

Trade Stalls - Fixed various bugs and the general glitchiness surrounding these should be resolved. Trade stalls can now also be packed up.

Mushrooms - Fixed bugs both with the farming plot, and that mushrooms could not be removed on soil patches.

Battle - Battles taking place around mobbits or vehicles, characters were prone to dancing back and forth instead of fighting. Also the hit counters weren't always showing the correct numbers.

AI Improvements - Ally teams should no longer steal food, or stand around doors begging to be let in for the same reason. AI miners should stop mining down your walls (fingers-crossed we nipped this in the bud this time). Made various other improvements to AI teams, and resolved some scenarios where units were getting stuck in a rut. Bats should no longer get confused about how to avoid lamps and light sources.

Placing Buildings - Fixed a bug where in large maps, occasionally what you were trying to build instead turned into beds.

Pathfinder Optimisation - Longer paths should now be a little more efficient, but less accurate.

We're also saying goodbye to easter mode tomorrow, although you will still be able to enable it manually for a while longer by going to Options > Gameplay > Seasonal.

That's all for now, have a good weekend!

[ 2021-04-30 23:17:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Easter Patch (Patch Notes 14)

Fellow Dwarves! Recent training advances will make your Warriors better at choosing their fights, and your working dwarves easier to boss around!

[h3]Easter Mode[/h3]
For the next few weeks, easter mode will be enabled, and you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The environment has a different look and feel.

Mobbits - Mobbits are larger than normal, and provide more meat!

Easter Eggs - You will find easter eggs sprawled about everywhere, even hidden in the walls! You can now harvest easter eggs using the gather instruction, and they can be stored on tables similar to meals.

As usual, seasonal modes can be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Dwarf-List - Added a 'select-all' button, which allows you to select all dwarves within the active tab.

Accident-prone - Dwarves with this trait will no longer injure themselves randomly, but continue to fumble more frequently in combat.

Blood-thirsty - Dwarves with this trait now attack enemies on-sight regardless of class, and gain bonus exp in combat. This change removes the stance restriction, as we will be removing stances in a future build (more info below).

Sound FX - Added sound FX for the schematic & tech table.

Guide - Added more guide entries. The guide now indicates how many entries have unlocked / unread sections.

Fixes & Improvements:

Flee - Warriors that are in the vicinity of enemies will now return home to rest anyway if they're low health. Spiders were giving up on fleeing too easily.

Unit Control - Dwarves that are being manually controlled by the player (selected and controlled) will slow down their autonomous behaviour. This gives the player more time to give multiple orders without the dwarf trying to leave.

Doors - The sprites for doors were getting confused. The symbols for which mode is selected should now be correct.

Music - Will no longer play the same track twice in a row. Added new track 'Aegis' which plays around more advanced bases.

Stats - Stats for units on your team are now bolder and should stand out more than stats for other teams.

In a future update, we plan on removing stances from the game. We feel stances require too much micromanagement for the benefit, and have decided to replace this with something else to give you greater control over when units choose to attack enemies. Once we have a more concrete design, we'll write a blog post about this change.

That's all for now, have a good Easter break!

[ 2021-04-04 01:56:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Guide to Glistenveld (Patch Notes 13)

Fellow Dwarves! Hereby follows a list of new discoveries in the world of Glistenveld! Creatures and characters are getting smarter, building and unit improvements, and an all new guide is under development!

Some of these updates were described in greater detail in our most recent blog: The Finer Details.

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
Features & Design Changes:

Spiders - There are now spider mothers, decided as the nest expands, which have the ability to create burrows for smaller spiders to travel through. Spiders will also flee from battle now when injured, returning to their nest. High level spiders are more dangerous than before, but less common in caverns mode.

Repair Zones - A new building plot that you can place near your important buildings, which will automatically tell your engineers to keep them repaired. Any building damaged within the Repair Zone's radius will be flagged for repairs. This includes caltrops and doors for example, but not walls.

Skirmish Mode - You can now assign teams by selecting the numbers on the right side and matching them together. Added randomly placed barrels and tomes.

Caverns Mode - New biomes, including an outer biome that holds greater threats and rewards. Fixed some issues with quest interactions.

No Beds Notification - A new notification pops up when you don't have any free beds for a dwarf to sleep in.

Supply Ballistas - The supply instruction for ballistas is now persistent, which means as long as you have spears in stock, your units will continue to supply them. You can remove the supply instruction at any time using the Remove Zone instruction.

Combat Ability Icons - The combat abilities were not very clear when they were active. Now when an ability like wall-puncher is active, that icon will appear above the dwarf's head.

Trade Stalls - Trade stalls now have updated sprites to include all the items they sell. Rebalanced some of the trades, and buying schematics in skirmish or some scenario modes has been moved from the tech table to the trade stall.

Clan Creation - You can now lock traits in while you re-roll a dwarf's appearance and name.

Tutorial Continuity - Reworked some of the dialog and improved the engine to enable the same dwarves to be retained throughout the 5 tutorials, without disturbing classes or positioning.

Guide to Glistenveld - We needed somewhere for players to go when they're confused about something. This guide is an in-game manual that expands as you discover new objects and unlock new techs. The more you discover, the more sections you unlock and the more intricate information you'll find in the guide. It is still in early stages, many topics are still to be added, but most of the important topics are written.

Fixes & Improvements:

Extensive AI Work - Both allies and enemies will now protect their buildings, go on assaults, attack enemy buildings and successfully explore, expand and grow of their own accord. Units were getting stuck in a lot of different situations, preventing them from properly developing.

Tiered Ability Icons - All level 2 abilities now have tiered icons for the different ability tiers. A level 3 dwarf will have tier 2 version of their ability, and a level 4 dwarf tier 3 respectively.Goblins have a new stone-cutter sprite to distinguish them away from dwarves.

Updated Sprites & More SFX - Most buildings now have clan-colour stripes on them, so you can better distinguish which buildings are owned by what team. Some still need updating, like doors.

Mining Tiles - With multiple units selected, you can now right click to mine tiles, as long as one of your selected units is a miner.

Building Damaged Notification - Now includes walls that you own, provided you have a dwarf or lamp post near that wall. Other buildings will notify you regardless of presence.

Line of Sight - Improved the sight system so you can no longer see through walls in some angles.

Various Instruction Improvements - For example, defend zones will now tell warriors to attack their nearest enemy building, instead of the first in the list.

Held Units - Held units will attack enemies next to them, but if they end up chasing their target, they will return to their held position.

Building / Assembling - A spinning spanner icon will now appear over a building instruction when an engineer is working on it.

Training Dummies - Fixed a bug to do with dwarves not going to train while another dwarf was on their way to train. Some other buildings also had this problem.

Sculptures - Made more configurable. You can now re-roll the sculpture itself.

Map Editor - Overhauled the controls and UI. Still looking into adding a tutorial or guide to make it easier to get to grips with.

As always, if you run into issues, let us know either in the forums or the in-game feedback form.

Our next blog will talk about AI improvements in greater detail, and what we have planned next. That's all for now, stay safe out there!

[ 2021-03-03 21:51:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween Mode, The Tomb & New Difficulty Settings! (Patch Notes 12)

[h3]Halloween Mode[/h3]
Fellow dwarves! Glistenveld is getting spooky once again as Halloween Mode is now enabled!
With Halloween Mode enabled, you will experience the following changes to the game:

Atmosphere - The colour and atmosphere of levels have become a little spooky!

Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew, which dwarves will treat like meals!

Webs - You will find random webs which are sticky.

Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!

Bubbling waters and mist - Water has turned greenish and bubbles, and you will find mist emerging here and there.

Green blood - Units and creatures flash green when injured, instead of red.

As usual, seasonal modes can always be disabled in the options menu under Gameplay > Seasonal.

[h3]The Tomb[/h3]
To help celebrate this spooky event, we have created a new map called: The Tomb! You can find it by going to New Game > Scenarios > The Tomb. Alongside this, we've just released a hefty new update to the game (patch notes below).

[h3]Patch Notes[/h3]
It's been a while since the last update. This is mostly because we've been focused on chapter 2 content which, for the time being, must remain secret. However, we have finally reached a state where we can push out a new update, and boy is this a big one!

Features & Design Changes:

Difficulty Settings - The Dwarves of Glistenveld will now present you with difficulty options when you start a new game! The options are 'Dwarfling', 'Normal' and 'Veteran', and will impact the gameplay in every mode. Once in-game, you can change your difficulty setting at any time from the escape menu!

New Campaign Introduction - When playing a new campaign, after the cutscene, you will find yourself in a new level called 'Introduction'. This short -yet dramatic- level bridges the gap between the story in the cutscene and the first true level of the campaign: Fisher's Cove. This introduction is intended to give you a real sense of the goblin threat, and being on the run.

Escape Menu Hints - While in the escape menu, hints appear that remind you what each section of the UI is for and offers some tips related to them. You can turn this off in the options menu, under gameplay.

Farming Plots - An addition to an existing tech: Farming. With this tech unlocked, you'll now be able to place little signposts called farming plots which tell your foragers to automatically harvest roots and mushrooms in that area. It also tells allies to avoid gathering there! This should allow you to automate your farms and let your foragers get on with it by themselves.

Tech: Bed-rolls - A new tech in the tech tree that allows any unit to build bed-rolls. Bed-rolls differ from regular beds in a few ways. Bed-rolls are cheaper and single-use (they are destroyed after a full bar's rest), but can be built by any class. Lastly, a crafted bed-roll is not put in physical storage but exists only in the HUD. You can queue one of these in the Workbench to be built later on. Then when you do build it, it will appear in the builder's inventory as if they were already carrying it around. This allows you to build bed-rolls miles away from your base in a matter of seconds, perfect for an assault on a distant base!

Tech: Upgraded Hinges - A new tech in the tech tree that provides you with 'Iron Doors' and allows nearby ballistas to trigger one another. Iron doors are a more durable and flexible alternative to wooden doors. While wooden doors prevent enemies but allow allies through, iron doors are configurable and can be chosen to allow everyone, noone or only your units through.

Big-Picture UI - The little UI in the top-left now features 3 sections: dwarf count, claim count and schematic count. Each section is also a button. The dwarf count will open the dwarf-list; the claim count will select one of the claims you own; the schematic count will open up the tech tree, once you have built a tech table.

Crafting Instructions - You can now prioritise specific crafts by selecting an engineer and right clicking one of the buildings the craft will be performed at. That engineer will then perform the chosen craft before any other instruction, assuming they are able.

Building Attacked Notification - New notification that tells you when one of your buildings is under attack!

Bats - Bats will now level up over time, growing slightly in size and strength. Bats will also avoid any buildings that produce light, like monuments and lamp posts. Younger bats will now follow older bats around. Also fixed some issues with bats bunching up on single tiles.

Goblins - Higher level goblins now have a different colour outfit. Goblins have also been balanced to be stronger in combat at higher levels.

Attention Pop-ups - Now have a timeout and will disappear after a while. No longer keep reappearing once dismissed.

Hardy Trait - Dwarves with this new positive trait will have +1 defence and an additional block opportunity in combat.

Root-puller Ability - This has swapped places with Root-hugger and is now a level 2 ability. In theory, this ability will be more useful earlier on in the game, and root-hugger will be more useful later on. Existing saves will not reflect this changes.

Tutorials - Tutorials now feature a side-objective, to click all of the hint signs in each level. Also fixed various issues with tutorials, like edge-cases that can lead to confusing situations for the player.

Gather Instruction - Can now be used to pick up items strewn on the ground, in addition to foraging or fishing.

Green Mushrooms - These nasty mushrooms will now cause a chain-reaction when triggered! When stepped on, a green mushroom spawns gas around it, and triggers neighbouring mushrooms with the same effect. This gas drains the victim's hunger and will cause them to become frenzied from too much exposure. A frenzied unit will only return to normal once you knock some sense into them!

Multiple Unit UI - Now shows the unit's level, and provides individual rest and hold buttons for each unit you have selected.

Pressure Plates - Now craft 3 at a time, similar to tracks. This should speed up the process of assembling pressure plates where you want them.

Flintlock - This ability is finally implemented! Flintlock is an engineer's level 5 ability that allows them to fire a shot at an enemy before engaging in battle. The graphics are still missing some sprites however.

Fixes & Improvements:

Notifications - Notifications for short-term or less significant events have a timeout and will remove themselves after a period of time. Also fixed issues with certain notifications not popping up.

Held Units - Units will now equip items even while held. Held warriors will no longer attack enemies on sight, unless they are adjacent. Holding a unit will only cancel their move if it wasn't directly issued by the player.

Moving Units - When issued a move by the player, units should no longer give up on their target when they get in each other's way.

Single-button Mode - Now named 'One-button mode' has undergone a few improvements, including certain cases where a vehicle couldn't be selected or moved, and gathering roots/fish required multiple clicks on touch screens.

Crafting - Engineers should no longer double-up on resources needed to craft something. Engineers should now take into account the resources they're holding when starting a craft or assembly, particularly for walls and bridges. Engineers will now try to build in order of distance from the target, which should make assembling tracks a little less chaotic.

Buildings - The colour of the HP bar now corresponds with its clan colour, as with units.

Stealing - You can no longer pick up an ally's building item while it's being assembled.

Steam Achievements - Some achievements weren't being validated at the appropriate times in the game.

Barrel-riding - Fixed a few bugs, one involving the pathfinder going through land to reach the target, one where loading a game with a unit in a barrel would cause issues with movement. Also you could drive them with no unit in them.

Ambient SFX - Ambient sounds will now play even before the source is revealed in the fog-of-war.

Ally/Enemy AI - Made more intelligent and aggressive when an enemy is sighted or one of their buildings is under attack, (more refinement might be necessary). An AI's 'give-up' threshold has been modified and made more intelligent, which should stop most AI-related FPS drops in the game.

Warrens - Should now be destroyed when their tile is mined by an AI team, as it would be by the player.

Caverns Mode v0.44 - Enemies would sometimes spawn with reduced HP. Tunnels should be guaranteed to spawn after exploring enough. Some quests have been made a bit clearer. New cave featuring mobbit warrens!

Skirmish Mode - Fixed bugs involving the 'choose spawn' option. Also Dwarf AI in this particular mode were inclined to stand around like lemons. You can now choose spiders as one of the occupants of caves.

Campaign Levels - All levels in the campaign have received small or significant updates. BridgeItLake now features an obvious schematic. SmuggleMeTimbers received improvements for conquest route, and the chest contents changed to contain gems.

Minimap - Clicking the minimap should now correctly move the camera to where you've clicked.

UI Flickers/Updates - Fixed some issues with flickering UI and issues with UI not updating icons correctly.

HUD Items - Items that are not stored physically but in your HUD should now show correctly when loading a saved game.

Placement Hints - Always on for heavily restricted placements. 'Remove instruction' only shows hints where instructions are present.

We'll also be releasing a blog post soon, so stay tuned for that. Until the next update, Happy Halloween!

[ 2020-10-31 16:06:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Performance Fixes (Patch Notes 11)

Hi everyone! We noticed after some changes to how pathfinding works, there have been some significant FPS drops for large groups of units in large open maps (like later stages of caverns mode). These were quite hard to track down since many of them were not reproduceable after saving and loading. We've resolved most of these along with a number of other fixes & improvements.

Patch Notes:

Performance Drops - In larger maps with vast areas to walk around, units whose target was inaccessible could cause significant FPS drops. Most of these have been resolved as the AI will now either give up or wait a reasonable amount of time before trying again.

Berserker Trait - Since we introduced this trait we've not been too happy with it. Before this patch, units with the berserker trait would not listen to any orders you give them as long as they're in battle. This effect can be quite irritating in practice, so instead of this they now refuse to equip armour. Currently the only equippable armour is helmets, however more will added to the game in future updates.

Single Mouse Mode - For touch screen users, such as the windows surface, there were no on-screen buttons to zoom the display, change instruction paint sizes or rotate buildings. We've added {+} and {-} buttons for these actions. The mouse hints near the bottom will also indicate in brackets what building rotation or instruction size you currently have.

Obstructed Mining Instructions - Miners will now indicate with a pop-up when the path to their mining instruction is obstructed. Most other units were already doing this, however a recent patch stopped miners from digging undesirable walls which in turn altered the miner's logic for obstructions.

Move Building Instruction - A series of closely related bugs were noticed involving the 'move building' instruction. For example, sometimes a different building would be placed there as well as, or instead of, the intended building.

All Items - Ghost items would sometimes appear in the all-items list. While we track down exactly what is causing this issue, we've introduced an easy 'clean-up' fix on the user's end. By clicking ghost items in the list, if they don't actually exist in storage, they'll be removed from the list.

Ballistas - The ballista's projectile was not firing correctly across water. You can now also fire ballistas manually while another unit is delivering ammo to it. As a quick reminder, to fire a ballista manually, select a unit and right click the ballista.

Loading Issues - We've fixed one or two more bugs that would sometimes crop up after saving and loading a caverns mode game. In rare circumstances, a saved game wouldn't load, even though the save files were fine.

Auto-Attack - Units will now think twice about auto-attacking enemies if their health is low.

Defend Zones - Warriors guarding a defend zone will now only go to rest once their hp is less than 60%, or their hp and stamina are both low.

Mine / Gather Notifications - These 'jobs done' notifications should now only appear once all mining / gathering instructions are completed.

Removed empty space around the All Items UI, where tiles wouldn't highlight.

Let us know if you run into any issues, or if you have any feedback or suggestions!

That's all for now, have a good weekend!

[ 2020-07-09 22:40:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Quality of Life Patch (Patch Notes 10)

Hi everyone! With many of the game's upcoming features temporarily on hold, this has been a good opportunity to get some real bug-fixing done and review some of the existing designs.

This update includes improvements to performance, soft-locks, black screens, saving & loading, gameplay, AI and UI fixes, but also a bunch of quality of life features and design changes to better suit how the game has evolved over the past few months.

Features & Design Changes:

Caltrops - These little spikes will no longer damage your units! After some revision, we decided your dwarves should be smart enough to tiptoe over them. Instead of damaging allies, caltrops will just slow them down.

Careless Trait - In light of the change of design to caltrops, this trait has been changed to: 'Takes double damage from enemy traps & defences'.

Mining - Units will now prefer mining through the mining-zone you've placed, instead of through walls that haven't been selected for mining. Also, miners should no longer mine owned walls unless they were specifically instructed to.

All Items UI - Clicking items will now show you where they are in storage. You can click these items in the storage UI for a description.

Right-click Actions - With a unit selected, when you right click one of their instruction zones, an option now appears to prioritise that instruction (except when the result would be no different than the default action). With multiple units selected, all possible interactions (from each unit type selected) are now included in the list.

Beds - Now have 6 rotations. Before you place a bed, scroll the mouse wheel to rotate them the same way you would a wooden door!

Tech Tree - Spaced out the tech UI and added flavour-text to each technology.

Minecarts - Various improvements to how these behave, tracks not joining, and fixed some issues with saving & loading. See the blog (link below) for more info on minecarts.

Workers Assignment UI - Left clicking an instruction zone presents the assignment UI. This UI has been revamped and has new functionality, including 'set as default'. This new option allows you to customise what units are automatically assigned to any new instructions of the same type.

Fish - Rebalanced to last longer, reach further but provide one less fish per harvest. The total amount of fish you get from a shoal is more or less the same as before, but fishing instructions should take a fair bit longer to deplete.

Bones - More flavourful descriptions for how those units met their makers. Will now fade over time.

Cave-ins - Will no longer spawn tiles that can cause further cave-ins. Cave-ins further away now have a more subtle screen-shake effect.

Frenzy - Frenzied ally dwarves will stop attacking one another once the frenzy effect has been lifted.

Battles - Units will no longer clump up in battle. Your warriors will now actively attack enemies within a radius, and other classes will also attack if they're adjacent.

Doors - Spiders, bats and other enemies will no longer find a way through these... Goblins can still break them down or mine around them.

Auto-pickup - Resetting a mobbit trap will now also pick-up the left-over items on the same tile. The same applies to opening chests and breaking barrels.

Various QoL Improvements - For example, when queuing crafts, the number you have queued also appears in the mouse-over tooltip.

Caverns Mode V0.40 - The reputation objectives now have counters, some fixes with clan interactions, more generation variety and some resources are now easier to find, including springs and roots.

Fixes & Improvements:

Cutscenes - Fixed the intermittent black-screen issue with playing cutscenes. Cutscenes no longer switch the game to windowed mode for the cutscene.

Flickering UI - Fixed some issues in full-screen where certain UI elements such as instruction zones would flicker. The steam overlay will no longer flicker in windowed-mode.

Performance - Optimised code to make large, busy maps run a little better. Still more we can do in this area.

Mouse-panning - Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen would sometimes stop panning the camera.

Recipe Info UI - Fixed bug where this UI would no longer show after interacting with the tech tree.

Engineering Instructions - Engineers would give up too easily when building walls or moving buildings. Fixed some bugs involving multiple engineers attempting the same job at the same time.

Crafting - Fixed some bugs where certain crafts would get confused and the wrong version of the craft is performed.

Cobblestone - Fixed bug where engineers would refuse to build cobblestone where there's a full pile of items.

Voice-Overs - Added a few more voice-overs for switching classes etc..

Saving & Loading - Minecarts no longer soft-lock after a load. Various unit information was being lost. The effects of certain traits were stacking after a load. Mushrooms were losing growth data, and sculptures their sculpture data. Choosing a unit's level abilities was sometimes broken on a load. Caverns mode was losing cave generation data on a load. A bunch of these issues have been retro-patched so that existing saves should be ok again, though we weren't able to do this for everything.

Autosaves - No longer autosaves when you have no more units, and will autosave to an 'Unnamed' folder if you haven't named your playthrough yet.

Pathfinding - Units weren't using the most optimised paths to reach places. There was a flaw in the heuristic. Units should stick to cobblestone paths a little more now.

Defend Zones - Warriors will now be much more pro-active about patrolling around defend zones.

Instruction Placement - Certain instructions like mining or building bridges wouldn't highlight the right tiles in certain places. Build instructions in caverns mode wouldn't always let you build where an ally or enemy has also decided to build something.

Low Health Notification - Now appears a little sooner, before it's too late to do something about it!

Enemy/Ally AI - Various improvements to AI teams, including their base-building design and dealing with cave-ins.

All Items - The UI for items that only exist on the HUD wasn't properly aligned with the other items. These HUD items are now also clickable to explain how they're used.

Various buildings, scenery and items were missing descriptions. Using tab to cycle units or buildings wasn't always working.

We've also released a blog post discussing the recent addition 'minecarts' and how to make the most of them: Minecarts in TDoG.

That's all for now. If you have any ideas, feedback or recommendations, don't hesitate to let us know!

[ 2020-06-28 12:02:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Bug Fixes Minecarts (Patch Notes 9)

Hi everyone! This is a slightly smaller update, mostly with some fixes, but there's also a new tech in the tech tree (see below).

Features:

Initial Loading - When the game first starts up, you are greeted with a loading screen, but until now it had no loading bar. We've added a spinning cog that will spin as long as the game is still loading something, so that you know the game is loading correctly! We've also significantly reduced the initial loading time by cutting out a chunk that wasn't necessary.

Minecarts & Tracks - A new tech in the tech-tree that allows you to build minecarts and rail-tracks for them to ride long, allowing you to quickly transfer items into storage and keep your miners mining. Units can also ride them, however they will only jump out at designated stop zones (configure the tracks to set them).

Caverns Mode V0.37 - A new build of caverns mode with a number of fixes, including fixing the 3 button room, switching tracks to old tracks that are harvestable, and a new starting condition: Schematics Everywhere. In this condition, schematic caves appear much more frequently, and schematics appear in more cave types; so you can develop your tech tree much sooner!

Cobblestone - You can now place cobblestone under buildings, so there's no longer any need to plan ahead or move buildings around to make your base look just right.

Support Posts - Slightly increased the radius in which support posts are effective, so you don't need to build as many.

New SFX - Sound effects now play when you click dust, water or cracked walls.

Fixes & Improvements:

Instruction Panel - The buildings in the 4 categories of the instruction panel have been shuffled around to better achieve the following goals: 1. The most used buttons are closest to the mouse, 2. Adjacent buttons make sense together, 3. The arrangement is aesthetically pleasing. These may still require more work, but it's a lot better than it was.

Multi-Unit UI - You can now shift-click a unit in the selection panel (at the bottom) to deselect that unit, making it a little easier to manage your selection.

Selecting Enemies / Items - In some circumstances, the game wouldn't let you select an enemy, or pick up items, if they're standing on a building belonging to a different team.

Holding Units - Replaced the text with a hand icon. We've also reworked it so that units coming out of battle no longer appear held (since this was confusing).

Storage-full Notification - Should not be quite so spammy when there are lot of units trying to drop items in storage. Clicking on the notification will also now point to the unit in question.

Chatterboxes - Some dwarves are spawned with the 'Chatterbox' trait, and could be real nuisances with dialog popups. We've significantly reduced the frequency that the chatterbox has something to say.

Resting in Beds - When units go to rest in a bed, if there was a dwarf standing on it, they would sleep on the tile beside them. They will now push that dwarf out of their way instead.

Structure-warning Icon - Ally/enemy teams were placing these icons in random places within the fog-of-war, due to some flawed logic with the hard-hat ability.

Instruction Panel - Added missing tooltips, and now remembers which page you were on in each category (currently only applies to infrastructure).

Cracks - The graphic to show that a wall has cracks in it has been tweaked to be more visible.

Fish / Bubbles - Sometimes fish would either spawn or get stuck on-land, particularly in caverns mode, leaving a trail of bubbles on the ground. They will now dip back into nearby water instead.

Visibility - Sometimes buildings would appear on (black) tiles that haven't been explored yet.

Super-ultrawide Monitors - Attempted to fix some UI anomalies and changed the default settings for these resolutions.

Dialog Interjections - More balanced, based on the nearest unit's arch-type, instead of tending to give the same specific interjections.

Movement Orders - Your dwarves should no longer complain so much about telling them to walk on water or into walls, if there is a path close enough anyway.

UI Boundaries - Some UI windows could be moved around and moved outside the screen; they will now stop against the screen boundaries.

Various other fixes, including enemy teams revealing wall tiles to the player, stone walls generating building rubble when mined, and other missing tooltips.

Let us know if you run into any issues, or if you have any feedback or suggestions!

That's all for now, have a good week!

[ 2020-05-25 15:00:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Easter Update (Patch Notes 8)

Happy Easter everyone!

New Features:

Easter Mode - For the next few weeks, easter mode will be available! In easter mode, there are easter eggs sprawled about each map, and mobbits are larger than normal. You can disable this under Options > Gameplay > Seasonal.

Tunnels - Tunnels have a new feature in both the campaign and caverns mode! In some levels of the campaign, you may find goblin scouts appearing from some tunnels. If they see a threat they may even bring reinforcements next time. If you want to keep their numbers now, you'll want to either avoid them or wipe them out. In caverns mode tunnels chosen at random will glow red and start spawning random enemies.

Goblin Warriors - A new class of goblin that focuses on exploration and combat. These guys can call for reinforcements, so watch out! More details in the recent blog post (link below). We've updated the campaign and tutorial with these guys.

Wells - A new tier 2 tech for the tech tree is 'Wells'. Wells are a building that upgrade Claims, and further increases your population cap by 1, while also having a lot more hitpoints. So for example, if you claim your first spring, you can then spawn 3 new dwarves. If you then upgrade that claim to a well, you can spawn a 4th dwarf.

Iron Tools - Iron tools used to be part of the smithing tech, but has been moved to its own tier 2 tech. Smithing has gained the ability to make helmets instead (see below).

Helmets - Now part of the smithing tech, helmets are a wearable armour item that protects your dwarves in 2 ways. First, that dwarf will no longer suffer critical damage when they fumble in combat. Second, when they're low hp and a hit would normally defeat them, the helmet is broken instead, protecting them from that last hit. More details in the recent blog post.

Caverns Mode: Clan Colours - In the latest caverns mode (V0.36), you can now choose a clan you played with in the campaign, and your dwarves will match the name, colours and emblem that you chose.

Caverns Mode: Starting Conditions - Also in the latest caverns mode, you are given the option of how you start the game. There are 3 options for this release: 'Regular start', 'traveling settlers' and 'goblins everywhere'. Regular start is the same setup as before. Traveling settlers starts with 6 dwarves and no buildings assembled, but the adjacent caves are already connected to you. Goblins everywhere is like regular start, except that a) goblin camps more common, b) goblins can randomly appear in almost any type of cave. If you're looking for an extra challenge, give this one a try!

Dwarf Names - We've done some work on our name generator, and now dwarves will have much dwarfier surnames! More details in the recent blog.

Meals - We've removed 'Moderate Meals' and renamed 'Basic Meals' to 'Meals', which now provide a fair amount more nutrition than the ingredients that went into them. There are now 3 recipes: The first crafts 1 Meal, the second 2 meals, and the third 3 meals, each taking the same time to craft. This allows you to craft a lot of meals rapidly if you have the food variety to do so.

New & Altered Abilities - We've made a variety of changes to abilities. Some replaced, some added; the full details can be found in this blog post: Root-pulling Stubborn Guzzlers. As a quick summary, for miners: Structure-sense and hard-hat have been merged, heavy-hauler and toothed-pick are two new level 5 abilities, and tunnel-vision is a new level 8 ability. For foragers: moisture-eyes has been replaced with root-hugger, root-puller is a new level 5 ability, and creature-friendly is a new level 8 ability. For warriors: rock-puncher has been replaced with wall-puncher, and back-breaker is a new level 8 ability. For engineers: reconstruction is a new level 8 ability.

New Traits - We've added 7 new traits to the game. Negative: Accident-prone and berserker. Neutral: Stubborn and Kleptomaniac. Positive: Thinker, guzzler, and candle-bright. See the blog post link above for more details.

Walls - When you build walls now, your clan's emblem will appear on top. Coupled with this change, allies will no longer mine walls that belong to you. This problem was most noticeable in caverns mode.

Fixes & Improvements:

CPU Usage - Fairly significant improvement to CPU usage. We shifted some performance hungry threads to the back-burner, as they were (most of the time) non-essential.

Caverns Mode - Bug fixes and balance improvements: Some of the quests and objectives weren't working properly, and one of the trade-stalls was supposed sell schematics. It could be really hard to find roots so roots can now be found on the edges of caves, plus rivers should now have fish. Various cave generations would conflict, resulting in tracks underwater or buildings blocking paths; we've resolved most of the conflicts.

Dwarf/Goblin AI - Both dwarves and goblin AI teams now build more buildings, and work and fight more intelligently. More work needs doing, as they can still get stuck in certain circumstances, but it's made progress.

Smarter Engineers - If Engineers are carrying the right materials, they will now build from what they're carrying, instead of returning to storage first. This may not yet be the case for bridges / walls. Carried items are also taken into account when enabling building options in the instruction panel.

My Fort - The last level of the campaign was fairly easy to beat. On top of introducing goblin warriors to this level, we've made some improvements that means it requires a bit more strategy to succeed without sustaining losses.

Storage & Food Barrels - When using the 'Move Building' option to move storage or food barrels, the items contained within them will also be moved. This allows you to quickly move your storage zones around or place food barrels further along in the map.

Food Barrels - Now displays a graphic showing the food that's contained inside them. Mushrooms, fish and meat are shown if any of those are contained inside the barrel.

Saving & Loading - Some fixes to saving & loading. We noticed that meals and tools weren't being saved, and some stats were stacking. Storage configurations were also not being saved.

Particles - Some particles associated with units weren't scaling correctly, including the red outline when a combat ability was active.

Trade Stalls - There were bugs with trade stalls having multiple dwarves standing in them, and also being unselectable. This should now be fixed.

Attention Dialog - The little popup speech-bubbles when a dwarf has something to say were persisting and becoming outdated. Most of these should now erase themselves if attention is no longer needed.

Minimap - Some levels, especially caverns mode, the minimap was creeping off the edges of the UI. This is no longer the case.

Dwarf-List - The dwarf-list UI is now much more compact by default, so that it doesn't impede so much on the game view. If you click 'Show Abilities', the full UI emerges as before.

Cooking Station - The crafting queue icons were being erased in some circumstances, making it appear that all the crafts had been completed.

Selection & Instruction UI - These UIs have various updated icons, and we've added some graphics for the stances and equipment sections.

'Use' Buildings - Most buildings that don't actually have a function when performing the 'use' action on them will no longer give you that option.

Steam's Stop Button - In the steam library, after you hit play, the button switches to 'stop'. This stop button was having trouble stopping the game from running, and it would freeze instead. This is no longer the case, and the game will now stop on command.

Various Bugs - Fixed a variety of bugs including tomes not doing anything, idle AI walking onto beds or traps, and some UI problems with the world map screen.

Also, the feedback form is now back in action!

We've released a blog post talking about the latest changes, including a few screenshots: The Easter Update.

Please let us know if you run into any issues, or if you have any feedback or suggestions for us, tell us about it either in the Discussions board or on our discord!

That's all for now, have a good Easter!

[ 2020-04-12 18:43:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Caverns Mode (Patch Notes 7)

Hi everyone! We have an exciting new update for you today; a new game-mode, loads of new content and improvements!

New Features:

Caverns Mode - A new mode in which the environment will generate and develop around you! You have a basic starting cave with a few random resources, and as you mine out you'll discover more random caves. There are currently over 30 different types of cave to discover; some are brimming with resources, some hold other clans, others feature dangerous new enemies. Give this mode a try, and see what you can find!

Minimap - The minimap now shows what part of the map you're currently looking at, with a rectangle. It also now features exclamation marks where your objectives are located.

Damage Counters - When any unit or building is damaged, hit counters will now appear as small numbers above their head, indicating the amount of damage dealt. The hit counter appears red for regular damage, yellow for critical hits, and green for healing.

End of Level Statistics - When playing the campaign, at the end of each level, you'll now be presented with a window showing statistics. This includes: time in map, dwarf count, goblins defeated, and some teaser information like schematics collected 0/2, indicating whether or not you've missed some. We'll be adding to this list in future updates.

Spiders - Currently only featured in the new Caverns mode, we talked briefly about them in our last progress report. There are still a few features to add, like the knock-out effect, but they already have a neat spawning ecosystem. All I'm going to say is, I'm really happy with how the eggs have turned out.

Cobblestone - A new buildable floor which gives units a small movement speed boost (found on the second page of infrastructure).

Wooden Doors - A new rotatable building that allows you to block most enemies from entering, while allowing allies through. Wooden doors can however be broken down, like any other building.

Coal - New mineral used to fuel forges, craft lamp posts and used as fertiliser for saplings. The sprite will be updated in a later patch.

Iron Roots - Similar to regular roots which also produce wood, however iron roots can only be harvested using an iron sickle.

Spawning Mist - Areas of high moisture will now randomly spawn mist. If you didn't already know, mushrooms and saplings grow quicker in areas of high moisture.

Storage Full Notification - Replaced a rarely-used storage counter with a 'storage full' notification, indicating when your units can no longer find room in storage.

New Sound FX - Ballistas now have loading & firing SFX. Goblins will voice more often during combat.

Various New Items - Including potions that heal, tomes that level up your dwarves when activated and small artefacts used as currency with Clan Kindlewick (currently only found in Caverns mode). Also features the iron sickle, which is a new tool craftable after unlocking the Smithing tech.

Forager Crafting - Previously, the engineer would craft and build mobbit traps and saplings. This is now the work of the Forager.

Storage Configuration - Now features an 'All' checkbox, making it easier to restrict storage areas to specific items.

Fixes & Improvements:

AI Performance - We've made some major improvements to the performance of AI, and pathfinding. Before this update, there were points where an AI unit would get stuck and cause a drop to performance as a result. Now however, getting stuck is no longer an issue for the engine.

In-game Dialog - The appearance of in-game dialog has been refined. The name of the unit talking is separated from their dialog, and colour-coordinated based on clan.

Dwarf Classes - Small balance improvement to damage dealt by each class. Also any dwarf trying to change class that is obstructed will now give up, instead of spamming the player with voice-cues.

Campaign Improvements - Various levels in chapter 1 of the campaign have undergone improvements. We've introduced granite and coal, and many of the idle Fishbeard dwarves that you encounter will now be mining and foraging. We've also made the last enemy in chapter 1 a little harder to beat.

Tutorial Improvements - Improved clarity in places and made some dialog more concise.

Main Menu - Maps that you haven't played yet will now appear with a '(New)' next to them. This data hasn't been logged until now, so as of this update, everything will have a (New) next to it until you play it.

Unit Cap UI - The UI in the top left now better explains how the unit cap works when you hover over it.

Structure & Moisture Indicators - No longer prevent placing buildings.

Various Sprite Updates - Moderate meals, minecarts and a few other entities have undergone improvements to their graphic.

Many smaller refinements, such as a bolder bevel for buttons and headings.

Once again, please let us know if you run into any issues. Also, if you have a play of caverns mode, please consider sharing your experience of it with us, either in the forums or through the feedback form. What you like or don't like, what you think we should work on next; any feedback you give is gold!

That's all for now, enjoy the rest of your weekend!

[ 2020-02-08 22:14:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Progress Report

Hi everyone, hope you've all had a good start to the new year! It's been a while since our last post, so I thought I should give you all an update on our progress.

We resumed work on The Dwarves of Glistenveld a couple weeks ago. We're still in the middle of adding some new content, including new buildings, resources and a proper introduction of granite to the game. We've been trying to follow the principle that any new features should be functional when they go in, or at least clearly indicate that they're not implemented. That way when you see new content in the game you can be excited about it, without worrying about whether or not it works. That does mean however it can take us a bit longer to release new features, while we try to make sure it's all working.

For those of you who feel like your dwarves don't get around quick enough, the next version will feature: Cobblestone. Found on the second page of infrastructure, you place it like you would a building and it converts the ground into cobblestone, which provides a small buff to movement speed. So if being speedy is something you like, try putting well-fed, hyper dwarves on a cobblestone road!

We've also been working on adding buildable doors to the game, which will block enemies but allow allies through. Originally we tried implementing it as a cleverly textured wall that dwarves can toggle, but we just couldn't get it to look or behave right. In the end we decided to make it a rotatable building in which the player chooses how it's placed using the mouse wheel. It'll have a placeholder sprite for now which we'll work on later when we have time. Note, some enemies will be able to break your doors down or get around them; so Dungeon Keeper fans, watch out!

There's a new mineral going in: coal. We've been meaning to add coal to the game to fuel forges and fires, but this alone wasn't enough of a reason for us to introduce it. After a bit of research and brainstorming however we have some other uses for coal now, like a fertiliser for farming, and with a few ideas to balance it we feel there's enough now to justify adding it to the game.

Now we have the sprites for them, we've been working on a new enemy: Spiders. Spiders are incredibly agile creatures, and can get around rocks and other objects that would normally block a unit's path. They also place down sticky webs and have a poison attack that drains a dwarf's stamina before eventually knocking them out. So don't go exploring a spider's nest by yourself! While spiders won't appear in the campaign until chapter 2, we will be introducing them as part of a new map we've been working on, which leads me onto the final update for this post:

We're planning on releasing an early version of a new mode called 'Caverns' as part of the next update. You start in a single cave and it generates the world around you as you explore. One thing I noticed as I was testing this map is it's a great way to present all the features of the game in a single level, and that we feel is something our game has been missing. Although it's less guided and there's no main plot to follow, it's already a mechanically and aesthetically vibrant map. Still, this mode is early days, and it does have a few remaining issues, so I don't want to build up too much hype for it yet.

Anyway, it shouldn't be long now before the next update. As usual we will accompany the update with patch notes in the news feed. So, stay tuned, and have a good week!

[ 2020-01-21 22:05:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Abilities and Tech (Patch Notes 6)

Hi everyone! I know it's been a while. We've been working on some core stuff over the past few weeks and wanted to wait until that was done before publishing a new version. Some cool new features in this one!

New Features:

Abilities - When your dwarves level up, you now get to choose which ability they get instead of being chosen at random. We've also introduced 10 new class abilities to go with this change: Hard-hat, Gravel-panner, Rock-tosser, Root-salvage, Dirt-tracker, Keystoning, Hard-hammer, Duelist, Shield-warrior and Survivalist.

Tech Tree - We've redesigned the tech tree UI to make room for new tiers and techs. We've introduced 2 new 'tier 2' techs to go with it. A tier 2 tech requires 2 schematics, and is unlockable once its associated tier 1 tech has been unlocked.

Farming - The first new tier 2 tech is farming, which introduces 2 new 'buildings'; a root sapling and a mushroom sapling. You can build any number of these and they'll steadily grow into fully grown roots or mushrooms.

Lamp Posts - The second new tier 2 tech are lamp posts, which are an upgraded version of support posts. Lamp posts also prevent cave-ins but provide light and an area of visibility as well, so you can keep an eye on things.

Ballista - You can now 'use' a ballista by selecting a dwarf and right clicking the ballista to fire a single bolt. This is essentially a manual way to fire them, without requiring pressure plates.

Iron Pickaxe - The old tech 'Advanced Forging' has been replaced with 'Smithing', and a new recipe has been added to the Anvil: the iron pickaxe. Along with a colour change in mining gear, the iron pickaxe is now an upgraded tool which provides +1 attack and slightly faster mining speed, as well as being able to mine tougher rocks like Granite (see below).

Granite - A new mineral now exists called granite, which is too hard to mine without having given your miner an Iron Pickaxe. Granite does not yet feature in the campaign, but we'll be adding more of this mineral in the next few updates.

Items - When a unit drops items there's now a 'dropping' animation, where the items are thrown into storage. This addition goes alongside the new miner ability 'Rock-Tosser'.

Stats - Health, stamina & hunger now display more intelligently in the game view. Stat bars are hidden when they're full. HP of buildings on your team now display if they're damaged.

Unit Selection UI - Cleaned up the selection UI, arranging stances, inventory slots and commands more neatly.

Fixes:

Unit Movement - Units on different teams now properly 'occupy' the tile they're on, preventing situations where a goblin walks through your dwarf or vice versa. Units on the same team can still walk past one-another.

Targeting Enemies A - Firstly, the pathfinding to an enemy has been improved so that when an enemy moves the path to them is recalculated as needed. This stops your dwarves wandering when they're a shorter path to their target.

Targeting Enemies B - Secondly, fixed a bug where units would sometimes re-engage in battle even though the player has ordered them away. Warriors are now more consistent in auto-engaging enemies.

Objectives List - The objectives in the objectives UI are smaller now, so that the list takes up less space.

Dialog - Was occasionally entering a semi-enabled state and throwing exceptions that could cause soft-locks. Also made events more robust so that they work regardless of any problems with dialog.

All Items UI - Phantom items were appearing in the list.

Save & Load UI - Unit counts are now working, so when you look through your list of saves, you can see how many units you have.

Dialog UI - Now hides any temporary UI until dialog is finished to prevent confusion, since other UI is uninteractable anyway.

Tile Rendering - Tiles now only render wall segments if they're visible. Provides a slight performance improvement.

AI Performance - Various optimisations to AI behaviour, especially mobbits and bats.

Map Editor - Provided a number of fixes to the map editor including culling music, improving performance and added an AI tab to the teams UI.

Engine Robustness - Various engine features have been made more robust, including retaining references between saving & loading.

We've also released a blog post talking about the changes with a few screenshots, as well as our progress with the Mac release: Marching into 2020.

The team will be breaking for Christmas now, but we'll continue to patch the game if anything crops up. See you in the new year!

[ 2019-12-14 22:18:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sound Effects Update + Patch Notes 5

Hi everyone, hope November has treated you well so far! In this post we outline some new sound effects, a cave-like ambience track and a number of fixes.

New features:

Cave Ambience - Background ambience will now play in the game! This was intended to be a feature on launch but was delayed due to some technical difficulties.

Construction SFX - We've updated the engineer's building animation and added SFX for both crafting and assembling.

Fishing & Harvesting SFX - More subtle than the construction SFX, but now you can hear your forager work as well. Also a ripple will appear on the water where the forager is fishing.

Dialog Voice-cues - Characters will now make a voice cue when there's dialog. The current lines are placeholder and we'll be replacing them at a later date, once we've recorded some new ones.

Fixes:

Force Rest/Eat - The two buttons in the UI to force a unit to rest or eat are now much more responsive.

Units at low health, low stamina or a low-ish combination of both will rest of their own accord. Resting is now given priority over eating when a unit needs both.

Starting Dwarves - The traits belonging to your starting dwarves are no longer hidden in-game.

AI Performance - Various fixes to reduce the potential for lag spikes when AI units get stuck.

Fullscreen/Windowed - Attempted to fix a bug where swapping between fullscreen and windowed mode might make the game go black. We had a hard time reproducing this but we might have found the cause.

A few more tutorial updates, mostly aesthetic this time.

Map Editor - Music and ambience are muted while in the editor.

Also, those of you wondering where the mac release is, we haven't forgotten you! We'll probably talk about progress with the mac release in our next blog, but we're working on it.

That's all for now!

[ 2019-11-22 15:07:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Patch Notes 4

Hi everyone! Getting cold out there isn't it? This is a short post detailing this week's fixes and some small feature updates.

Patch notes:

You can now click the items in the All-Items display (on the left) for a short description of what each item is used for.

We received feedback of a bug affecting some users playing in full-screen. Each time a decision was issued, the screen would flicker black. We've made an attempt at fixing this, if this problem persists, please let us know.

A significant change to how walls are built. Now when you tell your engineers to build walls where stone minerals already exist, they will pick up the difference and build over the top, rather than mining out the minerals first. This change applies to stone, while ores will still be mined as usual.

Units will no longer dump more than the available capacity of a storage building, and will distribute their items more intelligently now.

Configuring a storage's 'allowed items' will now raise the priority of that storage. e.g. units with gold will prefer placing gold in storage that is restricted to that item. Any storage left unconfigured will be treated as overflow for items that don't fit anywhere else.

We've also updated the third tutorial to remove the build bridge section from it, since it was confusing and interrupted the flow. We've replaced this with hints about building bridges in Bridge-It Lake.

Various minor fixes, including missing sounds, etc.

Halloween mode will still be enabled for another week. We may keep the option available for longer as well, you'll be able to find it under Options > Gameplay > Seasonal.

We're also working on a new unique scenario map, inspired by sandbox games. We're not sure yet when this will be released, we may save it for the chapter 2 release so that it has all the new features. We'll keep you posted!

That's all for this week, stay warm out there!

[ 2019-11-09 20:41:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy Halloween! + Patch Notes 3

Hi everyone, hope you're all ready for some scares tonight! This is a short post detailing some of the bugs that were fixed over the last few days, plus we've added a halloween mode to the game, which will be active over the next week or so!

Patch notes:

Loading game saves - A bug mentioned last week where a game save would load incorrectly every now and then. This one wasn't easy to track down, but I think we've fixed it!

Save/load UI - With this open, you were able to click on buttons in the escape menu through the UI, meaning that if you clicked in the wrong place you could quit to the desktop. Whoops.

Skirmish mode - Fixed some performance issues due to goblins getting in each others' way.

Mobbit traps - A building destruction sound was being played instead of the trap sound when triggered.

Now for the exciting part: Halloween mode!

Atmosphere - You may notice the game's colour and atmosphere have become a little spooky!

Pumpkins - You will find random pumpkins in each level. You can harvest these to get a tasty pumpkin stew!

Webs - You will find random webs too which are sticky and slow units down.

Bats - When you start a new skirmish mode game, you'll find a few more bats roaming the tunnels!

Bubbling waters and mist - Water has turned greenish and bubbles, and you will find mist emerging here and there.

If you'd rather play the game normally, you can turn halloween mode off by going to options, gameplay and unchecking Halloween Mode in the Seasonal section.

We'll keep you informed of any future updates. If you come across any bugs yourself, or would like to request a feature, let us know!

Happy Halloween!

[ 2019-10-31 17:20:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Patch Notes 2

Hi everyone! This is a short post detailing some of the bugs that were found and fixed over the last few days, as well as a couple of requested quality of life improvements.

Patch notes:

Bugs revolving around the victory screen and other UI. The fanfare would sometimes play twice, and input wouldn't always be restored after leaving the map or after a new save.

On linux builds, you couldn't travel to later levels of the campaign. Sorry about that linux users!

Once in a blue moon, the form alliance options wouldn't resume the dialog and soft-locked the level. If anyone is experiencing this issue, let us know and we'll patch your save files for you.

Saving & reloading in floody hell could soft-lock the level.

Placing a building instruction somewhere inaccessible would cause an Engineer to get stuck trying to build it.

In full-screen mode, tooltip was sometimes turning into a small square after the cursor leaves an entity or tile.

Various descriptions for buildings, scenery or traits were missing.

With the cursor in certain positions, pressing down and left/right would move the camera up instead of down. This was caused by a conflict with mouse-edge panning.

The list of levels on linux builds, for example the tutorials, were displaying in the wrong order.

In Bridge-It Lake, added various signs to remind players of the fundamental mechanics in the game. Also made it a little clearer how to reach the fishbeard outpost.

Double tapping a number key will now centre the camera on that unit.

Under all-items, there will now be a summary of how full your storage is.

We've also noticed occasionally a saved game won't load correctly, but that it can reload again without issue. We'll try to have this resolved next week.

We'll keep you informed of any future patches. If you come across any bugs yourself, or would like to request a feature, let us know!

[ 2019-10-26 12:46:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Patch Notes

Hi everyone! Hope you're all enjoying the game so far!

This is a short post detailing some of the bugs that were found and fixed over the last few days, as well as an explanation of how we plan on releasing updates in the future.

Patch Notes:

The 'Got it!' button wasn't always appearing once the game had finished loading. We've had trouble reproducing this one ourselves, but we had a go at fixing it anyway. We'll see if it worked!

Issues with not being able to name new game saves or remove existing ones from the escape menu. This should be fixed now.

For users that can't currently play cutscenes in-game, it should no longer switch to windowed mode and then back to full-screen. If you want to know more about the game's cutscenes, send us a message in the discussions tab.

We're also aware that on some machines the game uses a lot more memory than it should, but we're still investigating this issue.

We'll keep you informed of any future patches. If you come across any bugs yourself, or would like to request a feature, let us know!

One last thing, I'd like to mention how we plan on releasing updates in future. We don't want to flood you guys with patches, but at the same time if there's a critical bug we'll need to fix it as soon as possible. So we have updates split into 3 groups:

Game breaking / major issues. These will receive an immediate patch, as soon as we know we've fixed the problem.

Minor bugs or feature improvements. We'll roll these out on the 'testing' branch first, while we check that we haven't broken anything else. If you don't want to wait for these, you can opt in to the 'testing' beta in the game's properties. Note that you may experience other bugs on this branch.

Feature / chapter releases. We want to surprise you all with exciting new content, so we'll be keeping new features close to our chest until the next chapter is ready to go live. This may take a while, so stay tuned and follow our progress through steam or one of our social media platforms!

I wish you all the best!
Perry.

[ 2019-10-20 18:04:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Dwarves of Glistenveld - Release Date Reveal

The Dwarves of Glistenveld has been in development for the past few years. Today we are really excited to announce that TDoG will be releasing next month, specifically the 18th October at 18:00 GMT! As a small indie company working on our first title, this launch marks a really big milestone for us, not only for Nysko Games, but for everyone that has helped support us along the way.

[previewyoutube=zh38OZr8JaM;full][/previewyoutube]

We are also making our discord server public, so if you want a place to chat about the game, follow this link to join here: https://discord.gg/rg5Q9kC

Stay connected
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/nyskogames/
Twitter https://twitter.com/NyskoGames
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/nyskogames/
YouTube - https://bit.ly/2lWEAs8

[ 2019-09-18 19:00:36 CET ] [ Original post ]