Hey there!

I've been working hard the past days together with @Jouki (Who brought in most of the ideas for the skill tree and balancing) to release this update! It includes a ton of new features, so lets go through them:

Skill tree & Essence rework

The old essence was used for local research of buildings. While this was a cool addition compared to the old YORG.io, it had its flaws - you were limited in how much essence you get. zombies dropped essence and thats it. And since amount of zombies is fixed, it was pretty much hardcoded how much essence you have at a given time.



Meet the new skill tree, research labs and local research for crystals! First of all, you can now unlock skills using essence:



Besides of that, local research no longer requires essence - instead you can unlock it using crystals now (This change is still on our watch as we add options how to get the Essence).



And to fix the problem of being limited by essence, you can now build research labs which produce essence! However, be careful - Each research lab attracts more and stronger zombies!



Please note that those are brand new features and thus might not be perfectly balanced - Working on this!

Further Changes

Reworked Shields: Shields have been reworked - Instead of absorbing an attack regardless of the damage, they now absorb the damage, basically like additional health.
Also, the maximum amount of shields a building can have is now determined by the level of the shield generator.

Reworked Waves: The waves have been changed, now a boss spawns every 10/25 days. Also you can now see the amount of zombies in the next wave in the upper left corner!

Reworked Invisible Zombies: Instead of revealing invisible zombies, the signal repeater now gives all defensive towers within its range the ability to target them. This should make them much less annoying! Besides of that, spotlights now also reveal them.

Reduced sound volume: A lot of people claimed about the game simply being too loud compared to other applications - this should now be fixed!

Copy Key: You can now press 'B' to select the building below the cursor and place it again!

UI Improvements: You can now see buildings of the same type when placing, as well as to which buildings it will be connected!



Besides of that, there are also a lot of minor changes:

- Miners and factories now show the actual value instead of their base value
- The cost of signal repeaters now scales exponentially again
- The 'click to rebuild' now stays for 2 minutes
- Now showing their radius when placing new towers
- There are now dialogs shown when the invisible and armored zombies spawn for the first time, explaining how to counter them
- Added setting to hide action bar
- The arrowfactory and cannonballfactory now store much less uranium
- The pulse zombie pulse now occurs less frequent, also the radius has been reduced to 2.7 tiles from 3.5
- Vastly increased resource storage capacity and made the building cheaper
- Balancing: Increased exploding zombie damage in singleplayer
- Balancing: Blueprints are no longer targetable on medium/hard difficulty
- Balancing: Increased burn damage from the sun in singleplayer
- Balancing: Increased building health regeneration on day in singleplayer
- Fix settings going not back to the actual game but the main menu
- Fix music overlaping sometimes
- Fix resource statistics not closing when using its hotkey
- Fix spotlight just targeting the first entity instead of all within range
- Fix zombie factory being available via hotkey
- Updated Translations
- Added Japanese and Polish translations


Whats next?

For the next update improving the multiplayer experience is planned!

Things in my mind:

- Leaving games should count as a loss
- Improve servers & connections
- Make sure people with a bad internet connection don't ruin the experience for others
- Rebalance
- And much more!


Thank you for your continued support!

Hey guys!

I have been working hard the past week to get everything running during the release week, and also pushed a lot of minor patches (Be sure to check the changelog!).

Its been a tough week, and there have been a lot of complaints, from which I already could fix some. However, there are still some things which need to get improved.

Here are my plans on the next update. I can't promise when it will come out but I'll give my best to do it quickly! Please note that those are plans and not finalized yet, so they are subject to change!


Reworking Essence

Many people claimed about being limited by essence, especially in the early game. I am currently figuring out a way to improve this and reworking essence.

The new essence will work differently. Instead of using essence for research, there will now be an ingame skill tree which you can spend your essence on.

Regular research will then be unlockable using crystals. With this change, your base growth will no longer be limited by anything.

Dynamic Zombie Spawning

Right now the zombies are fixed and spawn based on the current day only. However this leads to more experienced players getting bored, and newcomers getting overwhelmed.

I want to change the current system so that zombies spawn on the strength of your base, if you are behind the zombies will also be weaker. (Of course, this will also depend on the difficulty).

Shorter day and night

If you are just waiting for crystals and it is day, the game can quickly get an idle game. Besides of the other planned changes, I also reduced the day and night duration vastly so that zombies spawn more often. This should make it a bit more interesting.

Multi-Select

I haven't finalized this idea yet, but I want to make it possible to select multiple buildings and then apply research or upgrades to all of them. Can't promise this will make it in this update though!


Better Signal Repeaters

Right now signal repeaters reveal invisible zombies, but I want to change it so that they give nearby towers the ability to target invisible zombies. This should make less annoying since you don't have to place your signal repeaters close to your walls.


Minor fixes

These are minor changes I want to get into the update:

- Spawn zombies in groups instead of coming from all sides
- Fix arrow factory storage being too high, consuming all uranium
- Explain using shift in the tutorial
- Make the resource storage cheaper and store more resourcement
- Shift click to research all
- Press Q to copy building below cursor and place it somewhere else
- Allow putting stronger attack towers over other towers, replacing them (To improve usability).
- The new mouse based placement system should properly show the radius


Can't wait to get your feedback! :)

A lot happened since the release yesterday morning. YORG.io 3 was listed on four major platforms, and we reached a player count of almost 700 concurrent players!

That said, there also have been complaints, and here's how I started addressing them with this first major update.

Improved Desktop Experience

Problem: I received a lot of complaints regarding the UI of the game, especially placing buildings. People found it too complicated, and here's why:

When I initially built YORG.io 3, it was supposed to be a mobile app of the original YORG.io. It quickly evolved, but it was developed mobile first from the beginning.

The controls worked fine on mobile, but were annoying to use on desktop. You had to click through a few menus to actually place a building, and then click another button to place it.

How I fixed it: This update introduces a new building toolbar! It is pretty similar to the old YORG.io and targeted specially for desktop. It should be much easier to use and I'd be happy to hear your feedback!

If you liked the old ui, you can still turn it on under Settings > Mobile Placement. Hope you like it!




Removal of Essence Trading

Problem: A lot of people complained that the current system of trading coins would be pay to win.

Fix: After doing a controversal survey in our Discord (Be sure to join it!), I decided it would make sense to remove them. Even if they were balanced, it would always give you the feel of having to purchase something.

In the steam standalone, you can now **only** purchase Skins. I have decided that it will keep this way, and no further game changing purchases are planned. All new items will be entirely cosmetic or not affect the game in a major way.



Changing your name is now free!

This kinda belongs to the pay to win section, but I thought it would be worth a short mention.

The game tries to generate a username from your public steam username when you start it the first time. If the username is taken, it will try to generate another one, e.g. tobspr#593234.

However, this is kinda unfair. You don't get to choose your playername, but changing it did cost coins.

Fix: Changing your name is now free! Don't overuse it please, though :p


Crash fixes & Further Improvements

Heres a list of further improvements in this patch:

- Fixed a crash when using the actions toolbar. Now there are no crashes that I am aware of left, so if you experience one, please let me know! (Discord or feedback@yorg.io)
- You can now see the player counts, as well as the amount of players in the multiplayer queue.
- Zombies have been increased by a little on lower levels (20-100), since people were claiming it was too easy.
- The sound in the matchmaking queue has been removed, since it was too annoying.
- Fix crystal storage emitting all crystals at once when placing a building
- Allow partially performing the level up + 10, level up all and equalize levels options (The lower left hotkeys), and also show the crystal cost
- Web Version: Allow logging out without having an E-Mail connected, effectively deleting the account
- Web Version: The map and difficulty selection is now skipped on the first time launch to be able to quickly jump into a game
- Translations have been updated


Whats next?

There are still a few minor issues I want to fix before I start the next great thing: A research tree. I haven't fully finalized the idea, but here's what I discussed with some members in the discord:

- There will be a new building, the Research Lab
- It will enable you to start researching a skill tree
- The skill tree contains skills like "Tower Damage + 10", etc, just like in the original yorg.io
- Skills will cost essence (Finally a good way to spend it!)
- There will be infinite skill upgrades for at least some skills, so you will never get to the point where you have unlocked all skills
- Skils might also unlock special abilities, haven't decided on that yet


Besides of that, i'm also thinking about adding drones. Here's how it would probably work (Idea not finalized!)

- There would be a drone factory building which produces drone parts
- There would be a drone port building which can store like 10 drones and has a radius similar to the shield generator
- There would be different types of drones, e.g. Healing Drone, Reconstruct Drone (Rebuilds destroyed buildings), Attack Drones. Maybe also drones which automatically level up your buildings.


I would love to get your feedback on this!

Lastly, a huge thank you to everybody who has bought the standalone! You are making YORG.io 3 possible!

It's time! I just hit the 'Release' button on Steam and am super excited for your feedback! Starting from now you can buy the YORG.io 3 Standalone on Steam. I've worked hard for a whole year to make this possible and hope you enjoy the game as much as I did while creating it!

Thank you for your support!


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