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Empires of the Undergrowth
Asid:
Freeplay Beta Patch 0.1213 Released
Empires of the Undergrowth - Mike
With this update to the Freeplay beta comes saving! Due to the complexity of this there are likely to be bugs here and there and we would very much appreciate reports of them. As this will affect saves we strongly recommend you backup your saves before trying this update.
We’re close to the end of the beta period for Freeplay and it will soon be made available for all players, but if you aren’t yet participating and would like to please follow the instructions here:
• Find Empires of the Undergrowth in your games library
• Right-click and select “Properties”
• Find the "Betas" tab
• Enter the code "betatestants" (without quote marks) and press "Check code"
• Make sure you've chosen the beta from the drop-down menu
• The game will now update to the beta branch version
As always, thanks for your help with this. We will soon be ready to test on Mac and Linux then finally release Freeplay officially.
New Features
• Freeplay games can be saved
o WARNING: Whilst we are testing this we STRONGLY recommend backing up your game before trying the new update
o At present Freeplay games do not save backups themselves; we will be introducing this in the future
o You will notice the Freeplay colonies you have already made available to load when you open Freeplay – these saves will be incompatible, please delete them as loading them may cause a crash (they do not have level data saved with them)
• Fog of War added to Freeplay
o This hides all enemies on the surface unless you have an ant close to them
o Due to the difficulty this adds, it dramatically increases your score
• Some Freeplay setup options now add a multiplier to your score
o Nest invasions increases score by 50%
o Uber creatures increases score by 10%
o Attack waves increases score by 10%
o Fog of war increases score by 150%
• Placing a marker will temporarily draw the trail the ants are likely to take to reach it
• All ants have an icon on them which roughly describes their role (worker, melee, ranged, tank)
• Hovering over a chamber will now give information about the room (ants, eggs, tile levels, storage)
• The nest group can now be selected and can have aggression and gathering turned on and off
• Realistic mode added in general options (hides tile surfer outlines, food outlines, path arrows on markers and marker icon overlays)
• Request to dig to surface can now be cancelled
• Minimap darkens as the day darkens
• Game will now pause when notifications are open (can be toggled on and off via notification button or option)
• Some tech tree icons have been updated
• Some furniture added to main menu screen
A screenshot showing two new features - classic RTS Fog of War (Freeplay only) and the ant trails being temporarily drawn when you place a pheromone marker
Bug Fixes
• Fixed an issue that could cause all creatures other that colony ID 0's health to be halved in Freeplay
• Fixed Royal Decree (thanks to Rayalot72 for reporting this)
• Potentially fixed issue with some hardware causing large black shadows to appear in 1_1 and 1_2
• Fixed a crash that could happen in levels with no surface
• Fixed a bug with the last chance worker in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue with the spawn point of waves in Freeplay
• Fixed some text capitalisation inconsistencies
• Changed title of Other Modes
• Fixed the "Reload last save" button in Freeplay
Balance changes / improvements
• Uber creature corpses can now be harvested by 8 ants at a time
• Stunned swirl updated
• Performance improvement added for rendering the upgrade overlay
• Several minor optimisations added
Asid:
Freeplay Beta Patch 0.122 Released
Empires of the Undergrowth - Mike
There have been many changes since the last beta update. This will hopefully be the final version before general Freeplay release. Many of the changes have focused around having a better game experience, making the end game more difficult and improving performance. Along with this many bug fixes have been added.
Features
• Population upkeep cost added to Freeplay. This feature has been added in order to make the end game more challenging whilst also keeping performance high. The end game is now more difficult with fewer creatures.
o This is a soft population cap and will increase the cost of ants beyond a specific population
o Workers have a seperate population
o Cost increase is exponential (starts small and increases rapidly with each ant)
o This can be disabled in setup, however doing so will reduce score by 60%
o Added in notifications for a few things in freeplay
o Fog added to minimap when Fog of war is on
Bug Fixes
• Fixed an issue where moving the marker between the surface and underground could cause ants to walk to the edge of the map
• Fixed an issue where ants could get stuck facing walls underground, especially when there were a lot of ants about
• Fixed an issue where resource score was lost when a game was loaded in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where hovering chamber info could be seen in the death animation
• Fixed an issue where dead creatures would disappear if brought underground with Fog Of War on in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where stored corpses despawned on game load in Freeplay
• Time now restores correctly for scoreboard on loaded Freeplay games
• You can no longer save Freeplay if your queen is dead
• Fixed the levels displaying incorrectly on chamber hover information
• Slightly altered queen start position on The Dunes Freeplay map
• Fixed an issue preventing ladybirds spawning at the the correct rate for the difficulty in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where ants when loaded from a save would immediately go home from a trail end
• Fixed an issue where ants would spin on the spot when walking or picking up food at the bottom of ramps
• Fixed an issue where wood ant projectiles could hit a lip on the tunnel exit
• Fixed an issue where ants were moved towards the queen on load if they were nearby (still exists but not as bad)
• Fixed an issue where saved fish would have their food restored on load and could duplicate
• Right clicking a notification now unpauses the game
• Word cost removed from build tooltips
• Fixed right clicking on harvestable resource placing marker correctly
• Prevented photo mode when in a cutscene
• Fixed an issue where ants would be very slow to register to a marker with no ants assigned
• Funnel Web spiders will no longer attack wave creatures in freeplay
• Minimap damage notification will no work no matter where your starting location
Changes / Improvements
• Loading throbber returned to the loading screen
• Tunnel exit tagged for excavation restores when loaded
• Changed the information on chamber hover to be more relevant to each chamber
• Reduced ant reaction time (wood ants should no longer reach targets before starting to fire)
Freeplay
• Ant fog of war vision radius has been increased (nearly double)
• At higher difficulties creatures will now drop less food (starting from 50% difficulty) and be much more likely to attack the player in Freeplay
• Later waves will now produce higher level ants
• Wave power significantly increased
• Wave timer has been reduced to 5 minutes and a 12 minute setup time has been added.
• Every 5th level wave creatures changed
• Added a warning to the player if they do not tunnel to the surface when waves are queing up to spawn
• Ubers can now spawn in all waves after wave 15
• Wave number is constantly displayed once they start spawning
• Added wave number to Freeplay score screen
• Chance of Ubers spawning increases with difficulty
• 14 landmarks will always spawn at the beginning
• Landmarks types are now evenly distributed
• A new landmark spawns every 150s down from 180s
• Uber creatures stats reworked, should attack slower but be more deadly and deal AOE damage
• Prevented smaller creatures spawning in waves later on (tiny spiders and devils coach horse larvae)
• More creatures spawn at lower difficulties
• Added a reload button on defeat in Freeplay
Performance Improvements
• Refined collisions for substantial performance improvements
• Performance improvements with certain animations
• Performance improvements with skeletal mesh updates
• Small optimisations added in for Freeplay
• Blueprint Nativisation in use for substantial performance gains
• Major optimisations in nurseries
• Creature decision making moved into C++ for major performance boost
• Job management speed improved
• Minor array access improvements
• Minor creature AI speed improvements
• Multiple minor optimisations
Asid:
Freeplay Mode Launched!
Empires of the Undergrowth - Mike
Freeplay Mode Added
Customisable - play your way!
Freeplay is a highly customisable game mode giving the player full control over what creatures and landmarks can spawn, how hard they want the game, how the difficulty of the game will change as time goes on and much more.
The Dunes Freeplay map – a monster of a map!
The Dunes is the largest map in the game to date, made possible through optimisation of the surface tiles allowing us to get more for the processing power. It boasts:
• 4 possible start locations for the player’s colony
• 120 by 120 surface tile grid (the previous biggest being 96 by 126)
• 80 locations for landmarks to spawn and 25 locations for creatures to spawn
Save-able
Freeplay colonies can be saved and returned to later, allowing you to take your time and even try that horrible attack wave again. For now saving is manual and there is no backup; we are planning on introducing backups in a future update.
Landmarks – let’s make this interesting!
Landmarks are various interesting points on the surface. They are randomised in look, functionality and location, will appear and disappear as your game progresses and scale with the difficulty setting.
Aphid Farm
• Has between 2 and 4 patches of 10 aphids
• Has randomly generated plant decoration
• Ladybird attacks increase with difficulty
Poppy Plant
• Will intermittently drop poppy seeds; the dropped seeds have a limited lifetime
Funnel Web Nest
• Generates dead creature chunks
• Contains funnel web spiders that will kill nearby enemy creatures (from the player’s colony… or anything else it is big enough to take on!)
• Number of spiders increases with difficulty
• Has randomly generated stones nearby
Dead Fish
• A large source of food
• Will attract enemy ants
Infestation
• Attracts large group of enemies of a specific type
• This large group stays around the central point
• The size of the group increases with difficulty
Creatures fight each other
In Freeplay mode creatures on the surface will duke it out with one another. However, they will not just attack anyone! Some of them will not attack larger creatures, or will ignore the smaller ones. In Freeplay every creature has a list of other creatures they do not want to fight.
Random start location
The player will start in a random pre-prepared start location. These undergrounds are similar in the resources that are available but the locations of resources are different, including where they start on the surface.
Day / night cycle and spawning
If turned on, the game will slowly tick from day to night and back again. When day turns to night nocturnal creatures will come out, and diurnal creatures will hide. Some creatures are about in both time periods. A full 24 hour cycle lasts 30 minutes in game-time.
Food spoiling
Creatures killed in Freeplay mode have a limited time to be harvested before they “spoil” and disappear (3m). Additionally, food generated by funnel web and poppy plant landmarks do the same so as to not cause too great a buildup of food.
Uber creatures – oh boy, it’s a big one!
Ubers are souped-up versions of some of the larger creatures. They can be identified by a red glow, increased size and will be announced in a message when they spawn. There are 4 types that are as difficult as each other and all provide 1000 food when killed. They take much longer to spoil than other creatures because of this (10m). The 4 types are uber hermit crab, uber beach tiger beetle, uber devil’s coach horse adult and uber beach wolf spider. Enabling Uber Creatures increases your score.
Attack waves
Up for a real challenge? With this enabled waves of enemies will spawn every 5 minutes after an initial setup period of 12 minutes. These wave will get stronger over time and do not drop food. How many can you survive? Enabling attack waves increases your score significantly.
Difficulty settings
Difficulty is handled differently in Freeplay mode. The difficulty changes as the game goes on and affects things such as the spawn rate of enemy creatures, how aggressive they are, how much food dead creatures drop and the difficulty of landmarks. You can set the start point of the game difficulty and how you would like it to change as the game progresses. There are several options.
• Constant – the difficulty remains at the value initially set and gets no harder.
• Ramp – the difficulty gradually increases at a steady rate.
• Spikes – the difficulty remains constant however it will spike up in difficulty every now and then. It spikes for a
• random amount and for a random length.
• Ramp with spikes – the difficulty steadily increases as the game progresses but will every now and then spike up in difficulty. It spikes for a random amount and for a random length.
• Scale With Colony – as your colony size increases so does the difficulty, meaning you should always feel a bit pressured no matter how well you are doing.
• Random – every so often the difficulty is randomised and stays there for a random amount of time. Note you may end up starting at some very hard difficulty.
Nest entrance can be dug out, and are hidden until done so (visible on minimap)
In Freeplay, your route to the nest entrance is not dug out to begin with - giving you the freedom to plan your nest your way. You will know where the entrance is from the minimap, however you will need to tunnel to it to reach the surface.
Select your species
Choose from one of the species from the campaign (currently black ants or wood ants) or chose one of your Formicarium colonies to play Freeplay with! If you choose one of your formicarium colonies all the upgrades you have chosen for that colony will be available for your Freeplay colony (note the ants themselves do not transfer, just the upgrades).
Fog of war
Enemies and food will be hidden from you unless you are nearby, what will be lurking for you in the shadows? Fog of war greatly increases your score!
Soft population cap (Upkeep)
After a certain number of tiles have been built, further tiles will begin to increase in cost. This makes the end game more challenging whilst also keeping performance high. Workers have a seperate population. This can be disabled in setup.
So, what’s the point?
• You are free to build up a colony and try and survive as long as you can! You can also try to score as high as possible as you will be given a score on defeat. This score is affected by several options:
• Nest invasions increases score by 50%
Uber creatures increases score by 10%
• Attack waves increases score by 10%
• Fog of war increases score by 150%
• Disabling population upkeep reduces your score by 60%
Asid:
June / July Newsletter 2018 - Leaf Cutter Progress!
Greetings everyone! This has been another one of those months where the general timings and various circumstances have meant we've not managed to get the newsletters done to the regular schedule - so enjoy this newsletter for both June and July! The biggest news since the last newsletter is obviously the release of Freeplay mode on the main branch. It's been available for everyone for several weeks beforehand in beta form, so those of you who were most keen are likely to have been fairly familiar with it when it finally landed for everyone on 2nd July. We've also got some great progress to show you with our next Formicarium update - Leaf Cutters ants!
Read full post here
Asid:
August 2018 Newsletter
Greetings all! We hope you've enjoyed your summer. Time moves on relentlessly, and as we chug the first pumpkin spice latte of autumn we've made significant strides in the progress of the leafcutter levels as well as plenty of other exciting things. We've recorded with our voice artists Mary Jo, Eric and Callum (Scientist 1, Scientist 2 and Narrator respectively) for the next levels and we're delighted with their work. Before we conclude our work on 3.1, 3.2 and Formicarium Challenge 3, there are some missing bits and pieces in the existing game that need finalising in preparation. Our current plan is to do an interim update between now and the leafcutter update, and that's going to be fairly soon. Let's get on to what that'll include!
Read full post here
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