Blacksmith Legends
Steam Awards and -55% Discount
Work on the full version is still in progress. We have two news for you.
Thank you for all your support, ratings and discord messages so far!
1. We are starting in The Steam Awards in the SIT BACK AND RELAX category!
The life of a blacksmith is not easy, but you have to admit that it is nice to spend time in the game after work and de-stress by developing our forge.
2. Historically low price thanks to a discount of up to 55%!
Who hasn't had the opportunity to buy the game yet or was waiting for a promotion, this is the perfect time to do so. Also remember that you can buy our game as a gift!
Starts: Tuesday, November 22 10 GMT-8 (19 CET)
Ends: Tuesday, November 29 10 GMT-8 (19 CET)
V2 October update
I'm bringing you another batch of things thatwere done during the time.
1. Blueprint setup will generate stats based on the parts used
E.g. tongs are offhand. And they can either give you energy bonus to your stat when equipped or failure reduction.
Hammer can give you up to 4 different stats, depending on what setup you choose. This gives player freedom of giving his players stats they want.
Some products, ready to be sold! If you need to dump your wooden reserves, sometimes you just have to create everything by using wood! :)
2. Masterpieces!
Blacksmith will have a small chance to create masterpiece out of any object followed by above shown animation and effects.
The stats of the item will be doubled along with it's selling price, will be represented differently in the inventory too and the materials of the object will be randomly different to distinguish it in game too.
Blacksmith will now also have new stat called 'Mastery' that will determine the chance of crafting a masterpiece. Will be increased by levels and items.
3. The rivalry of blacksmiths
New town menu now will show your and rival's marketshare and your fight over 'banners'. Each banner will give you bonus to fame, which increases your daily customers per day and so on...you get the snowball effect :)
There will be total of 6 banners in town and each banner will generate 'impressions' the will expand your fame but also the risk of the rival blacksmith to commit something 'shady' to damage it. Damaging will reset the impressions. So you'll have to dedicate some budget to protecting it.
Later with heroes on the board, there will be also battles over them.
4. Weather effects...and how it affects...
This will be fine tunes based on player feedback but basically I've decided to not use particles of rain which is very heavy in the scene but a nice post processing effect generating raindrops and so on.
At the moment there are 3 types of weather:
Sunny - all customers happily check you out
Rainy - customers are less likely to visit your workshop
Stormy - what poor soul would visit a blacksmith on this day?
As you guess, it will give a chance to get you less customers, well, that's the funny thing about weather. Hopefully it will not rain during that festival that you just organized for tomorrow!
5. Tavern reworked
Click here for a youtube video on how it will look like and all it's features described a bit. But mostly it will just be the same as it was.
6. Smeltering reworked
By putting more focus on the blacksmith I've decided to completely remove smelter profession from the game and supplement it's role by marketplace and devies.
As before, you can also buy stuff now on marketplace, only it's more organized and right in the menu.
Smelting furnace
Can smelt up to 5 ingots per day and materials are deducted when you end your day. So basically it's 'turn based' which gives you as much time as you want to do the right job!
Each will have it's own HUD to track what are you doing and what will be the outcome. Simillar thing will be for runes and gems. I'll need to think it through!
So, there is a lot in the works and hopefully it will all fit together well! Next huge milestone will be reworking the World map, which I've decided to do in 3d and in a style of Heroes of might and magic, where you see your champion and then just move him by clicking on visible points, collecting resources, attacking enemies and so on.
Most of things are going according the plan, I might have some delay, but the great thing is, all is going well.
Stay tuned for the next big update, will post it when everything is done and ready to be presentable!
Cheers and thanks for your support!
VM Machal <3
BSL v2 update
after the surveys I received from a lot of players (thanks a lot!) I've decided with my publisher to do major overhaul on pretty much everything while I'm still in a mid-development stage phase.
Sorry that this will keep you waiting longer time, but sitting at a low rating on Steam doesn't allow me to continue with the current setup of the game.
Most feedback I've received was about the UI and bugs. Later I've realized that even my visual scripting tool is overloaded and going further would bring serious performance issues. So it didn't take long to make a decision to restart it. And I don't regret a thing! Here's why:
1. Engine upgrade
Moving from Unity 2017 to 2020 turned out to be a great idea, even though was skeptical first. It allowed me to upgrade all my tools and also buy some assets that enahnces the look of the game.
BSL was never about fancy graphics, so It's not my main aim, although I want to make it enjoyable as much as possible.
Mainly it's actually the UI that finally gives me a lot more room to do some nice ideas.
Menus will finally be movable and resizable!
2. Crafting
I took some inspiration from Shop Titans, although still shape it in my own vision. Crafting is a complete sandbox now. You start with 1 empty blueprint and will have to set it up. I want to go away from premade recipes. It wasn't bad before, but now I can give more freedom to the players.
Player will be clicking blueprints for crafting and they will automatically be assigned to free workers.
Crafting log will report anything that will happen with the recipe. You can't see much now, since the quality of the recipe is 1%, which is the minimum where, so nothing worse can happen :)
Maximum level per character will be now 100 (up from 10) and each level gives you some stats. So even crafting quality, energy, working speed and so on will be affected by it.
Individual workers have additional crafting settings, but most of it it's as usual automatic. I don't want to overcomplicate it, since there are many other things players will do.
3. Blueprints
I was literally dreaming before of doing something like this in the game but never had knowledge to do that. Well now I can lol!
Each blueprint will be applied to an item that you will be able to craft. They can be changed any time for now and different shapes will provide different outcome. In the beginning you only choose handle and head but later there will be 2 additional configurations, so total of 4 changeable things for each blueprint type...hopefully :)
Item types remained the same, so you will just start from Agriculture and move on to other like before.
Point is to get player close to the blacksmithing itself. Previous model strayed a bit too far from my original idea.
4. Selling
I like the idea of having like 'racks' or 'showcases' for items in your workshop. So items will be assigned to the 'free slots' in the showcases for customers to notice them.
Once it's all set up, you can wait for customer to be roaming in your 'shop' and once they decided option will pop above their heads.
This will basically open up options for selling.
This will be the 'local sales' from original version now. It's more oriented for customers and your products and additional options for negotiation will be present.
I'm not yet sure if I'll keep the good/evil rep system, because my idea would be to have 'fame' with the bar and that will just attract more customers, different customers, quests and so on.
Next update will bring the changes in attracting customers (marketing) and the competition in town, where that you will engage with and then the world map. However, world map will probably stay the same, as I feel it was good the way it was and will only receive some UI boost.
Hopefully you like the changes and I'm very thankful for your patience and support.
VM Machal <3
Small survey update
- participants in the survey can provide a helpful feedback which will be evaluated (end of July)...the one with best answers will be declared a winner that can receive powerful in-game item reward! Stay tuned for the details.
More content news
after about 2 weeks of work I have to share some exciting news with you! As some of you may know (thanks for your ideas and suggestions) there are a bit too many things so this patch will take at least month longer than I anticipated. However, step by step, slowly getting there!
I've gone wild here clearly as no one sane would agree with this amount of content but for some reason, it drives me forward even more :D So what other stuff can you await in 0.9.0 patch?
1. New profession:
She will bring another bunch of equipment made out of leather, cotton, linen, silk and wool! The materials will act like ingots, so she will have to make them out of basic materials.
All recipes will be divided into leather, fabric and fine fabric as per specializations.
Her biggest benefit will be for staff items. If some may remember, I've created equipment for staff workers too. Although decided to rework it a bit as it was kinda lame before and have a look by yourself.
2. UI - rework
Equipment menu will bring total of 9 equipable slots by staff! Tailor will cover the garment (armor) slot and head, gloves, shoes. So it will kinda be divided into some reasonable things so that every profession contributes on it's own.
With that being said, I had to rework mines as there will be 5 new sources orderable from 'Royal farm' due to tailor. And I know that lot of players complained about it since it was a bit confusing and late game not helpful. So here is the change, where red brackets showes removal of the old HUD. It may have been graphically nice, but it consumed about 5-10 fps during late game, so it's a big no.
The new, green highlighted parts are icons of materials. After ordering them, it will just show quantity and display countdown delivery.
Yes, ordering will be done the same way as at marketplace. For now the limit will be up to 100 materials per oder. You can set it on repeat, which will repeat the same order after it's finished.
With new materials, I've decided to rework the top menu too, which is now like this:
Lastly, crafting system got a huge rework as there are 3 new stats for every employee due to the new stuff as well:
1. Energy - will be reduced by - 1/s when worker is crafting and + 1 / s when not crafting ofc. Same goes for Morale and Crafting speed during the day. Overall now it is pretty fixed as after 8pm workers just get refreshed stats and that's it.
New system will count when the worker is NOT at work and thus refresh +10% of their stats. That will kinda give working shifts more meaning.
2. Accident reduction change % - this stat is basically from skills atm, but I feel that it should be displayed and will also be included in items for workers.
3. Manuscripts reduction % - also same as above stat, but will now be included in items for staff. This kinda helps differentiate items for Heroes, Gladiators and Staff.
Employee allowance per fame is now increased and you can have Tailor as soon as you open Tavern. Which may be a lot for new players, but the quests will be in the bulletin board, so they are all optional.
I'm also optimizing the process with the overseer, as her actions are kinda heavy on the game performance due to constant refreshing and checking on many items. So that's why it takes big amount of time but it will probably save us some previous FPS (I hope :)).
I've thought that Dynasties and Wholesale orders will be the big things of this patch, but it was just a beginning :D. I'll have to create about 100 additional recipes and so on.
Thanks for the great input and hope everyone is doing great!
Will definitely put some pre-update before Steam Summer Festival with some survey for additional feedback. Coming in hot guys!
Stay tuned!
VM Machal <3
Upcoming patch update V2
my work got quite slow down due to the amount of content I'm preparing, but it will be much more worth it in the end. Also it takes a lot more work to implement new item now, than months ago, due to the depth of all the features.
But so far, it looks very exciting and you can definitely look for a major content update along with some changes! This week, I'm bringing you a small presentation of it's first part.
1. Staff equipment
It somehow felt weird to me, that you can equip your heroes with a lot of stuff, but your crafters no. Since it's a crafting game, I've decided to add it in the next update.
For now, I'm thinking about 4 slots should be enough. Expansion is possible based on the feedback, so we'll see.
In this case, weekly plan Apprentice training will be nerfed as the stats from it will be now equalled by the items.
Here are some items for staff:
Overall items will bring more depth in the game and more customization in terms for staff.
There will be also new buildings, such as furnace and so on, but not sure If I will make it in this patch or will just add it in the machinery update in the future.
2. New item tier - Epic
In previous updpate, I've mentioned how can you negotiate with other dynasties and build/keep relations or pillage their mannors. Either way, here is part of items. I don't want to spoil everything, but there will be also new researchable stuff from the library.
As a small example, I'd like to point out this item from the list:
If you equip this book, you will basically unlock a small additional feature to the game, which is
3. Legendary monsters
Map exploration can also reveal powerful monsters that will drop materials necessary for crafting powerful items. Although beating them will be quite a challenge and will require strong gear.
A discovery of the monster will be revealed on the world map, like Gemstone deposits, will not persist after loading and if you fail to defeat the monster, it will disappear from the map and restart the chance of its discovery.
Rogon
This two headed serpent will have detailed info in the battle. Maybe can add feature to show his pros and cons even before the battle depending on some conditions.
Let me know what do you think, as player's feedback here is very important!
This patch is bigger than I anticipated (surprise surprise :)), but all of this feels pretty necessary to be there already, so it has to be included. Second part of features will be revealed in few weeks!
Thanks in advance for all your input!
Cheers,
VM Machal <3
Upcoming patch news
as I'm prototyping new content for a major patch in summer, I want to introduce you the new content that will be added.
1. Dynasties
This feature will introduce more depth into the Kingdom and what is happening with it's economy, how it is handled and influenced and so on.
In order to do wholesale, you will have to register yourself as a form of a Dynasty so that your crest will be assigned to the Blacksmith Guild.
Marketshare will play important role as the one with the highest one will be able to submit Tax changes or have the upper hand in bigger decisions!
(King's tax is annoying you for so long!? Then change them!)
2. Friend or foe
So every dynasty will have it's own blacksmithing business. You could either sabotage their production lines or boost them, maintain relations, use your reputation into the play to get access to recipes of each family.
Having a friend or foe can make your game easier or more difficult. As others will be able to do it to you too! It's all 'busines' after all! :)
More detailed stuff will be shaped during these weeks so every suggestion or idea matters.
Mine ownership and potential backfires is a great idea presented by 'coolighost' on Discord channel as a great example!
3. Wholesale
With upcoming mid-late game play, there comes the Wholesale. As explained above, in order to do it, you have to have a Dynasty of your own. Think about huge deal contracts with rival blacksmiths standing in your way for becoming a legend!
These orders will be huge and which dynasty fulfills it first will get the market share bonus + all the rewards from it. So the percentage next to the order represents a progress made by certain dynasty on that particular order.
Citties will be issuing these orders randomly and it's up to you to build bigger infrastructure and make it all count!
4. Various new additions
Overseer automatic production will offer options to craft selected item types to respect char specializations.
Heroes will fulfill the role of being fighters but also market 'influencers'.
These items will be useless in combat, but great for your business. You can farm higher level on your Hero and then make him become an idol for the masses!
And many other improvements will be later introduced.
Stay tunes and thanks for your unrelenting support!
VM Machal <3
0.8.9b hotfix
- player character now starts with 1 skill point so it properly aligns for later levels and doesn't confuse player during a skill reset
Bug fixes:
- Wanborne is no longer skipping time as in old patches
- fixed some tutorial text overlay in the beginning of the game
- fixed font size for all quests
Patch finished!
after another month of hard work I'm happy to present you another patch that brings a lot of changes, mainly around overseer, employee traits, quality of life, special events and so on.
I want to thank players and publisher's QA team for helping me test the Beta and find a lot of bugs.
Full list of changes is here:
Changes:
- *NEW* Overseer menu - Manuscripts - overseer will now control design / utility / material setup of every recipe based on their sold quantity
- *NEW* Overseer menu - Quests - overseer will now automatically control what quest is currently player on and then set required quantities to craft
- *NEW* Special Event - Tavern can now pop up after player unlocks tavern feature offering some actions
- *NEW* Exploration of the map can be now automatic through Overseer menu
- *NEW* Special event added for World map exploration with various outcomes
- all manuscripts will now have predefined basic settings for design/utility/materials
- Staff menu/Working hours menu will now always call a default Pause to save performance
- added log notification for working accident messages and removed their 'pause' function
- increased character skill point cap to 15 (up from 10) for new obtained characters (requires new game)
- 'Skip tutorial messages' option added for the 'New Game' feature which will make all Lucy messages to not pop-up
- building tutorial tracker will now have also info about assigning overseer if player chooses casual game mode
- monday paychecks will no longer pause the game
- Runes will now be accounted for items that takes +1 slot in inventory space
- Complexity chance was reduced from all manuscripts based on their setup
- Fighting Terror quest will now discover Haunted Crypt automatically and spawn it on the World Map if it wasn't dicovered yet
- floors and walls have roughness and normal maps removed to slightly reduce the performance requirement
- player can now 'repeat' an exploration mission after heroes finish exploration and the status message pops up
- Casual game mode has now some added tutorial in the beginning
- starting scene light has been changed to help player understand shadow from the invisible 'roof'
- debug log will be popped at the start of the game
- starting prologue screen with world map is smoothen out
- aligned the mines menu and the scrollbar to fit withing the notification windows
- removed the moving notification to Wanborne, all objects should be already moved automatically
- smoothed out the movement to world map from the city
- employee accidents are now displayed temporarily and no longer obstruct the whole screen and are noted in the debug log
- Overseer automatic quests will now prioritize timed quests first
Bug fixes:
- working hour button will now show correct working hours number and redirects player to the menu upon mouse click
- Treasury HUD will now pop always on Monday listing all expenses properly and reseting the weekly chest in Tavern
- after losing a battle, group icon will properly disappear and exploration will be possible when heroes are ready
- Lesser scroll of glory will be now properly crafted
- fixed a bug with Blacksmith 1 menu tab displays
- fixed a bug where Shopping Fever quest enabled made World map accessible
- item not sold due to market being closed will now properly set back for sale after the market re-opens
- fixed a bug where screen resolution change buttons were not working
- accepting/declining quest will now put player back into pause (if his game was paused before that)
- fixed missing pop-up for cracks in different languages and some FR language errors
- player will start from 7am now, so character won't disappear and then reappear
- fixed a bug where player could place Overseer sooner than Blacksmith, thus breaking the tutorial
- fixed a bug where Drezhul hero could summon more than 2 skeletons in one fight
- Holy staff will be properly counted as 2 handed weapon, removing shield upon equip
- alchemist bookcase and reagents storage can now be placed on whole Wanborne workshop area
- ingots are now removed from the Manuscripts menu as they don't fall under the rules as other items
- mine displays withing the Mines Menu (E) are now properly aligned
- guard in Wanborne won't be stuck forever under the bridge during his partrols
- clicking on 'Skills' in Heroes menu will toggle the Skills menu on or off for heroes
- bottom menu will now be properly updated with language changes when going to main menu
- aligned the Auto production and Inventory space texts when player reached higher quantities of items
- equipment menus will have more space for scrollbar in case of more items
- game will no longer crash when trying to exit to main menu on 3x speed
- FPS counter is now properly displayed above the reputation bar
- Runes will now be counted in inventory slot during crafting process
- aligned fame count in-game with the one represented in the save file display
- fixed a bug where player could leave world map while dungeon menu was still on and spamming hotkeys would break the battle camera when entering battle
- fixed Manuscript Complexity calculation for most items as it was way too high
With these changes there may be some performance issues, especially late game with many items in the inventory. I'll think about implementing a hard cap for items.
Also, potions distribution for Overseer is not yet finished. It is because many things will have to be done consequtively as other changes will be implemented.
So with these changes, I'm now going to focus fully on the roadmap! So next patch will bring Dynasties and Wholesale. These 2 changes have to come hand in hand as they benefit from each other. I'll put some update as I'll have more info in the upcoming weeks!
Stay tuned and thanks for your support! <3
VM Machal
Testing Now!
so 0.8.9b is pretty much done and I'd like any participants to test it out and help me with polishing it out! I haven't found out all possible scenaries by far and community help will greatly speed up the overall process of unwanted stuff happening!
Also, most of the text in the tavern special event was done by google translate, so if you want to help me translate it for the live version, let me know! :)
To download beta version, please right click the game in Library -> Properties -> Betas and change it to 'Beta' mode.
Please report any bugs here or in the Discord channel of the game.
Changes:
- *NEW* Overseer menu - Manuscripts - overseer will now control design / utility / material setup of every recipe based on their sold quantity
- *NEW* Overseer menu - Quests - overseer will now automatically control what quest is currently player on and then set required quantities to craft
- *NEW* Special Event - Tavern can now pop up after player unlocks tavern feature offering some actions
- monday paychecks will no longer pause the game
- Runes will now be accounted for items that takes +1 slot in inventory space
- Complexity chance was reduced from all manuscripts based on their setup
- Fighting Terror quest will now discover Haunted Crypt automatically and spawn it on the World Map if it wasn't dicovered yet
- floors and walls have roughness and normal maps removed to slightly reduce the performance requirement
- player can now 'repeat' an exploration mission after heroes finish exploration and the status message pops up
Bug fixes:
- after losing a battle, group icon will properly disappear and exploration will be possible when heroes are ready
- Lesser scroll of glory will be now properly crafted
- fixed a bug with Blacksmith 1 menu tab displays
- fixed a bug where Shopping Fever quest enabled made World map accessible
- item not sold due to market being closed will now properly set back for sale after the market re-opens
- fixed a bug where screen resolution change buttons were not working
- accepting/declining quest will now put player back into pause (if his game was paused before that)
- fixed missing pop-up for cracks in different languages and some FR language errors
One more thing that will be new in this version is:
Special Events
It can randomly occur and over the course of days, more event types will be added. Pretty much anything can happen there, so it's up to the player to participate and explore the options or not.
Thanks for your support and have a great day,
VM Machal <3