Steam Awards 2019 votes started today. It's a wonderful opportunity for indie games to stand out!
You can now support the team by voting for Crying Suns in the "Outstanding Visual Style" category. Of course, you are free to choose another category although we truly think we have good chances in this specific one this year!
Thanks in advance and don't hesitate to spread the word! The DevTeam
A small update before big ones
Greetings Crying Suns fans!
Alt Shift team is currently working on some big changes and improvements for Crying Suns. Before going further into the details of what’s coming, here is a quick list of changes we pushed a few minutes ago:
11/15/2019 Update:
Story, events and texts - We improved again the events procedural distribution. The average distance between two events repetition has been increased. We also fixed some remaining statistically rare situations where the minimum distance between two similar events could have been still too low.
Gameplay: - It's now impossible to have two cryopod events during an expedition
Interface, Graphics and Sounds - Frigate laser projectile effects were not the ones intended on most of the frigates, it has been corrected.
BugFix Major - We fixed a major issue where the previous save "recuperation mode" was not working properly. - We fixed a major issue where, in case of a power outage while saving, all the save files were wiped off.
BugFix Minor - We fixed the allowed memory size for the sound engine that might have been insufficient, causing sound issues.
A quick look back
If you followed our last announcements and updates, you already know that many corrections and improvements have been made such as:
A new chapter selection feature allowing a much higher replayability (with new Steam achievements related).
A big rework of events distribution to prevent repetitions
A first rework on special officers availability (still ongoing, see below)
Game balancing adjustments
Ergonomy and “quality of life” improvements
The Steam Cloud save feature
And many bugs corrected, of course
What’s coming
Following the roadmap we announced a few weeks ago but also your valuable feedbacks on Steam and Discord, here are the ongoing subjects we are working on right now until January 2020:
A complete rework of special officers selection/availability, much easier to understand and much more interesting to play.
A deep rebalancing of the unlockable battleships, the idea being to allow more gameplay diversity between them and more advanced strategies.
This rework involved a long and deep rethink on a strategic level to ensure a global consistency and will also come with a lot of brand new contents (officers abilities, squadrons, weapons) and updates to existing ones to support these changes (an open beta will allow the beta-testers to try and evaluate these substantial changes very soon).
Brand new events including new quests, risky situations and skill related situations.
New contents to improve environment diversity (new stations, new civilian ships)
The iPad version is progressing everyday (stretch your fingers ;) )
Of course, lots of bug fixes and “quality of life” improvements.
And maybe a small surprise for players who will finish the whole game with every battleship in Hard mode ;)
Finally, the Artbook is almost ready! Here is a glimpse of it: 128 pages of Crying Suns artwork, unreleased contents and researches, a premium hard cover, in short: a very exclusive item for the biggest fans.
The only remaining question is the number of Artbooks we should print. We already have around 100 copies planned to be sent to our Kickstarter backers but if you are interested too, please comment this post with a “+1” or “+X” (X being the number of copies you might want) so we could define a rough number. Its price should be around $40 before shipping costs.
Thanks again for your support!
Update: special officers availability, rewriting and bugfixes
Greetings fellow space explorers!
Here is a new update to correct some bugs and improve some features following your valuable feedbacks:
Gameplay
We started to improve the special officers "growing" feature. Previously, there was a 50% chance to have 1 special officer randomly selected among those available. Now the chances start at 50% with 1 officer and each unlocked officer adds 4% more chance. With all 13 officers unlocked, the chances are 100% (meaning one special officer available for each new run). We are still working on a bigger redesign of this feature but for the time being it should make it a bit smoother and more interesting.
Story, events and texts
We made small adjustments to the final dialog, clarified a few loose ends that were not intended.
We rewrote some lines that were insensitive and hurtful about cancer or tumor.
Interface, Graphics and Sounds
We improved the visibility of special officers in shops.
Auxiliary systems that can't be stacked now cannot be bought twice in the shops.
BugFix Major
Fixed a bug where the Shredder and Basilisk units stopped applying their ability after being re-deployed during a fight.
Fixed a bug where people having finished the demo could not use the "reset chapter" feature.
Fixed a bug where the Church Battleship was not able to scavenge any Neo-N while at level 0 upgrade.
BugFix Minor
Fixed a bug where the docks were not updated after selling the brutal deployer.
Fixed a bug where a unit that was chasing a target at the moment of its death, was re-deployed with the same chasing target.
EDIT 31st Oct 2019: We just fixed a breaking error introduced in this last update. When loading the game with a current run with a battleship equipped with the brutal deployer auxiliary system, it caused the run save to crash and be discarded into a backup folder. It's now fully corrected.
Thanks again for your feedbacks and for helping us making this game everyday better and better!
Don't forget to leave a Steam review on our store page. You can also leave your review on Metacritic.
[UPDATE] Replayable chapters, events repetitions fixed, and many other things
Greetings Crying Suns fans,
Crying Suns was launched almost a month ago and thanks to your valuable feedbacks since the release, we were able to define our next priorities to improve our game.
Following your comments and reviews, we mainly worked on 3 big subjects :
Make the game replayable
Lower the repetitiveness of some events
Refine some gameplay parameters to provide a better experience
Replayability:
We developed a new “chapter selection” feature. After completing the story, you are now able to replay any of the 6 story chapters (with or without the story events, as you can reset the story on each chapter) and of course, with any of the battleships and officers you unlocked until then. Thanks to this new feature, you will be able to finally unlock story achievements you may have missed in your first runs! In addition, new Steam Achievements have been added for completing all chapters with every battleship, although only your future runs will count for these achievements (unfortunately, save files from previous versions don’t contain the information about which chapter was achieved with which battleship).
Events repetitiveness corrected:
Following multiple players reports that a small group of events appeared very frequently, we conducted a complete audit of the event procedural generation. We found several blocking issues that were provoking statistical aberrations. We also found that we had too much constraints on events generations (related to graphical environments, gamedesign constraints or POI types) which made 20 to 30 events to be mostly picked against the few hundreds of them (!) We conducted a complete redesign of our approach and the repetitions of events should occur a lot less often now. A lot of events that were almost never picked before should now reappear and most of the time there shouldn't be much repetition between two consecutive full runs.
Gameplay adjustments:
We reworked some game parameters to improve the global game experience, including a rebalancing of Neo-N distribution (making it fairer mostly), adjustments on some weapons effects and some squadrons abilities. We also heard your feedbacks about the lack of difference between the unlockable battleships so we started to adjust their characteristics to foster diversity among them and encourage various game strategies. We will continue these improvements in the next versions of course.
As planned in the roadmap, we also started to integrate the cloud save feature although this one will only be available from the next version as we need players to update first their data files with this version.
At the end of this post, you will find the whole detailed list of corrections we made thanks to your feedbacks.
Don't hesitate to use the Steam forum or our discord channel to report any problem you might encounter in the game. Your feedbacks are crucial for us to improve the game experience.
[New Steam achievements] New achievements for completing all chapters with each battleship. Earning those Steam Achievements in Hard difficulty will automatically grant easy or normal version of the same achievement. Unfortunately, as mentioned before, those data were not available in the save file, so all progression on those Steam achievements will start from scratch.
Gameplay
[NEW FEATURE] Chapter selection is now available after completing the story. New achievements have been added for completing all chapters with a battleship. It's also now possible (after completing the story) to reset a single chapter story, allowing to try again to unlock a missed achievement.
The space bender weapons were improved. All MK versions have now the same teleport long distance, 7 cells, instead of 2, 5 and 7 (for MK I, II and III respectively). Their cooldown and area of effect have been rebalanced too.
Neo-N refueling random generation has been slightly rebalanced to avoid extreme situations and provide a fairer experience.
Fixed an exploit allowing Flak weapons to reset their current pattern by undocking/redeploying them during tactical pause
Rebalanced some battleships maximum upgrade levels
Kaos class battleship has been improved (4 more hangar slots for squadrons)
Boomer squadrons ability (Exploding) has been rebalanced (from 6/12/18 damage per MK level to 10/14/18)
Jericho Class Battleship has been nerfed a bit, losing 1 level of hull bar upgrade at start (all difficulties)
Story, events and texts
[MAJOR] Complete redesign and correction of our events distribution approach.
[RU] Fixed a mistranslation for the Instant loader description.
[EN] Multiple typos fixes and improvements on interface and dialogs
Interface, Graphics and Sounds
The remaining quantity of repair available in shops was misleading, it has been improved to be more obvious.
Improved the reinforcement feedback to make it more visible.
Changed the display order of the mission dashboard summary during the expedition to match the order of the item in the dashboard pre-expedition
BugFix Major
Fixed an issue where there was a weird visual "jump" appearing sometime when returning from an expedition to the command center.
Fixed an issue where the visual displaying a weapon target was not cleaned after shooting
Fixed an issue where a lot of people were skipping dialog by mistake, the delay before being able to skip the next dialog has been extended to avoid this.
Fixed an issue where sometimes some objects on the battlefield were not teleported as planned
Fixed an issue where in the battleship selection menu, the battleships starting hull bars and health points were not displayed properly according to the difficulty (in easy mode starting battleships have more level in hull upgrades).
Fixed an issue where the "lose 1 hull bar" condition appearing in some events was marked as "not available" if you had only 2 available hull bars.
Fixed an issue where in some cases, just after selecting a new battleship in the run customization screen and clicking on “start”, nothing happened and the players were stuck with no interface.
Fixed an issue where the expedition dashboard was displaying wrong information (by 1) in some case
BugFix Minor
Fixed an issue where an expedition sound was not stopped and stayed in the background when the officer died.
Fixed an issue where hovering skills in the "resolution" part of the expedition was returning a "missing translation message"
Fixed an issue where final boss (chapter 6) officers were not displayed "properly".
Crash fix for Mac users
We have made a slight change in the way Crying Suns is launching on Steam on Mac. When you click on the "Play" button in the Steam launcher, you will now be presented with two options:
1️⃣ "Play Crying Suns", which launches the game as usual,
2️⃣ "Play Crying Suns (Intel iGPU - OpenGL)", which launches the game using the Unity's OpenGL graphics API.
This second option should fix the freezes some players have experienced with Intel integrated GPUs (iGPUs). The game should run as usual, but without a very specific visual effect (a rim on characters) which is not available through OpenGL due to the lack of support for Compute Shaders.
Don't hesitate to give your feedback if the game still encounters troubles after these changes on Mac.
Crying Suns Roadmap
Greetings Space Adventurers!
It has been a week now that Crying Suns was released and it’s time for us to share with you our roadmap for the next months. Thanks to your valuable feedbacks, we were able to adjust our plans to improve the game quality and make it deeper and more replayable.
We plan to update the game progressively every week with the following items:
Before 1 month
Adding the Cloud save features
Improving the overall replayability by allowing players to get back to previous chapters to experience the story again and try to beat each chapter with each battleship
Adding several “Quality of life” features (knowing which auxiliary system stacks, misplaced repair count, improving the identification of special officers, unwanted dialog skip, etc…)
Gameplay balancing
And of course, focus on fixing bugs, crashes, performance issues and typos
Before 2 months
Improving the special officers availability features (too confusing for now)
Adding new events and working on random generation of events to avoid repetition
Continuing gameplay balancing, “Quality of life” updates and fixes
Adding new contents (abilities, weapons, etc…)
Before 3 months
Continuing gameplay balancing, “Quality of life” updates and fixes
Improving replayability (maybe new game modes? Still a work-in-progress)
Adding new contents (abilities, weapons, etc…)
Adding new events
Between 3 and 6 months max
DLC with 2 new factions (Prag Mah and Phalanx), with new playable battleships, units, 4 new special officers (an example below), weapons and faction specific events. Might include more stuff but it’s still in discussion.
The iPad version
Artbook release
A glimpse of future new officers?
This list is not exhaustive, we might add or modify some items depending on your feedbacks of course.
Join our Discord community
You will be able to discuss with other players and directly with the development team, give your feedbacks, suggest ideas, and even learn some useful tips to go forward into the game.
It has been an incredible launch week for the team and we are so glad to see that you are enjoying Crying Suns. All your comments, reviews, and even videos, give us a lot of motivation to go forward and improve our game everyday!
Updates
To sum up this first new update, we mainly worked on:
At the end of this post, you will find the whole detailed list of corrections we made thanks to your valuable feedbacks.
Don't hesitate to use the Steam forum or our discord channel to report any problem you might encounter in the game. Your feedbacks are crucial for us to improve the game experience.
Stay tuned, we will also announce very soon our roadmap for the future major improvements of Crying Suns!
Don't forget to join our Discord server
… to discuss with other players and the development team. Click here to join us!
[FR] Lots of rewrites, typos corrections and overall text improvements in both interface and events
[EN] A few typos fixes and Breeder drones were renamed Krafter
Interface, Graphics and Sounds
Added a video option to control the framerate in the option menu, players should now be able to choose among 30, 60, 120 and uncapped FPS
Added hover information for units with absorb shields or on asteroid cells
Added a few new npc pictures for pirates and civilian children
Improved the health bar colors for squadrons to hint at health state
Improved the quality of some graphic assets (NPC)
BugFix Major
Fixed an issue where some players were stuck without any interface after loading their game
Fixed an issue where in some "undeploying" situation the dock would get "stuck" and unable to deploy anything for the remaining of the fight
Fixed an issue where players who did some shenanigans with their save files could face the wrong boss for the current chapter
Fixed an issue where the Okonkwo achievement was not triggered. Will be retroactively awarded to player who missed it
Removed the "Jeef Merkk" achievement as for now it was a bit tedious to unlock without being able to replay the chapter
BugFix Minor
Fixed an issue where the regen indicator on squadrons was still displayed while in command center
Fixed an issue where units that were in the pushed back zone after hull bar explosion were engaging adjacent units and slowing them down
Fixed an issue where the electromagnetic storm duration was not properly translated
Fixed an issue where the quantity of reinforcement in mother "call to arms" ability was wrong in easy
Fixed an issue where some ambushed enemies were not deploying weapons in all their available docks
Fixed an issue where buying the pirate transponder while on a shop was not updating local shop prices
A new (and longer) demo version
Greetings Crying Suns fans,
Here comes the last update before the launch (September 19th).
WIth this new demo, you will enjoy improvements :
The demo now ends before the sector 2 boss instead of before sector 1!
New weapons, squadrons from MK I to MK IV and new officers abilities and auxiliary systems have been added.
New feedbacks, visual cues and improvements on all the major interfaces (Displaying remaining times, status, notifications etc.) have been implemented.
And, as usual, A LOT of other features, game balancing and bugfix 🐛
This new (longer) demo is still available in 6 different languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Russian and Simplified Chinese).
We are thrilled to announce the release date of the PC version (Windows and OS X) of Crying Suns 🎉
Crying Suns will be available from September 19th
In the meantime, we invite you to discover our new teaser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYB-iycTOFE
Have fun!
A new demo version with new languages! (And more)
Greetings Space Explorers,
For this new version, we worked on many improvements on several aspects:
French, Spanish, German, Russian and Simplified Chinese versions were added! (Don’t hesitate to send us your feedbacks if something sounds weird in those languages by the way).🌏
A huge work on performances, meaning a big FPS jump for most of you 🚀
Again, a lot of work has been done on music, fight sounds, sfx, interface sounds... 🎵
