Playdius becomes Dear Villagers, update your bookmarks!
Greetings everyone,
A few days ago we rebranded Playdius to Dear Villagers, as you can see here in our announcement trailer.
Considering we cannot rename this page we kindly invite you to keep following us on the new one: Dear Villagers on Steam.
Note that we also just announced two new very exciting games:
Fast-paced free-moving roguelite platformer. Help Kyhra to explore the unknown and to slash her way through the ancient machines guarding the seal of her past, and maybe the redemption of humanity.
And not forgetting a new major update for the ongoing Early Access of JRPG Edge Of Eternity!!
Looking forward to fully release these games and unveil even new ones!
The Dear Villagers team
The DLC "Norse Side Stories" will be available in Q2 2019!
Hey survivors! Today, we’ll be talking about the new DLC of Dead In Vinland, called Norse Side Stories, bringing A LOT of new dialogues, between secondary characters!
Don’t worry, we’re still surviving! We've sent Manon fetching some beer water and Jacques and Thomas set up an expedition to hunt some food at the food truck. We even accepted fresh new recruits into our camp, we’ll soon grow into a real village!
Right now we have split the team in two: Matt is a team by himself and finishes the 3rd DLC for Dead In Vinland, while the others have fun working on a NEW, TOP SECRET game. We can’t wait to give you some infos about it! I think we’ll be able to reveal some things in the coming months.
Norse Side Stories
So the new DLC will be called Norse Side Stories. It entirely focuses on adding new dialogs between secondary characters.
The last DLC was more targeted to players who cared for the survival aspects of the game, and wanted to focus on that. But the characters and their little stories are a big part of the “Dead In” games, so we wanted to add more content for players who liked this aspect of the game. We thought it was a good idea to seperate the 2 DLCs like that, so that players who don’t care about one or the other aspect of the game wouldn’t be “forced” to buy something they didn’t want. Hopefully, some people will want to buy the 2 DLCs too ^^
Secondary Characters
So yeah, for production reasons we explained that we couldn’t include in the base game interactions between secondary characters, it was too costly to make for an impact on the game that was really tiny, for many “systemic” reasons (the main one being that we can’t possibly know when or even if a character would be recruited, so combinations of several secondary characters were impossible to predict, and so a lot of the writing would go to waste).
We wanted to “repair” that lack of interaction with a specific DLC. It was interesting because we broke the classic “main family centric dialogs” we had before, and could explore some totally new paths for the characters. How would Parvaneh and Eustache interact, for example? Or Angelico and Shanaw?
Some combinations were easy to work with, considering the stories they already had. But some combinations were… well… rather unlikely… (Knut and Cissé ??). It was hard work, but we wanted to have at least a minimal interaction for EVERY single combination of secondary characters.
In the end, everyone has at least one new dialog with everyone else, and some combinations were more interesting and led to advanced dialog chains, comprised of 4-5 dialogs. In general, most characters have 1 or 2 advanced interactions.
During production, we made a little sheet to recap how many interactions each character have with each other. I can share it to you so you see what we did.
New romances!
As you can see, some cells are coloured in red… because they indicate new romances included in this DLC! A total of 3 new romance option are added with the DLC (and half of one…)
Of course, new romances = new endings! We added 3 new endings for these characters, taking into account the new romances options.
Free 1.4 Patch!
But we didn’t stop there… as we always did for previous DLCs, we wanted to add some free content in the mix, so we wrote an addition of 11 new free dialogs integrated into the game even for people who didn’t bought the DLC o/
And… it’s not some random dialogs, it’s 2 new romance options for 2 of the main characters! You’ll get:
A new romance option for Moira. She was kind of explicit about being bisexual, so it was a shame we didn’t have a same-sex romance option for her in the base game!
A new very surprising (or not that much? x)) romance option for Eirik. We wanted to somehow have a same-sex romance for a man in the game, but considering our cast it was not that easy. So we tried to handle it in a “subtle” way. It’s totally optional, but one of Eirik’s “bromance” can turn in something totally different…
A special event between Gudrun and Freyja, just for fun. (and because Völvas were tied to Freyja)
“Norse Side Stories”, alongside the free 1.4 Patch, will be available in Q2 2019!
I think that’s it about the 3rd DLC? We nearly added a hundred of new dialogs (~22.000 words) in this DLC and had a good fun coming back to these crazy characters, but I think we wrote all we could about them.
At the moment, there are no plans for a new DLC, but who knows? If you want to help us, give us a thumbs up on Steam and recommend it to your friends ^^
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Happy surviving!
A NEW MODE is available now! + 1.3 Patch + New language! + A switch version?!
Hello survivors! It’s finally here! The DLC “Battle Of The Heodenings” is finally available!
Today, we’ll go through the main features of the new DLC, and we’ll also present the patchnotes of the 1.3 patch!
This mode redefines one of the main goals of Dead In Vinland: survive. Now, you are free to choose your team to survive as long as possible, in this endless, sandbox-y mode!
Batte Of The Heodenings
When choosing a new game, owners of the DLC will be able to choose either “Story mode” or “Heodening”, which will launch the endless mode of Dead In Vinland.
Choose your character
When starting a new game in Heodening, you’ll have to choose any 4 characters you want. There’s also a new option that will define your characters’ stats:
Generated like in the story mode: they will have the same generation algorithm, so the same overall skills and traits.
OR, Randomly generated: the game will follow the same generation rules than in the story mode (i.e. the same amount of total skill points on every character), but all their starting skills and traits will be procedurally generated!
Customize your character
Any time your want to add a character to your camp, you can first check their starting skills, traits, and fighting skills. If you want, you can spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize their starting skills. You don’t have to recruit him/her right away, his/her skills will stay like this until you recruit him/her. You can also customize again and again the same character, even if it’s not really recommended since Orichalcum Beads are rather hard to get (you start the game with some to customize your starting crew).
Here, you’ll be able to spend 120 points on Innate skills and 300 points on Acquired skills.
You can see that Innate skills can’t be lowered under 20 points each, and Acquired skills under 10 points. You also have a 80 high cap for innate and 40 for acquired. These are the same rules used in the random generation.
You can also spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize the starting Traits of the character. The game will then let you choose Trait between a choice of 5 for all the starting Traits (historic good and bad, and the 3 random bad ones)
Trade with the Gods
Now, you can trade with the gods in exchange of Orichalcum Beads:
Loki sells useful items (Fire Crystals, Ancien Knowledge and Tinder)
Freyja gives temporary powerful blessings or instant healing
Thor gives temporary battle buffs.
The tributes
Now the tributes are endless: they start right away, and every week Elof will come ask for the tribute. The dialogs are at their minimal, and always the same: you’ll be able to pay him the exact amount asked, 25%, 50% or 75% of this amount, or 125%, 150% or 175% of this base amount (or nothing at all). Of course, if you give him more or less than asked, the Animosity gauge will still change accordingly. You’ll still get retribution events every 10 steps of the gauge, and if you reach 100% animosity you’ll lose the game.
The map
To make the game truly endless, we’ve reworked the map for this mode. Every number of days (for now, it’s 25), all the empty cells of the map will regenerate a random content.
Fighting
Now the enemies you will face will automatically get an increasing number of random Traits the more days you stay on the island.
We also made a new encounter’s table: you may fight harder stacks early on, but they will have 2 bad Traits until a few dozen days have passed.
You may also encounter one of the 5 boss fights in the game.
One of the most requested language by the players is finally available! That’s right, Dead In Vinland now fully supports:
o Russian (Community translation. Thanks A LOT to our awesome russian translators: Gedo, Barley, Egor, Kerrael, Xippy, Suzakua, Alex))
We want to thank all the players! Dead In Vinland has been out for almost a year now, and we’re so happy that we’ve kept working on it since the release! There’s only one last DLC to be released after this one…
ONE MORE THING
That’s right, there was ONE LAST THING we still haven’t told you about! We are very happy to announce that we’re going to release Dead In Vinland on Nintendo Switch! Stay tuned!
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Happy surviving!
1.3 Patch Available
Hello survivors!
The 1.3 Free Patch is now available, bringing new features and improvements for Dead In Vinland!
NEW LANGUAGE!
One of the most requested language by the players is finally available! That’s right, Dead In Vinland now fully supports:
Russian (Community translation. Thanks A LOT to our awesome russian translators: Gedo, Barley, Egor, Kerrael, Xippy, Suzakua, Alex)
NEW FEATURES
Advanced difficulty options (for all game modes): modify A TON of parameters to customize your playthrough. See full list here:
Modify how the states increase/lower each time. You could for example play a game where the characters don’t get any Fatigue at all, but they get twice the amount of Injury and Disease.
Modify how the states impact the skills: you could make it so the characters’ states don’t lower the character skills, of have twice the impact.
Modify the random value affected to Acquired skills at generation: choose 0 to have less random, 100 to have crazy numbers.
Modify the number of bad starting Traits: you could start a game with 0 random starting Traits, making it fairer to every character.
Modify skills and general XP bonuses. You could make a game with skills that don’t evolve at all on each use, but you get twice the general XP, making it a game around level ups!
Modify the number of Level Up Traits you get to choose from each level-up. If the random factor of level-ups annoys you, you could set it up to 100 and get the choice to customize your character freely.
Change the resources gains, the crafting speed, the exploration speed.
Change how fast camp stations lose condition, and how fast Natural Resources lower and regenerate.
Remove the chance to have special Traits when using camp stations, or double the chance to get one, and change the value of “Depression Crits”.
Make the diseases more or less frequent, and make them harder or easier to heal.
Change the chances that each character will get Dehydrated each night (I personally advise setting it to 100% chances), and change the way water rationing works (yes, you can revert to the initial values that were a bit harsher than now)
Adjust the chances of food rotting overnight. You can make everything un-perishable ^^
For Heodening mode only: Modify the number of days you have to wait between Tributes, and the difficulty of Tributes amount asked.
Change the animosity gains. You could make an endless game by removing them completely.
The chances of getting fights. If you don’t like our battle system (and it makes us sad), you can remove the battles! (not recommended: battles are an important way to get loot!)
Give you a boost of chance to succeed skillchecks… You know, those nasty 3-in-a-row skillchecks you have to succeed in Rune challenges? 😉
Some other parameters for Heodening mode: the delay between map resets, and the pace at which the battles will increase in difficulty.
And finally, one set of options that I’m particularly proud of: you can completely modify the probabilities each weather has to appear, depending of the current weather… Very cool! You could make an island where it constantly rains, or where there are no storms, etc… You’re a real god now!
Intelligence skill reworked: now modifies skills XP gains, instead of doing… nothing.
Added stats screen in character sheet.
FIXES
Fixed a nasty bug which prevented Angelico’s main event chain to trigger.
BALANCING
Level cap increased from 30 to 99 for all game modes (Endless AND Story)
Tavern changed so that relax mode is less OP:
Lowered depression cured in relax mode by 5.
Relax mode has now 10% chances to give Bored trait and 10% chances to give Demotivated trait.
Happy surviving!
Features of the 1.3 Patch + DLC 2 Release Date!
Hello survivors, time to talk about the 1.3 Patch!
We’re approaching release time! Let’s talk about the content of the FREE 1.3 patch coming live at the same time as the second DLC of Dead In Vinland. We are slowly coming to the end of what we possibly could implement into the game, so this patch should be the last major one.
Honestly we totally went over the budget we had in the first place… but well, we wanted to go as far as we could with the concept of Dead In Vinland. We hope that in the end, it will have a lasting effect on sales and that the game will eventually reach balance, but that’s the subject of another blog post that I will make for the 1-year anniversary of the game’s release.
But yeah, when I look at what is the game now and how it was when we first release it… There has been quite an amount of major improvements that I’m really proud of. After the 3rd DLC is released, I think I’ll be able to call it complete!
But enough of that, let’s look at the features… There are actually 3 new major free features included in the 1.3 patch:
Advanced Difficulty Options
Okay… Let’s get to the REAL THING. Dead In Vinland has A TON of parameters running in the engine that we set up. We can’t possibly make it moddable since it was not something we anticipated from the start. BUT with this, you’ll really be able to tailor your experience how you see it.
We added not all but a lot of parameters that you can fiddle with, making your game extra hard or extra easy. We tried to give you the freedom to go very extreme in the parameters, so it’s very experimental: don’t complain if you set-up some crazy things ^^
We thought it worked well with a new endless game mode, but you can also use this to make the story mode easier or harder with the patch.
With that, you will be able to:
Modify how the states increase/lower each time. You could for example play a game where the characters don’t get any Fatigue at all, but they get twice the amount of Injury and Disease.
Modify how the states impact the skills: you could make it so the characters’ states don’t lower the character skills, of have twice the impact.
Modify the random value affected to Acquired skills at generation: choose 0 to have less random, 100 to have crazy numbers.
Modify the number of bad starting Traits: you could start a game with 0 random starting Traits, making it fairer to every character.
Modify skills and general XP bonuses. You could make a game with skills that don’t evolve at all on each use, but you get twice the general XP, making it a game around level ups!
Modify the number of Level Up Traits you get to choose from each level-up. If the random factor of level-ups annoys you, you could set it up to 100 and get the choice to customize your character freely.
Change the resources gains, the crafting speed, the exploration speed.
Change how fast camp stations lose condition, and how fast Natural Resources lower and regenerate.
Remove the chance to have special Traits when using camp stations, or double the chance to get one, and change the value of “Depression Crits”.
Make the diseases more or less frequent, and make them harder or easier to heal.
Change the chances that each character will get Dehydrated each night (I personally advise setting it to 100% chances), and change the way water rationing works (yes, you can revert to the initial values that were a bit harsher than now)
Adjust the chances of food rotting overnight. You can make everything un-perishable ^^
For Heodening mode only: Modify the number of days you have to wait between Tributes, and the difficulty of Tributes amount asked.
Change the animosity gains. You could make an endless game by removing them completely.
The chances of getting fights. If you don’t like our battle system (and it makes us sad), you can remove the battles! (not recommended: battles are an important way to get loot!)
Give you a boost of chance to succeed skillchecks… You know, those nasty 3-in-a-row skillchecks you have to succeed in Rune challenges? 😉
Some other parameters for Heodening mode: the delay between map resets, and the pace at which the battles will increase in difficulty.
And finally, one set of options that I’m particularly proud of: you can completely modify the probabilities each weather has to appear, depending of the current weather… Very cool! You could make an island where it constantly rains, or where there are no storms, etc… You’re a real god now!
Intelligence Skill rework
This is directly a consequence of the new customization options of the Battle Of The Heodenings mode that we included in the 2nd DLC, and this is something I wanted to change for a while. The Intelligence skill didn’t have much use, apart for the skillchecks in exploration mode (luckily, we used a lot of Intelligence skillchecks, so it was not a wasted skill). Now that you can freely distribute your skillpoints at character creation, we couldn’t allow ourselves to have a sub-par skill like that, that could easily been overlooked to max-out other skills.
So! Now Intelligence will give a bonus/malus on skills XP gains. The more a character is Intelligent, the more they will learn from their experiences and the faster they will get better at doing their activities.
Since skills level-ups give general XP, Intelligent characters will also tend to progress their levels faster, learning useful Traits along the way. So yeah, it’s definitively a skill that has some value in it, and that could lead to some interesting XP focused builds.
Stats screen in character sheet
Oooh… How I love this feature! To talk a bit about me, I have some kind of statistics fetish… When I see character statistics in a game, I can’t help but become instantly excited. I think I could buy a game just for a well-presented stat screen x)
I feel that many RPGs and tacticals are lacking a lot in character stats, that’s a shame because stats tell a lot of good stories that you can share and compare with other players.
So I pestered Raoul and Thomas (our programmers) day and night so that they would implement a nice little stat screen in Dead In Vinland. They accepted to implement a stat screen on game over to appease me, but now that we had this nice little stat screen, why not have it during a playthrough?! I whined, I yelled, I bribed… And now we have it! <3
Look at this beauty!
Now you can easily check that Lady Tomoe nearly died of Fatigue, so you should take care of her! Poor Lady… Doing all the work by herself while the others have fun in the Tavern… No wonder she always looks so grumpy.
Phew! That’s all! As you can see, you clearly can make the game less RNG prone, or more, depending on your setup. We hope you’ll have fun playing with all these settings!
It’s a bit of an “expert” mode, so if you find some good set-ups, don’t hesitate to share them with other players!
Release date!
We know it’s been a long time coming, but we finally has a release date! The second DLC (and the 1.3 Patch) for Dead In Vinland will be available on January 24th, so that’s next week!!
So, a small update today. We’re still working on the DLCs of Dead In Vinland, and we’ll be able to announce a release date after the holidays 😊
However, we still wanted to give you a little something in the meantime. We’ve been asked several times for a Linux port of Dead In Vinland. It was very hard to do right at release, since we were very busy with the launch, the post-release patches, the DLCs… But our programmers still wanted to make it at some point 😊
We’re very thrilled to finally release the linux version of Dead In Vinland!!
Right now, it’s only in the test branch 😊
To opt into the Public Linux Test Branch:
Right Click on Dead In Vinland in your Steam Library
Select Properties
Select BETAs tab
Select “Public Linux Test Branch” from the Drop Down Box
Close the Properties Window
Install the Game if it isn’t installed already.
If it is already installed restart Steam if the game isn't currently redownloading (restarting should trigger an update to the game)
Hello survivors! Time to talk about one other big feature of the second DLC of Dead In Vinland!
So, last time I teased you about another feature of the Endless mode, the now famous Battle of the Heodenings mode (yes, we couldn’t find anything shorter… just call it Endless mode like everyone else ^^)
In fact that’s something that was asked by the community, even since Dead In Bermuda… So it was high time we did it!
Choose your character
That’s right!! In the second DLC of Dead In Vinland, you’ll be able able to start a game in this mode with any four characters you want! Since we don’t have any storyline or whatever in this mode, we can do it more easily (with the story, it was just impossible without completely changing the game). You’ll now be able to play with your ultimate girl-only survival team if you want <3
When starting a new game, you’ll have to choose any 4 characters you want.
But we didn’t stop there…
You have a new starting option for this mode that will define your characters’ stats:
Generated like in the story mode: they will have the same generation algorithm, so the same overall skills and traits.
OR, Randomly generated: the game will follow the same generation rules than in the story mode (i.e. the same amount of total skill points on every character), but all their starting skills and traits will be procedurally generated! It can lead to wtf situations where Knut has 10 in Strength and 80 in charisma, but who cares ^^
In fact the random mode is really fun to play for veteran players, because you can’t rely on what you know about the characters! You really need to find new synergies and an efficient way to use your characters.
Of course random mode can lead to easier or harder runs, but well, it’s the rogue-likish component of Heodening mode.
Customize your characters
But we didn’t stop there…
And what if you could customize your own little team of survivors? YES YOU CAN!
We didn’t want to have just a new random mode where player would re-roll and re-roll again and again until they get what they want… Now, in the DLC, you can customize all the characters you’ll recruit into your camp!
Let’s take a look at how it works ingame:
Any time you want to add a character to your camp, you can first check his/her starting skills, traits, and fighting skills.
On these pages, you can spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize the starting skills of this character. You don’t have to recruit him/her right away, his/her skills will stay like this until you recruit him/her. You can also customize again and again the same character, even if it’s not really recommended since Orichalcum Beads are rather hard to get (you start the game with some to customize your starting crew).
When you click on Customize, you enter this screen :
Here, you’ll be able to spend 120 points on Innate skills and 300 points on Acquired skills.
You can see that Innate skills can’t be lowered under 20 points each, and Acquired skills under 10 points. You also have a 80 high cap for innate and 40 for acquired. These are the same rules used in the random generation. This is meant to avoid a bit of min-maxing abuse (although you can still min-max pretty good…)
Two things to be noted:
In the system generation, be it default or random, we still add on top of this generation a random factor on Acquired skills (a value between -10 and +10), to make some little variations. That’s how in the story mode you can end up sometimes with Blodeuwedd having more Crafting skill than Eirik. Of course, that means that sometimes you get a bit more points total, and sometimes a bit less… But having a bit more points in skills that are useless for this character… it’s not inevitably better. That’s why if you customize your character, you won’t have this random factor on top of the points you spent. But since you chose how you spent them, it should be in general better than even a good luck on random generation.
In story mode, all the characters globally respect these rules, but not every one exactly. There are some exceptions, that makes sense balancing-wise. So don’t be surprised if you can’t do the math, there ARE in fact some discrepancies 😉
You can also spend 1 Orichalcum Bead to customize the starting Traits of the character :
The game will let you choose 1 Trait between a choice of 5 for all the starting Traits (historic good and bad, and the 3 random bad ones)
New strategies
Since Orichalcum Beads are rather rare (even in the DLC), I think one of the good challenges of this new mode for the players will be to decide if they should spend one to customize a character before recruiting him/her, or roll with his/her starting skills.
All in all, you should have plenty of new ways to play the game: do you want to go endless in the same setup as in the story mode? Do you want total random and roll with it? Do you want to create your team of ultra specialized survivors? That’s up to you!
So yeah, to conclude, you’ll have 4 camp slots at start. You can kick out whoever you want anytime and replace them with one of your remaining characters in the same way you chose the starting members. Beware though, kicking out is definitive, and if you lose ALL the characters, it’s game over. It’s not meant to happen soon though, you have a stock of fresh characters waiting to be recruited only 1 click away ^^ Just be careful to not lose all the characters in your camp at the same time, because it’s game over too ^^
Next time: I’ll talk to you about the new features of the free 1.3 patch that will be released alongside the DLC! It’s the last major patch we’ll do before a while (maybe the last one ever?), but don’t be sad, you’ll have good value for your money free!
It’s been a while… After the release of the Vallhund DLC we kept on working on the game non-stop, and we’ll keep working on it until the 3 DLC’s we promised are finished. Part of the team started to work on a new game though, but it’s still waaaaaaay too soon to talk about it ^^ SO, we’re pretty excited to let you discover the new features we’ve been working on for the Battle of the Heodenings DLC, since we kept them rather secret and there’s a lot of new things here.
An endless mode
A bit of context first about the name of the DLC. The Battle of the Heodenings, or “Hjaðningavíg“, is a legend from Norse mythology about an never-ending battle. It’s not very well known, but you can find references of it in some poems. All in all, we thought it fitted well with the concept of our DLC: a new endless, sandboxy mode.
In fact, when we released Dead In Vinland, we were quite amazed by how many people wanted to play the game like a sandbox “build your own viking village” game, which was quite unexpected for us because it was not how the game was designed at all! In retrospect, I think that when you sell to people the idea of a management game AND a survival game, people immediatly think about sandbox, maybe like the excellent RimWorld.
Some people also didn’t care one bit about the game’s story, but were really enthusiastic about the management aspects of the game. At first we were kind of disappointed, but all in all it meant that our systems were strong and interesting, even if they represented only half (maybe a little more) of the whole game.
SO we thought it would be a good idea to give these players a way to experience the game the way they wanted, that’s why we came up with the idea of this DLC.
Okay, enough blabbering, let’s look at the features!
So now when you start a new game, you’ll be able to choose between the story mode and the new Heodening mode.
In Heodening mode, we went crazy: we kicked out ALL the dialogs between characters, ALL the quests, ALL the storylines… No more nuisance, you can focus on surviving! The only goal of this mode is to survive as many as days you can. No limit. To achieve that, we had to rework some (a lot of) features.
The tributes
Now the tributes are endless: they start right away, and every week Elof will come ask for the tribute. The dialogs are at their minimal, and always the same: you’ll be able to pay him the exact amount asked, 25%, 50% or 75% of this amount, or 125%, 150% or 175% of this base amount (or nothing at all). Of course, if you give him more or less than asked, the Animosity gauge will still change accordingly. You’ll still get retribution events every 10 steps of the gauge, and if you reach 100% animosity you’ll lose the game.
We reworked completely the system to make it procedural, meaning that Elof will now ask you for other resources than in the story version of the game.
It works like that: every resource has some weight number attached to it (Wood being the base 1). Every tribute asks for an increasing number of resources, multiplied by the weight of the resource (which has been drawn randomly).
An example, let’s say that Fresh Fruits have a weight value of 2, and the basic value of resources asked by a tribute is 10. Elof will then come and ask for 20 Fresh Fruits. (it would have been 10 Wood if Wood had been selected).
We added some control on top of it: some resources can’t appear before day X has been reached… Since some resources are harder (impossible) to produce early on.
You can still end up with unfair demands, but well, that’s the magic of the procedural generation ^^
The map
Of course if we talk about an endless game in a finite map, there will be a problem at some point… So we thought of a way to make the island truly endless: every number of days (for now, it’s 25), all the empty cells of the map will regenerate a random content! You’ll never run out of things to discover in Vinland.
We made the tiles generation more procedural too: now there is a definite pool for every type of cell (Forest, Beach, Lake and Volcano). When you explore a tile, it generates a content from the pool, and remove it from the pool until you exhaust all the items in the pool, so there will be some kind of sense in the randomness. But that still means that the very first cells you explore contain Rune challenges or anything else… You’ll just have to keep them for later.
While playtesting it, I found that there is now a real utility in a little option that very few people used before: you can set the next target cell you want to explore by clicking on it on the map. In story mode, there is no real use of it because the progression is “intelligent”, but in Heodening mode if you don’t use that, you’ll never be able to reach the volcano… It can be useful. You’ll have to experiment.
Maybe you noticed? We added 3 big buttons on the map… the 3 “gods” are not generated on the map, but we thought it would be cool to have some use of them… In fact, they are clearly REALLY useful to mitigate a bit the randomness of this mode. Now, you can click on these buttons and go talk to them directly . They will act as traders, a bit like how Loki worked in the story mode.
Loki has a new inventory of useful items to sell (most importantly: Fire Crystal, Ancient Knowledge and Tinder), Freyja will give you some temporary powerful blessings or some instant healing, and Thor will give you temporary battle buffs.
They will all exchange their services for Orichalcum Beads, which are VERY important in Heodening mode. You’ll get them by completing Rune challenges, and by defeating boss squads.
Fighting
Talking about fights… We reworked a lot too how they are generated, to make them truly endless. We iterated on top of one of the features we implemented in the previous patch: now the enemies you’ll face will automatically get an increasing number of random Traits the more days you stay on the island. We made a new encounter’s table too, you may fight harder stacks early on, but they will have 2 bad Traits until a few dozen days have passed. You’ll also have the chance (?) to encounter one of the 5 boss fights we have in the base game… very hard fights, but if you manage to win them, there will be good rewards. (yes, you’ll also be able to face Björn!)
That’s really something hard to playtest on our own, so we’ll need A LOT of feedback on your experience with the balancing of it all, but especially the fights, when you’ll be able to play the DLC… We have a ton of parameters we can adjust, but well, it’s kind of experimental.
That’s all?
Of course not! There is still a BIG new feature in the endless mode that I didn’t talk about, but let’s keep it for another blog post ^^
There are also some massive surprises for the free 1.3 patch, I can’t wait to show you!
The second DLC and the 1.3 free patch will be available this winter.
A new mode! The Battle of the Heodenings is coming this winter!
Hello survivors!
We hope you're okay! So, it's been 2 months since we released the first DLC for Dead In Vinland! Did you take good care of the Vallhund? ;)
We've been hard at work on the DLC 2 and 3 for Dead In Vinland! And now, we think it's time we announced the second DLC for Dead In Vinland
Battle of the Heodenings
Battle of the Heodenings will be a brand-new mode for Dead In Vinland. This endless, sandboxy, rogue-likish mode will be focused on the survival aspect of the game.
This second DLC for Dead In Vinland will be available this winter. We'll give more information about it in the following weeks, so stay tuned!
And, as usual, we will also release a free patch with new features for the game when the DLC comes out ;)
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Happy surviving!
The Vallhund DLC is available now! + 1.2 Patch + New languages!
Hello survivors! Time to welcome the Vallhund in your camp!
The first DLC for Dead In Vinland is available now!
That's right, you can now get a new member in your camp! This is actually the first time that we’ve released a DLC for a game, sooo we’re quite nervous! We hope you'll like it!
[H1]The Vallhund
Owners of the Vallhund DLC will trigger a mid-day event where they will be able to “recruit” the dog into the camp. It will happen on day 5 for new games, but you can also load your save and the event should trigger the next mid-day if you already passed day 5.
Actions The little dog will now be part of your camp, and each half day you’ll be able to select 1 action that the dog will do. (more on that later)
The dog has 2 gauges: Affection and Energy
Energy will enable him to do more complex actions, and is spent when you do any action.
Affection will enable him to learn new tricks.
The dogs’ actions are very diverse:
The most basic action: Rest! The little dog will regain Energy.
You can send him to Fetch resources: Bones, Basic resources, Food
Decrease states: Depression and Injuries
Give bonus Traits tp Kari or the whole camp
Treasure hunt: he will try to find one of the Skill Upgrade items!
Training Like every other camp stations in the camp, you can “upgrade”, or rather, train your dog! This training won’t take any in-game time, so the effects of that training will be immediatly available after the upgrade.
Story And of course, there is a little story between your beloved dog and Kari… We added a few night events for them. Will Kari manage to train this cute little dog to be a fearsome beast? 😉
If you want to know everything in detail about this DLC and the 1.2 Patch, please head to our official blogpost
Something that was very requested by our players was new languages! Today, we're very happy to announce that Dead In Vinland now fully supports:
Polish (Community translation. Thanks A LOT to our awesome polish translators: MrOrochimaru, Amne, Jacek “OddFables”, Kosciesza Starszyjsierzant, Wioleta (Vix) Perkowska)
Italian (Official translation. Thanks to Roberto Bertoni of Daring Touch))
Chinese (Official translation. Thanks to our chinese partner WhisperGames)
1.2 Patch
There are quite a lot of new features included in the 1.2 Patch:
Random traits for enemies
Crits on camp actions
Upgraded battle character sheet
3rd focus for the exploration
Rework of how the breeding chances
Rework of how the traps and dryers work
You can now check the characters' sheet during the night
We want to thank every player who supported us so far! We stil have 2 more DLCs to release, and just like this one, with each DLC there will be a free patch with new features and improvements!
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