Drifting Lands
Drifting Lands new pricing - 5$
This decision is a way for us to try to share our work with a larger amount of people, without going so far as to make the game entirely free. There is no intent here to give a second life to the game, just the will to make more accessible our little contribution to the world of action-RPGs (see how I did not call it a shootemup ? ^^). The game didn't reach our expectations and retrospectively we would have done a lot of things differently, but i'm still super proud of the work of our little team.
For the time being we will continue to make slightly different games. Probably imperfect games, sometimes a bit too niche, but we will always try to bring something new, something different to the table, with a lot of polish as we did for the past ten years.
Thanks everyone.
An update... and some news
Hi All! It's been a while since the release of Drifting Lands. 7 months, and I have to admit we gave very little news or spend very little time improving the game. To be honest, the game didn't perform as well as we hoped. It's probably my fault, and for multiple reasons, but the sales barely covered 20% of the development cost. I can't really give steam sales publicly (it's supposed to be under NDA) but you can get a pretty accurate estimation by looking numbers on steamspy.
Anyway... We're still around because Alkemi has another source of stable income and we finally found some time to complete unfinished tasks we had on the game! At this point though, it would not be reasonable to expect a lot of new content or any console port for Drifting Lands. We lost enough money in this project as it is.
In the future, Alkemi will still work on games but probably with scopes A LOT smaller than for Drifting Lands. At least until, we have proven to ourselves that we are not only able to make games but that we are also able to actually sell them decently :)
Here's a changelog for this update :
FEATURES:
* We finally changed the gamepad control in the menus. It's now a focus based control system. If like me you prefered the virtual cursor, you can still switch back to the old mode in the options!
IMPROVEMENTS:
* Most SFXs of weapons have been revamped and are now much more present in the global mix (stronger and louder pew pews!)
* There is now less notifications when you start the game. Some have been removed, others less important are triggered later in the game.
* 2 mandatory missions were removed in grade 1 to allow a quicker progression in those boring levels without suicide bullets :)
* There is now a helper window to remind you that you have cargo in your hold each time you return from a mission. You can empty your hold into your stash directly from this window.
Minor Fix
* Fixed a bug preventing from using the Skill Harpoon (Spear) with a pad
* Fixed a graphical bug on the Guardian and Crusader
Weekly Patch !
* 2 New skills :
- Expert Mine
- Charged Fire
BUGS:
* Fixed a bug in the mouse control detection which would cause some controllers to not work anymore
A few more fixes!
* Added an option to disable mouse control in the settings. If you want to use your mouse for its buttons but move with your keyboard.
* Slow camera movement is now also disabled when you disable screenshakes in the Settings. Even if the text doesn't yet say so.
IMPROVEMENTS:
* Added in forgiving mode the possibility to buy one item of each type with a level 1 in the Market. These level 1 items are always free and should avoid a situation where you have no money left to repair a weapon or an energy cell and no way to earn any more money.
* Saves are now automatically triggered each time you craft an item from a blueprint or if the application loses focus.
BUGS:
* Fixed a bug causing one part of the Hunter to become invulnerable
BALANCE:
* Uniques should drop significantly more on most Bosses.
* Decreased the duration between the arrival of the two Guardians from 30 to 25s for dual Guardians fights.
Mouse Control Update
A major change today: mainly to improve accessibility we have to decided to allow mouse control during gameplay phases. Some people may also feel like it's giving a lot more control to dodge bullets efficiently. We also improved pad and keyboard controls by adding a slow movement mode you can trigger with a button or a key to move precisely with greater ease.
FEATURES:
* FULL mouse control. Even during the missions. (the cursor sensitivity now applies to menu AND mission controls)
* Slow move feature added to gamepad and keyboard controls. A new button to move at a third of your maximum speed to allow greater precision.
IMPROVEMENTS:
* Intro volume is now correctly using your sound settings
BUGS:
* fixed a bug causing notification titles to overlap with the close button
BALANCE:
* The fight against the 2 guardians is now easier: one of them will appear 30 seconds before the other. It may not be enough to finish him but you'll have two of them during a much shorter period.
Post Release Patch #6
FEATURES:
* An important missing part is not missing anymore...
BUGS:
* Fixed a bug causing unlocks of ships to be transferred to another save slot.
Post Release Patch #5
* Bravado, a new rank 5 Skill in the Close Range family
BUGS:
* Fix on the Controller detection. Hopefully this should allow more unrecognized gamepads to be used.
* You can now skip entire cutscenes by pressing the skip dialogue button for 2 seconds.
* Update of the Steamworks.NET dll. Hopefully this will limit problem of connection to Steam for the game.
* Fixed a bug on the item tooltip background. The size was sometimes not correctly calculated when there were too many modifiers.
BALANCE:
* The speedrun achievement (Faster than Bestio?) has now a time limit of 3h30 instead of 3h. It was really too tight with cutscenes.
Post Release Patch #4
* On the market screen, sorting items on all stash tabs now correctly refreshes the "sell all" buttons.
* Fixed a minor bug on account creation while navigating through pages.
IMPROVEMENTS:
* More waves for the third faction.
* Bigger texts in item tooltips when viewport height is equal or greater than 900px.
* When comparing two items, missing modifiers are no longer striked out.
* Account file persistence is less often triggered now.
* Pressing the "back" button while on the Hub screen or Account screen will now show the quit message box.
Post Release Patch #3
* The demo was ending with a cutscene ("Dissent") with missing assets. You can now watch correctly this cutscene in the demo. No more crash.
* The mission "witness protection" was automatically launched whatever you did after any attempt at any other mission until you finally succeeded. This was causing some players to get stuck because they didn't have good enough stuff to fight the Guardian at the end. This mission is not automatically launched anymore.
* Expert Blade and Expert Detonation were completely broken and were dealing waaaaaay too much damage. This is fixed.
* Fixed some typos or text placements in french
* A few achievements concerning equipment were not tested correctly. It is now fixed.
BALANCE:
* Guardians now wait an average duration 50% longer before fleeing.