The release on steam has gone really well I must say! I've gotten a lot of positive comments that really inspired me. I've also gotten some constructive critique that have helped me get some perspective on certain aspects of the game. So thank you all :D
So now a new version has been released, this is mostly a bug fixing version that solved some major bugs that the player wasn't able to go to the surface without reseting the game (by saving and reloading it). Well, this have been solved now together with some other bugs. But they are not really solved until you the player confirms them as solved :)
So here's the changelog of the bugs that have been solved with this version
0.11.15 - Can't Render PrtScr in Full Screen Mode - There have been some issues with not being able to do a print-screen in fullscreen mode. This has now been solved by using the borderless window option in the launcher.
So my next step is to categorize the resources in the top menu bar. This is so that it will be a lot easier for players to keep track of the resources. I also want to be able to hover them so the player gets more information about what item it is, and what it is for etc. You can read more about this suggestion here.
And after that is done and I've pushed that update I will start working on the level editor so that we get some campaigns in there. I also want the level editor to be accessible to the players from start so that they can start making levels on their own if they want to :D
Dwelvers 0.11.15 is now released on Steam
Hi all :)
Dwelvers 0.11.15 has been released on Steam! It has been over a year since the last update on Steam so this is a really big step, My hopes have been to turn some of those negative reviews around about the game being abandoned.
So to make this release as good as possible we have done some serious bug-testing on the Dwelvers forum. Three weeks ago I released Dwelvers exclusively on the Dwelvers website, and during that time up until now the forum users have been really good at reporting all the bugs they could find. Well, they have reported small bugs and big bugs, and in total they reported 85 bugs. And 81 of them has been solved :D
So my hope now is that this will be the most stable release ever on Steam!
So what's new since the last Steam release? I've been making some smaller news post about the progress up until now, but I feel like it is the time to sum it all up :)
SMP are no longer publishers of Dwelvers
I ended my cooperation with SMP so now they don't get any cuts from the Dwelvers sale. There was a lot of unhappiness about SMP in general, and a lot of it spilled over on Dwelvers. So therefore I decided to start new and bought their shares in the game.
As a developer I know that what takes the longest time to develop in a game is usually what is seen the least. So therefore I took some time picking some low hanging fruits, and that was the graphics! I also felt like this was something I had to do because I know that this game engine has so much potential, and somewhere down the road I let the graphics stray down the wrong path. So I gave it a shot and updated the lightning, water, lava and the rock.
The biggest feature I've been working on since the last release is the new radial menu. The main purpose of this was to remove all the build options from the bottom bar and put them all into the radial menu that is controlled by the mouse. Why I didn't do this in earlier versions is because we had a huge amount of building options that couldn't be presented efficiently enough in the radial menu.
So that's where the new system comes in. Now you can select almost anything in the dungeon such as bar tables, farm gates and construction sites and get information about these individual buildings. In earlier versions you selected the whole tile, and this tile could for example contain a farm room, farm land and farm gates. Which made it very hard to separate the information.
So now when right-clicking on an object you only get the actions available for you that you can do, which filters down the options dramatically and make the game play much more intuitive.
So I really hope you like this new version, and if you have any questions or suggestions please let me know in the comment section below :)
I must say that some of the comments you have given me earlier have given me so much motivation in the development, and for that I'm eternally grateful :D
Dwelvers 0.11.x bug testing version has been released on Dwelvers website
Hi all
Finally Dwelvers 0.11.x BT has been released! A lot have changed since the last version, we have new graphics, a new UI, and a new radial menu that is a lot more intuitive. This version is a bug testing version and will probably contain some nasty issues. Therefore it is not available on Steam yet. This is because I don't want to release a game that hasn't been properly tested to a big crowd that wants to enjoy playing the game without bugs.
So Dwelvers v0.11.x BT can now be downloaded from the website by those of you that have buyers account. If you want to be a part of the bug testing team and are owners of Dwelvers on Steam but don't have a website account then please contact me and I will set up an account for you. My plan is to use this upcoming week to bug-fixing, and when the week is up release a stable version on Steam. Once again, if you feel left out of from this release then please contact me.
So here's some of the updates that have been made since the last release and that I haven't reported about before.
New Launcher
I have been working on making the menus more clean by giving them a flat modern design, and the first thing I started working on was the launcher.
New game menu
When I was finished with the launcher I gave the game menu a shot. You can check it out here below. Please note that when you select "Start game" the tutorial have been disabled. It is because the voice acting wasn't consistent with the new UI in the game and it would only have created more confusion for new players.
My plan is to release a level editor with the next big release (in a month or two), and with this a couple of campaigns. The campaigns will be created in such a way that they will teach the player the game as he goes along. So therefore I didn't want to spend an extra week fixing this tutorial when it would be replaced in the end anyways.
Better building sites and a new info menu
If you recall earlier newsposts I made I talked about being able to select individual buildings tiles. So now instead of selecting the whole tile you are able to select a table, a farm gate, the room floor and more just by pointing on that object.
This gave me a lot more possibilities informing the player about individual buildings instead of packing together information about all the buildings, minerals and jobs on one tile. So what I did was expanding the info bar in the bottom so that it now can contain three rows. The first row shows the name of the building selected, the second row more details about the building and the third row technical information about the building, such as health, items delivered, if it attracts any creatures etc.
This also enabled me to remove the hovering icons above the buildings which made the dungeon look a lot more cleaner. In the screenshot below you can see how it looks when the player is selecting a building site. Also, many of the building sites (not all) now have progression models for what building is being built. In this case it is a table, and we can see how the imp builds the table step by step.
New radial menu
Now this is the big update. A new radial menu that contains almost everything! As it contains almost everything I was able to clean up the UI from all the building buttons in the bottom right, and this made the UI look a lot nicer and not as confusing in my opinion. The radial menu works as such that if you right click a tile you will get options that affects that tile.
For example, if you right-click water you will not get the option to build rooms, because you can't build rooms on water. And right-clicking next to a wall gives you an option to build wall related buildings. At first I made it so that it filtered away everything that couldn't be built on the selected tile, but I noticed pretty quickly that this caused some confusion for me because the options got a new location in the menu everytime and was therefore harder to locate.
So now it works like this, if you are able to do a fluid action such as dropping water on the ground, you will get the fluid menu, and in that menu you also have the options of building bridges as so on. So it is only the first radial menu that gets filtered, not the sub menus.
And a lot more...
As it was more than a year ago since the last release and I've been working on the game a little bit now and then it is hard for me to memorize all the changes that I've made. So you will most definitely find a lot more than new stuff than what I've been pointing out in this news post. There has also been a lot of under the hood changes such as me cleaning up the source code that will have no affect on you what so ever, except me being able to find bugs a lot faster Tongue One thing you may notice is that the game loads a lot faster, this may not be such a huge deal for you but it is for me as I'm restarting the game about a 100 times a day when developing it.
Final words
As I said in the start of this news post this version is only released on the website because it needs some serious bug-testing before I release it on Steam. During this week I will not only fix bugs, I will also try to get some achievement into the game so that the players gets a better feeling of progression and reward.
Well, that is it for me for today, I will be back tomorrow with some more information and answer all the questions you may have.
Thank you all for helping me with bug testing the game and not giving up hope :)
I really hope you enjoy this version, and if there is something you don't like, please let me know so that I can make it right.
Dwelvers Alpha v0.11.x BT is available for download only at the Dwelvers Website
Graphics Reworked
Hi all,
For the last week I've been working on some eyecandy as well as the new UI. I felt like this was something I had to do because I know that this game engine has so much potential, and somewhere down the road I let the graphics stray down the wrong path. So I gave it a shot and updated the lightning, water, lava and the rock.
New lightning
First of, I have given all the creatures and buildings in dungeon new specular textures so that the materials looks much more alive. Here we have a screenshot of the Dark Mother and the walls surrounding her, you can see how the light shines on her demon like skin, and that the walls reflects the light in a appropriate manner.
One thing that I've been working on before and never got right was that the dungeon was either to dark or to bright. I had trouble giving the rooms enough lights to not look empty, and if I gave them some overall lights the rest of the dungeon usually got to dark because I didn't want to overexpose the lightning. Now this is solved! What I did was that I gave all the room objects a light above them, which made them stand out more and look a lot more active.
Another feature I added to make the dungeon look less pale was that I gave all the corners shadows. If you look at the picture below you can see that all the corner edges has a darker edge, and if a wall edge is facing an open area it is made a little bit brighter. It is not much brighter or darker, but it is enough to give the player a much better feeling of depth.
I just had to replace the rock texture! The problem with the old one was that the color was way to outstanding, and as it is a rock I don't want the player eyes to be distracted by it. Just like the lights above important buildings make these buildings stand out, a grayer texture makes the rocks stand out less, and by doing this the important buildings stands out even more. This screenshot may not be the perfect example of this because it only features rocks, but you can check out the other screenshots to see what I mean.
As everything else in the dungeon started to look more realistic (but not too realistic) I had to rework the water as well. The old green water just didn't cut it, it just didn't look like water. So now we have a more realistic looking water! I made some research on this and the most authentic water color in a cave would be the same color as the rock surrounding it, and a lot darker. But I had to gamify it so that it was easier to see and to select, therefore I gave it a bit greenish color.
Here you can see an example of a calm lake that is reflecting the light from the hand, but is also reflecting the rocks surrounding it. The cyclotaur is also being reflected but it is much more easier to see this in game than with a screenshot.
I didn't post any images on the new UI and menu system because I wanted to leave that for my next newsletter. Right now everything is working almost as it should and I mostly have to check the game for bugs. So for the next week I will play through the game over and over again searching for bugs that may have come up with this huge code re-factorization I've made. So hopefully in a week or two I will be able to release a new version. But in the meantime I will need bug testers, if you feel up to it just let me know and I will add you to my pre-release list.
So what did you all think of the new graphics? Please let me know in the comments below :)
SMP are no longer publishers of Dwelvers
Hi all,
It has been a while since my last news update here, or any post at all for that matter, sorry about that. It is just so hard to be engaged when I have no new game updates to show.
I have noticed that the rating for the game has gone down a lot, which is understandable when no new updates are being made. I just hope that if I get back to working full time on Dwelvers this will change.
Even if many of the reviews are "not recommended" they still give me some inspiration, because the main reason for these reviews is that the development has halted, and not that the game itself is bad. So I still feel hope to turn these reviews around at some point.
That is also why I've taken the step to buy out SMP (The developers of Towns). I felt that if I'm going to get back to developing Dwelvers I can't have SMP's bad reputation following me around.
So for the last months I've been working on the next update. It has only been about 10 - 12 hours a week, but at this point it is enough to be able to release a new update within a couple of weeks. The update is a big refactoring of the menu system so that it is much more intuitive. I will get back to you all with some more information about this in a week.
Thank you all for your patience :)
Development updates
Hi all,
It has been some time since the last update, the reason for this is that I'm working full time on another job and therefore I don't have as much time to develop Dwelvers as I wish,
I started looking for a full time job because the income I got from Dwelvers just wasn't enough. From start I had some money put away to manage, but after three years of solely living of the income Dwelvers my economy went pretty bad.
My economy is back on track now, but I still can't go back to develop Dwelvers as I did before, because if I did then a couple months from now I would be in the same situation as before.
Since the last update I have been working on the game, but I haven't added any new features, instead I took the opportunity to just improve on the game and make the game engine more stable. So at the time being I have been able to work on Dwelvers about 10 hours a week. In the month of November I think things will loosen up a little bit more for me and I will probably be able to develop Dwelvers more than that.
Just know that even if I talk about that Dwelvers don't give me enough income I know it's just because Dwelvers is still in Early Access, and that I still haven't used up any of the promotions opportunities Steam offers. Therefore I know that Dwelvers will pay of financially in the end once it is finished, but I also know that it will be a couple of years from now probably. But I also know that I can't just drain myself focusing on finishing Dwelvers while having my economy balancing on an edge. Therefore I have decided to let it take the time it takes and do it properly.
I'm hoping that the next update will be out before the end of the year, it will be a big update in performance, graphics and stability. The new menu system will also be included in this update as well. I will not post any progress photos until then because I don't know how much I will be able to work on Dwelvers, and I find it extremely stressful when I need to post updates on a regular basis. So my plan now is to let the next release come with a big news update boom and with using one of the Steam promotions.
If you have any questions about anything just let me know and I will answer as soon as possible.
Thank you all for your patience :)
Post Kickstarter and the second look at the new UI
It has been two weeks since the Kickstarter ended, unfortunately it didn't go as well as I've hoped. But never the less, I'll keep on developing Dwelvers out of the reason that I love developing Dwelvers :D
Here's the new development update of Dwelvers, I hope you enjoy it and don't forget to like the video to help me with spreading Dwelvers to the masses. If you have any questions or suggestions about this video then don't hesitate to tell me :)
https://youtu.be/kRzk4fL4QbE
First Look at the New UI
This week I've been working real hard on the new UI, unfortunately I haven't been able to finish it in time, so this week there will be no new version of Dwelvers. Instead I made a YouTube video explaining what I've done so far this week.
Please check it out and give me your opinion of what you think :)
https://youtu.be/DJQTjD9WsVY
Dwelvers Alpha v0.10 released!
The focus this week has been the radial menu and restructuring of the UI. It's a big feature and not fully tested yet, so this week's update consists of a bunch of bugfixes.
The radial menu I'm working on is moddable and will be smarter. Now the menu items will be based upon which game object that is right clicked. This means that if the player right clicks on a mineral tile like coal, they will get the option to construct a mine there without selecting the "construct mine" tool first. An other example is that if the player right clicks on a construction, they will have the option to sell it, without first selecting the sell tool. When I release it I will give a full description on how it works and how you can mod it.
Tonight at 6 pm CET James and I will also have a livestream that you are more than welcome to participate in where we will talk about this release. We will make this a weekly event every Wednesday at this time, Check us out at: https://www.youtube.com/user/Dwelvers/live
For those of you how haven't played Dwelvers in a while I recommend checking ou Nathan's Sandbox Dwelvers Let's Play here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxoRp_kmAUI&list=PLCUMEjFdpASnoB7HEX-fViuYWKu-aR1XV&index=1
Please, tell us what you think about this update :)
Dwelvers Alpha v0.9g-2 released
The plan was to wait until thursday before the next release, but because we got some game breaking bugs reported we needed to make a hotfix. We had an issue where some couldn't put down a rally flag on the surface, and another case when selling the guard room could cause crashes. I have fixed more bugs than that, but these were the most urgent bugs to fix.
I hope you enjoy this version, and don't forget to check out the forum, we have many bugs there that has been solved but needs confirmation from players.
