We've been cranking out new content for you in the latest version of Fictorum. We're still a few months off from having it where we'd like it, but we're really excited for you to play it once it's ready!
For those of you near Seattle, we'll have a booth at Rencon over the weekend. If you live nearby, we'd love to meet you! You can also play our latest version with all of the new badass spells we've added.
Here's a quick sample of a few of them:
We hope you have a great weekend :)
V1.2.3 Patch Notes
Hey Wizards,
We're still hard at work on version 1.3! A pretty major bug came to our attention so we wanted to get a tiny update out.
Patch Notes:
Fictorum Patch v1.2.1 (and v1.2.2)
Hey Wizards,
We've just released version 1.2.1, which has a boatload of fixes and improvements (many of which were suggestions from our player community)!
Patch Notes:
Fictorum Patch V1.2
Fictorum v1.2 Released!
Major Change: New Runes
New runes can be found throughout the world! These powerful spell augments are Sentinel, Storm, Familiar, Bounce, Chaos, and Order.
We put together a new shorter, hardcore only game mode for players to try. This is still in its preliminary stages and may evolve in the future.
Major Change: Observer Mode
Players can now take control of an observer and view the world in slow-motion.
https://gfycat.com/OrnateScaredCricket
Major Change: Cone of Cold Improvements
Cone of Cold has been significantly improved by granting the player the ability to create walkways, bridges, and ramps.
https://gfycat.com/MindlessImpossibleGoosefish
Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes
What's Next?
Now that we've improved the overall quality and internal structure of Fictorum, we are ready to focus our efforts on adding new content. Additionally, we're on a much more recent version of the Unreal Engine and have no plans to upgrade again (which was the source of most of our dev time in releasing this version), which means that we can get future updates out much more frequently.
Here are a few of the things that we're planning:
We hope you're as excited about these changes as we are. If you'd like to chat with us about suggestions to improve our game or share any issues you encounter, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to us in whatever way works best for you.
Beta Testing v1.2
Hey, Wizards! We’re working on some major changes in the upcoming version 1.2 patch and would love your feedback!
Features:
New Shorter game mode
New Runes: Sentinel, Familiar, Storm, Chaos, and Order
New Spell: Flareus
New Observer mode (Will need to reset your keybindings to take effect)
New enemy difficulty: Every 4 chapters enemies get significantly harder, (enemies are also probably way too fast in later chapters).
Performance improvements
Known bugs (we'll get these fixed in a few days):
The History Windows re-opens on selecting an event, and opens twice
Chaos and Order runes can be assigned to channeling and area spells, but will have no effect
Storm, Sentinel, and Familiar runes can be assigned to channeling spells, but will have no effect
All new runes lack descriptions and final symbols
For a full list of everything we’re working on, check out our Trello list here: https://trello.com/b/8wEgujks/fictorum-the-road-to-more-patches
To enable the Fictorum [beta] branch on your Steam:
Go to your library, right click on Fictorum
Click on Properties
Go to the BETAS tab
Select “beta - Beta”
We really value your feedback and would love to know what you think of the new spell, runes and game mode, feel free to reach out to us on:
We're back with another few quick bug fixes and added a binding for our Bug Helper.
Fictorum v1.1.05 Patch Notes
Fictorum v1.1.04 Patch Notes
Hey, fellow wizards!
Whoops! We broke the chapter map a little bit and the inventory wasn't behaving properly when using the Escape key to close the inventory. We've fixed those issues and a few others.
Fictorum v1.1.04 Patch Notes
Fictorum v1.1.03 Patch Notes
Hey, fellow wizards!
We've got a couple of good things in this patch—mainly a pretty nasty crash to desktop, along with a few quality of life changes.
Fictorum v1.1.03 Patch Notes
Fictorum v1.1.02 Patch Notes and v1.1 Reception
Hey, wizards!
Thank you so much for the bug reports, feedback, and reviews! Based on your suggestions, we've got a clear road ahead for our next improvements.
We've been hard at work to resolve bugs as they arise and we've just pushed an update to the latest version, bringing us to v1.1.02. Here are the patch notes:
Fictorum v1.1 Released
Fictorum v1.1 Released!
But First: A Word from the Devs
Seeing the large number of bugs reported from our players and the critical reviews (which were completely fair), we realize that our game was not quite ready for release, nor did it meet a lot of our player's expectations, and for that, we're sorry. We hope this patch can restore your confidence in us and Fictorum, and further, we plan to add more content and features to our game in the future (all completely free) to expand upon its potential and our initial goal of making a truly great game to play as a wizard.
After the game's release in August, we combed through our reviews and feedback and listened to our game's community for ways that we can improve our game and, after months of hard work, we are proud to bring you a massive patch with those improvements.
https://youtu.be/5IuPpNOF-TM
Major Change: Performance Improvements
We've made massive performance boosts throughout Fictorum! The areas that you'll see the biggest changes are:
The camera will switch to an over-the-shoulder view while inside buildings for a more consistent experience. Additionally, you can now play over the left or right shoulder (available in the settings menu or press the interact hotkey while casting a spell to switch in-game).
We've ditched the joystick mouse cursor plugin we previously used and reworked all of our UI to work beautifully and seamlessly with a gamepad. Additionally, we've added an auto-sort feature to make managing the inventory with the gamepad even easier.
https://gfycat.com/ifr/BackCarefulBactrian
Major Change: Event Rewrites
We've been working with Nathan Fierro—the author of The Demon of Cliffside—to improve our existing events and add new ones. Every single event has been either edited, rewritten, or removed and he has done an amazing job crafting the confident, brutal, and vengeance-fueled voice of our game.
New Starting Text:
It was impossible, of course. But Acanthio was a Fictorum, the last one, and by stretching the very limits of his power and of creation itself he survived his own execution. Such power comes with a price, however, and his body was warped with corruption, his mind scarred with the brief, blazing glimpse of the world that moment gave him, of the horrors within the Miasma. And of the Inquisition, its endless armies already stirring, a hound scenting the magical trace of his miracle. The Firebrand could not run away, not forever, but he could run toward. He cast his vision onto his map, marking the way to the Grand Inquisitor. Marked with red, marked with blood. It was the Grand Inquisitor who had decreed The Firebrand would die, and it was death he would receive.
Major Change: AI Improvements
One of the main complaints of our game was the AI. Upon spotting the player, enemies would run as fast as they could towards the player in the absolute, most direct line. With this version, we've significantly improved their formerly bad behavior—they'll now search for alternate routes to overwhelm the player in small groups of mixed forces, working together to bring the player down. This has also laid the framework allowing us to do even more for our enemies later on...
https://gfycat.com/ifr/ZigzagIllinformedJaguar
Major Change: Physics Improvements
Another common comment that we saw when we posted to Imgur or reddit was that our destructible meshes lack weight and move too much like foam once shattered. After adjusting the physical materials of our meshes, they now move much more realistically.
We made a big mistake when we were first setting up our enemy spellcasters in that they all had their own individual spells that were specific to the caster, even if it was essentially the same spell. They worked differently, had inconsistent damage and physics, caused loads of bugs and balancing issues, and were an overall pain to maintain. Eventually, we realized that we should rework all spellcasters and archers to use the same spells available for the player and then add any additional output (damage tweaks, multi-shot, chain reaction, etc.) that we'd like for them. As a result, casters are more varied, putting to use spells that you can also find in-game. We even have more we'd like to do with these capabilities, but that's for another patch...
https://gfycat.com/ifr/BlandSillyDiplodocus
Minor Improvements and Bug Fixes
What's Next?
Now that we've improved the overall quality and internal structure of Fictorum, we are ready to focus our efforts on adding new content. Additionally, we're on a much more recent version of the Unreal Engine and have no plans to upgrade again (which was the source of most of our dev time in releasing this version), which means that we can get future updates out much more frequently.
Here are a few of the things that we're planning:
We hope you're as excited about these changes as we are. If you'd like to chat with us about suggestions to improve our game or share any issues you encounter, we'd love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out to us in whatever way works best for you.
