FrankenStorm TD (Full Version): Steam Coming Soon Page and First Trailer is Up!
We've had our heads down, working hard on the full version of FrankenStorm, and are delighted to finally be able to share some progress with you all! Here is the full game's Steam Coming Soon page, and we hope you enjoy the first trailer:
As you can see, it's a huge increase in scope compared to the prologue. A recap of some of the changes that are visible so far:
- Switch from 2D to 3D 😮 - New types of structural rewards: different towers and traps - New maps with their own environmental mechanics (not just skins like in the prologue)
And there's a lot more that's not yet visible:
- A full campaign with different branches to go down. Branches will be unlocked based on what you've got salvaged! - Many more enemy types planned - A crafting system to bring new life to old salvaged rewards - A complete rework to the code that runs the game, aiming for better performance
What's Next?
As you can see, there's a lot for us to do 😅 We need more time to work these through tasks and make the best game we can, so we appreciate your patience in following us through this journey.
The next milestone for the full game is a demo release, which we mentioned in our newsletter as a target for February 2023.
The demo will contain a small slice of the game's full content. Planned is 3 maps out of 10+, maybe 10 towers out of 50+, etc...
Your support in the form of a wishlist on the above Steam page would be super valuable for us, as it helps sway the Steam algorithms in out favour ❤️
Thank you, take care 👋
Dr Frank N. Storm PLUSHIE
A plan has been set. The schematics have been drawn. It's only a matter of time until this experiment's inevitable success - those imbeciles won't be able to stop us now!
Yes, of course I'm talking about the new Dr Frank N. Storm PLUSHIE that will be gracing the Earth with its presence in the months to come!
Although we must keep the precise schematics a secret for now, we're running the numbers and planning for success.
So let us bring the Dr Frank N. Storm plushie to life together! Hit the 👍-button on this announcement to help us run the numbers, and join the Discord for updates and launch news.
Enough banter now, I hear the clanging of pitchforks approach ⚡
Trashing salvaged doodads now refunds 50% of their Salvage Point cost
Season 2 is here! Details follow...
Season 2 details
Highscores for the v1.0 leaderboard are now locked permanently, including for any in-progress saved games, and are only viewable for history.
A new v1.1 leaderboard is available, and the all time leaderboard continues to be available both for viewing and setting new highscores.
For a highscore to be eligible for the v1.1 leaderboard, you must not have any salvaged doodads from past seasons equipped. That means you must use a salvage set consisting entirely of new doodads, although you can use salvage points earned in the past to help salvage these new doodads.
Balance Changes
All balance changes below only affect newly found doodads, unless otherwise mentioned.
There are significant nerfs to the most powerful strategies from season 1, with the goal of reducing the highscores by more than 100 waves, bringing things closer to the original intended game duration.
Enemy changes
Movement speed increase per wave has been reduced by 20%
The rate that the number of enemies per wave increases has been reduced by ~20%
The minimum effective enemy chance and life multipliers have been increased from -90% to -80%, now matching the minimum effective movement speed multiplier
Doodad and Gadget changes
Fixed an oddity where a Doodad's dodge penalty was worse than a Gadget's
Before: Doodad 3-4% dodge; Gadget 2-4% dodge
After: Doodad 1.5-2% dodge; Gadget 3-4% dodge
Tinkerer's Gadget prefix weakened from 7-9% chance to 6-8% chance
Removed Reach (attack radius) suffix from Gadgets. It is now only a prefix
Removed Violence (explosion radius) suffix from Gadgets. It is now only a prefix
Violent (explosion radius) prefix on Gadgets improved from 0.25-0.35m to 0.4-0.6m
Removed Escalating Violence (explosion radius over time) suffix from Doodads. It is now only available on Gadgets
Nova (chance on hit to nova) prefix on Gadgets weakened from 4-7% chance-on-hit to 2-4%
Penalties related to spawning Brutes / Hounds / Hawks have had their chances increased:
Doodad penalties increased from 7-10% to 10-13%
Gadget penalties increased from 10-15% to 14-20%
Masterpiece changes
Lightning Rod reworked and weakened:
Before: Multiple rods would increase the armour shred per hit, and the total shredded amount was uncapped
After: Armour shred is fixed to -1% per hit. The total shredded amount is capped at -250% - -200% per rod. Multiple rods add their caps together (e.g. -220% + -240% = -460% cap)
Nova Core changed to make it harder to achieve enormous novas with only a few % attack radius Gadgets:
Before: -75% - -65% attack radius
After: -2m attack radius AND -50% - -40% attack radius
The following masterpieces have had their randomised penalty removed:
Unstable Acceleration
Fanaticism
Cable Runner
Induction
Cable Runner weakened (considering the removed randomised penalty) from 0.5 wires per wave to 0.25
Focus Distributor improved:
Before: +3m explosion radius AND -75% - -60% hit damage
After: +3-4m explosion radius AND -65% - -50% hit damage
Arrival Party improved from 1 fireworks to 8-12
Stasis Trap improved from a 1.5s stun to 5s. This change also affects legacy Stasis Traps
Induction improved. It now additionally grants 3-5 Towers and 7-10 Wires
Other Changes
The shielding penalty has been reworked. This change also affects legacy doodads with shielding penalties. Here's the new stat description:
Enemies have +X% chance per second to gain 10% of their Max Life as Shield
The sprinting penalty has been reworked. This change also affects legacy doodads with sprinting penalties. Here's the new stat description:
Enemies have +X% chance per second to gain 50% Speed for 1.5 seconds
Towers have been changed to have their attack and burst cooldowns continue to tick down even while they're disabled by Scientists - they simply won't shoot until the disable ends
Season 2 Release & Dev Live Stream Timing + Salvage Set Editor Sneak Peak
Pardon the very short notice, but here are the season 2 launch and live dev stream time in a few timezones:
Feb 23 12am GMT
Feb 23 11am AEST
Feb 22 4pm PST
We're preparing our sacrifices to the code gods to ensure a timely launch and live stream tomorrow, so prepare your alibis to avoid work and join in the fun as season 2 of the FrankenStorm Prologue begins with a fresh leaderboard.
What do you mean, Season 2?
Highscores for the v1.0 leaderboard will be locked permanently, including for any in-progress saved games, and will only be viewable for history.
A new v1.1 leaderboard will be available, and the all time leaderboard continues to be available both for viewing and setting new highscores.
For a highscore to be eligible for the v1.1 leaderboard, you must not have any salvaged doodads from past seasons equipped. That means you must use a salvage set consisting entirely of new doodads, although you can use salvage points earned in the past to help salvage these new doodads.
That may sound inconvenient, but we have more changes coming to improve the experience around...
Salvage Set Management
A new feature included in the v1.1 seasonal update is the ability to create and manage multiple salvage sets. They all share the same pool of available salvaged doodads, and allow you to switch quickly between different equipment sets.
Click on a salvage set to activate it, and then click again to edit it.
On the edit screen you now have a stat list too, showing all the stats active from equipped doodads and allowing you to filter the salvaged doodad list to help you more quickly find what you're looking for. There's also a button to toggle display of all stats (as in, even stats with 0% active) if you're looking for doodads that haven't yet been equipped yet.
Pro-tip: On filter-able stat lists, you can right-click a stat to exclude any doodads that have that stat!
You may notice that both individual doodads and whole salvage sets have a "version" associated to them, on the right of their name. This represents the season that the doodad was found and salvaged in, or the season of the oldest doodad equipped to a salvage set. If you equip any doodads from an old season to a salvage set, then any highscores earned with that salvage set active will be ineligible from appearing on the seasonal leaderboard.
That means if you want to show up on the v1.1 leaderboards, you must use a v1.1 salvage set (e.g. a salvage set that only contains v1.1 doodads).
However, you can still compete for the all time leaderboards with salvage sets of any version, if you'd like to.
Salvage Point Refunds
In the new version you will be able to trash salvaged doodads to be refunded 50% of the Salvage Points spent on them.
This includes doodads from previous seasons, or doodads from the current season, so it'll hopefully not feel as bad if you salvage "sub-optimal" doodads to speed up your effectiveness in the new season 🙂
So, Game On!
We hope you like the sound of this, and are as eager as we are to jump into the new season tomorrow 😀 I already see those imbeciles charging in with renewed vigour, so we best prepare our defences.
Full patch notes describing all balance changes will be made available alongside the launch tomorrow.
See you then ⚡
v1.0.10 Update
Change log:
During wave one's construction phase, you can now press R or a button at the top-left to instantly re-roll switch positions
You can now toggle a Friends Only leaderboard display, to see your ranking amongst only your friends
You can now click the photosensitivity warning to skip it
Added master volume setting
Wave rewards can no longer roll a Masterpiece with the same penalty as a Gadget or Doodad in that set - previously only Gadgets and Doodads had this rule
Certain Masterpieces have had "overly self-synergistic" penalties removed from their random pool (only affecting new reward choices), specifically:
Unstable Acceleration, Fanaticism and And Another One will no longer roll speed related penalties
Larger than Life will no longer roll life related penalties
There are now skulls scattered around the UI indicating when Nightmare difficulty is being played, suitable for most "screenshot occasions"
Bug fixes:
And Another One switch placement behaviour changed: it used to check that a potential spot had all neighbouring tiles be empty (not even allowing wires) - this is sometimes impossible and crashes the game. Now it checks that it doesn't have any neighbouring switches instead
Large explosions are no longer visible outside the play area on vertical aspect ratios
Fixed a tooltip error that showed enemy shield chance as having a 2 second cooldown when it has in fact had an 0.2 second cooldown
Attempt to fix the problem where some chance-based effects were triggering despite having 0% chance to (e.g. Coup de Grace, enemy shield). Not sure if it works lol
Attempt to reduce the rate of accidental reward clicks (e.g. clicking without knowing the wave ended and accidentally selecting a reward) by preventing reward choice selection for ~0.3 seconds as they fade in
New Season Plans & Current Season Review
We're about 6 weeks into Prologue's launch now, which is about half way to the game's second season. Let's talk about what these seasons mean, what to look forward to in the new season, and how things are going in the current (1st) season 🙂
Seasons the what now?
FrankenStorm TD: Prologue will release with a new "season" about every 3 months, for two main reasons:
1. To add a new, blank leaderboard for a refreshed competition 2. To roll out significant balance changes, largely in response to what turned out to be over or underpowered in the previous season, without unfairly affecting the current season's leaderboard
Old salvaged doodads cannot be used to compete in a new season's leaderboard - you'll need to start a fresh new set. But you can keep old ones and still play for the All Time leaderboard if you want to.
Unspent Salvage Points will be retained and usable when a new season begins. Also, we'll be allowing players to scrap salvaged doodads (including ones from previous seasons) to recover a percentage of the Salvage Points spent on them. Hopefully this means playing before a new season begins shouldn't feel "useless".
Season 2 starts on February 23/24. What's there to look forward to?
The salvage section of the menu screen will be revamped to enable some of the things just described, making it easier to browse and manage growing sets of salvaged doodads.
Otherwise, some major balance changes are planned in response to patterns that emerged from players in season 1. Here are the key gameplay problems that we aim to address:
Focus Distributor is practically never used
Lightning Rod, Snow Day and Tinkerer stacking feel "required" for achieving very high scores
It's still easier than it was intended to be to achieve consistent, massive area novas or explosions
Stacking negative enemy chance frequency lets you pick far too many Brute / Hound penalties before they stop showing up, removing more penalty variance than was intended
Overall, the highest scores are much higher than the game was initially designed for, leading to excessively long, slow and very laggy matches
We're also going to kick off the big update and season release with a dev livestream, where you can play along and compete with us developers on a fresh leaderboard! This unintentionally happened when the game was first launched and it was really such a thrill, so we're looking forward to doing it again.
How's season 1 going?
We're about 6 weeks into the game and thus season 1's launch, and there's about 7 weeks to go until season 2. Here are some highlights and interesting facts:
KyrosQF, the game's all-round world record holder, made a Christmas tree based maze when we challenged them, showing how easily they could crush even wave 120+
There are over 18,500 entries on the Normal leaderboard
There are over 5,000 entries on the Nightmare leaderboard
We have 300+ reviews which are 90% positive
Over 300 people have joined our Discord server to get involved in discussion
It's been delightful to see people exercise pretty much every strategy that was consciously designed 😀 But nobody (as far as we know) has managed to reach the -90% Enemy Max Life limit yet
The community has put together some awesome resources for the game so far, e.g. this document by Esoteric which describes all doodad affixes, their min/max ranges etc., and contains a detailed FAQ; and this great guide by LotusBlade with tips on strategies and tricks that even taught the developers something
Meanwhile...
Development on the full version of FrankenStorm is going ahead, slow and steady given these trying times. Hopefully 2022 will be easier on you and us all.
The game's "framework" is being remade from the ground up to enable greater performance for more extreme levels, much more variety in terms of game design features and mechanics, and a visual overhaul (including a switch to 3D) that'll allow us to raise our bar on quality in that regard.
That also means we're not devoting all of our effort to the Prologue, so some new features and implementations of suggestions from the community will be spread over further seasons to come.
Nonetheless, we hope you'll stay tuned and join us on the new leaderboards when season 2 begins! There'll be another announcement closer to the date with the exact timing of things so you can play during the live stream and compete on the fresh leaderboards with the developers 🙂
Anyway, you need to get to the graveyard now don't you? A corpse won't appear on that altar by itself! ⚡ Game on
Launch Reception and Future Plans
We launched less than a week ago and already thousands of players have their names on the leaderboard, and we've been sitting on the Steam store front page almost the entire time (what?!? 😱) - totally unreal!
In this time many players have joined our Discord, or voiced their opinions and suggestions in reviews or forum threads, and it's clear that there's an appetite for more things FrankenStorm, and that there are many ways to do what the game's already doing a lot better.
Being honest, it's all been a lot for us to take in, and we've taken some time to figure out how to proceed from here. Finally, here are our plans which we think will best address the current state of the game, and the way forward to something bigger and better:
FrankenStorm TD: Prologue
The current game will change to the prologue version of FrankenStorm, remaining 100% free and continuing to deliver the tight, focused experience it was initially intended to:
- one base tower - one base enemy - one choice per wave
We know there's an appetite for more tower options, bosses and such, but from the outset the three points above were what we planned for this game to be, so everything's been engineered and designed around that. For the prologue we're going to keep it that way, but we'll be dropping some of those restrictions and expanding on the game design in the full version that'll be described below.
This doesn't mean that nothing's going to change in the prologue. There were still things we wanted to get into the initial launch that we didn't, and there's been excellent feedback and suggestions that'll significantly improve the current version of the game:
- daily challenges with leaderboard integration - seasonal leaderboards, synchronised with balance changes and introduction of new stats / strategies / mechanics - friends-only leaderboard views - a way to see the stats people had on their leaderboard runs - achievements - dozens of planned UX/UI improvements - CHAIN LIGHTNING - more enemy types - more QOL improvements, Steam integrations, etc - more, list too long lol
There's clearly a lot to do, so we wish you'll keep playing the prologue, revisiting it through the seasons, and sharing your suggestions and feedback as it continues to grow as its own game.
FrankenStorm TD
The full version of FrankenStorm will lean on the core features of the prologue, but relax some of the themes and constraints so the game can have access to more features and mechanics. This will be a premium game with a larger scope and quality target. Some planned additions:
- a branching campaign that tightly integrates with the salvage system - more tower, mazing and map variety, strategy and progression - devastating bosses - real-time gameplay elements (e.g. mid-wave: trigger one-time or temporary effects, control directional towers, etc) - many more mechanics, stats and strategies - a more advanced reward system that adds extra dimensions to the quality of rewards (so you can find more amazing stuff!) - some kind of reward or re-rolling / augmentation / crafting system - multi-language support - probably more, but we can't confirm yet
Some things may be added or removed later, but the above represents what we currently think are the most important features for a premium version of FrankenStorm.
We realise that, even already, there are feature requests that didn't make it into this list. Unfortunately we've still got day jobs and must be careful with what we commit to - we're doing our best and don't want to take unreasonably long working on this game, in case the energy of our current community is lost. Even with the above list, we're not sure how long it'll realistically take when all the different aspects of life get in our way, but we're committing to delivering it so we wish you would join us in this journey.
What next?
We've tried to synthesise the energy we've felt in the reviews, the Discord and the community hub as best we can into this plan so hearing your thoughts on it is very important. On that note, we have some questions for you, and would love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or concerns:
- Do you think this is a good idea? What would you do differently? - Would you be interested in following dev logs or some other form of regular development update? - Anything else at all you'd like to share?
Comment below, or discuss in Discord - we'd really love to hear from you.
Also do continue enjoying what's now the FrankenStorm prologue (pending a rename from Steam support 😅) - this'll continue to be our immediate focus. And note that although it's the basis for the full version, even after that's released the prologue will remain a standalone, tight experience in keeping with what it currently is. It's not a game we're planning on abandoning, but continuing to improve in its own right - just like the classic WC3 maps that we were inspired by so many years ago.
Enough talk now, it's time to complete that experiment - tonight's the night, I can feel it ⚡
v1.0.4 Update
Change log:
Photosensitivity warning when the game opens
Setting to Simplify Explosions, replacing nova, explosion and stasis trap graphics with simple rings that don't look as good but are a lot easier on the eyes, which can be helpful if things get spammy
This was rushed out to improve the comfort of some players. We'll still put in more time to make it look a little better in an upcoming update
Switches now have numbers floating on top of them indicating their ordering
Lightning Conduit VFX are now coloured red instead of blue so it should be easier to see which towers have more stacks than others
Bug fixes:
Floating text for critical strikes and dodge no longer stop appearing when enemies are hit quickly later in the game
Fixed an inconsistency with how enemies were spawned. Now if you have 150% brute, 100% hound and 250% hawk chance, that'll effectively mean 0% standard and approximately 30% brutes, 20% hounds and 50% hawks. Before, the numbers didn't turn out exactly like this, but it was the intention
