When your wife warns you that you'll be spending the better part of Christmas in a house with four sick family members, you take some precautions. You wash your hands. You avoid doorknobs. You pray to the gaming gods for protecton so this crucial phase of your game's development doesn't get interrupted by a bad head cold.
I thought my prayers had been answered when I escaped apparently uninfected by the holiday cheer, but really, the moment I stepped into that house it was too late. It was always too late.
So. Until this blows over you won't see me in the forums & you won't see any daily updates. Sorry. Blame the holidays. I know I do.
Balance Update Numero Uno!
Hello, everyone! I've been watching your lets plays, reading your bug reports, listening to your suggestions and reading your personal mail - erm, I mean: here's a collection of balance-related tweaks made in response to your feedback:
NOTE: Many of these changes may not show up for you until you start a new game.
Balance Changes
Food & Water - Even the hardcore survivalists agreed these were punishing. So at normal difficulty you can now survive while drinking only once every three days & eating only once every week. Many new water sources have been placed in the game to make finding water easier, and you can now drink from lakes. The Civilization bonus you get from following paths and staying in populated areas is more potent so eating / drinking isn't a concern until you're in the Wild. (Note: In the future you'll be able to reverse these changes using custom difficulty settings.)
Temperature - This system has been overhauled. Temperatures are milder in general and more consistent with climates. Structure interiors are always comfortably warm and cave temperatures are now suitable for shelter. Clothing can no longer cause you to overheat.
Clothing - Shirts, pants, boots & gloves have been added to the game, and more varieties are incoming. You'll start the game with a basic set of clothing and you can craft more.
Crafting - You no longer need to select blueprints before crafting. Several items have been reworked to be less expensive to craft (like the Canteen). You now start the game knowing how to refine metal and I've placed forges in the University area for public use. Charcoal is dropped by nearly all burnable items.
Money - It's a lot more scarce. Purses contain considerably less money than before. Luminite no longer respawns indefinitely. Your cash is automatically converted to base currency when buying things.
Animals - You're far more likely to find leather on dead animals. Many creatures are easier to kill in general. You can shear sheep for wool, pluck chickens for feathers and milk cows.
Reputation - Damaging another person's goods will cause reputation loss. The rep system will play a bigger role now that money is more scarce.
Paths - Several more arterial paths have been laid down in the South. More are coming.
Major bugs I'm still working on:
Not really related to balance but I might as well give you an update while I'm here.
The post-prologue crash is still happening for some of you. I'm still seeing more success cases with every build, and your reports have helped me pinpoint the exact cause, so thank you for that. I'll keep at it.
Darkness Issue - The game is unplayably dark on a handful of machines. I'm frankly mystified by this one. I've made no real progress in figuring out the root cause. Hopefully the new brightness settings will help in the meantime.
Disappearing buildings - the cause is known so now it's a matter of fixing the problem without causing more bugs in the process. I'm still seeking / interviewing programmers who can focus solely on this issue while I handle everything else. (Feel free to email me at frontiers.game@gmail.com if you're interested.)
That one bug you really hoped I'd fix in the next update because it's way more important than balancing hunger, and besides how hard can it be to fix anyway? Yeah, that one's still in there. But seriously: don't assume that time spent on balance means bug [x] is getting forgotten or ignored. I know it sounds weird but that's not really how it works. A lot of these bugs have to get fixed a little bit at a time so the fixing doesn't break everything else. It's a living nightmare long and difficult process. (Just kidding it's not so bad.)
Alright, the update should download shortly - you can expect daily builds to resume again, at least until we gather enough feedback for Balance Update: La Deuxième Partie.
Cheers,
- L
Proposal: Save Only in Campsites
I've been mulling over this one for a while. Another couple of bug reports convinced me to bring it up.
Saving inside of structures is dicey and often ruins save games. The safest place to save is on top of solid empty terrain. It will get better in time, but it's going to be a while before we iron out the kinks.
One way to prevent ruined save games is to limit saving to campsites. Campsites can only be created on solid empty terrain, and they can't be created inside, so if you had to be in a campsite to save, boom problem solved. (The requirement for a nearby water source would be turned off.)
In the future when saving inside of structures becomes more stable this can become a global setting like 'SaveOnlyInCampsites,' which can then be toggled using difficulty settings.
Pros: This would 'fix' the save game problem. Wouldn't take long to implement.
Cons: Losing the ability to save anywhere might cause some rage due to general instability. People are already clamoring for a quicksave options so I can't imagine they would love this.
Thoughts? This is a rare case where I don't feel strongly one way or the other, so be free with your opinions.
[edit: Alright, I've seen enough strong negative reactions here and in chats to say this would probably ruin more good times than it would create. So I'm going to skip it and just focus my energy on the root of the problem. Thanks for the feedback, everyone.]
PSA: Do NOT buy this game as Christmas gift
Hello, everyone - Lars here with a friendly developer PSA.
A lot of folks have told me: I'm buying this game for my kid/friend/spouse for Christmas, they love exploration games! And I say the same thing every time: DON'T!*
The only people who will love it are players who seek it out for themselves, because it's NOT FINISHED. Your kid/friend/spouse will just be annoyed with you. I'm proud of this game, and with everyone's help I believe it's going to be great - but it's not great yet, so in the meantime get your kid/friend/spouse Dragon Age or The Binding of Isaac or something, trust me.
The December release date unavoidably puts Christmas gift in people's minds. That's why I'm only releasing a trickle of press copies till after the new year. People are prone to impulse buy right now, and you don't want people impulse buying an Early Access game, especially not for others.
On the other hand, there is one situation where it's an appropriate gift: for yourself! If you love exploration and don't mind bugs, by all means treat yourself. (Just make sure to stop by the forums first so you know what to expect.)
Cheers,
- L
*(After I say 'thank you' of course. What am I a savage?)
State of the Game
Hello, beta players! It's been a week of squashing bugs and reading posts. Here are a couple of things I've learned from watching everyone play. From roughly MOST to least important:
Inventory bugs are the worst bugs. The inventory bugs really seem to spoil everyone's day. Nobody likes it when their stuff disappears. So I'm putting a lot of work into those. You're not seeing many big updates, but case by case that stuff is getting fixed. The trickiest part is getting older save games to behave - I'm sort of embracing the challenge of making that work instead of just saying 'start a new game,' because I want to preserve save-game integrity after we launch on Early Access.
Crashes after the Prologue are far too frequent. The move from the Prologue to the Unviersity is very resource heavy and as a result even mid-range machines are experiencing crashes. My changes to the character textures should help a bit, but I need to do more.
Players need more information about basic gameplay. And I don't mean hand-holding, just information. The Prologue is tiny, self contained and very short. Once that's over I get the sense that people are overwhelmed by what they don't know. The game is simple once you know the basics (I think?), so I'm going to write a little guide book similar to the interface guide book. That will be what you find when you wake up in class - it will give you some bullet points on how to play. (I really want to implement some tutorial missions as 'classes' in the University, which is something Hannah has suggested. But that's probably too ambitious.)
Saving and loading. It's getting better. But players should never spawn inside an empty building, it kills the fun dead.
Resources aren't obvious enough. For instance, wild animals are way too good at staying hidden. They're actually all around you - dozens of them, seriously - but nobody ever sees the frickin' things. I'm going to make them dumber because they're intended to be a resource, and you can't gather what you can't see. Same goes for mine-able rocks, trees and so on.
The main survival elements seem 'fair' to most people, but the weather system is confusing. I haven't heard any complaints about how quickly you get hungry or tired or thirsty, so it seems as though these elements are fairly well balanced. The exception is temperature which (on top of being buggy) seems to just confuse everyone. I need to work on that.
People don't seem to mind buggy updates as long as they're frequent. I could be misreading this one, but I've broken the game several times with my 2-3 builds per day goal, and people haven't complained. So I'm going to keep doing that. (Now's your chance to stop me if you were just biting your tongue earlier.)
Alright. I still don't think we're ready for an awesome Early Access launch yet, but we're getting there, especially if this pace keeps up. Several systems have really started to come together since the beta was launched. Onward!
Beta Update - Memory Footprint
Hello, everyone! First off thank you all for the amazing bug reporting you've done so far. In just three days we've found and fixed (and found) dozens of bugs - your descriptions & logs are helping me squash them one by one.
Today I'm taking a break from the customary 'fix / push build / test / fix / push build / test' rapid-fire approach & and focusing on the single task reducing memory footprint. A lot of beta players are reporting crashes on transitions between areas and their logs point to texture memory as a culprit. This is an art-focused task so you won't see me in the forums much till it's done.
Keep doing what you're doing every report helps! Cheers
- L
And the FRONTIERS store is live!
Hello everyone, and welcome to the FRONTIERS storefront & Steam community hub! If you're part of the private beta testing group then head on over to the community forums where all the bug squashing action is at! FRONTIERS has come a long way - from Steam Concepts to Kickstarter to Greenlight to this storefront. I've brought over a bunch of artwork, screenshots and videos from those earlier incarnations, but not nearly all of them. So if you'd like to see this game's roots you can visit:
