We have a neat surprise for you. What is better than surviving the apocalypse alone? Right, bringing in your buddies to survive together!
Nope, Judgment is not getting a multiplayer update (sorry!), but we - Suncrash, the team behind the game - are teaming up with Assemble Entertainment and Pajama Llama Games and Suncrash to survive the apocalypse together, in a 48h bundle discount!
Which apocalypse can you survive?
Three colony-management survival games - can you survive Radiation, endless waters, and a demon invasion all at once? Check out the "Colonies of the Apocalypse" bundle - get all 3 games (or those that you don't have), at a discount.
Allow us to introduce the... Colonies of the Apocalypse!
Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation
Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation is a colony simulation game with tactical combat that takes place in the midst of a demon apocalypse. The gates of hell have opened and unleashed relentless demons into the world -- but you can fight back!
Endzone – A World Apart is a post-apocalyptic survival city builder, where you start a new civilization with a group of people after a global nuclear disaster. Build them a new home and ensure their survival in a shattered world, threatened by constant radiation, toxic rain, sandstorms and droughts.
The floating garbage town survival game! Scavenge what precious garbage you can from the ocean's surface and grow your city while doing your best to survive in this colorful post-apocalyptic world.
New patch - The Samurai Update improves melee combat and adds Japanese support
Hello survivors,
As I explained in the previous post, we needed a short break from working on our next title Dream Engines: Nomad Cities, and getting back to Judgment for a small but impactful update was the perfect way for us to spend this time. So here you have it - the Samurai Update.
In this update we focused on making survivors equipped with melee weapons more meaningful. We've heard your feedback in which melee were not very useful because they died before they could even get near their targets and deal any real damage. This update strengthens these melee survivors and adds new ways for them to quickly close the distance and deal damage, but also increase their survivability and make them less cannon-fodder. We also added some new content around this such as the Samurai profession, a new enemy, and some small quality of life improvements.
This isn't a huge update, as we're super busy trying to release our next title, but it's always good to show our older child a little love and we tried to choose something that would be meaningful but not too time-consuming. I hope you enjoy this update.
Other than that, the big change is added support for the Japanese language, which made the Samurai culture the perfect blend of our focus on Melee and Japan. So we've also added some content around that.
On a more personal and grim note, this update is coming out at a hard time for me, as my beloved father passed away a few days ago. I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for all that he has done for me, he taught me so much and always took great care of our family. I wouldn't be where I am and this game would never have been made without his loving care. Thank you dad.
You can find the full change list in the bottom of this post.
Melee Changes
To increase the survivability of melee characters, we mainly added two new mechanics. The first is giving shields a blocking stat that has a chance of completely blocking ranged attacks. This has the added benefit of adding a new weakness to ranged weapons when we gave this blocking stat to some of the enemies, making melee wielders even more useful against these specific enemies. Shields can only block attacks from the front (ie - non flanknig) and not at point-blank range (ranged attacks already have a penalty for point-blank range).
The other thing to increase survivability is something that creates some equality between ranged and melee survivors in terms of their ability to stay alive after taking damage. Ranged survivors could fight and take damage until they were badly hurt, and then retreat from combat fairly easily, since they were already fairly far away from their attackers. Melee, on on the other hand, had to run straight into the front lines, drawing damage from all demons, ranged and melee, and if they took heavy damage escape was almost impossible since they were so deep within the range of their attackers. So we added an ability, that is mostly available to melee-weapon wielders, which allows them to retreat from combat by becoming untargettable and increase their movement speed for a very short duration. During this time they would also be unable to deal any damage, so this is strictly a defensive ability.
We also gave additional bonuses to all melee weapons, added a charge ability that allows melee wielders to quickly close the distance to their targets before taking too much fire, and two new samurai armor sets that provide some bonus to melee attacks.
The Samurai
A new profession was added, the Samurai, that has several melee-oriented skill sets, in addition to scouting, crafting, farming and archery. You may even find a Ronin with some extra bonuses.
We also added a new Samurai special survivor, we'll let you try to find it yourself so no spoilers here.
The Jiangshi
This Oriental soul-sucking demon is actually Chinese in origin and not Japanese, but it felt like a good fit for this update. Fairly strong melee enemy that can suck a survivor's soul.
Quality of Life
We've already done several quality of life updates so the most important changes that are fairly doable have already been done previously, but I still feel these new ones are pretty useful. We've added a keyboard shortcut to cycle between survivors, when you press TAB the next survivor will be selected. While you could always set group number 1-9 to specific survivors, it was limited to 9 survivors and usually these groups were better used for combat formations (melee, ranged, snipers, etc). The cycle ability is much more useful for quickly checking on the status of all your survivors or task forces.
The other thing is just something I felt was missing, and it's a small number splash indicating the damage amount dealt when a unit is hit.
Old saves and Mods
As far as I can tell, save files and mods based on the last build (desert survival update) should work just fine. If you find any issues let us know.
Playing the older version
I understand that some of you may be in the middle of a game and all your planning for character progression and equipment did not take these new changes into account, so you may want to continue playing in the older version.
For this purpose, we still have the old version available on a separate branch. To play it, right click the game in your Steam library, then select Properties, and in the "Betas" tab select the "Desert Survival Update" branch. That's the previous version. I do recommend to switch back to the default branch afterwards.
Full change list
Added an official Japanese translation.
Mechanics: Added a blocking mechanics where shields have a chance of completely blocking ranged attacks when they are not flanking and not point-blank ranged. This effect only applies when a melee weapon is equipped with the shield.
Mechanics: Added a mechanic where survivor abilities can only be used in combat when specific equipment is used.
Mechanics: Added a mechanic that allows an ability to have two types of effects, one applied on the user and another applied on nearby enemies/allies. Previously each ability could only have one type of target (self, AOE, or single-target)
UX: Added the ability to cycle between survivors or task forces by pressing TAB.
UX: Added a small damage amount indicator when a unit is hit.
Content: Added abilities that allow melee weapon wielders to charge at enemies and quickly closing the distance towards weapons range.
Content: Added abilities that allow survivors (mostly melee weapon wielders) to become untargettable for a very short time to allow them to retreat from the front-lines before they are mowed by ranged enemies.
Content: Added a new profession - the Samurai, that excels at melee combat, bows, farming and crafting.
Content: Added a new special character you can find.
Content: Added a new enemy - the Jiangshi is an oriental vampire-like demon that can suck survivors' souls.
Content: Added a disappearing consumable that allows survivors to retreat from dangerous areas without taking damage.
Content: Added a smoke bomb consumable that acts like disappearing powder but also disorients and applies penalties to nearby enemies.
Content: Added two new armor sets - the Samurai armor and Ronin armor that provide decent protection and are agile enough to have high evasion stats. They also provide a small bonus to melee attacks.
Content: Added a new higher-tier dagger type weapon, the Wakizashi.
Balance: Increased the bonus melee attackers have when attacking targets with ranged attacks.
Balance: Increase the penalty ranged characters have when attacking at point-blank ranged.
Balance: Added ranged-blocking stats to some of the enemies (similar to the new bonus provided by shields).
Balance: Added another benefit to each melee weapon (except tier 1). There are different benefits to swords, knives, and blunt/other melee weapons.
Balance: Increased speed bonus provided by the rocket-boost ability of the rocket suit from 40% to 100%.
Balance: Changed the disappear ability (ninjas have them) to make the survivor untargettable for a short duration instead of increasing evasion, but also cannot deal any damage for the duration. Also gave this ability to daggers wielders and added it to melee defense skill tree.
Balance: Changed the maximum damage that can be reduced by armor to 80%. Previously there was no limit except that you always took at least 1 point of damage per attack.
Graphics: Added the ability to disable the FPS limit (by default we limit the game to 60 FPS to lower usage of CPU and GPU).
Fixed bug: When selecting some enemies their description texts had a tiny font in Chinese.
Fixed bug: You could cancel a construction of a free object (like the well you get when you start the game) after it was already built and get another free one.
Added a credits screen
New update available on the beta branch
Survivors!
We hope you are all safe and healthy and staying at home. Here's a little something to make your time at home a little bit nicer, hopefully.
It's been a while since we released our last update with the free DLC - Desert Survival. We've been very busy working on our next title, Dream Engines: Nomad Cities. Sometimes, however, it's good to take a break and step away from a big project for a little while, and what better use of that time than updating or good old Judgment?
Melee Update
So here we are, a small update centered around melee combat. We added a new profession, skills, abilities and items around melee combat. Most of these are meant to increase the survivability and usefulness of melee warriors. We've added abilities that allow survivors to quickly charge at enemies, and also those that allow them to disengage and retreat before these brave front-line warriors are mowed down by the hordes of ranged demons.
The full patch notes will be posted when the update is pushed to the main branch, but here are some of the main changes:
Added abilities that allow a survivor to become untargetable for a short time, allowing them to retreat to safety.
Shields now have a chance of completely blocking ranged attacks if they are equipped with melee weapons and as long as they are not flanked or at point-blank range.
Added a new melee-oriented profession - the Samurai
Added a small boost to all melee weapons (either an ability or another benefit)
Japanese Translation
We'll be adding Japanese translations to the game, but these are not ready yet so they will only be available when we push the update to the main branch.
Beta Branch
Reminder: To play on the beta branch, right click the game in the steam client, select properties, and then select "beta" from the betas tab.[
The beta branch update is missing translations for some of the new texts, these will be added before the main branch release.
Save games and mods based on the last version should work without any problems, we've mainly added new stuff.
We hope you enjoy these changes, please do let us know if you encounter any issues or have any feedback on these changes, that’s the point of having this in the beta branch. It’s been thoroughly tested, but no testing we do is as good as actual players playing it.
Desert Survival FREE DLC now available
Survivors,
It’s summer, it’s hot, and it just got hotter. A new update for Judgment is now available on Steam, with a new, FREE DLC will let you fight of demons in the Desert!
The Desert Survival DLC opens up a new game mode which takes place in the desert, and changes some of the game mechanics. The desert is more sparsely populated, so a bit harder to find places to scavenge, and as if that is not enough, your base is also much less self sufficient, at least in the beginning - so you will need that scavenge more than ever.
If you like our work, don’t forget to Wishlist & Follow our upcoming survival city-building game:
Desert Survival is a free DLC, anyone who owns Judgment can download and play it. Moreover, the DLC unlocks the desert game mode, but you can still play the regular “Vanilla” mode even if you download the DLC, so there is really no reason not to.
Here are some of the Major changes when you play the desert survival mode. Read below to see what other changes we have made in the game that will affect both this new and the base mode.
Your base map will be a desert biome, with a new sandy terrain and different resource distribution. Rocks are now more common while trees are less so.
Building farms and planting trees require seeds that can only be found by scavenging.
There are two types of trees, dead and live ones. A live tree will yield wood and seeds while dead trees only yield wood. Most of the trees in your starting map will be dead, but any tree that you plant will be live, so you will never “lose” seeds (unless you sell them).
Farms, trees and wells can only be built/planted on the dirt parts of your baes, not on the sand.
By default, enemies and loot contents of scavenge missions will be hidden. You will see which enemies are there, so you can estimate the tier/difficulty, but not exact numbers.
Removed the rain dance ritual and rain collector building. You'll have to work harder to get food and water.
A lot of balancing changes around food and water. A single survivor can handle more farms, but each farm feeds less survivors, so you'll have to work harder to gather materials and build farms, but once you do you will need more or less the same amount of survivors to feed your people.
The world map now has desert in the center, and grass/forests are rarer. Scavenge areas in the desert are much more rare now, so you will need to search farther to find those much needed seeds and other important loot.
By default, survivors will only eat one food type per meal, even if more are available, to conserve food. Players can change this if they want to gain multiple food type bonuses.
New desert combat maps.
Visual changes to some terrains and trees.
All in all, the desert survival challenge is significantly harder than the vanilla mode, and we recommend it to experienced players that have already played Vanilla and are familiar with the game. We also recommend starting with “Challenging” and not jumping straight to “Tough”.
Changes to all modes
Other than our work on the new game mode, we also went over all your feedback, and implemented several improvements and changes, many of which were requested by the community. Here are the main changes. For a full list, see below.
When starting a new game, players now have more customization options, including if they want the campaign story or not, if they want to enable the intro combat, and if they want the Halloween content or not.
A new very important setting allows players to play with loot & enemies hidden in the world map. You can still see which enemy types, but not numbers and loot. This adds some extra challenge and a random/surprise element to the game, which I personally love. These are displayed by default in Vanilla, but hidden by default in the desert challenge.
Many UX and ease of life improvements, including around defensive positions before being attacked, destroying multiple objects and font readability improvements, and being able to better control how many food types your survivors eat, balancing food spending and bonuses received.
Added several decorative objects that will allow you to create settlements that are more aesthetically pleasing and customized. You can also customize the appearance of objects that have several variances such as trees, beds, and the new decorations.
Fixed several smaller but annoying bugs reported by our community.
What’s Next?
It's been more than 4.5 years since we started working on Judgment. Now, with this DLC, we plan to focus most of our efforts in the near future into our next title - Dream Engines: Nomad Cities (you’ve already wishlisted it, right?).
Judgment continues to be very important to us and will always be in our hearts. We will continue to support it, chat with players in the Judgment Discord server and on the Steam forums. We will fix bugs as needed, and perhaps later down the road we will release more content updates, special challenges, or any other neat idea that may come up. But first let’s enjoy this new content, and see how well it is received by you, the valued members of our small community.
If you want to chat with us, Discord is the best place to do so, but we still regularly check the Steam forums as well. Other players in the community are very helpful, so these are the best places to find answers to any questions you may have.
Thank you all for your continued support!
Full Change List
Mechanics [Community Request]: There is now an option to hide the exact enemy numbers and loot contents of scavenge missions, making the game less predictable and require more trial and error. This is hidden by default in the desert survival mode but displayed in Vanilla.
Mechanics [Community Request]: When an attack is incoming, survivors will no longer get tired or hungry. This will allow them to prepare for the attack without having to worry about starving or becoming tired just as the enemies are about to arrive.
Mechanics [Community Request]: You can now destroy resources to prompt more of them spawning. Beware, there is a cooldown before more can spawn.
Balancing [Community Request]: Limited the trader cooldown for neighboring settlements to 25 days, preventing them from becoming irreperable if you decline too many help requests.
Content [Community Request]: Made most of the halloween content a separate setting which you can toggle on/off when starting a new game. Some of the decorative content remains in the base mode as well.
Content [Community Request]: Added decorative objects - flowers, statues and roads (they don't affect walk speed, but they can help with base planning).
UX: You can now control how many food types your survivors eat. Instead of eating one of each enabled type to get maximum bonuses, the player can now limit how many types survivors eat to save food without having to enable/disable specific types. By default they still eat as many as they can in vanilla mode.
UX: Changed new game user interface, allowing for more customization options.
UX: Added a reset button to game settings.
UX: Rain collectors now show different images depending on how full they are.
UX [Community Request]: When a survivor enjoys bonuses from eating multiple food types there will now be an icon showing that in their info panel (when you select them).
UX [Community Request]: When an attack is incoming, you now see a timer near the notification icon.
UX [Community Request]: When an attack is incoming, you can now manually give the "go to defense stations" (from the colony management panel) before the game suggests it, and stay in those positions until after the attack. Useful for complex bases.
UX [Community Request]: A destroy button has been added to the create multiple tasks menu so you can destroy many objects at once (like trees, walls). Not that you will not get resources from destroying trees this way.
UX [Community Request]: Added an option to toggle whether speed returns to normal after battles or continues in the same speed as before the battle (different players had different preferences, this is the way to make everyone happy).
UX: When you have a confirm window (such as the one asking if you're sure you want to quit, or if you want to send your survivors to defensive posts) now acccepts keyboard shortcuts Enter/Esc.
UX [Community Request]: Improved our font so some numbers are clearer, especially the digit "1" and period/comma.
UX: Can now shift + click several objects in the "create multiple tasks" tool, instead of dragging a square area (or in addition to)
UX: You can now enable/disable mods or change languages without restarting the game.
Visauls: Change game saturation a bit, and players can now contorl it.
Visuals: Can now customize appearance of objects that have several random options (such as beds, trees, and many of the new decorations)
Fixed Bug [Community Request]: fixed some issues with combat preparations and guard towers.
Fixed Bug [Community Request]: metals and other resources will no longer spawn on the edges of the map where you can't build mines.
Fixed Bug [Community Request]: when adding a skill that affects survivor health, their health will immediately update now, instead of having to wait until they change armor.
Fixed Bug [Community Request]: fixed a bug where after loading an autosave in which survivors were on their way to their defensive posts, they wouldn't continue to their positions after the combat started.
Fixed Bug [Community Request]: missing localization to the text that explains some settings can only be changed from the title screen.
Dream Engines: Nomad Cities announced
A survival city-building game with flying cities
Survivors, we’re proud to announce our next game - Dream Engines: Nomad Cities
In its base, Dream Engines: Nomad Cities is a survival city builder. You will have to build a city from scratch in a wacky nightmare-infested world and defend it from terrible creatures. What really makes this game special is that the cities you build are nomadic. They can - and must - fly in order to survive. Resources are scarce and dangers are vast, the only way to stay alive is to keep moving.
Dream Engines is inspired by classics such as Caesar and Cleopatra, as well as newer titles such as They are Billions and Factorio. These all provide inspiration, but Dream Engines is significantly different than these games and creates its own unique experience.
If you’d like to learn more and remain updated on development progress, wishlist & follow on steam.
Dream Engines is still relatively early in development. We spent a lot of time in pre-production testing our concepts and designing our visuals. Our focus in the last few weeks was mostly on getting the game ready to capture the trailer footage.
Most of the core mechanics are implemented - construction, production line simulation, economy, unit control, defense, exploration. The world-travel mechanics are still missing (the mechanics that allow you to relocate your city), a lot of polish (including UX and UI design), and content - before we can release the Early Access version of the game. We can’t commit on a date just yet.
Now that we have made the game public, we will start posting regular updates in our social media and on the game's Steam page. We hope you enjoy watching the game come together.
Judgment Update
As promised in our previous post, now that we’ve reached this milestone of announcing Dream Engines officially, we will get back to working on the next update for Judgment - the desert survival update.
Judgment is now our top priority again, for the near future. We will review all your latest feedback, decide on what goes into our next update, and finish the development of the desert survival scenario.
We appreciate your patience, and hope that it will be worth the long wait. Stay tuned for more information soon.
Once again a big thank you to all of you who supported us along the way. We couldn’t have gotten to where we are without you.
Desert Survival - Dev Status Update
Hello Survivors,
It’s been longer than I’d like since our last update post. I have no excuse for keeping quiet so long, but I’ll try to make up for it by being as informative and open as I can and tell you what we are doing and what/when to expect.
Development Status
First, I’d like to be honest with you, and say that I believe we’ve bitten on a bit more than we can chew. We started working on that new project (more info below), one that is very ambitious, and at the same time promised you that we will provide more post-release updates to Judgment. Our new game is turning up much more complex than we expected (so much that we haven’t been able to announce it officially yet), and the update we have in mind for Judgment is taking far longer than we anticipated.
This doesn’t mean that our plans changed, only that the timeline is not what we hoped it would be - we still want to provide more free content for our loyal players. Right now our most immediate goal and focus is to get our new game to a position in which we can make an official announcement and start showing our progress. That means enough implemented gameplay and art for a short, preliminary trailer, and then all the branding work, which includes actually choosing a name for the game… A choice that is turning out to be far more complex than we ever imagined! Let us know if you have any cool name ideas for a Tim Burton-inspired city building game with survival elements.
Here’s a new piece of concept art (and an old one too), and if you want to hear more about it once information becomes available, you can sign up here (or follow us on twitter / facebook).
Once we are done with that part and make the official announcement, we will prioritize Judgment again and focus on finishing this big update. It will still be a while longer but I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
I personally did spend some time working on Judgment code, while the art guys focused on the new game. What I did manage to do in Judgment so far were mostly small fixes/improvements and big infrastructure changes such as those I mention below (game modes support, destructible buildings - that has been abandoned since) and some preliminary desert survival mode changes (more on this mode below) such as map generation. What still needs doing is content creation - designing, implementing and balancing the things that will make the Desert Survival mode unique, all the new artwork, and additional general fixes/improvements.
Game Modes Support
As many of you have probably noticed, any change in the game’s configuration (such as activating/disabling a mod, or changing language) required a restart. Due to lack of experience this being our first game, we made some architectural mistakes early on and a lot of the config data was being cached, making it impossible to “just switch configs”.
It was a very boring and exhausting task, but I managed to improve our system so that you can now change configs without having to restart. You can enable/disable mods, and change language from the title screen.
You may be asking yourselves why would I go to so much trouble to fix something that is relatively painless? It’s not so bad having to restart when activating mods or changing languages, it’s not something that happens very often. The answer to that question is: Game Modes.
In our next update, when starting a new game, you will be able to enable/disable different modes. For example, you can enable/disable the campaign storyline, the opening battle, and any new mode that we choose to add that can affect gameplay in pretty much any way. This is similar to mods, except its on a per-game basis, and you don’t have to activate/deactivate them before loading a game, the system will automatically bring up the right config for every saved game.
Desert Survival Mode
Our incentive for the game modes system was that we wanted to introduce a new game mode, one that would significantly change how you play the game and provide new challenges even to veteran players. After running through different options (more on one of these below), we decided to go with the Desert Survival Mode.
In this mode, your base will be placed in the desert instead of the woods area you got used to. Gameplay mechanics and balancing will be changed, in a way in which we hope to put more emphasis on survival and needs. Food and water will be harder to find, it will no longer be as simple as building farms and wells.
We still haven’t gotten all the details and balancing, mostly we’ve been doing infrastructure work, and left the fun part for last.
Abandoned Idea - Survival Mode
Our original idea for a new game mode was around a “Survival Mode”. In this mode, the plan was to make faster-paced, shorter, games, in which you didn’t HAVE to explore the map to advance (you could get almost everything in the base), and enemies attacked you at regular intervals, increasing in strength. Sort of like a tower-defense waves mechanics.
The idea was that you had to grow strong fast enough to survive increasingly difficulty waves of demons, without trying to fight back and solve the story. Just seeing how long you could survive.
Adding this mode required us to vastly rethink how base defense works. It should be able to support much stronger and larger hordes attacking your base, in a way that there is no “winning strategy” that you can use to always win these battles regardless of how many demons and your own strength. Strategies that make use of our limited AI such as building huge mazes for the enemies to be attacked as they go through, and a choke point where you can kill them one by one.
The first step towards this, was giving demons the ability to destroy your buildings. We actually went as far as implementing this, but when we started to test and balance it, encountered too many issues. The game and enemies simply weren’t designed around this, so unfortunately, we had to abandon this idea and so we came up with the Desert Survival mode.
Stay in touch
Remember, we love to chat with you guys, hear what you like, what you don’t, see your screenshots, and discuss your ideas for improvements/additions. You can catch us on our Discord server where we are very responsive - https://discord.gg/judgment
It's hard to believe it has been five months since we’ve released the full version of Judgment. We have been overwhelmed by the worldwide response, the hundreds of streamers and YouTubers that showed our first game to the world, and the tens of thousands of people who made Judgment, for a few days, one of the best-selling games on Steam.
As a small show of our appreciation, we made a special Halloween update.
Pumpkin Apocalypse!
For thousands of years, humans considered Halloween as a time of magic and portents. Many saw it as mere superstition, but after the Apocalypse, we’ve all learned the truth. At this time, more than just demons roam the Earth.
Pumpkin Apocalypse, as you can guess from the name, is our very own Halloween themed update. You can expect quite a few features:
New random events that will challenge and amuse you.
Some crazy new items.
A pumpkin farm!
Decorate your base for Halloween.
Halloween themed hats.
Terrifying new enemies…
...And as always, a bunch of small bug fixes, updates, and improvements.
Still working on a larger update
You might remember that a few months ago,we promised a larger update for Judgment in the near future. Initially, we intended to release that update toward around this holiday season.
Do not worry, that update is still in development, it’s just taking longer than expected, since we’re no longer focused on Judgment alone, and our new project is still in those sensitive early stages that require a lot of attention to every detail. For now, enjoy this smaller Halloween update, and our next update will be released later, in 2019.
A taste of things to come
While you’re waiting to hear more about our next project and Judgment’s larger updates, we wanted to share a small concept-art based teaser of our new (yet unnamed) project.
Soon, you will be able to build a city that never rests, in our next big project, a city-building game with a neat twist. We’ve opened a newsletter just for announcements regarding this. Sign up or join our Discord server, to be the first to hear more details about it.
Right now, we are still locking our core gameplay, art-style and world-building - the history, lore, and background of our new universe. We are also working on the very first bit of content and starting to fine-tune the economy.
I can tell you I am personally very excited. I think we have something truly original here. With your help, and what we learned while developing Judgment, I’m sure we will be able to create something truly amazing.
Thank you all for listening, and we hope you enjoy the Pumpkin Apocalypse!
Judgment Status Update
Survivors,
It’s been a while since you last heard from us, so this post is to let you know what we’ve been up to, and our plans for the future.
Since our first post-launch patch, Update 16.1, we’ve taken a break from working on Judgment. Some of us went on vacations, some of us had new babies born, and even moved to different countries. We did manage to get some work done as well. Yes, we started brainstorming, prototyping, and testing ideas for our next game. We’re not quite ready to reveal it just yet, however, I can say that it won’t be a sequel to Judgment or happening in the Judgment universe. It will also be a strategy game though.
So what about Judgment? Well, next week we’re going to Gamescom (PM us on Discord if you want to meet up!), and after that - we’re going to start working on Judgment’s first major post-release update.
We’re still not ready to give exact details on what it will include, but we can say that plan for it to be a larger update, that includes not only bug fixes and quality of life improvements, but also new content. And the best part - we’re also planning to add a new game mode! If all goes as planned, this new mode will change several factors of how you play the game, and let even veteran players enjoy a new challenge.
We expect the update to be ready in a couple of months. We won’t be working exclusively on Judgment, we’re also proceeding with the pre-production of our next game, and hopefully by the time this update is ready, we will also be ready to announce it.
As always, we will keep tab on all your suggestions in the suggestion thread and our Discord server, and choose those that fit our schedule and vision to add to the next update. So keep them coming!
A month ago, we opened the gates of Hell – and a wave of players poured through! We have been overwhelmed by the positive response to Judgment’s release. But we have not been resting – we have been listening carefully to feedback, both from our veteran players and the new. Update 16.1 is the result.
We are releasing 16.1 today to the main branch after a week in the beta branch, where you had a chance to test it out and report any issues or feedback. It includes a range of quality of life improvements and community suggestions meant to make playing Judgment more intuitive and fun.
16.1 includes a whole range of improvements meant to improve base defense gameplay. First and foremost, we overhauled the awareness system.
Without doubt, when we set our eyes to do a quality of life patch, we knew we had to address awareness. In its previous form, it was highly un-intuitive. It was not clear what awareness actually did, which was to increase or decrease the strength of base attacks – and not directly decide the time of base attacks.
The awareness meter now serves to indicate when demon attacks will happen, all formulas have been simplified, and awareness no longer affects the difficulty of the attack. The simpler awareness formulas have absolute values instead of exponential and percent-based values as before. Every survivor adds 2 awareness per day, a research can reduce this value by 5 per day, lookout posts being patrolled also reduce this by a set amount.
Since awareness now directly determines how often you are attacked, if you choose to ignore this, you may find yourself under attack every day or two. So make sure to include awareness management decisions as you grow - research, lookout posts, skills such as stealth, and rituals are some examples on how you can manage awareness.
Combat planning has also been improved, including the ability to assign survivors to defensive towers, and survivors will now continue to their assigned posts even if combat starts before they reach it.
Streamlined Scavenging
We have added a few quality of life tweaks that should make scavenging several locations less of a UX hassle, per player feedback. An option has been added to remove the combat summary to speed things up as well.
Crafting Quality of Life
A range of improvements to the UI and AI should allow you easier control of your burgeoning industry. Mostly improved manually assigning survivors to craft specific items without changing crafting priority for everyone, and automatic crafting so that it doesn’t use up more resources than you want it to.
Pistols
We felt pistols were a bit underrepresented in higher tiers (4 and 5), so we added a bunch of new ones. Some can be crafted, some can be scavenged, and one even has explosive bullets! We also added another tier 4 bow.
Previous Saves
Previous saves are supported and it will even fix some corrupted saves from older versions, reducing the amount of bugs and crashes occurring in these games.
Mod Support
The majority of mods should be able to work just fine, unless they deal with base defense and awareness, which have changed a lot. Check out our Backwards Compatibility page to be sure.
What is coming next for Suncrash and Judgment?
With the launch of 16.1 we have addressed many of the immediate kinks and bugs that remained post-launch. We will continue to monitor and identify any urgent issues that require immediate attention.
Aside from that, our plan is to work on a longer-term content update. These last months before and after the release were very intense and we need to unwind. We expect the next big content update to be at least a few months away, as we work in a more relaxed manner, and in parallel we will begin to think about and plan our next game. Yes, there is a next game in Suncrash's future, we hope that makes you happy and that you will join us in our next adventure as well. We still don't know what it will be, we are brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and researching. Our current goal is to decide on what the next project will be.
As always, if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our ever-lively Discord server. It’s a great experience to be able to talk to you guys directly. See you there!
Full Patch Notes
Mechanics: Replaced the awareness system with a simpler one. Awareness now grows at a daily rate of 10 + 2 per survivor, and bonuses that reduce this rate do so at an absolute value, instead of the exponential, percent based system we used to have. The minimum rate is 8/day (attack every 12 days or so) and maximum 60/day (attack every 1.8 days).
Mechanics: Demon attacks now happen when awareness reaches 100, so they are easier to predict and less confusing. Demons will no longer attack at less than 100% (except for special events). Attack difficulty now only depends on the day, and awareness now only affects the rate of attacks and not the difficulty.
Mechanics: Removed awareness gain from the custom difficulty settings. The rate of increase will now be affected by the attack frequency setting.
Usability: Added the ability to reserve resources that will not be used by auto crafting. Very useful to reserve water for drinking instead of using them all to craft bread, for example.
Usability: Added an option to skip the Combat Summary screen after fights.
Usability: Added a button (Left Control by default) to buy/sell/craft 100 items at once.
Usability: Added the option to search for "Special Locations" in the world map, making it easier to find campaign or random event quest locations.
Usability: Items that grant skills will now describe the effects of that skill in the item's description, so you can decide whether it's worth buying or not.
Usability: A new "tip" message appears when relevant. When building it explains how to rotate or build multiple objects, and when crafting/trading it explains how to buy/sell/craft x10 or x100.
Usability: Added some more explanations of where some items can be gathered in their descriptions.
Usability: Added a disband button on taskforces, that is enabled when the taskforce is in your base. You can still disband by removing all survivors from the taskforce as well, like before.
Usability: Added a button that will let you equip survivors in the Colony Management window. This will open a window similar to the one you get before being attacked, where you can see all survivors with their equipment and quickly change it.
Usability: The game will now resume the same speed it was before combat, when the combat is finished.
Usability: After a combat in the world map, if the world map was displayed before the fight, the taskforce will be automatically selected so you can quickly scavenge many locations one after another without having to reselect.
Usability: Survivors will continue moving towards their destinations after combat starts, if they were ordered to move somewhere before. This includes activating the defense plan.
Usability: You can now assign survivors to defensive towers as part of the defense plan. When the plan is activated, they will wait outside the tower, and will automatically enter it once the combat begins.
Usability: Selecting another survivor when the "select equipment" window is open will update the window for the newly selected survivor, and choosing an item will equip that new survivor.
Usability: Manual assigning a survivor to craft something will now keep them assigned to it for as long as more items of that type are queued, instead of just crafting one like before.
Usability: Can now assign more than one survivor manually to craft the same type of item without replacing the previous survivors, as long as there are enough of this items queued for crafting.
Content: Added a new tier 4 bow and several new high-tier pistols, since those were a bit under represented.
Content: Added several new achievements.
Balancing: Improved "Punching Bag" special skill a little bit.
Balancing: Made the "Scouting" +1 range skill a separate one from that of Marksmanship, so a survivor can have both.
Balancing: Repel evil now reduces the awareness increase rate by a set percent for a limited time, instead of reducing the awareness value. This is to prevent players from abusing this ritual and avoiding attacks forever, given the new system in which demons will only attack when awareness reaches 100.
Balancing: Attempting a rescue no longer has a one-time increase of awareness by an absolute amount like before.
Fixed Bug: Game states could become corrupted, keeping a combat region in memory with the survivors that participated in that combat. When that region would later be deleted, the survivors were deleted with it, breaking the game completely. Survivors will no longer be deleted with regions.
Fixed Bug: When a random event activated at the exact same time as scavenge combat, the scavenge screen would close but the game would keep thinking that the combat is on, making any additional combat impossible until reloading. Saving the game at this state created the corrupted save described above.
Fixed Bug: Mods with map sizes larger than 100 high would not display correctly.
Fixed Bug: Some typos and fixed Russian text that would say "+100%" range instead of "+1".
Fixed Bug: Area healing effects will no longer affect dead survivors.
Fixed Bug: Gather limits on herbs will no longer affect companion farms, since those provide other resources as well. For now companion farms will not be affected by gathering limits at all, because the system does not support a building that generates multiple items.
Fixed Bug: When survivors go to positions in preparation for an attack, it will no longer cancel their manual assignments.
Fixed Bug: Resources should no longer spawn in the map edges, where you can't build a mine on top of them.
Fixed Bug: Where it showed an empty window when clicking the mission button in the intro battle right after killing the enemies (during the short pause before more enemies arrive).
Fixed Bug: Attempt to fix some rare codec/graphics driver related crashes when playing videos (this would cause the game to crash on start on these systems, when attempting to play the logo videos).
Update 16.1 now available on Beta Branch
Survivors,
A month ago, we opened the gates of Hell – and a wave of players poured through! We have been overwhelmed by the positive response to Judgment’s release. But we have not been resting – we have been listening carefully to feedback, both from our veteran players and the new. Update 16.1 is the result.
We are releasing 16.1 today in the beta branch so we can collect some feedback before uploading it to the main branch. It includes a range of quality of life improvements and community suggestions meant to make playing Judgment more intuitive and fun.
The full patch notes will be released when the update will be pushed to the main branch. The list below includes some highlights of what you can see in 16.1.
Reminder: To play on the beta branch, right click the game in the steam client, select properties, and then select "beta" from the betas tab.
The beta branch update already includes translation to all supported languages.
Base Defense, Combat Planning and Awareness
16.1 includes a whole range of improvements meant to improve base defense gameplay. First and foremost, we overhauled the awareness system. The awareness meter now serves to indicate when demon attacks will happen, all formulas have been simplified, and awareness no longer affects the difficulty of the attack.
Combat planning has also been improved, including the ability to assign survivors to defensive towers.
Streamlined Scavenging
We have added a few quality of life tweaks that should make scavenging several locations less of a UX hassle, per player feedback. An option has been added to remove the combat summary to speed things up as well.
Crafting Quality of Life
A range of improvements to the UI and AI should allow you easier control of your burgeoning industry. Mostly improved manually assigning survivors to craft specific items without changing crafting priority for everyone, and automatic crafting so that it doesn’t use up more resources than you want it to.
Previous Saves
Previous saves are supported and it will even fix some corrupted saves from older versions, reducing the amount of bugs and crashes occurring in these games.
Mod Support
The majority of mods should be able to work just fine, unless they deal with base defense and awareness, which have changed a lot. Check out our Backwards Compatibility page to be sure.
Awaiting Your Feedback
We hope these changes improve your experience with Judgment, please do let us know if you encounter any issues or have any feedback on these changes, that’s the point of having this in the beta branch. It’s been thoroughly tested, but no testing we do is as good as actual players playing it.
