Chinese Support, Steam Workshop and update 13 progress
Judgment in Chinese
The apocalypse has come to China! We've just updated our build with Simplified Chinese translation, we want to see how good Chinese speaking folk are at staying alive!
German and Chinese were our first two translations, we wanted to develop and test the localization system while we're still in Early Access. So far the feedback has been great, so good that we are considering adding additional languages even before the final release. We'll let you know if we do.
Steam Workshop out of beta
Our Steam Workshop has been in Beta for a while and will now be publically available. There are not a whole lot of mods there at the moment. There are 3 translation mods:
- Chinese, which is no longer being updated since we announced our work on the official support. I want to take the time and thank ZombieKingdom for taking the time and making the game available to Chinese players before the official support, and being the first mod in the workshop.
- Russian translation, thank you Nivaska for this mod. It seems to be updated to alpha 12.
- Italian translation, also updated to alpha 12, thank you Darth Vader.
We hope that now that we have made the workshop public, more players will create their own mods to share with others. You can create much more that translation with our modding capabilities. Learn more in our Modding Guide.
Update 13 progress
We haven't just been working on supporting new languages these past few weeks. We've already started working on the story and new end game content for the full release (currently planned for Q4), and in parallel we've been polishing, improving and adding new stuff for Update 13.
Update 13 will be mostly about polishing existing mechanics. We'll add a bit of new stuff as well, but as we near our full version we put most of our effort in making sure that what we have works really well. One new feature is scrapping unused items! Many players have asked for this, and we are happy to provide it.
Judgment with German support!
It's time to survive in a new language! We've spent the last few days integrating multi-language support and adding a German localized version for Judgment. You can now play in German.
This is still alpha 12, same as the one in the main branch, except that we added an infrastructure for supporting new languages and the German language can be selected, in addition to the default English.
Update 12 - The Explorers
The Explorers Update
Survivors, the demons have mutated! So has your equipment. Actually, the whole world has mutated and changed, so welcome to the new world of Update 12 - The Explorers.
In this update a lot has changed. The world outside your base has become a colorful, bloody world with many different biomes, all full of demons, destruction and loot. Everything else in the world has changed too, because we have re-balanced the game from scratch. With the addition of new music tracks, improved base visuals and several other smaller fixes, Update 12 is a huge step forward. Want to hear more about these changes? Keep reading.
Judgment now has a huge new world for you to explore. You can now create a taskforce and send them to explore the world, where they may find several biomes, each with it’s own unique locations and loot. You can now directly control the task force, and it’s no longer back-and-forth. You can scout a large area or scavenge several locations before returning to base for some rest and healing.
Finding biomes becomes an important part of the game. City biomes, for example, are the place where it’s most likely to find the elusive research materials and research kits, to unlock those advanced technologies. Lava biomes hold obsidian, used to craft some of the most powerful equipment in the game.
The new taskforces are also persistent, making your life much easier. You do not need to re-select your team every time you want to send an expedition. You can assign survivors to task forces, and they will still participate in base chores as long as the task force is located in the base area. Once you send the task force on a mission, they will automatically leave the base area and join the expedition.
Re-Balancing
Balancing and difficulty were one of the things players complained about most, since the day we launched Judgment. While we do not intend to make the game easy (at least not in the default challenging difficulty), we do want to remove frustrations and keep the game hard but fair. For that reason, we re-balanced the entire game.
Re-balancing Judgment pretty much means we defined all the stats of everything in the game from scratch. We re-defined how long it takes to gather resources, how long it takes to craft resources, craft equipment, research technologies… From there, we defined how much things cost, based on how long it takes to create their raw materials, and how powerful they are.
We divided enemies, weapons and resources to tiers and “rarity”, then created guidelines for how much power they have and how much they cost. This change is very dramatic in that higher tiers are far more powerful than tiers below them, so getting new equipment of higher tier is a much more meaningful change in power than it used to be, and a must-have in order to fight higher-tiered demons. These guidelines help us make sure that a survivor equipped with items in the same tier as the demons will be well matched, with a much clearer pace of progression.
Armors have been revamped altogether. They are now essential, and their bonuses are not minimal. Armors determine the base health, evasion and damage mitigation. These base values are then affected by skills and other bonuses, so increasing the base value has a huge effect. Even with very high level weaponry, if a survivor has low level armor they are not likely to survive for long.
There is a rock-paper-scissors-like effect now, as some enemies like the Legion have very high armor and are susceptible to weapons with high damage, while weaker enemies such as hellhounds are dealt with much faster using weapons with high attack rate. Others, like ghosts, have high evasion and will be most vulnerable to weapons with high accuracy. Building a varied team and focusing your firepower on the correct enemy are more important than ever.
Enemy AI has been dumbed down a bit. One of the reasons was to improve performance, but we also felt that enemies focusing on your weakest survivors was frustrating and left little room for tactics. The demons are now much simpler, which you could and should take advantage of. Plan your tactics taking their simpleness into mind, because the strength and numbers will be in their favor.
The pacing of the game has been dialed down a bit. Exploring and advancing takes a bit longer, but the demon armies also take longer to mount full-strength attacks against your base.
These are some of the main balancing changes, but all in all, pretty much the entire game feels different now. We tried to maintain the challenge while reducing frustration and creating a smoother, clearer rate of progression (both for you and the demons). We hope we did a good job, and as always we will listen to your feedback and improve.
Random Encounters
Teams of survivors exploring the world may now encounter demons even when they are just walking around. No more sending a single survivor to scout the area. Well, not without risking a gruesome awful death by demons.
The need to send larger teams is mitigated by the fact that teams can explore larger areas before returning to base, instead of scouting a single tile every expedition.
In the full version of Judgment we intend to add more events such as meeting other survivors, ambushes, quests, and more. For now there is only the occasional encounter of hostile demons.
Food and Colony Management
We simplified how food provides bonuses a bit. Instead of having different categories, each with it’s own bonuses, you now receive bonuses depending on the variety of food you have, regardless of what types. So a salad and bread (2 food types) will provide the same bonus as pasta and a sandwich.
In addition, you can now control what food your survivors eat. In a time of relative quiet, where you don’t need those bonuses, you can choose to save some food and only let them eat salads. Later, when you suddenly need the productivity boost, you can change the rationing with all that food you managed to store.
This colony management window also displays all the global bonuses (as opposed to survivor specific bonuses displayed in the skills window), such as those gained by rituals or performing research.
Visuals & Audio
We’ve made some major changes to how Judgment looks and sounds. We made the colors a bit more vibrant and less greyish. While the greyish unsaturated colors we previously had did give a bit of a gloomy feel, they made our visuals a bit boring and we had a hard time adding variation. Most of these changes will be noticed around the base, where we changed the terrain and many of the assets, but there is also some effect in scavenge regions.
As for audio, we’ve added a whole lot. We replaced the regular game music with something a bit more fitting for a survival game, and we added a new, separate soundtrack for the night. There are also new short music clips after combat, and when your colony is destroyed.
New stuff
There are lots and lots of new stuff in the game. Many of them are related to the new biomes, there is a new resource per biome that can only be found there, and at least one piece of new equipment that requires said resource. There are plenty of new research technologies which are now also divided into categories for ease of use.
A new fire imp has been added, this demon you will encounter very early and can attack from afar, but is rather weak and easy to kill.
There are new barrel walls that you can build in your base to block enemy fire as well as their advance. You will no longer have to resort to building a maze of log cabins to defend your base.
Since armor got a new important role in the game, there are many new types of armor for all stages of the game.
Performance
One of the few technical issues that we had in previous builds of Judgment was the game lagging badly when hordes of demons attacked your base, if you managed to surround it with buildings or spikes, and the enemies had to go around those to reach you.
The reason for this lag was mostly due to the pathfinding that enemies used. Part of it is the enemy AI that tried to choose the best attack position, so we had to calculate the distance to all the possible attack positions. The simplified AI no longer needs to calculate all these options.
In addition, we implemented some new, more advanced, pathfinding techniques which improved performance dramatically. All of this together, in all of our tests, solved the lag issue altogether.
Previous saves and mods
Due to the huge balancing change and a completely new world map, we decided not to support saved games from previous versions. Those would be completely skewed and unbalanced. To play this new version, you will unfortunately have to start a new game.
Mods created for previous versions may need some updating, especially those that add new research technologies and world map scavenge locations. We will publish a list of changes in our modding wiki soon to make it easier on modders to adjust their mods. In addition, any items or enemies defined in those mods may be out of balance now that we changed our stats so dramatically.
Full list of changes
Mechanics: New, much larger, world map consisting of several biomes and impassable tiles.
Mechanics: Can now create taskforces for map exploration and control them directly. Missions are no longer back and forth, you can explore and scavenge many locations before returning to base.
Mechanics: Can now control what food types survivors eat at any given time.
Mechanics: Survivors no longer receive specific bonus per food type. Instead, they get bonuses based on the amount of food types they eat.
Mechanics: While travelling in the world, taskforces may encounter enemies, even outside of scavenge missions. Don't send weak teams to explore difficult areas.
Mechanics: Finding new survivors now takes into account all the survivors you ever found, in terms of chances of finding a profession (previously only considered those you currently had).
Usability: Created taskforces remain while survivors are working in the base, so no need to re-select survivors on every expedition.
Usability: Can now see a taskforce's loot when still in the world map. This loot is transferred to base inventory when the taskforce enters the base tile.
Usability: Can now see profession, level, and equipment of every survivor in the bottom of the screen.
Usability: Taskforces are now shown and selectable from bottom of the screen, when in world map. Similar to survivors in otheresourcesr maps.
Usability: Players now start free buildings instead of resources needed to build them, to prevent "incorrect" use of starting .
Usability: Most actions (crafting, building, etc) now show how long it will take to do.
Usability: Research is now split into several tabs instead of one big tree. It has also been reorganized to show clear progression.
Usability: Added new colony management window where you can see and select which food types to eat, and all the global bonuses/penalties (from research, rituals, events, etc)
Usability: When selecting a building that has stuff in it, the destroy button will appear disabled and when hovering will tell you that you first have to remove it's contents (previously the option didn't appear at all)
Usability: Added more tips to the loading screen when starting a new game.
Usability: When clicking level up on a survivor they will become selected in addition to opening the skills window (so you can see their equipment, health, etc).
Usability: When building a mine, the mining task will now be created automatically when the construction is complete (so when you build a mine, survivors will start mining as soon as it's done).
Balancing: Completely re-balanced all existing game assets, including research, equipment, loot, enemies, rituals, skills, progression rate, and more. These are not small tweaks, we pretty much created all the stats from scratch. Too many to list them all.
Balancing: Fallen angels kept their long range but have been tuned down (assuming adequate equipment).
Balancing: Armor now determines the base armor, health and evasion values. All percentage bonuses (from skills, items, abilities) are now based on those base values. Armor is now essential and no longer optional.
Balancing: Changing equipment that changes amount of health now works so that the percent of max health remains the same. Healing also works on percent of max health now to prevent exploits.
Balancing: Difficulty of scavenge missions and the new random encounters now depends on distance, the biome, and in case of scavenge the type of location. Loot still scales with difficulty.
Balancing: Rescue mission difficulty no longer depends on how much time has passed, only how many survivors you have.
Balancing: Tweaked lower difficulty levels. Casual difficulty is now much easier.
Balancing: Base maps now have more trees.
Balancing: Enemy AI is simpler now. The demons' strength is in their numbers, not cleverness.
Balancing: Random events now scale with time.
Balancing: Awareness now has more effect on how often your base is attacked, but less effect on the difficulty.
Balancing: Weakening rune now only affects negatively attack stats, making it an ideal tool for tanking survivors.
Balancing: Casual difficulty has been made much easier.
Balancing: Rescue and scouting missions can now spawn farther away from base but have a longer lifetime. Think twice before venturing into dangerous territory.
Customization: Can customize banners, colors and names of taskforces.
Visuals: Brand new, more colorful world map visuals.
Visuals: Reduced flickering of assets when zoomed out.
Visuals: Improved research tree visuals.
Visuals: Improved much of the base area visuals.
Visuals: Night is now a bit brighter and easier to see.
Visuals: The smaller details (stones, flowers) will now be hidden when you zoom out much.
Audio: New day soundtrack (replaced the previous one).
Audio: Night time now has different music and ambience.
Audio: Added a tune when base is destroyed.
Audio: Added a tune in the after-combat report.
Audio: Added new day ambiance effect.
Audio: There are now some quiet moments without music, instead of a constant endless loop.
Audio: Better balance for mining and occult sound effects.
Audio: New sound effect for occult research (the whispers remain for the rituals only).
Content: Added new research with passive bonuses.
Content: Can now build barrel walls - that blocks shot and movement.
Content: New low level ranged enemy - fire imp. Throws fireballs, but not very dangerous.
Content: Several new armor types, weapons and resources.
Content: Every world biome now has unique resources that can onnly be foudn there, and unique equipment that needs these resources.
Performance: Major improvements to pathfinding algorithms that fix issues when base was built as a maze.
Fixed bug: Cancelling a ritual before it's done now refunds the resources.
Fixed bug: Seed is now displayed properly in game menu, if you want to retry the same map or send it to friends.
Fixed bug: Object attributes (such as a farm's maturity) is now properly localized instead of hard coded. Affects translation mods.
Fixed bug: When scrolling the survivor list to the right and then switching to a combat map, the survivor list will automatically scroll back left so you can actually see the survivors in the new map.
Fixed bug: Guns muzzle flash was invisible.
Fixed bug: Right clicking the rescue/scavenge object after starting the action will no longer reset the timer.
Fixed bug: Survivors now sleep in the center of the bed.
Fixed bug: When returning to title screen after having changed the game speed, the title screen animation would play incorrectly.
Fixed bug: Overexploitation achievement is now achievable.
Alpha 12 in beta branch
Alpha 12 is here! After two months of extra hard work, alpha 12 is ready and brings with it some great changes to Judgment. Try it out in the beta branch and let us know what you think.
Our main focus in alpha 12 was split between remaking the world exploration mechanic, and rebalancing the entire game. These two changes alone have a huge impact on the gameplay, but are not the only ones in alpha 12. A few other of the larger changes include redoing food bonuses and adding a management window for food, redoing our research tree and splitting it into categories, giving armor a whole new meaning, improved base visuals, and new audio tracks.
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.
World exploration has been completely remade. The world map has new visuals, and consists of several biomes. You now create teams of survivors called "Taskforces", and directly control them as they explore the map, searching for rare scavenge and biomes containing those much needed materials.
We've also added random encounters, so exploring the map is no longer safe, be sure to arm your teams well, and do not enter areas (biomes) that are crowded with tougher demons before you are ready to take them on.
Balancing
The balance changes encompass pretty much the entire game, but I'll try to list a few of the principal changes.
Enemies and equipment are now divided to tiers. The difference between enemies or equipment of different tiers is much larger than it used to be (around 2x stronger).
Armor has become a very important part, and now determines not only damage mitigation, but also your evasion and hitpoints.
Research has been divided into categories, and is now more vertical and less spread around. In each category there is a clear progress path, with a few side branches to spend your spare resource points for an additional edge.
Difficulty and pacing of missions, defense, events, etc have all been redone based on the new guidelines.
These are a few of the changes, but there are many more. We wrote all the numbers in the game from scratch, so pretty much nothing has been left unchanged.
Feedback
As always, we're looking forward to hearing your feedback on these latest changes.
Now more than ever, we'd love to hear your feedback about the new balance. Is it more predictable? Not too punishing but not too easy? Let us know what you think!
We also improved pathfinding and enemy AI performance, which fixes the performance issue with late game attacks in maze-like bases. Please try it out and let us know.
Once we are sure this alpha is stable and well balanced, we will make it available in the main branch.
Previous Saves
Due to the major changes in both the generated map and the balancing, playing old saved games would be completely different than the experience we had in mind. So saves from alpha 11 and earlier can not be loaded in alpha 12.
Alpha 12 progress
Survivors, it’s been a while since you’ve last heard from us (unless you follow our social channels), so we’d like to give a small update on what’s going on.
As a means of getting more structured information about our players and their preferences, we recently introduced the voting system where players can vote on the features they’d like to see added to Judgment. We’re happy with it’s reception, with over 100 unique voters, these are the 4 most wanted features:
Improved world exploration
Equipment upgrade
Interaction with other colonies
Scrap unused items
We're already working on #1! More on this below.
Parallel work on full version
Most of our efforts are working on Alpha 12, but in parallel, we’re slowly starting to work on some full release content. This content will not be available until we release the full version of the game. Since we plan for the full release update to be a huge one compared to previous updates, we have to work on it in parallel to the regular updates, to prevent a situation where there are many months without any releases.
We started working with Rick Gush, who will be writing the awesome storyline for Judgment’s full version. We are also creating new game content such as items and creatures that will not be added to Alpha 12 despite being ready.
Alpha 12 Progress
Down to business, here are the two biggest changes that we’ve been working on for alpha 12. Both these features are a result of much feedback from you, our Early Access players.
World Exploration - The highest voted feature in the voting system also happens to be our next big feature. A brand new, much larger, more colorful, and more diverse world map is being added. This new world will consist of several biomes, each with it’s own unique locations and resources. An overhaul to how you explore the map is also included, in which you create taskforces and can directly control them on the world map, instead of going back and forth. You provide them with supplies, and go in search for technology and treasure. But beware, strolling around during the apocalypse is not as safe as it used to be; sending a lone explorer is no longer a smart choice. Enemies are abound, and you never know what will happen as you travel around...
Complete Re-balance - There have been a lot of issues around balancing and the difficulty curve. Up until now the game’s balance has been mostly intuition, trial and error, and iteration. It wasn’t very structured, and even though it achieved it’s goal, it had many issues, and fixing each one created new ones. Now, we have a much more organized system, with formulas and a clear progression graph that guides us. It’s easier to add new stuff and make sure they don’t break the game, because we have guidelines that connect an item’s benefit, it’s costs and research availability. It’s easier to add new enemies, because we have a guideline to connect the enemy’s difficulty, to when it should appear and how many of it. Bottom line, we changed almost all the numbers in the game to create a smoother, frustration free (well as much as possible, it is still tough surviving the apocalypse…) experience. We also tweaked the lower difficulties so that casual difficulty is much easier.
These two are the main changes, there are many other smaller changes accompanying them, some related some not. These two changes are so big that there is no part of the game that is not affected by them, base economy, combat, exploration…
The bad news are that these two changes, being as big as they are (there is no part of the game that is not affected by them; base economy, combat, exploration…), are taking longer than expected, and we still have our work ahead of us before we are able to release alpha 12. We plan to release it in May, but it’s probably going to be later in May than we hoped.
We appreciate your support and your patience, and we hope you’ll be happy with all these upcoming changes!
Fort Triumph Kickstarter
Last thing for this update, we'd like to mention a Kickstarter campaign by friends of ours: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forttriumph/fort-triumph-tactical-rpg/updates
Fort Triumph is a tactical RPG, X-com style, taking place in a fantasy world with emphasis on environment interaction. The game is already far in development, with a demo available, and knowing the team personally, we believe they are capable of creating a great product.
If this kind of games interest you, check it out!
Feature voting - let us know which features you'd like to see
Early Access survivors, we want to hear from you! We created a Trello board in which you can vote for which of the major features that we are considering you'd like to see in the game.
Check out our board and vote now! We value your opinions greatly and invite you all to vote.
What is this board for?
This board is meant to provide us at Suncrash some insight into which of the ideas we have interest you, our players, most.
How do I vote?
You need a Trello account. You can create one with a single click by connecting with Facebook or Google.
Then simply open the cards you want to vote for and click the "Vote" button.
Can I vote for more than one feature?
You can vote for as many features as you like, but keep in mind that this is meant to provide us an insight into what our players want most. If you vote on all features, it will provide us very little information as to your preference, so it's best to vote on just a few of your most wanted features.
Will the highest voted feature get implemented for sure?
This board is meant to provide us information and guide us. There are many additional considerations such as technical difficulties and features interacting with each other, so we cannot promise the highest voted features will be implemented, but we do promise that we will take your votes into account when deciding.
If the feature is in this board, we are at least considering it.
Are there other things you will work on not in this board?
Yes. We only list here major features that we are seriously considering for a nearby update. There are many other ideas we are considering but for later, or smaller tweaks/changes that are not considered a major feature.
We want to keep this board small and to the point and not overload it with the hundreds of ideas we have.
How do I add an idea to this board?
Post all your ideas in our steam forums (http://steamcommunity.com/app/455980/discussions/). We always review your feedback in the forums, and if we feel a feature belongs here we will add it.
Alpha 11 - The Scavengers
Alpha 11 - “The Scavengers”
In the apocalypse, you either adapt or you perish. Everything changes, and so does Judgment. The Scavengers are here, with a bunch of new mechanics, improvements, content and much more.
Alpha 11 - “The Scavengers” is now available on the main branch. The main focus of this update was combat missions. There are two new modes, and several other improvements around this.
Here are the main changes. You can see the full list of changes in the bottom of the post.
Scavenge missions have been overhauled, and a proper scavenge experience has replaced the generic “Find and kill all enemies” that was previously used when scavenging for supplies.
In alpha 11, loot crates are scattered across the battlefield, and demons patrol the area. The demons will no longer attack as soon as you spot them. Instead, every creature and survivor have their own “vision range”, and an enemy group will only become aggressive if they spot a survivor.
Equip your survivors with binoculars and grant them skills in scouting to increase their vision range, and you can sneak around and collect scavenge without engaging the enemies. But some enemies are very perceptive, and you may prefer to take them out before venturing too far from your escape route.
Rescue Missions
Another new type of combat is the rescue mission. In these missions, you need to find and rescue a trapped refugee, then escort them back to safety.
Clear the area first, then find a good defensive position, as you will need to defend the survivor that attempts to release the refugee, demons will become aware of your presence and attack relentlessly until you finish the rescue attempt and escape.
Alchemy
To survive the apocalypse, your team can now research and make use of Alchemy. Alchemy adds new workstations, rituals, resources and equipment.
Scavenge Aether, and craft the legendary Prima Materia, the base of all matter, that can be used by alchemists in their Alchemy Table to create powerful equipment. Build a philosopher’s stone, and perform weird rituals to transform the base matter into more useful substances.
The Priest
A new profession of survivors is introduced - the priest. Some priests are good at farming, some knowledgable in the occult, others are good builders. There are devout priests that are sworn enemies of demons, dealing huge amounts of damage, but also more vulnerable to their attacks. Others are corrupt, they take the apocalypse more lightly, dealing and receiving less damage from the damned.
As priests gain experience, they can craft powerful defensive crosses, but their most important skill, they can conduct last rites, and bury their dead friends. At their graves, strange new rituals can be performed to harvest some of their essence and allow them, in their own way, to aid the cause even after death.
But in the time of the apocalypse, dead spirits are restless, and they attract each other. Building an entire graveyard so close to home, while important for morale, may prove fatal…
Visuals
Several visual improvements have been introduced, such as a new dynamic title screen and combat summary. If all your survivors die horribly and your colony is overrun, you will now see a neat new game over screen with some interesting stats about your time in the world.
There’s also a brand new Urban combat biome. You will now be fighting demons in an urban environment, amidst abandoned apartment buildings and a sea of concrete
Previous saves and mods
Previous saves are supported, but due to map generation, content and balancing changes, we strongly recommend to start a new game.
Mods from previous alpha should work fine, most of our changes are backwards compatible. You can read more about modding backwards compatibility and modding in general in our modding wiki.
Full list of changes
Mechanics: New system to support different combat types (as opposed to a single "kill all enemies" mission).
Mechanics: Loot can now be found in the combat maps, and you can scavenge and retreat instead of clearing all enemies in the map.
Mechanics: Rescue missions now require that you actually rescue a trapped survivor, protect the rescuing survivor from enemy attacks, and retreat - instead of just killing all the enemies in the map.
Mechanics: Enemies now patrol combat areas instead of standing in place.
Mechanics: Enemies now have their own vision range. They only aggro if they see survivors, making it possible to sneak around.
Mechanics: Night time now holds penalties to vision and ranged accuracy, for both survivors and enemies, making melee and sneaking more effective at night.
Mechanics: In combat, an attack now happens immediately, and the cooldown afterwards. Slow firing weapons become a more viable option, and there are less "delayed hits".
Mechanics: When the base is attacked, enemies will now only spawn in tiles at the edge of the map, or tiles within a certain travel distance from edge tiles. They are much less likely to spawn inside buildings. An exception is if the building is on the edge itself.
Mechanics: Summoning rituals now spawn the enemies near where the ritual was performed, instead of map edges.
Mechanics: It is no longer possible to earn Steam Achievements when there are any mods enabled.
Usability: Added a search option in the world map, that will highlight locations with specific items.
Usability: Final combat stats taking into account all skills, weapons and other modifiers are now displayed in the skills window, making it easier to decide on survivor equipment.
Usability: You can now name your saved games.
Usability: Autosave files are now given meaningful titles and are easier to identify.
Usability: New indication when enemies have spotted the survivors and are actively attacking them.
Usability: Cursor now changes to attack/loot/rescue when a survivor is selected in combat and the mouse hovers an enemy/loot crate/trapped survivor.
Usability: Added keyboard shortcuts for Taks Priorities window, Skills window, and Crafting Priorities window.
Usability: Survivor shortcut group numbers are now shown on their portraits.
Usability: Selecting an enemy in combat now shows more of their stats.
Usability: Enemy aggro range is now visible to the player, if the enemy itself is visible.
Usability: When customizing a survivor's appearance, the body color selector now shows the final color instead of a greyscale tint.
Usability: Now displaying the map seed in the game menu, so you can share with friends or replay the same map.
Usability: Changing survivor equipment with the skills window open will now reopen the skills window, easier to see the change in stats.
Usability: Hovering texts in the game menu now highlights the text.
Visuals: New, more dynamic, after-combat report.
Visuals: New, more dynamic, title screen.
Visuals: New game lost screen with some awesome statistics.
Visuals: Survivor eyes in portraits are no longer affected by skin tone, making them clearer in darker skin colors.
Visuals: New werewolf walking animation.
Visuals: Added rotating options to several 1x1 objects such as food table and bed (doesn't affect gameplay, only aesthetics).
Visuals: Replaced the combat retreat area with something that fits better in all biomes.
Visuals: New Save/Load window.
Content: New combat biome - Urban Area.
Content: New profession - Priest.
Content: New starting skills and levle-up skills for priest profession.
Content: New item: dead body, that is dropped when a survivor dies
Content: Survivor Graves can be built by a priest with a dead body.
Content: Perform a dark harvesting ritual in a survivor's grave to gather demonite from their spirit's essence. This ritual can only be performed every so often.
Content: New item: Cross, that can be crafted by priests with the right skill and provide a big boost in protection for a short duration.
Content: New alchemy research tree with 3 new research subjects.
Content: Alchemy Table where you can craft new alchemy-related resources and equipment.
Content: Philosopher Stone where you can perform rituals that transmute materials into other materials.
Content: 2 new alchemy-related resources, the crafted Prima Materia, and scavengable Aether.
Content: 4 new alchemy-related items - Paracelsus Sword, Transmutation Gun, Mercurial Armor and Elemental Bomb.
Content: New item and skills that affect survivor vision range.
Content: Added a new very easy base defense mission right after the weapons crafting quest.
Balancing: Tweaked enemies in hellgate a little.
Balancing: Scavenge Speed bonuses now apply to speed of looting and releasing trapped survivors in combat, in addition to searching debris at the base.
Balancing: Amount of items in scavenge locations are no longer shown in advance, only which items.
Balancing: There are now more enemies in scavenge missions since you no longer have to kill them all to get the loot.
Balancing: Enemy difficulty in rescue missions is a bit lower now, to make up for enemies spawning during the rescue mission.
Balancing: Sniper rifles now increase combat vision range a bit.
Balancing: Some research materials will now spawn a bit closer to base, making them easier to find.
Balancing: Experience gained from damaging enemies was decreased a bit.
Balancing: Rescued survivors now have higher chance of having a profession that you have less of.
Balancing: Reduced the chance of getting an Occultist and Priest, and increased the chance of getting a Survivalist.
Steam: Added several new achievements and modified some of the old ones to keep up with all the latest changes.
Modding: Can now add custom audio files.
Modding: Can now add movement speed effects to items, abilities, etc.
Modding: Can now give combat abilities to Weapons and Armor, as long as they do not consume the item.
Fixed: Overall pants skinning issues.
Fixed: Incorrect phrasing confused "hellgate" and "portal".
Fixed: When sending survivors out of towers in combat they always tried to travel to the top-right of the tower before going to their destination.
Fixed: Couldn't send survivors out of towers in combat if there was another object anyhwhere near the tower.
Fixed: If a save file got corrupted somehow, it caused the game to stop working altogether.
Fixed: When enemies were targeting a survivor that retreated from combat they would become stuck.
Fixed: When a survivor had many effects in the skills window and they wouldn't all fit, it wouldn't scroll and some were not visible.
Fixed: Sometimes barrels on top of roads would not be visible.
Fixed: Level up indicators no longer appear in mission preparation (clicking them would cause the game to be stuck).
Alpha 11 was released on the beta branch last week, and we got lots of good feedback from you guys. Following that feedback, we just uploaded a patch that fixed and tweaked some of the issues in alpha 11.
We still feel it needs more time in the beta branch before we make it the default version for everyone, but we encourage everyone to give it a try and let us know what you think (see how here)
Some of the things we changed since the first alpha 11 beta release:
<*>Tweaked rescue mission, made it faster and more balanced.
<*>We now show survivor group shortcuts on survivor portraits
<*>The type of survivors you rescue are more balanced, there is a higher chance to rescue survivors of professions you don't have too many of. Also reduced the chance of getting an occultist or priest, and increased the chance of getting a survivalist a bit.
<*>Fixed a bunch of bugs
Judgment Alpha 11 in beta branch
Alpha 11 is here! Will you survive alpha 11?
Try your luck on the beta branch. There are many changes, improvements, additions and new challenges. New combat missions, alchemy, another combat biome, and more.
Here are the major changes we've made, a full list will be published when the update becomes available in the main 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.
Up until now, whether you went out to scavenge, rescue a survivor, or take on a hellgate, the result was the same - search and destroy all enemies.
In Alpha 11, there are 4 types of missions - scavenge, rescue, attack and defense. You can now interact with loot within the combat map, release the trapped survivors, and retreat - without having to kill all enemies.
Some stealth mechanics have also been introduced, enemies will now patrol the map, and you get a chance to ambush or avoid them.
Combat Stats
You can now see some of the enemy's stats when selecting them, allowing for better planning and smarter tactics.
In the survivor's skill sheet - you now see the actual combat stats of the survivor - taking into account all their skills, equipment, food bonuses, and anything else that may affect these stats. This info will help choose the best equipment for the situation.
After combat, you see some stats such as experienced gained, loot, enemies killed, everything is animated and more rewarding.
Urban Biome
A new urban combat biome has been added. Fight in the streets of destroyed cities.
Alchemy
New research subjects, resources and equipment will allow survivors to use alchemy to help fight the hordes of hell.
Priest
A new proffession - the priest - has been added. Some priests are good at farming, some knowledgable in the occult, others are good builders. There are also devout priests that are sworn enemies of demons, and corrupt priests that take the apocalypse more lightly.
Priests have some unique skills that allow them to bury dead survivors and perform rituals at their graves. But with dead spirits about, is that really smart?
Usability and blanacing
We made many tweaks and improvements to make the game smoother and more enjoyable, such as being able to filter scavenge locations in the world map according to their loot.
Previous saves and mods
Saved games from alpha 10 will work, but we recommend starting a new game. Some of the new items and functionality will not be available in older saves.
Mods from previous alpha versions may or may not work, we have made some changes to the format of our configuration files. The modding wiki will be updated in the next couple of days to describe these changes and the new modding possibilities of alpha 11.
Guides, Wiki, and Alpha 11 progress
Survivors! It's been a while since you last heard from us. We apologize for the long silence, we have been so hard at work on Alpha 11, that it was tough for us to find time to write a proper update.
So, what's this update about? Community! And alpha 11 of course, we'll let you know how it's progressing and give you a sneak peek at some of what's to come.
The Judgment Wiki has been created and filled with information. Many of the game's concepts are explained there, and you can find information about the different items in the game. It's still a work in progress, and being a wiki, everyone can contribute! We'd love it if you help filling it out with more information, and let us know if there's anything we can do to help.
Guides
Two guides have been published, a Beginner Survivor's Guide and a Combat Guide. These guides contain a wealth of information, calculations, tips and tricks that can help both new and experienced players survive the apocalypse. Check them out and let us know what you think!
Alpha 11
Now what you've all been waiting for, alpha 11.
Alpha 11, as some of you may know, is focused on making combat missions more interesting. We've created an infrastructure that allows different types of missions, instead of the single "Kill all enemies" type that you've been used to. We're pretty far along, and we expect to release this new version in the next few weeks.
Her'es a sneak peek at what's coming in this next update:
