Mindnight
Vote the Summer Skin Community Contest winners!
We have not expected so many submissions, and so much talent when we have started this contest. We are overwhelmed and really glad that we have so many passionate talented community members.
Now - it is your turn - everyone in the MINDNIGHT community to decide the winners.
All finalists will have their skin implemented in the game, but only three of them will get the big prizes.
1st Place: 50$ Steam Gift Card + Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 30.000 In-Game Credits
2nd Place: Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 15.000 In-Game Credits
3rd Place: Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 10.000 In-Game Credits
Honorable Mentions: Implementation of Skin + 5.000 In-Game Credits (All finalists)
You can only choose one so choose carefully.
Choose your favourite skin and vote here -> https://forms.gle/tVCSbgidvBmRxoBYA
We will announce the winners Saturday at 9PM UTC.
Cheers,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
2.7.8 HOTFIX
we just pushed a very small hotfix addressing the issue with player names and reputation buttons not showing in some cases.
Happy hacking, your MINDNIGHT Devs.
Art Studio Released + 50$ Steam Gift Card - SUMMER Community Skin Contest
ART STUDIO RELEASED
With over 500 community skins created and submitted on MINDNIGHT's Discord Server, we have decided that now is time to streamline the process of community skin creation, submission and implementation. The Art Studio Discord section is the start of this streamlining.
What does this mean for MINDNIGHT?
The Art Studio is a section in MINDNIGHT's Discord Server where passionate community members now have their own special tidy little corner where they can create skins, maps, discuss with other fellow creators and even submit skins for approval to be implemented in the game.
We want through the Art Studio to take care of passionate community members, grow together, make MINDNIGHT a better game from a visual point of view while rewarding anyone contributing. MINDNIGHT is everyone's game.
How does it work?
The Art Studio might seem overwhelming at start, but it is quite straightforward if you carefully read the descriptions of each channel.
The Art Studio Section on the Discord Server consists of the following channels:
- #info-read-me - Where you can find out everything about how the Art Studio functions
- #skin-guide - Quite self-explanatory - redirecting everyone towards a newly created skin guide
- #community-skins - The old, but moved channel where everyone can post their ideas and concepts
- #pending-skins - @Artists post skins here taken from #community-skins that they deem suitable in terms of theme and quality to be added to the game
- #approved-skins - @Dev-Artists post skins here taken from #pending-skins that were approved by them and the skin creator can now start creating animations for that specific skin
- #completed-skins - This is where @Dev-Artists will post completed skins that already are zipped and animated, for No Moon Developers, to get them implemented in the game.
- #skins-gallery - This is the gallery that has compiled all skins created thus far from #community-skins. Over 500 community skins.
For a better understanding of each channel read descriptions and the pinned message from each channel if you want to be part of the Art Studio and contribute.
In this section we are also going to be conducting the Approval Process of a skin, from concept to animations to implementation. The Approval Process is detailed in the channel descriptions in Discord and in the Skin Guide.
How can I contribute?
Just join the Discord server and start creating!
We've built the Art studio to be supportive of newcomers for creating MINDNIGHT skins, we know many of you love the idea of adding your own skin into MINDNIGHT and we want to make the process easier for you.
The new and freshly written guide for creating skins will get you started with pixelart tips, but we also invite you to discuss in the Art Studio section, where you also can tag our talented community members & art developers with the new @Artists role, which has been added to help you receive better feedback and give more voice for the talented community members!
SUMMER COMMUNITY SKIN CONTEST
Don't have enough $$$ for that cyber-pre-order on Steam or Credits for MINDNIGHT skins? Fret not as we're launching this Skin Contest for you to have a chance to add it to your collection.
We challenge you to create an original piece of art - a skin for MINDNIGHT.
This also includes submitting in the form below, a name and a proposed description that should be in theme with the game. This will also matter for the jury and for the decision to chose the finalists.
Never made a skin or have no idea where to start? No worries, we have your back!
Check this SKIN GUIDE to learn about how to create a skin for MINDNIGHT and what kind of templates you can use in order to create a skin for MINDNIGHT.
Note: The general Approval Process of skins does not apply to Contests like this one. Just post your submission in #community-skins to get feedback.
START -> The contest starts on 28th June
END -> The contest ends on 5th July - 11:59PM
WINNERS -> The winners will be announced on: 8th July - 09:00PM (CET Timezone)
The contest will be happening on MINDNIGHT's Discord server. Join in there, share your creations on #community-skins - get feedback, advice and show all of your awesome ideas!
After you have created a skin concept SUBMIT YOUR CREATION HERE
Rules and Specifics
- Create a skin by using one of the provided templates for MINDNIGHT
- There is no need to create animations or other frames/color variants for the skin, only the concept for the skin
- The skin needs to be a new skin that you create, not a skin previously submitted to MINDNIGHT's discord channel
- This Skin Contest edition does not have a specific theme and you are free to do anything you would like
- If you have a lot of ideas, you can submit all of them, no limit in submitting skins for this contest, this will increase your chances in winning though
- If you submit abusive, offensive and/or discriminatory content you will be disqualified from the contest and banned from MINDNIGHT
- Your entry must be appropriate for players of all ages - so nothing too risqué
- You are eligible to participate only if you have a working Steam Account with at least 1 hour of gameplay in MINDNIGHT
- Your entry must be made by you, submitted by you, and made for this contest: this is about YOU showing YOUR artistic talents specifically for this contest
- Your entry can’t include any logos, advertisements, product names, or product placements: we don’t want NTF writing us any cease and desist letters!
- In order to pick a winner, we will choose a number of skins from all submissions and let the community decide over what is the best skin out of all of them
- The winner's skin will be implemented in the game and he will be credited and rewarded accordingly
- Skin creator winners will be credited in-game and rewarded accordingly
- Winners skins will be worked on by dev-artists before implementation for animations and tweaks, but the winners are also free to work on the animations if they want to, while guided by dev-artists.
What are the prizes?
1st Place: 50$ Steam Gift Card + Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 30.000 In-Game Credits
2nd Place: Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 15.000 In-Game Credits
3rd Place: Implementation of Skin in MINDNIGHT + 10.000 In-Game Credits
Honorable Mentions: Implementation of Skin + 5.000 In-Game Credits
All skin creators winners and honorable mentions will also receive their skin in game once it will be implemented.
Here you can check all of the skins that are in the game right now for inspiration -> https://imgur.com/a/VfDlWoa
There are also over 500 skins posted on Discord, in the channel #skins-gallery
Have fun and we can't wait to see your creations!
CHEERS AND HAVE A GOOD DAY!
MINDNIGHT TEAM
Update 2.7.7 is live now
Fixes:
- Fixed some exploits that allowed some players to manipulate some minor aspects of the game, unrelated to gameplay
- Fixed some visual bugs affecting the chat system
- Fixed some security server loopholes that were pointed by one of our community member that was really helpful! Thanks a lot!
Improvements:
- Server performance when a lot of matches save the leaderboard has been improved
- Improved general server security
In other news - we are still working on the web and mobile version of the game while working on how and what we will change going forward with the development of MINDNIGHT.
Thanks for sticking around and thanks for playing MINDNIGHT.
Don't forget you can join in Discord if you haven't already and be part of a big and active community.
Cheers,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
Update 2.7.6 - Bots, maps and skins changes
A small update is live now with very few specific changes and some surprises.
In relation with our recent blog post about Bots and how they grew to be more than just a way to handle disconnections, into a reason for some players to abuse their patterns - we have decided to make some long-awaited changes to them.
https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/667870/view/2074411495522256418
BOT CHANGES
We need to make sure though that you understand what are bots for and how we have intended them to function in the first place.
Bots were initially implemented as a way to handle disconnections. We have made them as intelligent as we could to mirror the behaviour of humans. By doing so, we have also made them do some actions in extreme cases in the same way each time - because that's what humans would do. E.g: Refusing certain proposals or proposing certain people in the game.
That being said we have changed the behaviour of the bots now, but as you may already know - we cannot disclose how they work.
We have done this in the hopes that we would do this from time to time, in order to scramble patterns and not let players that want to create an advantage for their team read into them easily.
This is a first step towards resolving the issue of some players reading bot patterns or creating metagame rules around bots. Soon after we will make other changes as well, in order to solve disconnection problems in different ways, so that bots would become an underpowered mechanic that would not be used to gain an advantage in anyway.
You can read more about what we want to do in our blog post about Bots.
https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/667870/view/2074411495522256418
If you have suggestions on how to handle disconnections, by going away from bots - we invite you on our Discord Server where you can post suggestions and discuss with other passionate community members and developers
OTHER STUFF
In other news - it's 1st of April. Enjoy and don't hate us. The times are strange. We needs to adjust. NTF need to adjust. Will you?
P.S: If you bought a skin that you can get for free, your credits will be refunded. Don't worry.
Cheers,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
MINDLOG #1 - Metagaming, Bots and Evolving MINDNIGHT
In these series we will try to cover development, justify new features, share interesting game facts, highlighting community feedback and elaborate on how MINDNIGHT is evolving.
We also want to open a dialogue in order to get the valuable feedback that we need to make sure we are taking the right decisions moving forward.
Why Blog Posts now?
First, we are conscious that until now the discussions around the game have been mainly happening on our Discord Server, but we know that not all of you are there, thus we want to expand our reach and try to gather community feedback from everywhere we can.
Second purpose for these blog posts in the following period is to present the issues that MINDNIGHT currently faces, argue why we call them issues and compile a list of solutions for each issue, in order to make better decisions, develop and change features while letting everyone contribute with their opinions and feedback.
Celebration! Over 200k total players!
It’s been over two years since our journey on MINDNIGHT began and we’re so happy that you’re here with us for this milestone. You guys are a total of 200.000 unique players that installed and played MINDNIGHT at least once. That’s around an average of 7000 new players each month since we launched the game.
MINDNIGHT is also the 2nd most popular game in the Social Deduction genre.
As you can imagine with each anniversary there’s a celebration, and as you can guess, we want to celebrate with you all in MINDNIGHT. You’ll see something really interesting in the game in the next few days so stay tuned!
Improving Community Suggestions Process
We are improving our pipeline to gather and address community ideas, suggestions and improvement inquiries.
On our Discord Server we have introduced a new and improved #suggestions channel where users can directly post their suggestions now, have their suggestions upvoted and automatically be added to our list of to-do and backlog.
If you want to suggest something you can do so by joining our Discord Server, and posting into the #suggestions channel using the command !suggestion and typing your suggestion in the same message as the command. After that the suggestions will be added to a queue and a reaction will be automatically assigned to it.
When it will reach 10 upvotes it will be added to our backlog and we will start discussing it. The system will be adjusted in time in accordance to the interest the channel will have. We might increase or decrease the upvotes threshold needed for a suggestion to be added to our to-do list.
Our views on METAGAMING
What is Metagaming? Metagaming is any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.
Metagaming is usually not explained in a game, although some games make exceptions and they introduce certain elements of metagaming as descriptive parts of the game (e.g: Overwatch Roles - Support/Damage Dealer/Tank etc.)
We are not against metagaming and all multiplayer games that have a high degree of strategy and tactics will eventually have you try to create optimized strategies in order to create a more reliable and safe game space for themselves.
Now, MINDNIGHT is not a game that was built with reliability in mind (we have built it specifically to create gameplay, ONLY out of dialogue and action deduction) - that is why many of you seek ways to create reliability and find step-by-step metagame strategies to obtain an advantage over other players that you encounter. To some degree that will always happen and some metagame rules will always exist, that we are even considering implementing in the game, including in the tutorial.
But, the reality is that more than often, some metagame rules unbalance the game and are a constant subject of harassment. We do not tolerate any kind of harassment and we have seen that some metagame rules came together with a lot of negativity in public matches, toxicity and bad image around our company and game.
This is why we wanted to open this discussion in blog posts and explain why certain metagame rules are in fact cheating, or they unbalance the game substantially, and discuss how we would like to tackle these mechanisms in order to shape MINDNIGHT into the experience that everyone wants. A safe, fun and scalable gameplay environment with balanced game sessions.
MINDNIGHT Development Goals
We were watching several weeks ago one of Mark’s essays on video game design, and there is a thing that Mark says in this video that really resonated with us as something that really is important for MINDNIGHT. Mark said - “Try not to discourage players to play in a certain way, but encourage them to play the way you envisioned”
https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8
We have looked long and hard at the bigger picture and really examined what our goals are with MINDNIGHT and how we can achieve them, before making any big changes. We now feel that we have a better understanding of what we want to to achieve and how to achieve it. We will share all details in these blog post series and await your feedback and opinions.
We can sum the development goals of MINDNIGHT as follows:
- We want to evolve MINDNIGHT into a game that emphasizes the importance of passive information and communication, rather the information that some players invent or exploit through metagame strategies.
- We want you to feel rewarded when you are nice to other players, non-toxic and overall focused on the match to communicate.
- We want you to not feel punished whenever you are playing in a particular style that might not be in line or synced with the other players in a game session
- We want you to not exploit a particular mechanic in order to gain advantage over other players, unless you are just better at communicating, deducing and manipulating
- We want you to have agency, but not be harassed by other players whenever you choose to do something in a particular way
- We want you to feel a sense of progression, but really not blame or rage whenever a game does not end with a Victory.
The game issues really end up to be a circle between three major problematic categories:
- Exploits and Metagaming
- Toxicity and Raging
- Motivation and Competitiveness
Exploits and Metagaming - There are several things that now players can do, but not all players are aware of them such as the Hacker Protocol, Honour Duels, Alpha/Beta Concepts, Node 1 Meta, Testing Bots etc.
Toxicity - Players get mad and toxic over primarily two reasons. One is for not following the exploits and metagame rules from above and the second is for not winning - which actually translates into not having the same playstyle and strategy like others.
Motivation and Competitiveness - The game cannot inherently be competitive due to the nature of the game and the math behind a game match. But most players think that it's competitive due to the way we framed the game with Ranks and Leaderboards. And we take full responsibility.
Conclusion - Players always want to win, thus they become toxic, thus they use exploits and metagame rules to gain an advantage because the game rules are naturally quite unreliable.
That is why we will address each aspect mentioned above, one by one, in this blog post and in future blog posts - with the objective to slowly but surely push some changes into the game. We will not get into details on how we want to solve all of this in this post - but we are quite sure we have found a way to adjust and evolve MINDNIGHT to serve the goals that we mentioned.
Bot Reading and Bot Exploits
Introduction
We will be starting with one of the most important issues that the game faces now, in order to slowly start aligning the game to the new direction.
We have introduced bots into the game primarily as a way to replace a disconnected player and have the game continue as seamlessly as possible for the rest of the players in the game session, without interruptions.
Our goal with the Bots was and still is to create a complex framework of artificial intelligence that tries to behave to their best ability to replicate human decisions in order to serve their objective. Either to not get caught as a hacker and to get into missions as an agent.
Bots have some patterns, because there are certain situations that they cannot accept or refuse certain missions because it doesn’t serve their objective. But - bots also have in some decisions a form of randomness in order to simulate humans unpredictable behaviors. We call it controlled randomness.
We never wanted to share exactly how bots work, because of obvious reasons - but many players have argued and complained that the bots became readable in time. Patterns became more and more clear for experienced players and this gave an unusual advantage to players that knew and knew how to exploit the system.
It is needless to say that we will never be able to make bots totally random, because well - humans are not totally random in this game - and that would only create more gameplay problems than solve them.
But - let’s not forget the main objective of bots. Replacing a disconnected player and continuing the game.
Some players or more specifically Agent players started abusing the bots behavior for information - according to experienced players, here's how the current behavior works:
- An agent bot is more random, it's the hacker bot that has a pattern.
- The hacker bot will always refuse a proposal with his hacker teammate, except if the proposal was a hammer or a reproposed hacked node or after two hacked nodes. To confirm this, players re propose a proposal that a hacker bot had refused, if he refuses again, that confirms the bot is a hacker & his teammate is in that proposal.
- If the bot does not always refuse a proposal with a certain player, then the bot is an agent.
This gives a great cheating advantage to agents.
Currently, abusing bots using the methods mentioned above, is considered a very discouraged metagaming.
Some players leave the game to intentionally abuse the bot behavior - usually to prove innocence - this is reportable & bannable. Intentionally leaving the game is not allowed, moreover this is a direct abuse of the game behavior, it is considered cheating and you should report it under cheating.
Well - frankly speaking - players wanting more reliable gameplay outcomes is the cause of the problem. Any way that a player can take advantage and win a game - is a good excuse for exploiting a mechanic. Making bots not have a ruleset, will make the bots have no value.
What are the consequences of this problem?
Whenever a bot is tested by agents, hackers are put into a significant unfair disadvantage
Significantly lowers the quality of matches, due to how reliable bot testing is sometimes.
We will try as much as possible, periodically - sometimes without notice to make the bots unreadable and non-abusable, but solutions and discussions will not be limited to that, we are open to different mechanics for disconnected players.
The next update will have changes in bots and we think that will make them non-abusable for a while.
That is why we want to propose the following solutions and we want your thoughts around them:
We are considering adding a feature when after a player disconnects a match, to let the players choose if they want to continue the match or not with a Bot replacement - while also making the match not count as a win, nor as a loss - if continued.
Changing their behavior periodically in order to not become abusable - but within a ruleset that is not 100% random.
You might say - make them completely random. There are pros and cons to that.
- Bots behavior is completely unreadable
- Hackers hesitate to hack when included with their hacker bot teammate. This is good because when bots are unreadable, they become agents’ disadvantage
- It becomes a great disadvantage for agents, because even if the bot is an agent, its complete randomness makes it difficult to convince it for their proposals and they can’t gain reliable information about its role.
- Agent bots can become the hackers advantage, by accepting their proposals or hackers framing the proposals.
That being said - because we want to ultimately address the disconnections issues - we want to go away from making Bots random, as it was proven in our tests that they are in their best form now - and they are trying to play as human as they can. We will just improve and change them periodically while considering other options to handle disconnections.
Let us know your thoughts around this and we will listen closely on all of our communication channels. Join our Discord to have the highest chances to have your voice heard.
Stay tuned - In the next blog post we will be talking about the next issue in line - Hacker Protocol.
Over and out,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
Happy St. Patricks Day y'all! Update 2.7.5 is on!
Some occasions are secret, some are obvious. This time around we are bringing some new content + a new seasonal event! St. Patrick's.
Happy St. Patrick's everyone! You are now able to put your hands on two new deals, one including a small Leprechaun skin!
We have also added a few new skins that you can check out in the shop now:
- Mr. Whom
- Town Drunk
- Cyber Thug
- Gimp
- Gnome
- Holo Grant
Last but not least, we have also added two new emojis
- OK Hand
- and.....a Snowman
In other news, we wanted to let you know that we are all safe, since most of us are working from home and we'll keep on working on MINDNIGHT and the other projects that we have with no slowing down.
Thanks to our new artist Luke - we made sure we don't stop bringing new and juicy content for y'all.
We'll come soon with other news for you, until then, stay safe - play some MINDNIGHT and wash your hands.
Cheers!
NO MOON TEAM
Hotfix 2.7.4
- Fixed the ghost lobbies. The lobbies without any player shouldn't be there now anymore.
- Improved custom games browser.
Thanks for playing MINDNIGHT and sorry for any inconvenience that these issues might have produced.
2.7.3 Update
Community-driven Development
As we are moving forward in support MINDNIGHT and trying to update it more often, although we are working on it in our free time, we decided to open the discussion even more than just our Discord Server, around some changes that we would like to make in order to make MINDNIGHT a better, safer game.
In order to do that we will start posting some blog posts here on Steam - and we will invite everyone to review and suggest solutions to some issues and gameplay changes that we will make.
We will try our best to explain our vision and justify the changes that we would like to make, and we’ll listen very carefully and take all of your feedback into consideration.
Now let’s get into the changes that we made in this update and prepare for a bigger update soon.
Improvements
- Added support for animations for static skins such as Xmas Tree, Cake etc. that are not conveying to the default classic skin template
- Implemented a moderator in-game tool that can be used to manually ban players in extreme cases faster
- Changed the End Game Screen layout in preparation for the Reputation System development
- Added a Game Rating feature in the End Game Screen, where players can now rate the game that they just played with stars. We will use these ratings internally to improve the game.
- The number of active ongoing custom games are now displayed in the main menu
- MacOS users can now play Custom Games with Voice Chat
- Small performance improvements when loading
- We changed the time allowed for a player to join a match if he disconnected from 5 minutes to 3 minutes. Players will now need to join a game back faster, in order to avoid punishments
- We have changed the punishment amounts for when a player would leave a game.
The first penalty was changed from 5 minutes to 30 minutes
The second penalty was changed from 15 minutes to 1 hour
The third penalty was changed from 30 minutes to 24 hours
The forth penalty was changed from 1 hour to 7 days
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where emotes would be broken when a player would type colored names
- Fixed an issue where the chat would break when typing extremely long words
- Fixed a typo in the Reputation System Widget
- Fixed a glitch that would trigger when pop-ups would be active in the game menus
- Fixed a bug where the Cake Skin would be mirrored in-game
- Fixed a bug where the animated background in the main menu would enable again after playing a match
Notes
- The issue with achievements being claimed twice, was identified as not a bug, as the bug only occurs only on the client side. On the server side players receive the correct amount of credits and achievements cannot be claimed multiple times
Join our Discord for contributing and joining the development of MINDNIGHT.
Thanks for playing,
MINDNIGHT TEAM
First time - Overwhelmingly Positive! Thank you to you all!
We wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for supporting MINDNIGHT so far and for continuing to play it!
For the first time we have reached a milestone that we have never thought we will ever achieve after 2 years after launch. For the very first time we have Overwhelmingly Positive Recent Reviews. More specifically 99% of the last 30 days reviews (116 Reviews) are Positive Reviews!
This may not mean a lot for the regular Steam user/player but for the perception of the game and for our motivation is incredibly important. Last but not least, having 99% recent positive reviews also means that MINDNIGHT was pushed in the Steam Visibility Algorithm and this is all because of you! Thank you!
Despite the obvious problems that MINDNIGHT faces, such as toxicity, low playerbase, meta-game harassment, not so often updates and balance issues - we want to express our gratitude and humble thanks to all of you out there that believe in the concept and in our team.
As we are moving forward, we are working hard parallelizing three fronts around MINDNIGHT:
- Fixing a lot of bugs and issues with the current version
- Discussing with the community, gathering solutions and applying gameplay changes to fix balancing issues and problematic metagame issues
- And last but not least, working on the Web and Mobile port of the game that will introduce new ways to play MINDNIGHT
We encourage any of you that have played the game, to review the game as this is helping us tremendously in our journey to improve the game
Thank you for believing in us and we invite you to be part of the conversation on our Discord Server.
Just to barely scratch the surface, in order to express our gratitude - for the next 24 hours we will be offering 2000 Credits per user - by using the following code in the Redeem Section inside the Marketplace of the game -> bbe18f8a06
P.S: The code will be cancelled in 24 hours.
CHEERS and THANK YOU again,
MINDNIGHT TEAM