Monstrous
Development Update
After an entire summer in the oven, we're taking the development to the next stage. I'd like to thank everyone involved for their hard work and dedication in completing the update, developers and players alike. There is still a lot of work to be done but we're all committed to making this an exciting action game.
The main goal of the current stage of development is to finalize all gameplay elements and the Rivals mode. To be able to achieve this in the next few months, we've limited the game area to the southern districts of the city, Harbor and Tenements. Afterwards, we will start implementing the Co-op and Duel modes before completing the rest of the city. Even though it may seem limited, it is still a rather large area full of objectives, enemies and all 5 progressive phases of Rivals Mode.
Moving forward, we will increase the frequency of the updates to once every two weeks for the game, and once a week for the beta. Now that we have almost all of the systems in the game, our implementations will be short and bulk updates to fix existing problems and to increase performance and stability of the game as soon as possible.
Last but not least, the issue of price. It was kingofcats who asked if there was going to be a sale anytime soon and we felt it necessary to answer this question properly. Pricing a game in Early Access is always very difficult. It has to have a balance between supporting the development, setting a worth to the final product and reflecting what is available currently. We've put a lot of thought into this, and decided to go into a 25% discount to reflect the fact that we've closed major parts of the city, and we still need to polish what is available in the store.
I have to stress the fact that this is not the first in a long string of ever increasing discounts. The price will increase gradually to its former amount as we finalize the features of the game, and as we get closer to release, it will surpass the Early Access price. We're not taking this approach because we're greedy. Setting a price range also gives us a bar of quality to work towards, and we will make Monstrous a game that has the production quality to match its price range.
As always, thank you for your support :)
Halloween Patch Notes
• World Design Update: Lairford South
o 6 more world squares have been added to the play area, completing the Tenements and Harbor districts.
o Current game mode is set in a 500x200 playspace with explorable rooftops, landmarks and essential shops.
o Numerous decoration bits and pieces have been deployed in available world squares to flesh out the town.
o Most shaders and environment textures have been rebuilt or overhauled to add more detail to the world.
o We have also built a relit version of the city that is more demanding in hardware performance terms. We will also make that version available on a beta branch while we work on optimization features.
o More background music and ambient audio has been deployed in the city.
• Player Character Updates
o The Ghoul has been remodeled and retextured.
o The 4 player characters (the Ghoul, The Vampiress, the Promethean and the Witch) had various animation updates and tweaks. They also include transitions for certain states.
o More character abilities and mechanics have been implemented.
o All player characters now have a sprint attack.
o The Ghoul can now lay and detonate traps. Laying a trap can also be used as combo with melee attacks. He has access to a special, ricocheting shot and a super shot that penetrates. He also has more knife attacks with different properties to build combos with.
o The Vampiress can now steal different buffs based on enemy strengths when she performs Essence Drain. Her Impaler is now a special attack. She can activate a short duration, powerful life drain buff as her new super.
o The Promethean now has a very strong, special punch. He had most of his attacks tweaked to have wider attack arcs. He can buff his defenses with his power button.
o The Witch can now receive randomized beneficial effects when she reveals a card with her power button and casts a set of randomized harmful effects on enemies around her when she reveals her hand in her super attack. She also had her attack animations tweaked to transition better.
o The 4 player characters received a texture and shader update. These changes will become more apparent in the relit version of the city.
o More player attacks and abilities now have particle and sound effects.
• Starting Area Update
o The starting area has been changed. It is now more compact and contains several new interaction platforms.
o Player character customization is now accessible via the interaction button (F on keyboard, X on gamepad) at the character select screen. There are 3 styles and 4 color sets available per player character now.
o Players can view, unlock and equip different weapons at the Arsenal.
o Players can view collectible items and game information at the Collection platform.
o The new game platform by the collapsed tower can be used to start a new, single player game.
o The Game Narrator now provides basic guidance in the Start Space to start teaching the player in a free form tutorial.
o There is a small island built to give the player a space to practice jumping and wall jumping.
o There is a small island built to give the player a space to practice combat basics with dummies. It also has a health / stamina / magic / comeback refill spot so the player can replenish character combat resources while practicing.
o The newly built starting space islands will be properly polished later.
• Game Content Update
o Primary and Secondary objectives have been overhauled. They now have more content and allow for a completion of a session.
o The primary quest line is separated into 5 phases with 3 possible tasks per phase.
o Secondary goals are selected from a larger pool and distributed to all players.
o There are also free form goals on the map such as treasures and faction VIPs.
o Up to five tiers of essential passive & consumable items have been added to reward lists and treasure chests. More complex items will be distributed to the same outlets in waves.
o Each player character has 10 collectible weapons in-game now.
o 50 unlockable lore bits are in-game. Most have been redeployed to better reward exploration in the newer city districts.
o NPC encounters have been redistributed to populate the updated city map and to provide a smoother difficulty curve.
• Systems Updates
o The AI framework has been updated. Both pathfinding and combat mechanics have been improved on.
o Fixes to combat systems have been made. Core mechanics have been overhauled such as combat states, blocking, parrying, reversals, frame advantages and disadvantages.
o Weapons clashes and parries can now set involved characters to a “recoil” reaction state.
o Guard crushes have been simplified in implementation. This change will allow more polished animations.
o Attack types, dodge types and guarding are now better arranged in a RPS flow. Horizontal attacks defeat sideways dodges and deflect thrusting attacks. Overhead attacks deal double guard damage and break through horizontal attacks. Thrusts punch through overhead strikes and catch enemies dodging backwards.
o Glancing hits are enabled on NPC attacks.
o The animation system driving our characters and combat system has been overhauled to better integrate with engine features and to enable more detailed transitions.
o The GUI has received a visual update. An ongoing under the hood revamp will make future updates easier and faster. The city map can now be accessed by pressing the inventory menu button (Tab on keyboard, Back on gamepad).
o Improvements have been made to performance. Batching now works and culling has been optimized.
o Various small fixes to characters, abilities, effects and content.
Upcoming Halloween Patch
The upcoming update will release on the 31st of October, in time for Halloween. It will include:
• Updated look of the southern area of the city, covering both the Tenements and Harbor districts.
• An overhaul of the core combat animations of existing player characters.
• New weapon types for existing player characters
• An updated starting area with the first version of tutorials and character customization
• An overhaul of encounters and combat AI
• New objectives and progression opportunities.
• Last but not least, performance optimization for the updated areas of the game.
As a quick preview, take a look at the comparison screenshots below.
Old Tenements
New Tenements
Old Pillory
New Pillory
I will also be sharing frequent status updates in the days leading up to the Halloween Update. Thanks again for your continued support 😊
Patch 0.4.2.3 is Live
Next update at the end of June will be more substantial in terms of Graphics, Animations and City Layout. We will also keep tweaking and improving the AI in general. If you do not wish to wait a month and want to see how the monthly update is progressing, please join us in the beta. It is updated at least every week, mostly once every few days as fixes and features are immediately tested on Steam.
Here are the patch notes:
• Killed off several bugs affecting combat mechanics. You can now land attacks better and your enemies will be stunned properly when performing combos. Guarding will also work more reliably now.
• Following the combat fix, we have tweaked our AI so they don’t dawdle around too much. They might be a bit relentless now, but we will keep tweaking until they feel right.
• The Collection system is live! The first batch of collectibles are lore bits that can be found in various locations in the city.
• Players can gain coins by killing enemies now
• Starting Area has been populated. It has an acceptable performance right now. We will improve performance in the next couple of weeks
• Fixed an issue that prevented the player from returning to the lobby after completing a game session.
• Weapon trails are now dynamically adjusted to match the frame rate. Trails will better match the attack arcs and look smoother to boot.
• The camera will now properly shake when you land a killing blow on an enemy.
• The NPC AI now handles movement better. Next week the animations will be updated to match their movements.
• Small update to move lists to include default sprint and interact buttons.
• Various UI fixes in character selection, highlights and the game menu.
• Starting Area fires don’t clip anymore.
o https://steamcommunity.com/app/748820/discussions/2/1693795812299861930/
o Thanks to ShroudedNight for pointing them out.
• Combat Music Triggers have been fixed
• Fixed collider issues for some sidewalks and buildings in the City
• Gameplay Effects icons have been fixed. They only show when they are in use
• Character Selection has been improved. Player Character now faces the camera and the annoying respawning issue while selecting the character and colors have been fixed.
• A collision issue with Dash has been fixed.
• Character rotation on slopes has been tweaked.
• No more encounter respawning on death.
• Zeppelin transport UI has been fixed.
• Adjusted encounter population and distribution to favor simpler enemies in earlier phases.
• Fixed healing items dropping rarely from chests. There will also be more chests in the world as the game session advances.
• Erroneous hitbox removed from Ghoul Power Attack.
• Small fixes to AI pathing in the City.
Finally, out in Early Access!
Monstrous originally started out as a 2D game. It was heavily influenced by Moonstone: A Hard Day’s Knight, which we hold dear to our hearts. We didn’t want to make just a copy though, we tried to imagine how a game like Moonstone could be realized in a time where melee combat has taken to new heights by excellent games such as Souls series, Bloodborne and Dragon’s Dogma (a personal favorite for me). Moonstone was also a free-roaming game, so we made a board-game like setup but dropped the turn-based approach to modernize it even further.
After a few early prototypes, it became clear that the concept was more suited to 3D so we switched to Unity Engine around late 2017. The prototypes immediately improved and after an initial phase of technology pre-production, we started production in January. We all knew that making a free-roaming action game in 3D would be a tremendous undertaking and we needed help developing it as we didn’t have the resources to hire user-testing groups. We had two options at that point, either crowd-fund the game to increase our resources or release the game in Early access and get help from the player-base that would be interested in being involved in a development cycle.
None of us felt comfortable with the idea of crowd-funding. We wanted to have an open structure where players would take part in the development, not just fund the project and hope that it will one day release to their expectations. While it is true that we could have setup the tools to involve the players ourselves, it meant additional time and resources spent on setting up and maintaining such a structure. Steam already offered such tools, Valve were and still are actively spending tremendous resources on demolishing the wall between developers and players. It takes little effort for us to communicate with players, push fixes and builds that can be downloaded from quality servers.
So here we are, finally in Early Access. We are well aware that the game is nowhere near a release. It’s not a highly polished game with only few bugs remaining to fix. Being a free-roaming game, it is not the kind of game where we can just push a couple of polished districts for players to explore and feed content over time either. The game currently has the core combat, general structure of the Rivals Mode and the districts implemented. We could have added more to the build, more assets, more enemies, more features. But we thought it was important to have a frame-rate that was at the very least over 30FPS. We omitted anything that wasn’t optimized and would drag the frame-rate to sub-30FPS.
We want to use Early Access as a platform where we can build a game with a dedicated community that is as excited about the concept as we are.
We sincerely thank you for any support you can offer even if it is just showing the patience to read this announcement 😊. Please feel free to join us on Discord and Discussions where we are actively keeping a presence. If you want to have more information about how we’re going to proceed from here onward, I will be making a post in the general sections of the discussions.