Greetings everyone! We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!
We are happy to announce that our new Roadmap is here! As we promised in the previous posts, we have created a new roadmap containing our development plans for Northern Lights!
Full roadmap and details available below.
Improvements to character animations - Released in 0.5
General UI and UX Improvements based on current feedback - Released in 0.5
New quest based tutorials to get players through some of the basics of the game - Released in 0.5
New game languages - Released in 0.5
New and improved ambient sounds and soundtracks
New and improved character action sounds
Improvements to existing interaction sounds
Improvements to sound balancing and mastering
Controller support
Custom difficulty settings
Brand new Story Mode focused on exploration and lore, with re-written escape endings!
Brand new Side Quests for the notes collectibles system
Improvements to Character Dialogues & Voice-Overs
Steam Achievements for both Story Mode and Survival Mode
New small and filler locations
New bird and bird flocking mechanics
New fauna AI and more animal diversity
Improvements to nature level design
Improvements to existing locations
Improvements to some graphics elements of the game
The long awaited CO-OP Survival mode
Everything else that's left for the game to be considered finished!
We will keep this Road-Map updated with any new additions or changes! Thanks to everybody for reading and for the ongoing support!
We Wish you all a Happy New Year and we hope to see you all Well and Safe Next Year! - MadGoat Team
December 24 Hotfix Notes
- Fixed an issue causing player-built fires to not load when loading game - Fixed an issue causing cooking spots to lose preview graphics when loading game - Minor fixes and tweaks to various aspects of the game
MadGoat Team Wishes You a Merry Christmas!
MadGoat Studio wishes you Happy Holidays!
Hello everyone! With the Winter Holidays around the corner and 2021 coming to an end, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas, and all the best for 2022!
We appreciate all the support we've received from you throughout this year and we are looking forward with excitement to what 2022 will bring!
If you haven't had the chance to buy the game yet, you can now do it at 30% OFF! Northern Lights will be on sale for the whole Steam Winter Sale!
We hope you will enjoy playing Northern Lights during this winter holiday!
Best wishes, MadGoat Studio
December 21 Hotfix Notes
- Wanderer and Resourceful difficulties now start with journal affliction treatment entries revealed from the beginning - Added mouse sensitivity setting - Added ability to take items from world slots by double clicking instead of dragging - Improved backpack to world interactions user experience - Improved balance of cabin fever affliction risk - Tweaked animals audio rate - Tweaked plants colors to fit better the setting of the game - Tweaked warmth drop values
- Fixed an issue causing unexpected behaviors with graphics settings that was affecting some users - Fixed an issue causing Game User Interface to stop working after changing resolution or idling the game alt tabbed for too long that was affecting some users
December 20 Hotfix Notes
- Added missing sounds to interactions (these are meant as placeholders and will be improved with further updates) - Tweaked visibility of HUD health alerts - Tweaked triggers for health stat tutorials - Tweaked footsteps audio - Tweaked mapping mechanics
- Fixed bird carcass not applying decay to harvesting tools - Fixed some languages having missing controls in tutorials - Fixed watch missing beeping alarm sound on low stats - Fixed an issue causing some equipped clothing graphics to be glitched - Fixed house stoves having too low burning time - Fixed an issue causing adding wood sticks to contribute too little to fire burning life - Fixed missing locked doors hints - Fixed an issue with hallucinations in interiors - Fixed issue causing furniture storage slot to display in wrong screen position
December 19 Hotfix Notes
- Fixed an issue causing interactions to break in certain house interiors - Fixed an issue causing some beds to start highlighted by default - Fixed an issue causing fire-starting to not work correctly sometimes - Tweaked font scaling for Russian characters
Northern Lights Overhaul Update is now RELEASED!
Today is a big day for us. After one year of work, we are finally launching the Overhaul Update for Northern Lights!
Developing this major update has been a challenging experience, to say the least. During this period, within our small team, we’ve been through difficult times for each of us. The harsh times we live in, lack of funds to continue development and the tragedy of losing people we love have made us consider at some point the idea of abandoning this project.
We are glad we didn’t! After months of hard work, we are finally able to release this huge update that totally changes the gameplay in all its forms!
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What is new?
For this update, we took all the ideas and feedback that we've got in the past year and re-thought the whole Northern Lights experience based on them! Here are the most important new features of the game!
Focus on surviving - The story mode of Northern Lights has become Survival Mode! Survive for as long as you can while waiting for rescue! Game endings are currently undergoing major changes and will be released in a future update!
New First Person Character and Animations - We replaced the character and animations with higher quality ones!
Slot-based inventory system - With a strong emphasis on item physical size and weights!
Better looting - The actual items now spawn in the game world and can be picked by hand!
New journal system - The journal now plays an important role in the gameplay. From keeping track of your knowledge and discoveries to crafting, it's all there now!
Updated Health System - New affliction and treatment system, tweaked health values, and improved overall stability of the system!
Several new locations - We have also added a bunch of new region-specific locations for everyone to find!
Updated existing locations - The previous locations of Northern Lights have been updated with new assets for a fresh new look!
New and Improved items - New and redesigned tools and handhelds! Every item now has a visual representation in the game!
Improved core mechanics - We redesigned fire-starting and cooking to be more intuitive and engaging! The other mechanics such as sleeping, fishing, harvesting, etc. have also been "refreshed" to be on par with the rest of the update!
More buildings and crafts - All the buildings in the game have been remade from the ground up! We have also created new buildings called "Shelters", making it possible to build your own small shelter! Also, the building process is interactive now!
Brand new mechanics - Researching books for blueprints, water gathering from water bodies, meat salting in salt buckets and more!
More languages - With the help of community volunteers on Localizor.com, we translated the game into multiple new languages!
And much more!
What we fixed?
A lot of development time also went into improving and fixing existing features and systems. We wanted to make sure the game is as stable as possible for this release!
Game Core Improvements - A lot of game core features, such as saving, settings, region loading, etc. were improved. The overall stability of the game was also improved!
Performance Improvements - The performance and memory usage of the game was improved!
Graphics Improvements - The game should look better now!
Lots of bug-fixing - We managed to fix a lot of issues that have been reported during the previous months by our community!
In the coming weeks we’ll be sharing more information about our plans for the future of Northern Lights, such as next-gen improvements, more FX sounds, AI overhaul, the return of the endings, and the long-awaited Cooperative Gamemode.
We hope you’ll enjoy the experience we have created for you, and we want to thank you for your support and patience, as you waited for this day. Thank you for believing in us, as we believe in you!
All the best, MadGoat Studio
Dev Diary 4 - A status update on Northern Lights Overhaul
Greetings everyone! We want to start this dev diary by apologizing for not posting any more updates here lately. We also want everyone to know that we haven't abandoned the game!
We’ve been working hard on addressing all the feedback we’ve received during the initial phase of the early access, and we believe we have finally crafted something that both us and you will be proud of!
Without further ado, here are some of the biggest improvements we've brought to the gameplay!
Meet the new Backpack System
The main concern everybody had with the initial version of the game was the clunky inventory system. With the help of community feedback and ideas, we’ve redesigned the inventory from the ground up!
The new backpack is now limited in both space and weight, making it challenging to manage resources. It is now impossible to carry an infinite number of items, and there are separate pockets for different kinds of items, so think twice before stuffing the backpack with materials!
Along with this major change, we have also redesigned the way in which the player interacts with world objects. And such, every interaction is now “drag and drop” based between the backpack and the objects’ item slots.
This also allows for stacking support so that the players don’t have to input items one by one in world objects as before!
Another issue we wanted to address was carrying big objects. Instead of going into the inventory, which didn't make much sense previously, big items are now carried by hand, obstructing the player from using handhelds while doing so.
Journal Improvements
We have also worked on improving the journal mechanics, which are now a core feature of the game.
The journal now contains everything from health and flora knowledge to craft recipes and building blueprints!
Journal entries are now unlocked by exploring the world, experiencing certain aspects of the game, or by leveling up certain skills.
What's left?
The update is currently in the testing stage, meaning that most of the new features and improvements are done! This means that we can finally showcase every big change that is coming to the game!
However, we can’t fit everything into one blog post, so we will continue to post regular diaries in the coming few weeks. Stay tuned!
Feedback is important for us, especially now with all the big changes we are making to the game, so don't hesitate to let us know about your potential ideas! Also, let us know how you feel about what we're currently working on! We encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community!
And as always, thanks to everyone for the support!
Dev Diary 3 - Rethinking the Health Mechanics (Overhaul Update)
Hello community! We are coming with yet another development diary, in which we are going to talk about what we changed related to player health and stats!
By doing more difficulty balance testing and looking through the feedback from the community, we decided the stats system needs an overhaul! As a result, most of the health system changes come from the things we improved with the player stats!
We started by simplifying what affects stats and what stats are affecting, meaning that there will be no more odd behavior between stats during passing time, etc. Some stats also have better names now, to make it easier to understand what their role is in the game (Fatigue is now Energy, Calories is now Hunger, Condition is now Health).
We also ditched the clumsy stats menu and the annoying on-screen bars by moving the stats to the player’s wristwatch, which we added back to the game. The wristwatch interface will appear by holding the [T] key.
Sanity is now more than a “visual” stat that does nothing! With the overhaul update, we wanted to bring our original sanity mechanic idea to life. So, in addition to the audio-only hallucinations, when going insane, the character will now experience visual hallucinations in the form of wolf packs that will attack you. Failing to defend yourself from hallucinations will result in fainting, which can be dangerous when coupled with low stats.
For all this to make sense and be manageable to the player, we also had to rethink the sanity interface. To achieve this, we moved the sanity indicator to the first person HUD, and we've added sanity notifications that show exactly how much sanity you lose or gain after doing certain actions.
The first thing we wanted to change about afflictions was their complexity. The old affliction system was hard to understand and had a lot of effects that didn't make much sense in the context of our game.
In the overhaul update, we aim to make afflictions more straightforward and less cluttered. To do so, we started by removing some of the afflictions which we thought didn't make a lot of sense, as well as removing the "positive" afflictions (Energized, Last Resort, etc.), which are now just health effects that get triggered when the case may be.
We've also added a new affliction named "Fever". This affliction can be triggered by other diseases and can rapidly kill you if it goes unnoticed. Thus, we decided to add a thermometer icon that will appear on HUD so that the player is aware of it as soon as possible.
Lastly, we have re-designed the way treatments work from the ground up. No more complicated treatments in the form of loot recipes! Rather than completing complex treatment schemes, treatments now have a progress bar that can be filled by passing time and baring the effects, and/or by consuming natural medication such as herbs, mushrooms, or even resin.
We are working hard on polishing the game and adding new features for the Overhaul Update. Until the update is ready for release, we aim to publish a weekly dev diary with the new awesome stuff we add to the game to keep everyone updated. So stay tuned for more!
Feedback is important for us, especially now with all the big changes we are making to the game, so don't hesitate to let us know about your potential ideas! Also, let us know how you feel about what we're currently working on! We encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community!
And as always, thanks to everyone for the support!
Dev Diary 2 - First steps into Northern Lights Overhaul
Greetings everyone! You’re probably wondering why we’ve been silent for the past few weeks!
And to answer that, the whole team is working hard on the big update, which will completely change the core mechanics of our game and the visual representation of those mechanics.
In this Developer Diary, we will be taking our first steps into showing you some components of the game’s overhaul.
Big part of the user experience and the part that you will see on screen the most during gameplay sessions is the First Person HUD. So we started by redesigning the HUD from ground up based on feedback from our UX team and the representatives of the community!
The new HUD is more streamlined, less cluttered and takes less vital space on screen. We have also re-themed the whole interface to fit better with our game's "natural" thematic. No more industrial looking UI elements!
Another important bit that we noticed from your feedback is that opening a menu to see your current afflictions is annoying and breaks the game flow. To make this a better experience we have moved the list of active afflictions to the HUD and we simplified the data we display for them. This panel can be shown by holding the [Q] key in your keyboard!
As a quality of life improvement, looking at an interactable object now also displays contextual information! Looking at a tree trunk? Now you will know if you have the correct tool to harvest it! Found a new coat? You will know if its better or worse than your currently equipped one without having to take it and navigate through menus!
It is also now possible to do certain actions such as harvesting or consuming pickable items without having to loot them first, by accessing their right click menu while inspecting.
We have also put a lot of effort into polishing the world map menu lately! As per your feedback, the map is now displayed in full screen and features a legend to make it easier to understand what you are looking at! The maximum zoom has also been increased.
A new feature for the mapping system is the addition of the push-pins to the game! Push-pins can be used to mark locations such as loot caches and points of interests on the map. And to make things more interesting, they have to be found and looted while exploring certain locations before they can be used!
Note that the number of push-pins the player will be allowed to loot and carry will be limited to balance difficulty and to avoid filling the map with pins!
We are working hard on polishing the game and on adding new features for the Overhaul Update, and until the update is ready for release, we aim to publish a weekly dev diary with the new awesome stuff we add to the game to keep everyone updated. So stay tuned for more!
Feedback is important for us, especially now with all the big changes we are making to the game, so don't hesitate to let us know about your potential ideas! Also let us know how you feel about what we're currently working on! We encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community!
And as always, thanks to everyone for the support!
