Posthuman: Sanctuary
Progress update
It's time to give a project update while the world is still going through its apocalypse lite.
We're testing new characters and we've been adding some functionality to them. We were not entirely happy with how they looked and we're putting in some more work on them before releasing them.
We've also been working on the story mode. We've finally fleshed out the actual encounters and we have to now detail them and implement them in the game. The progress here was much slower than expected due to a number of spokes that intruded our wheels. The global pandemic obviously didn't help and set us back a bit. It definitely impacted our finances and slowed us down that way. But other than that we had other hurdles, including some personal health issues, and technical ones, like finding some combinations of player actions which conflicted with some story paths and choices. So we're enduring and surviving through this stage as we make small steps forward.
We've also implemented other small fixes, like for example fixed some inconsistencies in the weapon visuals, and those of the enemies. We will be releasing an update with these and more encounters which we've tested. The release date for this next update will be announced soon.
Discord channel + giveaway
As we announced recently, we're trying to focus more on our communication, so that you can keep following us through whichever medium you prefer. Since Discord is a favourite venue for most gamers, we've opened a channel for Posthuman: Sanctuary where you can reach out to us or discuss your adventures with other survivors of the apocalypse. Please do join us there - the more the merrier!
To celebrate the new channel and to boost our community, we're also running a GIVEAWAY for 5 lucky winners to get free Steam keys! Go ahead and visit the link before the 31st July 2020 to take part in the competition.
Good luck!
Mighty Box
Don't go out or you'll meet new people!!
A long-due update is finally here, and there's a lot to it, so let's cut to the chase and start listing:
- Content, content, content - we've added loads of new encounters for you to explore. There's plenty to make your survival more challenging, but also more rewarding. We're already working on the next batch of encounters too, so get digging into these cause there's going to be more coming.
- Game balancing - many of you suggested that the game is very difficult, as did our testers. Well, the wasteland is a tough place, but we've now made it more endurable. A lot of changes went into this, but here are the most notable:
- We tweaked the preset characters and their starting equipment to make each of them feel more distinct in terms of play style.
- The combat difficulty progression has been eased out somewhat, enabling a longer stretch of survival in each play.
- We took the message from our community that having a follower seemed like a burden rather than having a helping hand, especially when it comes to maintaining their loyalty. It involved a lot of head scratching and hair pulling but finally followers should now FEEL like followers not burdens.
- Some inventory items have also been tweaked to make them more useful.
Let us know what you think about this - feedback is very important to us especially about these. - We tweaked the preset characters and their starting equipment to make each of them feel more distinct in terms of play style.
- Efficiency - this is mostly transparent to you, but we've restructured many of the game system so that they are more efficient and use less resources on your machine.
- Bug squashing - as we progress and add more to the game, we inevitably find more unwanted critters lurking in the dark recesses of code. We've crushed many of these, and at this point we're quite confident that the major ones have been exterminated. We're still working on some minor/cosmetic ones, so we're still not completely free of the pests, but we're getting there.
There's plenty more coming soon, too. We're adding the final touches to the new characters, adding more encounters, and working on the story mode. All of this needs more testing so we'll be gradually releasing as we test.
We've also heeded the calls for more presence with our community. Going forward we're going to keep a much more frequent contact with all of you through all channels. Make sure to follow us on our social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ) to get the latest news and upcoming competitions. More about these next time.
In the meantime, good luck and make the most out of that can of beans.
Development Update
We also want to bring you up to speed on what has been happening at Mighty Box whilst also informing you on some of our plans for the future of the game. During the past few months, we've been hard at work on tuning the game, and smashing those pesky bugs which crop up now and then (some ugly ones!). Furthermore, we've been making quality of life changes to pave the way for some really exciting stuff in the near and not-so-near future.
We've conjured up some new encounters which will undoubtedly enhance your experience with the game as well as make your survival in it more difficult. But fret not! We have new characters in the works and new weapons to help you on your journey. And yes, the long-awaited Story Mode! We've hit a few bumps in the road, but we strongly believe that we have now found our footing and ready to go full force into creating a rich narrative experience for you survivors out there.
We're really excited for you to see what we've been working on, and you'll see some cool additions sooner rather than later! We would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your patience, your support, your trust and most importantly, your feedback. We cannot stress enough how much we value your suggestions and opinions. It is your contributions which enable us to make Posthuman: Sanctuary the best version it can be. We'll stop rambling and get back to work now. Stay tuned for more exciting news coming your way very soon! ^.^
P.S. For those of you who prefer to see updates on Facebook, we've set up a group which you're all invited to join.
Time to hunt those mutants down...
- We've added a large amount of content to the game in this one - there are a LOT of new encounters for you to explore, tons of difficult choices to make.
- We've also made major overhauls to some of the buggiest parts of the game, like the inventory management. You should find the game runs much more smoothly with fewer oddities and bugs occurring.
- The starting characters have been revised, generally made stronger, so the game is easier at the beginning. We're not sure how the majority of you will feel about this change, but please do let us know.
- Apart from adding more non-combat encounters, we have reviewed and cleaned up the 'old' ones. Those which yielded items, or trade have been tested thoroughly and fixed where broken.
- In combat we now allow multiple dice to be re-rolled when a character has a high enough mind stat. Each die may still only be re-rolled once, and the complement of 'mind' re-rolls can be used over one entire turn (i.e. including in your opponent's action, if you still have any remaining from your action).
- Combat now yields more experience points.
After the good news, a little bit of bad news is inevitable, but it's not like it's the (post-) apocalypse, or anything:
- We have updated the version of the game engine that we are using, which makes the game run better. However, in this version we noticed that on Windows, if you do not have the Windows Media Feature Pack installed (i.e. if you do not have Media Player, usually when you have the 'N' variant of the OS, like Windows 10 N), the game crashes when starting a new game as soon as it tries to play the intro. We're working on a fix, but in the meantime, you can install the Media Feature Pack from the Microsoft website pertinent to your OS version. Sorry about this, but this wasn't happening in our previous version of the game engine (the video simply used to remain blank, with the "Skip" button visible and functional at the bottom right of the screen) - the crash is new and we only realised it was happening a few days before releasing this update.
- Due to some of the changes we made, there is a change that the game might crash at some points when you use an 'old' save game form a previous version. It may not happen at all for most of you, and in fact this was the reason we didn't outright reject older saved games. Starting a new game will prevent any of these crashes from happening.
And that's all regarding this update. In other news, we welcome to our studio Andrea, who has already been hard at work to make this update possible.
Now what are you waiting for? Venture forth into the apocalypse...
What's happening
It has been a long time since we gave you an update on what we are up to and it's also been a while since we updated the game.
Several have been wondering whether we've abandoned the game, but rest assured that the game is still under development.
We did have a setback in the development; our lead programmer on the project had to move on to a different venture, which obviously meant that we had to have a hand-over period. This was quite extensive work, so it set us back until we could settle back into the space he left. We're back in shape now and we're trying to reduce the backlog.
As regards the game content, we have continued to add more and more encounters which we're still in the process of testing. The testing has also been set back a little because found issues most of the time relate back to some programming tasks, as is the case in all games. At first we were going to post the updates bit by bit, but we want to test a little bit more before releasing. We will release a new update of the game with more content and bug fixes over the next few weeks.
We've also started to work on the Story Mode, and we're excited on how that's going to shape up. However, that's one thing that we definitely won't be releasing until it's completely finalised from start to finish, so you'll have to hold on a while longer for that.
In the meantime we wish to thank Gary for the awesome job he did while he was with us, and we wish him the best of luck in his new career! We'll miss you.
The rest of you, stay tuned for more updates.
Next update
The next update is finally here! It's been a while since we've last updated but we hope it's been worth the wait. This one was a chunky one - here's what the update brings:
1) We've updated the game engine version - we had been putting this off since a major update to the game engine we use was released a couple of months before the release of Posthuman: Sanctuary to early access. We didn't want to risk it, so we put off the update until we actually launched. And boy, aren't we glad we waited! This isn't a change which you'll notice, but for future development it's something that was crucial for us not to put off any longer.
2) Re-worked combat system - we were finding a number of bugs in the combat system and while fixing them we realised that we could do things in a more efficient manner; one which would eliminate the current issues and potential ones for future content. So we re-wrote a good portion of the combat system, which was quite a task, needless to say.
3) While we were at it, we also re-wrote some of the code in the map navigation scene. Once again, here you won't notice many differences but the exercise was more future-proofing for additional content.
4) New followers: we've added more followers and refined existing ones, who will add some variety to your party. There's the quirky Rockstar, the eager Fanboy, the wise Teacher, and more.
5) Twitchy finally has a face! Some of you might have noticed that the mutant Twitchy looked like a regular human. That was just temporary and now he's got his own avatar to make humans' life more miserable with in the post-apocalypse.
6) Minor fixes - we've fixed other minor things, such as updates to skill descriptions, fixes of typos in some narrative encounters, and such.
Overall we hope this update makes the experience more enjoyable to you. Next in line we want to add more visual variety to some of the avatars in combat, add more narrative encounters, and also tune the difficulty progression.
Keep following us for more updates.
Marvin
Status update
I just wanted to drop a couple of lines to let everybody know what we're working on.
First of all, I hope that those of you who who were on holiday have/are still enjoying them :)
We've been quiet for a while but we've been busy. Many of you should have noticed significant reductions in bugs in the game, as we've been uploading small updates in the meantime.
We're also trying to update to a newer version of the game engine, but it has proven to be trickier than we expected, and we need more work before we can roll out another update. We want to ensure that we do not break any saved games, so we require more work there.
In the meantime, more content is being developed: our artists are preparing more enemies and followers to add to the game, and the writers are adding more encounters. These take a while to be included, but we should be ready to start testing them over the next few weeks.
Also, in other news, we're thrilled that Rock, Paper, Shotgun have included Posthuman: Sanctuary in their best 5 indie game picks!
Thanks!
A big thanks also goes to all those other reviewers who have covered this game.
Now, back to those mutants...
Mighty Box
Second update
Thanks for helping out to identify these issues.
First update
We're working on the issues you highlighted and have already started to fix them in the first update we've just uploaded. Below are the changes in this update:
- Introduced a resolution dialog box before the game starts.
- Fixed crashes on leveling up characters.
- Fixed text not showing on a specific text encounter (encounter with singer).
- Corrected missing skill icon and weapon on unlockable character (Marco).
- Changed settings saving so that they are preserved between sessions.
Thanks for all the support you're giving us!