Developer Note: This week will be the first of a few that see changes to Packrunner (Yellow) cards. Our goal with these changes are to help differentiate playstyles of Yellow from other factions and from themselves, as well as increase Yellow’s effectiveness across the board. Expect that multiple cards per week will be tuned, reworked or simply replaced before these changes are complete. As with all aspects of Shardbound, feedback on these changes is very useful to the process.
Idol of Reckoning has been reworked into a new card: Idol of Kinship
Yellow 0/4 Artifact minion for 2.
After you summon a non-Primal minion, lose 1 health and summon a Spirit Primal next to it.
Beloved Trainer has been replaced by Rites Reader
Yellow 3/3 Melee minion for 2.
Warcry: Draw a card for each injured enemy.
Tribe Warrior has been reworked.
Yellow 3/6 Melee minion for 3.
After you summon a minion, deal 1 damage to a random adjacent enemy.
Ancient Caller has been reworked.
Yellow 2/2 Melee minion for 3.
Deathhowl: Summon 2 Spirit Primals next to this minion.
To Me! has been reworked.
Yellow Spell for 2.
Charm all friendly minions.
Thundering Giant has been reworked.
Neutral Legendary 6/9 Melee minion for 7.
Warcry: Destroy all enemy minions within 2 tiles that cost 2 or less.
~~~~
Stonecall Seedling’s Angry Stones are now Uncontrollable.
Swift Strike cost increased to 3 from 2. Spirit Primals summoned increased to 2 from 1.
Pack Lord health increased to 5 from 4.
Menagerie cost reduced to 6 from 7.
Wolf Primal cost increased to 2 from 1. Stats increased to 4/3 from 3/2.
Shade Health reduced to 3 from 4.
Dancer Attack reduced to 3 from 4.
Dark Traveler will now display its gained stats as base stats (white values) instead of buffed stats (green values) to better communicate its gameplay.
Options Menu
The default graphics quality level no longer defaults to “High” for all players. New players with lower-end graphics cards should now have it set to a more appropriate lower setting by default.
Spectator
You will now always spectate games from the perspective of the player you are spectating, instead of always spectating the player who went first in the game.
Core Tech
Developer Note: We are continuing work improving performance on lower end machines, and are particularly interested in crashes due to graphics drivers hanging. The changes below may help alleviate these crashes, so we would love to hear how the patch affects you.
GPU performance for Embassy Gardens, where the Prologue takes place, has been improved by ~25% on low end graphics hardware.
GPU performance for Broken Mesa, has been improved by ~10% on low end graphics hardware.
Loading into levels is now significantly less hitchy.
UI
Server status notifications can now be pushed to the client and will show up as a ticker in the upper right of the client. This will be used to provide updates during the patching process.
API
Third party API now supports Steam login.
Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug with Lifespark’s tooltip when used on Lifelike Statue.
Fixed a bug with Fear where non-adjacent fears were slightly undervalued (resulted in occasional 1 tile fears where a longer fear would be expected).
Fixed a bug where Skywatch Dragoon would not destroy a Skyborne Crusader under rare circumstances.
Units with 0 or less health can no longer be healed (prevents zombie-Sabine).
Fix for Stormbell Adept’s death sound playing when the game is muted.
Fixed a bug where Warcrys would not play the full animation in the Card Details screen.
Fixed a bug where Flyers would move 1 tile too far in some cases when Charmed.
Shutting off the servers for maintenance will now log all players out, so certain hooligans should not be able to keep their client connected for the duration.
Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted tile and rock geometry on Broken Mesa on low end graphics hardware.
Here are a few ways you can keep up with Shardbound:
Today we’re kicking off a new series of weekly updates that are designed to start your week with some deeper insight into what’s going on here at Spiritwalk Games. If you’ve joined our official Discord channel or caught our weekly livestreams, you know we take the idea of transparent, community-informed development very seriously. Hopefully this series gives you an easy one-stop shop for news on Shardbound and what we’ve got in development.
Shardfall System Revisions
We’ve gotten a lot of fantastic feedback over the past month on our most recent version of the Shardfall system, and now that we’ve seen how it’s impacted by player account progression, we’re ready to address some of that feedback with system changes. Some problems we’ve heard:
Huge swings in power rewarded by matches make Vault progress frustrating and confusing
Enemy concedes can be punishing by robbing you of Pylon triggers
Some Shards are much harder than others to power, especially for new players
Matches which generate a lot of power (such as those where First Win of the Day triggers) can feel wasted when a vault is nearly complete
All of this feedback is fantastic, agreed with, and exactly why we like to release our systems to you guys as early as possible. Expect some changes to the Shardfall system to start coming as early as next week, targeting these issues and more.
Alex and Hunter will be discussing the revisions on our weekly Dev Livestream on Thursday the 20th at 4pm PDT. Join us at https://www.twitch.tv/spiritwalkgames.
Packrunner Reworks
Content designer Dan (“Dibs”) Gibson isn’t happy with the cohesiveness of the Packrunner faction’s playstyles, and community sentiment suggests that the faction is slightly underpowered with the exception of a few highly specific yet powerful combos. Since we’re prioritizing the mechanics of play over pure numerical balance at this point in development, it’s a great opportunity to dig in and make some significant changes instead of applying some stat adjustments.
In some cases, cards will be replaced by entirely new ones. Your ownership of cards (such as Beloved Trainer) will simply transfer over to ownership of a replacement unit. Expect new and adjusted cards to better support the faction’s “win through swarming the board” playstyle and also have some stronger unique minion effects.
Check out the patch notes as they drop tomorrow for the details of how these first batch of Packrunner cards are changing, and please keep slinging feedback our way.
Performance Optimizations
The engineers have continued to focus on work to improve client performance and stability. This week’s patch is an additional step to address framerate issues on lower end GPUs, and you can expect work to continue for at least the next few weeks as we keep making incremental progress on this front. As always, please keep us apprised* on how these updates impact your Shardbound experience!
And More…
Your friendly neighborhood Quartermaster will be receiving the art treatment in this week’s patch. You should expect to see a decent amount of the combat veteran in your games, as he’s one of the top 3 most utilized non-basic cards in the game.
Other things going on in the studio include enhancements to to card art, design revisions on new map layouts, and getting our footing around new community initiatives like this weekly update! We hope it proves informative.
Look forward to all of this work rolling out over the next series of patches.
We hope you have a great week, and we’ll see you Shardbound!
Performance Fixes and a Developer Live Stream Friday 4.14 at 4pm pacific time
Performance & Stability Fixes
Launching on Steam and bringing a bunch of new people into the game has been a great opportunity to identify some valuable performance and stability work. Spiritwalk’s engineering team has been working hard to resolve login errors, performance problems, and other technical issues.
Our most recent patch and a subsequent hotfix have tackled a number of these issues, and we will continue to improve the Shardbound experience over the next few weeks. We've been reaching out to players who have been reporting issues in our Steam Community, on the Subreddit, and in our Discord -- if you hear from us, we'd love your help!
Developer Live Stream, Friday
Come join us on our Twitch Channel for a chat about all things Shardbound.
https://www.twitch.tv/spiritwalkgames
Hunter and Dave will be discussing the road thus far, the Steam release, and what to expect in the months ahead. As a bonus, they’ll also be showing off a new piece of unit art coming in our next patch. Come hang out, ask questions, and chill with the community!
Patch Notes 36 - Hotfix 1
We have released a minor patch to fix some issues that were preventing users from logging in or finishing games.
This update is not required to play, so you may download it at your convenience. However, we recommend updating to avoid problems!
Core Tech
Login will now silently retry up to 3 times before giving up.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue where some forms of login failure could result in the user getting stuck at the loading screen indefinitely.
Fixed an issue where initially failing to login or create an account could cause the client to be unable to login until restarted.
When the client loses connection to a game it silently tries to reconnect. Fixed an issue where some reconnects would succeed, but never start updating the game again.
Fixed a crash on shutdown if the client is closed while still starting up.
Patch Notes - Week 36
Developer Note: Shardbound’s launch on Steam has surfaced a number of technical issues that we’ve been hard at work resolving. This patch primarily consists of those fixes, and we will continue to roll out improvements over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, our design team has been hard at work collecting feedback about the new player experience and our progression systems. Expect to start seeing changes from that feedback in upcoming weeks as well.
New Art
Stormbell Adept (formerly Bellowing Giant) now has art!
Card Renames
Bellowing Giant -> Stormbell Adept
Card Changes
Phalanx Leader health reduced to 5 from 6.
High Shepherd Katell cost increased to 8 from 7.
Steam
Force Shardbound to re-launch in Steam if run from a shortcut while Steam is not running.
If Shardbound can still not detect Steam, it will now display an error message to that effect and exit, rather than prompting the user to log in with email and password.
Disable voice services to avoid any performance impact, since we are not using it.
Patcher
The patcher used to distribute the game pre-Steam will no longer be available to use. If you have not yet, please download the game from Steam at http://store.steampowered.com/app/586030/
Core Tech
Fixed a threading issue that could cause the game to run substantially slower while in a match. This should improve FPS for many players while in game.
Improved a number of backend reports and fixed some bugs with telemetry collection.
UI
Barracks can now be scrolled via the page up / page down keys.
Barracks ‘show unowned’ cards option no longer resets back to default.
Fix for UI bits occasionally getting orphaned when mousing over Hero cards in the Barracks.
Bug Fixes
Windowed mode client window position and size no longer reset when alt-tabbing in & out of the game.
Fix for the “Add Friend” context menu item on house roster members not sending an invite.
Improved rate limiting for login process to avoid client hanging.
Hotfix 4/6: Removed a legacy versioning feature that could cause the client to lose track of unlocked cards.
Hotfix 4/6: Fixed a bottleneck that could cause slow server responses when interacting with the Twitch API.
Here are a few ways you can keep up with Shardbound:
Get in the game and start building your collection!
Everyone at Spiritwalk would like to express our gratitude to both our pre-Alpha players and our Kickstarter Backers. You helped us refine the game, reach Alpha, and get it onto Steam Early Access. Thank you!
There's more work to do on Shardbound, and we will need your help everyday.
If you like the game, share it with your friends. Stream it on Twitch. Participate in the community and talk directly with the devs on Discord and r/shardbound.
Stay with us, play with us, tell us what's working and what's not. Help us make Shardbound the best game it can be for all of us.
It's gonna be an awesome ride!
<3
Everyone at Spiritwalk
Steam Update, Livestream & Patch Notes!
It's down to the last few days before we release on Steam Early Access! We have received all the required approvals from Valve, and will be hitting the button to launch Shardbound at 9 AM PDT on Thursday.
All of us are looking forward to the new faces that will be joining our community. Please come and welcome them in the delightful Steam Community Hub! We would also love it if you'd write a review on our Store Page after we've launched to help get the word out.
The final content patch before we launch will be released tomorrow at 11 AM PDT. We have collected an incredible amount of feedback about our initial progression features, and are addressing the most pressing issues. Check out the patch notes below for details.
We will be streaming from the Spiritwalk Games' studio today at 5 PM PDT for a preview of the changes in the patch. Hosted by Dibs and Gasty, we will talk about what we've learned since our progression patch and our plans to address the parts we aren't happy with yet. Bring your questions and come join us on our Spiritwalk Twitch channel!
This week we're introducing the art for the first time-space anomaly from the Fatekeeper faction, the Quantum Turnkey. Coming up with a look and feel for the anomalies was a challenge. We wanted something unusual, mysterious and playful. Taking some cues from creatures of the deep, and running it through the delightful imagination of Nicholas Kole, we discovered this delightful fellow!
Check him out in your barracks, and take him for a spin!
And without further ado, here are this weeks Patch Notes, going live tomorrow...
General Progression Changes
Developer Note: Thank you everyone who helped test the progression systems we rolled out last week. We received a lot of great feedback and have some changes coming to start improving it. Here’s some of the consistent things that we heard:
“Higher rarities in card boxes felt like they dropped too rarely. Similarly, commons felt like they dropped too often.”
“Crafting costs felt too expensive and prohibitive.”
“The value for selling cards felt too low.”
“Duplicate cards being automatically converted into currency felt bad. This was exasperated by both the very high drop rate for commons and their low sell value.”
“The initial rate of earning boxes and Chroma from Vaults is too slow for new players. Similarly, new players should have ways to construct at least one competitively viable deck more quickly than they can currently.”
Here’s the changes we’re making to the system in this week’s patch to try to address some of these concerns:
Relative Box Drop Rate Changes:
Common drop rate reduced by ~25%.
Rare drop rate increased by ~49%.
Epic drop rate increased by ~61%. Legendary drop rate increased by ~65%.
Bad luck Prevention Changes: Developer Note: To help prevent against unlucky streaks, every time you open a box that isn’t Epic or Legendary, the drop rate for these rarities is increased until it eventually reaches 100%, guaranteeing you one. These values are being massively increased.
The speed at which Epic bad luck prevention builds has been doubled.
The speed at which the Legendary bad luck prevention builds has been tripled.
Currency Changes: Developer Note: We’re moving from a one-currency system (just Chroma), to a traditional two-currency system (Chroma and Royal Marks). This change lets us adjust costs to make crafting more accessible.
Chroma is now just used to purchase card boxes, and will be used in the future as an alternative way to unlock any feature or item that could also be purchased with real money.
Royal Marks are used for anything that doesn’t have a direct real money purchasing option. Currently, this is just the crafting and selling of cards.
Crafting Changes:
The cost to craft a Rare has been reduced to 100, down from 125.
The cost to craft an Epic has been reduced to 400, down from 500.
The cost to craft a Legendary has been reduced to 1200, down from 2000.
The currency returned when selling a Common has been doubled to 20% of its crafting price, up from 10%.
The currency returned when selling a Legendary has been increased to 33% of its crafting price, up from 25%.
Changes to duplicates from boxes automatically converting to currency: Cards that you already own the max deckable amount of will no longer automatically convert into currency. Additionally, you can now own above the maximum deckable amount for a given card. This is in preparation of a new upcoming system which will allow you to convert a certain amount of duplicate instances of a card into something else of value, as an alternative to simply selling them.
New Art
Quantum Turnkey now has art!
Hero Changes
Petra
Deadly Gizmo (Poison) and Speedy Gizmo (Charge) have been removed from the Gizmo Pool.
Weaponized Gizmo (+2 Attack) has been added.
Sturdy Gizmo (+2 Health) has been added.
Sneaky Gizmo (Shroud) has been added.
Card Renames
Timebender -> Quantum Turnkey
Card Changes
Ghost Blade health reduced to 3 from 6.
Phantom Betrayer stats down to 6/4 from 7/7.
Bot Changes
Bots will go slightly easier on the player when they have board advantage.
Map Changes
A tile on Broken Mesa has been updated to not have a crack so that it does not match the tile next to it. Are you happy now Tehkjel??
Steam
Steam notifications have been moved to the upper right corner so they don’t overlap with the end turn button.
When a client is disconnected while using Steam, it now displays a “Disconnected” screen instead of immediately logging back in.
Fixed some error cases that would result in a user being prompted to create a new account when they already had one.
Options Menu
Entering custom resolutions will not prompt you to confirm the resolution until after you’ve entered both the height and width.
Treasury
The option to reselect the last box is now cleared when another box is opened.
The unselected cards now fade out when a card is selected from a box.
Tutorial
Basic cards are now unlocked by playing through the tutorial. A new screen has been added to the end of each tutorial mission displaying the cards that are unlocked. If you have already completed the tutorial will not need to play it again to unlock these cards.
Finishing the Prologue will now award you with 30 Core Set boxes. If you have already completed the tutorial, 30 Core Set boxes will be granted to your account automatically.
Core Tech
Matchmaking is now skill based and will attempt to not match new players with veteran players, resulting in slightly longer queue times.
UI
Twitch events now tell you that rewards are coming soon.
Red “Pre-Alpha Content” labels have been removed because we’re now in Alpha, yay!
The tooltip information on mouseover of a card is now left aligned instead of centered.
Entering the Duel screen now dismisses the Barracks if it is opened.
The button for closing the deck list has been updated to work consistently for Shardfalls, Duels, and Bot Matches.
Rarity can be used as a search term in the barracks. Requires a full match (ie. “legendary”) to avoid awkward partial matches.
Added Spiritwalk Games intro movie clip while the client is loading. This can be clicked through if the client finishes loading before the clip finishes.
Bug Fixes
Rook’s threat range previews have been fixed.
Growler Primal will no longer deal damage to the enemy hero when summoned in a position not adjacent to them (through giftable summons).
Fixed a bug that was causing the Summon Primals and Summon Seedlings pylon objectives to award less power than intended.
Fixed a bug that prevented selling a card if you could not afford to buy it.
Fixed a bug that prevented playing with Twitch event decks if you did not own the cards contained in the deck.
Fixed a bug that would cause the deck UI to refresh repeatedly if you had no decks.
Fixed a bug that could cause the dragged card in the barracks to get stuck on screen.
The cancel button on the “Change Quantity” dialog in the box purchase screen now actually cancels the changes.
Fixed an issue that could cause your Shardfall to get sorted behind Twitch Shardfalls in rare cases.
Dialog popups now sort below the Options menu.
Fix bug preventing Escape from bringing up the Options menu during Cinematics.
Clicking outside the Friends List now dismisses Friend List context menus.
Tactical camera controls are now disabled during Cinematics.
The random map selection in duels and bot matches is now actually random, instead of using the last selected map.
Attacks that deal no damage to their target (such as a ranged attack against Shield of Durant) will now still display the target in Turn History.
The line of sight tile preview information no longer overrides the valid attack tile preview information on a tile.
Fix for the mouse cursor getting locked into the game client on game startup.
Changing your preferences for matching against bots will now take effect immediately, instead of requiring matchmaking to be restarted.
Thank you again for all of your support! Here are a few ways you can keep up with Shardbound:
We have a ton happening at Spiritwalk, and we wanted to check in here because we're getting close to opening the game up on Steam!
Early Access = April 6!
We are on track to launch on Steam Early Access on April 6. If you haven't already, add Shardbound to your Wishlist and Follow the game!
Progression v1 is now in private pre-Alpha testing: Box opening and Card Crafting
Yesterday, Zalgus live-streamed the addition of the last couple of features needed to complete progression.
Check out the VOD here ... https://www.twitch.tv/videos/131674025
Pro-tip ... skip ahead to 18:00 to get to the goods! While you're there, click the Heart in the upper right to follow us on Twitch!
If you don't want to watch the VOD, here are the basics:
The Treasury: Opening Boxes You can open any boxes you earn in the Treasury. When you open a box, you will receive a choice of 3 cards of a randomly designated rarity. If you already have two of a card, you will have the choice of receiving a payout of Chroma instead.
The Treasury: Store In the Treasury, you can enter the store to purchase boxes with Chroma. In a future patch, you will be able to buy Boxes or our Welcome Bundle for real currency.
The Barracks: Crafting Cards You can now use your Chroma to craft specific cards. In the barracks, choose the card you’d like to craft and Right-Click it to view that card’s details. From the details page, simply choose to Recruit the unit or Learn the spell.
What's Next?
What the completion of progression means is that the game is essentially ALPHA (basic feature complete). We're going to put this through test on our private servers for another week, then bring it to you guys here in Early Access.
We're looking forward to seeing everyone in the game next week when it launches into Early Access. In the meantime, come hang out with the community on Reddit and Discord.
Cheers,
Everyone at Spiritwalk Games
We’re bringing Shardbound to Early Access!
Hi guys! I’m Dave, one of the co-founders of Spiritwalk Games.
Our first game, Shardbound, is coming soon to Early Access and we wanted to share why.
Our amazing pre-Alpha community rallied and funded our Kickstarter in 11 hours, that’s why! And now they’re working on stretch goals while we’re busy integrating with Steam.
We’re very grateful to be building this game with such amazing players, and we’re hopeful that we will count you among them soon.
Shardbound’s Kickstarter ends in less than 48 hours! Go give it a look, learn more about the game, and if the spirit of community development moves you, please consider backing us.
We’re looking forward to growing Shardbound within the Steam community.
We hope you’ll join us … we’re just getting started.
