SpellShokked! cover
SpellShokked! screenshot
Steam
Genre: Indie

SpellShokked!

Alpha 20 released
A small update to SpellShokked! that introduces our smart particle technology - used in this release to add some nice animations to your right hand. The particles you see are actually small free-flying agents that try to keep each other's company. We have developed this as part of the an 'insect swarm' AOE spell that we want to deplyoy in the future as a tactic to force oponents to move to other blink locations.

Also, we are very sad to announce that this will be the last Mac release since Steam has discontinued macOS support for SteamVR. SteamVR is essential for SpellShokked!, and we currently see no financially viable way to bring the game to a macOS-supported alternative.

Alpha 16 released
On January 2nd, 2020 we had a breakthrough: After almost a solid month of engineering and completely losing playability, we got SpellShokked back to running. This was no small feat, because the new version contains the following changes


  • A completely new network layer. Spellshokked was originall built upon UNet, which uses a relay server (which is expensive) and a paid-for third-party matchmaking infrastructure that did not work very well. Technologically, it also used UDP frames that, although fast, don't work well with demanding games, and (worse) often get filtered by many common firewalls. We now use straight TCP/IP which is not as performant, but additional network latency of 10ms is covered by predictive movement code. The end rsult works much more reliably, and is compatible with most (if not all) firewalls
  • Instead of a relay server, we now use Peer-To-Peer connections. This further reduces latency (that's how we were able to go from UDP to TCP/IP), and we were able to get rid of the legacy and unsupported relay server architecture
  • Matchmaking currently is reduced to direct connect open duels, and we'll introduce our own matchmaking later once there is sufficient demand (currently too few people duel each other to warrant a global leaderboard)
  • The original Lobby system we had in place with it's awkward UI was also scrapped. In place we now have a streamlined system where you can either sign up for an existing duel, or create an open invitation for a duel (see images). choosing which kind of duel to create now is a simple click with your wand. 
  • Most importantly, however, the entire networking middleware is more stable. You no longer need to re-start the entire game every other duel because of re-connection issues. The new Lobby and network layer have been extensively battletested and we no longer experience these strange network outages (which we believe were the result of dropped UDP packets)
  • We removed some bugs from shaker code, so the 'humming' of the wand during casting should be slightly more pronounced, and feel more 'magic'
  • We have temporarily toned down the soft-body physics on the female avatars (you saw an example of that technology on the bouncing gifts that littered the floor of your home room). This may return to full in a later version


That being said, there are still some items left to fix


  • There is a lingering issue where a client may not show the corect avatar in a network game.
  • Additionally, we are tracking a report of slow-moving player avatar after blinking
  • The Valve Index controllers still make for an uncomfortable playstyle due to the fact that they are rotated 45 degrees up; we re looking for a solution here.
  • The 'Bridge' and 'Breach' levels are now playable in that you can lose. Winning conditions still don't always register correctly in co-op, though.


So, have fun trying out the new version!

Alpha 15 is live
Another month, another update. Progess on the network front is frustratingly slow, and we are looking at completely re-thinking our approach.

Still, we finally completed the haptics feedback module (which is a very looking-down-your-nose way of saying 'shaker'). When your spells are ready to cast, the right-hand controller now will start pulsing to give you a tangible feedback. Because, obviously, aural and visual wasn't enough.

We've also started on compatibility work with the valve index controllers, and hope to remove any lingering issues with the next release in January.

So, shokk around the xmas tree, folks!

Alpha 14 released (Nov 2019)
The network migration (yeah, 'notwork migration', as we call it) is proving to be more difficult than we expected. So, in order to not have anything for you,, here's a tiny update that features

  • some seasonal stuff for the home screen and
  • restores the butterfly's AI in the home room

We bet you didn't know that the little butterfly (which you only see if you turn on the lights around the rostrums) has an AI, huh? Well, it does, and it's not in any way a simple piece of software, as it has to

  • mimick the 'butterflyish-ness' behaviour of fluttering about, changing direction near-but-not-quite randomly
  • avoid obstacles while fluttering about


OK, so it's not that complex, but still...

Alpha 13 released
We are progressing the network update, and it is as bad as we thought. Changing network infrastructure is ugly in the best of cases, and this is not a good case. But we have some progress nontheless. Alpha 13's network code itself has not been touched, as we are working on a branch for this, so you can still duel with your friends.

Other than that, we have added some minuscle visual touch to some scenes. The background here is that we were working on some of these effects for over four months, but had not had the opportunity to deploy them, as the levels they are intented for aren't complere yet. So we took some of the effects, toned them down, and added them to the game in order to test-drive them, If you look closely, you might see them, but they are subtle (hint: they all involve particle systems).

Alpha 12 (August 2019)
We did it! We moved the entire game to the new infrastructure, and made it run. There are some inconsistencies, some rooms have different lighting, and some shaders don't quite work as before, but that's small fry. Network duels function, but their life is on a lease, which is why we'll need to prioritize that part in upcoming releases. The update clocks in at a couple hundred megs, which is due to a complete re-compile of all scripts and shaders, plus some re-mapped textures. Under the hood a lot has changed, but you should not see much inside the game, except perhaps for some small-scale performance improvements. Oh, and – except for the main room – we've taken out the moving dolly at the start of some of the tutorials, as too many people have complained about motion sickness caused by the movement. Sissies.

Alpha 11 (July 26, 2019)
Another month, another alpha. With apologies to "Spinal Tap", this one goes to 11!

This release is entirely about bug-fixing. As it turns out, supporting multible avatars across network duels has the little critters multiply like crazy. Even though most of them aren't of the game-breaking kind, they do distract and annoy.

We should now have eliminated most of them, but are still tracking an especially annoying one that involves invisibility. This release has some debugging code baked in to help us get a better cross section of debug info. Note that we can't access this info ourselves. It always requires your active and willing participation to get that data to us. Should you contact us with a bug report, we might therefore ask you to copy and paste that data into an email to us.

Alpha 10 (June 16th, 2019)
Ok, so we were a bit optimistic about how long we'd take to bring multiple avatars to networking. And yes, there's still the aberrant optical glitch occasionally when you blink in network play (although we think it's specific to some graphics hardware).

Anyway, you now can take on your favorite avatar to unleash the fury of your spells on some hapless denizen of the internet.

Other changes are minor tweaks to the way the sound is mixed (which should cut down on the clicking noise some of you may have experienced), and a complete re-build of the internal messaging engne that was causing some performance bottlenecks during scene switching.

Alpha 9 (March 2019) has arrived!
This is a big update (and not just by download size). Alpha 9 brings a host of improvements:


  • Player-selectable avatars:
    Until today, you always played as 'Aria', the hooded wizard (the one you also faced off in the Shield tutorial and one of the Solo Duels). Now, you can choose between five different Avatars, Aria among them (the others being: Zediuk, Fionna, Kas'Danel and Artemis. Let's see if you can match the names correctly to the Avatras). Note that we need to tweak the individual avatar joint bending routines. We are currently using a general reverse-kinetic routine that works for all skeletons, but since all Avatars have slightly different skeletons, the currently might look strange for certain movements or if your height doesn't fit that of our testers.

  • Solo Level multi-avatar support
    All the Solo levels (but not the networked) now support the new multi-avatar system. This only applies to those levels that originally supported an avatar, e.g. channeling and invisibility tutorials, and the Shokkrange. Other solo levels (e.g. thsi missile or shield tutorial) remain avatar-less

  • Avatar Chamer with Vanity-inducing Mirrors
    You need a way to change into the other avatars, and we built a brand new special room just for that purpose. We then added functioning mirrors (!) to this room, so you can spend hours there, gazing into the mirror, admiring yourself. This new chanmber is accessible from the "home" room.

  • Three new audio tracks
    The network level 'Breach', and solo levels "Invisibility tutorial" and "Avatar Chamber" all have received brand new audio tracks

  • More vanity in the Library
    The Solo Library has received a mirror. It's been delivered, but still requires correct placement. It's currently stowed behind the leather comfy chair.

  • Mac Parity
    This release brings full Mac parity to all visual effects. Please note that the OSX implementation of VR still lags in performance behind Windows by a significant margin (30%-50%). On full settings we get stutters using a Vive Pro an an AMD Vega 64 - which does not happen in Windows on the same machine (using BootCamp). This needs to be looked at by Apple, there is nothing we can do.

  • Other changes
    We continue to tweak the visual f/x. Ambent Occlusion and Anti-Aliasing still aren't where we want them to be, but it's getting much better.



Enjoy!

Alpha 8 released
As you probably have noticed, there was no January update – the reason for that being that we took a long-overdue break after spending the last two weeks of the Year battling the (still on-going) hack attempts on our site, and celebrating various superstition-based events.

We returned mid-January to work with renewed zeal on SpellShokked. This (and the next) release will feature improved graphics. Since we got our long-overdue graphics hardware update, we were able to finally test the update to the graphics that underly the 'I want even more pretty stuff' preference. The graphics tune-up is on a by-scene basis, as we must hand-tune each scene individually.
For each scene, we individually calibrated color saturation, contrast, and hue. We also provide (in some scenes) a subtle sub-pixel sharpening. The last update is causing is some headache (luckily not literally, just a figure of speech), as whenever display text (as in the Aftermagic display), the sharpen render effect produces some artifacts.

We have added the new, improved visuals to the following scenes:
- Splash / Welcome
- Intro (Blink Tutorial)
- Home
- Library
- Tutorials (Missile, Shield, Fireball/Meteor Strike, Ice Shard, Shokk Range, Channeling (Shield, Lightning, Guided Missile, Invisibility)
- Duel Selector
- Solo Fights (Skeleton Rush, Necromancer, Cliffs, Darkness)

In other words: all tutorial- and solo levels have been updated, the network levels are planned to be updated for the next release.

There have been some other changes under the hood, but they are mostly minor. And of course there are lots of minor bugs and annoyances that we (hopefully) removed permanently.

On a negative side, this release is PC-only, as we still need to macOS-proof the grphics update (which, given the Mac's poor performance even with a Vega64 graphics GPU, will only a few people notice). The macOS support for increase eye-candy will follow in four weeks at latest.

Finally, this update provides full support for Vive PRO.
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