Cryptark Update 5

We decided to get another update out with a large amount of balancing changes and new weapons. After this our focus will be on the ‘end game’ finale mission before release!

Updated Ship Types:
We updated all ship types, combining some and adding some new ones:
– Cloaker: Always Jammer, ranged enemies
– Duplex: Two cores. Balanced enemies
– Factory: Multiple factories that build up enemies over time. Balanced enemies and hazards.
– Dreadnought: Low number of powerful/shielded enemies
– Miner: Hazard focused
– Nuke: Nuke tank and self destruct system focused. Kaboom
– ScienceVessel: Lots of tech. Defensive focused enemies
– Scrapyard: Melee focused enemies and lots of destructible debris
– Sentry: Turret focus
– Swarm (colony ship): large number of light/weak enemies
– Warship: balanced ship with a bit of everything

New Weapons/Items:
– Barricade shield: Fire in a direction to stop projectiles/enemies from coming
– Taser: Melee weapon to stun enemies
– Prism Laser: Shotgun rail cannon type blast
– Slug shotgun: fires slug that bursts into shrapnel
– Zap shotgun: fires sticky electric balls that do damage over time
– Repulsor Shield: Shield that can push projectiles away at a large distance
– Hostage Shield: grab enemies and use them as a shield. Slows player on use.
– Subminution Rocket: Remote rocket that bursts into a swarm of seeking cluster munitions

Enemy/System changes:
– Repair system now repairs last destroyed system – so it’s possible to stay ahead of the repair process
– Took out self repair functionality from repair system – was too hard to take out in combination with the attacking bees
– Goal time now slightly less
– Alarm/sentry/core now dont attack cloaked player. Mines also dont go after cloaked player
– Friendly turret item now has laser weapon to make it more powerful than drone item (but less mobile)
– Juggernaut increased density to stop gunfire from pushing it into walls
– Picket shielded added rapidfire blaster weapon
– Viper lowered attack range and lowered movement speed
– Lowered Ironclad health, and lowered amount of time shield is up
– Decreased MrFixIt heal speed, and now no longer letting multiple heal the same enemy/system
– Increased Sentry system laser damage
– Faster advanced factory spawning, from 100 to 60
– EMP stun now works on shield systems, stops their rotation
– Tattletale enemy now faces player rather than trying to run away
– Now displays ‘max drones’ in sidebar, to show the total possible drones that can be created on the ship
– Slimer enemy can now take slime damage

Weapon/Item Changes:
– Large balancing pass to ammo counts / prices
– Drunk rockets: proper explosion and projectile sizes. increased initial projectile speed (now more accurate. you can spit them into a room before they boost)
– Increased Rail Cannon charge speed
– Alarm lure: added 3 uses to alarm lure
– Nuke charge: added 3 uses to nuke charges
– Speed loader: increased rate of fire from 10% to 20%
– Speed booster: increased speed from +40% to +80%, and increased recharge time to 60 seconds

Character Changes:
– Now shows starting health in character select screen for rogue mode
– Enforcer: Starts with 12 health – max 15. Now has a single large health pack. Starts with shotgun zapper.
– Jennet: Starts with 11 health – max 13. Starts with two remote nukes
– Salamander: Starts with 9 health – max 10. Now has mine rack instead of slime mortar.
– Intruder: Starts with 6 health – max 6. Now has Guantlet melee weapon
– Wevil: Starts with 6 health – max 6. Replaced melee spike with taser

Graphics:
– Lighting pass on all levels, giving more contrast / individual lights on enemies and game objects
– Better background starfield maps
– Enemy ship images in the ship selection campaign screen now better sized
– Added star map to background of enemy ship selection screen
– Fully lip sync for all new dialog / artifacts
– New frag and small rocket particles
– Fixed problem where minimap wasn’t accurate with a lot of crushers/wall saws in the level

Fixes:
– Fixed Weevil character going into space mode when inside enemy ship after teleporting
– Now stops enemies from exiting ship doors (except for advanced factory enemies, who will chase player into space)
– Fixed issues with systems being spawned in bad wall positions in early levels
– Physics optimizations
– Fixed some sounds playing over each other – or left on when outside ship

Let us know if you have any issues on our forums! Or any feedback at all,
thanks,
– Lee & Jesse

Cryptark Update 4

Check out the update video:

We probably should have had at least one update between this and the last one. After this we just have 1 major update to make before release.

Changes:
– Massive optimizations to drawing, and level loading. Should also fix a lot of out of memory errors players were having
– Massive changes to level setups / generation
– Rogue mode dialog – a starting tutorial with the captain, then a lot of new voice acting for each character for rogue mode
– 11 new artifacts to find, all in Rogue mode
– New Character: PDX-40 – Can slow down time for better fighting precision
– New Character: Weevil – Phase Tunneler ability, can teleport a short distance (even through walls)

New Enemies:
– Bee Hive
– Viper – From Advanced Factory. Nimble hunter-killer drones that seek out intruders in deadly packs.
– Leviathan – From Advanced Factory. Mobile factory drone that carries packs of smaller attackers.
– Tank – Heavily shielded drone that requires high-damage weapons to destroy
– Picket Medium – Medium sized turret

– New background star system graphics
– New System: Hazard System

New graphics / new functionality for:
– Shuffle System
– Jammer System
– Failsafe System
– Nuke Destruct System
– Armour System
– Advanced Factory System
– Repair Bee

– New ‘Science Vessel’ ship class: No reward, no bonuses, and a lot of tech advances
– Changed Flak turret seeking projectiles
– New Juggernaut weapons
– Player leaving ship animation after death
– New Weapon: Gas Chamber
– New Weapon: Galvanic Fission Bombard 9000… aka BFG
– New full shield enemy graphics

Known Issues:
– New artifacts do not have lip sync for the dialog yet

thanks!
– Lee & Jesse

Modbox Update 4 – Drones and Dungeons

Modbox update 4 is now live – with dungeon mod, drone fighting, and lot of other additions.

Update video:

Some new creation highlights:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=747574978&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=747570506&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=747570130&searchtext=

Be sure to check out our Modbox building tutorial series – we just added a new video. ‘Mods and Hockey’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmxoWqpuawU
All tutorials:
http://www.modboxgame.com/tutorials

Major Additions:
– Dungeon Mod: First complete new ‘core’ mod option. Comes with 2 enemies currently (fly skull demons) and a large amount of building assets and weapons.
– Drone Trainer Mod: 2 flying drones, 2 hover tanks, 2 turrets, 1 training drone
– Wave Defense Mod: Set up your own wave defense games by placing a ‘wave controller’ entity, and ‘wave spawner’ entities to set what enemies to spawn.
– Physics Guns Mod: With a gravity gun to grab and shoot physics objects, and a ‘physics gun’ to pick and move them exactly
– Sci Fi Weapons Mod: Bazookas with 3 missile types (steering / laser guiding), energy bow, shotgun blast, charger blaster, grenade launcher, and chaingun. Also comes with ammo clips that can be put into recharge stations
– New Teleport system: now a curve based for easier navigation. We also changed how +/- height works to easy go back on the level terrain
– New Entities: bow and arrow, 5 doors, new button entities, a raygun blaster, Slingshot, Joystick controller, 2 goal posts for the sports mod, lightswitch toggle, dial display, detonator toy, new toy handles, exploding barrels, kitchen mod, chess mod
– New Environments: Moon, Dojo, Gymnasium, Landing Pad, Testing lab
– Health/Damage system, with restart option on death
– Can now color any entity with the color tool
– Game mode settings: no spawn menu, infinite ammo, infinite health
– Control Pack Mod: 3 new levers, 5 buttons, 2 throttles
– The in world UI large screen now always draws infront of objects

Other Changes:
– Fixed conveyor belt physics
– Spawner now has option to stop spawning after hitting max amount
– Max speed option for Thruster
– Made Mod screen easier to navigate
– Labels now shown for wiring mod

Known Issues:
– Loading times on the Dungeon level are currently pretty bad – sometimes being around 10 seconds. We know how to solve it, hopefully this will be fixed for the next update.

Other new creation highlights:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=747567180&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=742437028&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=742436507&searchtext=
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=741260242&searchtext=

Modbox 0.2 Update

We have finally released our major update 0.2!

Major changes:
– New ‘Featured Creations’ system. Loads a list of the best workshop content that players can download ingame – both for mods and creations.
– Complete UI overhaul
– New ‘Main Menu’, which is the menu button the Vive controller
– New Mods: Sports pack, Target Practice
– Mod system with workshop support! First mod available thats not auto-installed is a FBX Exporter to export your creations to FBX models
– Wiring System expanded to be a general visual scripting tool
– Tons of new entities for the core mod: spectator camera, signs that you can set text to, sound effect entites that can be triggered to play sound/music, timer entity that can be wired to events, player start location, play area restrictor (set where player can teleport to)…
– Haptic feedback and completely new grabbing system for play mode. When playing creations you are now given hands
– Steam Leaderboards can now be added to your own creations

This is a large update so let us know any issues on the forums.

Modbox Website now live: http://www.modboxgame.com/ With a few tutorials on basic playing/building, but mostly tutorials for our ModboxSDK (which we are releasing to developers over time). You can also browse featured creations / mods there – or see current issues/feature requests in our issue tracker.

We are still working on the Dungeon Mod. After this update we plan to have smaller and more frequent updates expanding on content / gameplay, which includes getting the dungeon mod ready in the next few weeks.

New featured creations:

WesternCastle
The direction for Modbox is to become a general game building tool – so a few of the new creations are much more game focused than just sandboxes. This includes scoring, leaderboards, music, and challenges. We are still working on expanding this with more advanced visual scripting (including AI).
Both the Western level and Castle level are Target Practice creations were you can compete on the leaderboards for the best score.

You can now make your own weapons! Add one of the blank toy handles and build on top of it. You can then wire the input to be for a spawner to launch entities, or to move a hinge joint for a catapult, or move a piston…

Check out the ‘Wacky Weapons’ creation to try the piston soccer ball extender, a sword launcher, and a bowling ball catapult.

Mesh Editing
With a primitive entity selected you can now hit ‘mesh edit’ on the radial menu to edit it’s vertices:

We plan to expand this to allow polygon adding/removing and other advanced features.

Other Changes / New features:
– New Color Tool with complete color palette
– Upgraded to Unity 5.4 beta
– Can now teleport onto static entities in play mode
– Switched world scale from 10x to 1x
– Uniform scaling options: Use the sphere scalers to scale all sides at once
– ‘Autoconnect’ option. By default all primitives are set to automatically connect to other entities. You can now turn this off for them – and also turn it on for other entities. Like connecting a Chainsaw to wall.
– ‘Clone Tool’ – Point at a entity to clone it and bring it to your hand
– Game Mode System. Right now the only active game mode option is the Sandbox. Game modes will also have options that can be set – like setting if the spawn menu should be active for the Sandbox.
– ‘Build New Creation’ menu
– Crossbow now auto reloads
– A lot of fixes to the Group system
– To place Entity inside Spawner you now hit the touchpad when inside to place it, to prevent accidental use

 

 

With this update finally out we are going to start distributing the ModboxSDK to select developers. Eventually it will be public, but we are releasing it slowly since Modbox is still heavily changing and breaking things. Apply here if you want to check it out!

thanks,

– Lee

Next Modbox Update – Mods!

We are still working on the next large Modbox update – coming mid June. Largest change is the expansion of the mods system – including a Dungeon mod with a completely different entity set:

Large new changes coming:

– Haptic feedback! For when shooting / hitting stuff
– ‘Game mode’ system. The default game mode for creations is ‘Sandbox’, where there is no health / inventory, and you can spawn whatever while playing. We are adding additional game modes that you can choose for your creation to have to set it’s rules. Rules like allowing teleporting, default tools and options, and eventually additional systems like health / inventory. Eventually you should be able to join a server running the ‘deathmatch’ game mode with a score/health system, that uses a variety of mods for its level
– New ‘Main Menu’ – the current Modbox menu is the UI cube that comes up in edit mode. We decided we needed to make a simple ‘main menu’ for loading creations, going from edit to play mode, joining online games, and setting options, and the UI cube is now just the ‘edit menu’ for editing. This is part of the change in making it easier for people to consume content, without having to dive into the complexity of editing creations.
– New Mods: Target Practice (with scoreboard/highscores), and new ‘sports pack’ mod. We are hoping to get the Dungeon mod released for mid June, but we are still working on the actually game mode gameplay for it (along with working on what a ‘game mode’ is).  Our goal for our own mods is to develop stuff thats fun to build levels for – so we are planning a Dungeon mod and a possible ‘Escape Room’ mod to develop internally
– Hopefully some tutorial videos on advanced building

Multiplayer:

I was expecting a open beta of multiplayer to launch this month, but it has been delayed. I think it’s important the game has depth and is incredibly fun when just playing by yourself – so I am focusing on that before focusing again on multiplayer (core of the networking works, it’s just a matter of a ton of polish and bug fixing). The last version of Modbox had a lot to offer players who wanted to edit and create their own content – but not enough for people who wanted to just consume, so I am hoping to address that with this next update (with a lot of new content / game modes). The date I am aiming for the multiplayer beta is now end of June

ModboxSDK

To create mods modders will use the ModboxSDK. As an example Brian Lindenhof created a spectator camera and a twitch chat window all with the SDK:

We’ve developed Modbox entirely with modding in mind, ‘eating our own dogfood’ to develop the modding tools while we developed the game from the start, so modding the game really allows you to add anything.
We will be keeping the ModboxSDK closed for the next 2 months so we can better refine how modders can make content, and decide what to include/exclude. If your interested in trying out the SDK – and have a lot of Unity/C# experience – use this form to apply to check it out.

Thanks for the interest / support of Modbox! This is a long term ambitious project for us – so any feedback at this early stage definitely helps. Let us know what you think on the Steam forums,
– Lee