Greetings, Creators!
We hope you’ve all been having a grand ol’ time this past month. Are you rested up enough to try out some new content? Of course you are! As you may remember, some of our coding ninjas were down for the count in the days leading up to the previous patch, due to unexpected illnesses (well, aren’t all illnesses unexpected?). However, we’ve been working on some nifty performance improvements and slapped some new content into the mix for the latest update. A lot of backend work was performed, so you may not see the majority of these additions at first glance (but you will notice the extra polish).
IMPORTANT: The game is shaping up enormously well, and we’re on track for full release in around 8 to 14 months. With the majority of gameplay in place, we only have some larger systems left to implement, alongside a major polishing pass, before we officially go gold. As a result, we’ve been doing some major planning internally to construct a development schedule that will maximize efficiency. Monthly updates take up quite a bit of time to get everything through QA and constantly work towards a stable public release, which sadly slows us down (but we always loved doing it anyway, to get feedback on new features directly from all of you).
To ensure we’re firing on all cylinders to get the final bit of content finished, we’re going to be moving to a bimonthly patch schedule (every two months), or perhaps a bit longer depending on the state of the game. In particular, the last push towards launch may require more than two months to get everything ready and do a final quality pass. However, this does mean you’ll be seeing far bigger systems making their way into The Universim in future updates!
Exciting times, friends! It’s been a massive undertaking, and we are so close to achieving our vision for the game. Just wait until you see where we’re going. We think you’ll be gobsmacked!
Now, let’s get down to the good stuff:
Trading with Exile Villages
Those annoying little upstarts may finally offer something useful! This is the initial release of what will become a very complex system, currently allowing you to trade resources with Exile Villages. It will be expanded upon in future releases, so drop us any suggestions on what you’d like to see added!
Automized Stone Refinery
Machines will take over all of the stone crunching to free up time for Nuggets to procrastinate with greater intensity.
Automated Wood Refinery.
Tell Nuggets to keep limbs away from the saw blade at all times. It does not discriminate between a log or a living being, especially if the living being possesses the intellect of a log.
Modern Airport.
Just a little higher and we’ll have reached the stars! Introducing the Modern Airport, complete with procedurally-generated airline branding on the planes. This building will be expanded later on to allow you to create trade routes with Exile Villages across the globe (and perhaps beyond).
Modern Age Vehicles.
You’ve seen a robot turn into a car, now see Nuggets turn into adorable little trucks. Your citizens will move around with far greater speed, thanks to the modern combustion engine. We’re currently working on a major road network system that will certainly require as much positive energy as you can muster.
Modern Age Haircuts
Style continues to evolve alongside your Nuggets! You’ll see more colors than ever before, and even a few hairstyles that positively scream, “I want to talk to your manager!” Try to avoid these individuals.
Moon
A new celestial body has appeared in the sky! Where did it come from? What does it smell like? Is it made of cheese? You’ll have to find out in future updates.
New stuff:
- Trading with Exiles.
- Modern Stone Refinery.
- Modern Wood Refinery.
- Airport (v1)( no major functionality yet).
- Trucks (v1) (faster Nugget movement).
- Camera Shake Option (Settings).
- Modern Haircuts.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed: modern scaffolds not appearing after load.
- Fixed: Season change power has no effect on believers.
- Fixed: Nuggets take forever to clear construction sites.
- Fixed: UI scale issue for certain display sizes
- Fixed: Tall buildings had inaccurate hit boxes
- Fixed: Resources were not removed from settlement and instead were subtracted from exile villages
- Fixed: When family was created, male and female nuggets properties were swapped in some cases.
- Fixed: Alarm on weather tower that was going off randomly
- Fixed: Orbit camera was getting stuck if Steam Overlay was opened / closed.
- Fixed: Game settings were not saved properly and in some cases were applied incorrectly leading to UI disappearance or scale issues.
- Fixed: Stars could be clicked through UI panels
- Fixed: Unassigned nuggets from modern eatery would become invisible
- Fixed: Tooltip for leader election would stay on the screen forever if the “Fly to” button was clicked
- Fixed: Crime tooltip displayed the text from a school tooltip
- Fixed: Multiple nuggets could have received the same request to clear an item, which would slow down the nuggets performance overall, since 1 nugget would be clearing the spot and other would wait for that spot to be cleared
- Fixed: Protector dome was disappearing if you were looking at it from inside out
- Fixed: Creator power action cost was doubled if the action was applied to nugget
- Fixed: Save / Load issue that was caused due to some systems reading the save file in incorrect order.
General balance changes / Improvements:
- Extended modern scaffolds for “huge” buildings.
- New particle effect for “Repair all” & “Creator Points” falling objects box items
- Reworked picking up objects system in order to improve overall performance and to work with a feature content.
- Cement Factory perk was moved before Glass factory perk in order to improve the overall experience traversing the research tree
- Mating female / male threshold was improved. This change should improve the overall ratio between male and female nuggets and keep balancing the ratio when nuggets dying due to unintended events such as tornado, fire etc.
- UI scale default settings were tuned for all OS in order to improve the UI ratio between different elements
- Rebalanced animal reproduction system & spawn system. Previously a lot of animals could have been spawned in the same location with a fast reproduction rate. Spawn locations, max number of animals of each type that can exist at the same time as well as the reproduction rate was tweaked to resolve those issues.
- Exile event timer was changed from 1 hour to 30 minutes
- Exile village attack change was increased from 40 percent to 55 percent
- Exile Village Steal Chance was decreased from 50 percent to 45 percent
- Exile Village Priests Chance was decreased from 60 percent to 45 percent
- Exile Village Orator Chance was decreased from 60 percent to 45 percent
- Creator mode is back online :)
Art:
- Airport Building.
- Airplanes with different skins.
- Crater has updated visuals and 3 more variations are added.
- Moon!
- Legendary Buildings - Pisa tower.
- Vehicles for Nuggets with a set of different skins.
- UFOs!
- Modern Stone Refinery.
- Modern Wood Refinery.
UI Design:
- Fixed position of Construction menu cloud.
- MainUI bottom indicators - updated visuals.
- Added pisa tower puzzles.
- Modern stone and wood refineries construction menu renders.
As always, our biggest and most heartfelt thanks to all of you! We are so excited to be pushing towards full release and can’t wait to be able to hand it over to you with a beaming smile. If you’re enjoying the game on Steam so far, leave us a review to let us know your thoughts! We only feed our developers after every dozen or so positive reviews we receive.
Also, we’re planning to have a live stream this month! Have some questions you need answered? Wanna tell our developers about a long-lost treasure you discovered off the coast of Africa? Keep an eye out for the date! In the meantime, join our Discord server and follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more tasty morsels.
Love,
The Crytivo Crew