- Hot Fix: AI Starving Scatter Bug - 8 April 2024
Quick fix for a rare error that occurred if the AI opponent needed to scatter starving units, but only had one neighboring region. Should be all good now!
- Updated Demo & AI - 5 April 2024
Hey folks! We just pushed an update to the demo that includes a whole bunch of stability and bug fixes, as well as our latest pass on the AI opponent! UPDATED AI OPPONENT We've been working hard on the AI and it is now much more dynamic and puts up a proper challenge. We fixed a bunch of issues that could sometimes cause it to hang, added some new features (it should now be able to handle most actions in the game), and tuned it's responses to be more varied so it shouldn't be as easy to bait or get stuck in loops. But the most exciting thing is that the AI now runs on it's own background thread - this means that it calculates it's turn at the same time as you, instead of waiting for your orders to be submitted. The turns are MUCH faster now, with the AI often putting in it's orders before you even finish yours! RANDOM PLAYER COLORS We've added a palette system that allows us to have ran…
- New AI Opponent! - 24 March 2023
Things have been quiet lately, while we have had our heads down working hard on building out the single-player side of the game. We've been busy with a couple of big features - prototyping a single player campaign mode (more on that at a future date!) and overhauling our entire AI system. While it's still going to be a while before we have anything from the campaigns to show, we're excited to have the first version of AI 2.0 ready to share! Initially we intended to simply update the existing AI prototype, but it turned out that we had to rebuild it from the ground up to get the features we wanted. It's still using our original utility system, but has been extended and made more modular so now it can consider much more complex actions, and most importantly - be tuned and extended further in the future. We still have another whole phase of AI development on our roadmap, but this version i…
- Hot Fix: Game Notifications Bug - 17 October 2021
Fixed a minor bug that sometimes caused in-game turn notifications to stop working.
- Hot Fix: Squashing Bugs - 5 October 2021
The flood of new players following our Melbourne International Games Week showcase has helped us flush out a few sneaky bugs, so we've pushed a new build with a handful of fixes. === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.24.3 === - Fixed a bug that would cause errors the first time a player joined an online game, if they disabled email notifications. - Fixed an issue that occasionally caused the game to hang on the claimant screen, making it impossible to submit the first turn. - Demo end info text now pops up automatically when returning to home screen after the game limit has been reached. - Selecting an empty slot when keeping a title now disables all buttons while loading the title into that slot. - Formatting tweaks to the title screen while the title is being generated. KNOWN ISSUES - Copying match codes from the Play Friend window doesn't work. Paste works fine though. - City and castle portrai…
- New Build: Title Collections & New Location Art - 30 September 2021
High time we had a new build! Not a huge update, but it does include some cool new features, including being able to collect more than one title, and new procedural portrait art for castles and cities. We've also tweaked the endgame conditions slightly, to allow for losing players a better chance at a comeback. === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.24.1 === You now need to hold five castles for two turns to win, instead of one. Added the ability to save more than one title. Can now select your displayed title from any you have stored. Added claimant names to title reward screen. Procedurally generated castle and city portraits. Added mouse click sounds back to the home screen. Minor clarifications to Guidance text. KNOWN ISSUES City and castle portraits still show the old generic portraits during turn resolution. Slim chance of issues migrating old titles to the new system. Let us know if you lose…
- New Build: Bug Fixes & Stability - 10 July 2021
The influx of new players from Next Fest gave us lots of great data, so we focused this build on bug fixes and stability improvements. Resolved some very quirky crash bugs, UI glitches, and a missing spymaster claimant who deftly hid themselves in the code... Thanks to all our players who have been reporting issues in both the bugs channel on our Discord server and the in-game feedback form, it's been a huge help. So good to see our community of players growing and enjoying the game! === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.23.7 === Spymaster revealed! Fixed bug that was causing the rank 3 spy claimant to be hidden, appearing only under rare conditions. Fixed bug that caused the game to hang if you played three practice games in a row. General stability improvements to help reduce situations where the game becomes unresponsive. Fixed memory leak in the name generator (thanks @Garbage#8809 for catchin…
- Dev Update: Demo On The Horizon - 11 June 2021
There's been quite a bit going on since our last post. Unfortunately, a sudden covid lockdown in Melbourne means that everyone has been stuck at home for the past two weeks, and sadly we had to cancel our local event at Pixel Bar. It’s been a tough year for everyone and after months of relative freedom here in Australia, this was a reminder that the world is still in middle of a major crisis. But our wonderful team is very supportive of one another, so we are able to keep morale up and stay focused on our big push toward a demo build for the upcoming Steam Next Fest. We're very much looking forward to taking the game for it's first big public outing! So, what's everyone been up to? LUIS Continuing on from the last dev update, Luis and Ben teamed up to tackle re-configuring the map system to support our new single player campaigns. This is a major overhaul, and one of the biggest bits of…
- Dev Update: Steam Next Festival! - 25 May 2021
We’re back with another dev update, but first some exciting news. Spies & Soldiers is going to be part of… …STEAM NEXT FEST! We’ll have a shiny new demo available to play, some fancy live streams throughout the event, and Spies & Soldiers will be featured alongside many other amazing new games. The festival runs from June 16 – 22, so we’re currently hard at work polishing the game and implementing a few new features in time for the launch. Meanwhile, a new update to the Steam build went live last week, featuring the ability to save practice games, a few bug fixes, and a big overhaul of the screen display system that means the game is looking crisper than ever. You can try it out over on the playtest on Steam. Lastly, we have an upcoming event at Pixel Bar in Melbourne which is looking super cool. Come along for a beverage and a chance to go head-to-head against local opponents. Details…
- New Build: Unified Display System & Single-player Save Games - 13 May 2021
Been a while since we pushed a new build! There's been a few big changes behind the scenes, the most significant of which is the new unified display system. The game should now scale across all screen sizes consistently, maintaining crisp visuals and UI layout. Getting this resolved was a big task we needed to sort out before moving forward with more art updates. Feels great to have it done! Please let us know if you see any screen size related oddness... We also added save games for practice mode, so now you can return to AI matches easily. The rest of the update is mostly bug fixes or UI tweaks here and there. With this build out of the way, we've been free to work on some really cool new features for the future. Procedurally generated unit portraits and a proper solo campaign mode are both on the horizon! === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.22.0 === - Added support for saving practice games.…
- Dev Update - Mid-May - 12 May 2021
Maddy here! We’re trying a new format for our dev updates, something a bit more conversational, chatting with the team about their recent work. I’ll start. Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking into cool things for our discord (tournaments are in the works), as well as a fun physical event that could happen soon! If you’re based in Melbourne keep an eye out for that one. We’re also preparing for something big in June that will be announced shortly, so I’ve had my hands full getting ready for that. And now onto the important dev updates! It was a super busy week for everyone, as we prepare to push a small playtest update to Steam, while wrangling a couple of other big design additions. Let’s check in with the rest of the team… BEN Ben’s been doing awesome work getting the new procedural image generator implemented, creating random portrait art for units. Basically, it’s a system that…
- A Look Back At The Last Few Years - 29 April 2021
We’ve been posting regular game updates on here, but we wanted to get everyone up to speed on the big picture of where the project is at overall. So we sat down and wrote up a quick 'previously on...' post. Turns out a lot has happened over the past few years! Here's a (somewhat) brief look at what we’ve been up to since we got funded, and how the game has been progressing. After we received funding from Film Victoria in 2017 we brought on a couple of new part-time team members. Luis Van Slageren to help build out the multiplayer server side of things, and Matt Dodd to work on creating an AI opponent. Murray Lorden even joined us briefly as a project manager to help get things off the ground. We also started our own company! Welcome to Ghostbat Games. This was a prerequisite for receiving the funding, but also an important business step that was well worth getting sorted early on. Hot t…
- Patch - Fix For Occasional Issues With Practice & Tutorial Games - 19 February 2021
A quick hot fix for a rare issue some people encountered that would cause the game to hang when starting Practice or Tutorial sessions. Also, a couple of small menu tweaks for good measure.
- Added Assassination Events & Bug Fixes - 12 February 2021
We've added assassinations to the event system during turn resolution, so you won't miss seeing your sneaky spies do their handiwork! Cleaned up a few other issues with the new event text we put in last build, and squashed a couple of bugs. And to keep things fun, we've added a bit more variety to all the name generators! === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.21.00 === - Added turn resolution event for assassinations. - Added more variety to the name generators. - Updated the battle event text to include more scenarios. - Added a tutorial versions of the battle and assassination event texts. - Fixed a few bugs with the battle event text. - Fixed a bug where spies not involved in the battle would show balance icons. - Fixed an issue where sometimes the wrong spy would show as opening castle gates. Known Issues: - Dagger icon in assassinations doesn't always flip to point at the victim. - Returning…
