Hello everyone,

Steam Keys and the Email Bot

First things first, we have not gotten any definitive answers about why our Steam Key database is failing from the people at Humble; so we rebooted our janky email bot to manually send keys to people who backed at tiers from $8 to $20. We’re sorry about the confusion and inconvenience this has caused. For those of you who received keys earlier ($20 and higher), your old keys will still work.

Even so, the email bot is not very reliable, and is frankly a bit of a hack. After first trying to send keys through gmail, the email bot managed to send out 1,017 keys before gmail locked us out of our account for 24 hours from over-using the account. We set up a new email bot using our own server, and sent out an additional 200 keys (mostly to paypal backers) before our server hosting service also locked us out.

Clearly we need a better solution than this if we want to manually send personalized information to backers in the future, but we have (mostly) gotten the job done. There were about 10 or so backers that the email bot refused to send data to, because either the email addresses don’t exist anymore, or perhaps the email addresses were mis-entered into the database. We also had to re-send keys to $15 backers due to the lockout problem, so some of you may have received duplicate emails.

What To Do With your Keys

The DwarfCorp alpha is currently invisible on Steam to the public. To activate the key and download the Alpha, you can follow the instructions from the Steam site here:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5414-TFBN-1352

Please note that we haven’t uploaded Mac or Linux builds to Steam yet (more on that below).

Alpha Build 1.1.1

Coinciding with the keys, we’ve also uploaded a new build of the Alpha to Steam.

Combat

In this build, we wanted to focus on combat. Axedwarves may now be hired from the Motherland to protect your corporate assets!

 

 But, protect them from what, you might ask? We’ve finally implemented a simple monster spawning system. For now, goblins, necromancers and skeletons will spawn at the edge of the world and attack your employees at night.

 Necromancers are weak on their own, but will spawn 2 to 6 skeleton minions (depending on their level) to fight for them.

 

A lot more balancing work is needed before the enemies in the game present a manageable challenge, but at least a few of them are in the game now! One funny bit we noticed during development: skeletons and necromancers are in a “faction” of creatures called “Undead”. All of the factions of the game have “relationships” with one another ranging from Love to Hate. Originally, we had “Undead” creatures “Hating” Herbivores and Carnivores — so when skeletons spawned they were immediately attacked and killed by the deer and birds of the forest! Now, the two are indifferent to each other, but it has given us a good idea for a spell the player can use in the future 😉

The Stock Market and Losing

We have also finally implemented a first pass at the stock market. A number of randomly generated companies “compete” with yours in a simulated market which is updated every now and then.

 

 As you ship goods to the motherland, your stock will tend to rise depending on the value of those goods. Operating at a loss or losing employees due to … “work related hazards” … will result in your stock falling. If your stock falls to zero over a period of two consecutive days, you lose the game!

At the moment the other companies in the market are just there for fluff, but they can at least be a little entertaining to look at!

 

 Crash Logs

In addition to fixing several bugs and reducing the game’s memory footprint by nearly 40%, we also added a crash logging service to help us make the game more stable. Every time the game crashes, it will generate a report about the crash and some details about your computer to help us debug these problems. Details on how to submit a crash report can be found here:

http://www.dwarfcorp.com/site/contact/

Porting Progress

The good news: the game has been ported to both Linux and Mac in the sense that the game can be compiled for those platforms and will run. We made use of the “FNA” distribution of Monogame from Polytron Studios, which was used to port the indie game FEZ to Mac and Linux. After a couple of sleepless nights of debugging GLSL shaders, Linux windowing and Mac library naming conventions we finally got the game running on an OSX virtual machine and Ubuntu 12.04. It was much easier this time than last time. Many thanks to the people at Polytron for opening up their process to other developers!

 

 

 

 The bad news: the game is too slow and buggy on Mac/Linux systems right now for us to feel confident releasing builds. We will need to do further testing and optimization on Linux and Mac systems before sending out builds. As part of this process, we will put some of the kickstarter funds toward a Macbook so we can directly test on Mac without using a virtual machine. Until then: Mac and Linux users, thank you for your patience, we promise we will have something for you soon.

Migrating forums to Steam Community

After having a discussion about game forums, we’ve decided that the easiest thing for us to do right now is to direct people to the Steam Community forums instead of our own forums. Steam has much stronger anti-spam measures than our game website, and we can still moderate the forums through our Steam account.

Link: http://steamcommunity.com/app/252390

That’s it, thank you!

— Matt