Increlution News

Our journey continues with two new chapters! Featuring various new mechanics that will feel both familiar, and may just take you by surprise!


I'd advise playing it without New Game plus benefits for the intended first experience. If you have finished the game after the June 2022 QoL update, a save-backup of your completion should have been automatically created in: [installFolder/saves/backups/completion]. But I realize that a fair amount of you completed the previous chapters earlier than that, so this solution doesn't fully work until after this update. Alternatively, you can find a save at the end of chapter 9 here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/841043627705892902/1065641149936705556/chapter-nine-finished.txt . Obviously this is not advised if you haven't completed the game yet. Although I'd personally advise playing through the new content as intended the first time, the game doesn't force you to. If you prefer to use a New Game plus save or over-grinded save instead, I'm not stopping you either.

If you were playing new game plus and want to try the new content without perks, make sure to backup your new game plus save so you can continue after seeing the new content!

• Jobs that deal damage on completion now include off-cooldown food in their combat-safety computation, to be more accurate at low maximum health values
  
• Food cooldowns in the inventory tab now display as rounded up, rather than rounded down. To tackle a common confusion when dying when it displayed 0.0s, when that could just mean "below 0.1s" internally. Internal cooldowns still work on the same millisecond precision, this change is purely visual
  
• Chapters 6-8 now record their chapter completion stats upon finishing their last exploration for the first time, rather than reaching the next chapter. To better account for pathing options
  
• New game plus perk tooltips now display the previous perk price, as well as the total dna allocated on said perk. To be more informative in helping you determine how you may reallocate dna between playthroughs, would you want to
  
• The game client now detects when the Steam client isn't running on launch, and requests the steam client to relaunch the game automatically
  
• The prevent auto-refill setting should no longer fire when no manual actions are shown. To prevent unexpected halts of automation in edge-cases
  
• Fixed a rare case where run-once jobs could run twice, if automation triggered in a specific way behind the scenes
  
• Fixed a display bug that could prevent the reincarnation screen from showing if death occurred during the hiding transition. This could occur to some self-assigned challenge-run players when combined with offline time
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the chapter 8 meta-progression mechanic to not have it's downside applied, if the chapter 6 meta-progression mechanic wasn't ever completed
  
• Fixed a minor rounding-error in the fifth new game plus perk, causing it to occasionally display a slightly better value than it would actually be (last digit)
  
• Fixed a minor display bug in the story timediff seconds notation that could cause it to format as 1Ks instead of 1,000s when between 999.5s and 1000s
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause opening and closing (cancel) the NG+ screen during a run to unpause the game
  
• Reworked exploration completion accuracy at high numbers, mainly to support new content. But it should also make speedrun levels of optimization a tad more accurate
  
• Removed an internal cap to offline progress that was still there by mistake, causing offline progress to be capped to 5% of the total playthrough time when it shouldn't be
  
• Reworked various internal calculation-functions to support new scaling factors, allowing for new and future meta-progression mechanics
  
• Reworked how the NG+ passive jobs perk affects the action queue, to be more easily maintainable for future job-types
  
• Expanded various internal data management aspects, further reducing creative constraints for future content
  
• The game will now notify you when it detects that an update was installed (after this one)
  

Since launching into Early Access a little over a year ago, this update marks the point where content has reached over twice the original launch-size (about 100 unpaused hours to roughly 225). It was always the idea to slightly raise the price as the game expanded, even though I'm not entirely sure where the final price will end up. This raise will be $3 USD > $4 USD. Steam has updated their currency conversions since, and the world has seen turbulent times, so the new price may see a bigger or smaller change in your local currency. This price raise will probably happen sometime in February.

[h2]What does a price-change mean if you already own the game?[/h2]
Nothing. You already own the game and the price only applies to new purchases. Consider it an early-adapter discount. After all, it's players like yourself that allowed me to spent as much time on the game as I did, and any other approach would simply feel unfair to me (especially during Early Access). If any "additional purchases" ever happen, it would be a full fledged DLC side-story, but I have no plans for that at this time.


In terms of development, it didn't. I'd say it took somewhere between 4 and 5 months to flesh out in full. It has seen a record number of "back to the drawing board" moments throughout development. But ultimately I just wouldn't feel comfortable launching any content/mechanic until I was confident in the result. Any other approach would just create a long-term "bad stage" in the game. Aside from the development time it took, personal life added a significant additional delay due to an unfortunate family event. Sadly that's simply a down-side of a solo-developer project, and sometimes life gets in the way in ways that are out of our control. But I hope I'll be able to keep future updates to a more frequent release rate (although multiple months for content updates will probably remain a thing for creative freedom).


[h2]Short term roadmap (approximately 2-4 months)[/h2]
At first I want to monitor the release going smoothly, and quickly tackle any bugs, would they arise. After that has proven to go smoothly, I want to shift the focus back to a couple of quality-of-life/player-feedback updates again. I fell notably behind on responding to your feedback over the past half year. But your feedback has been the cherry on top when it comes to polish throughout all development stages, and I certainly want to make sure that I've read it all and work with the ideas that feel fitting! After some feedback related updates, I hope to start working on new content some time before the summer. But the exact timing tends to go with "whenever inspiration takes control", and is all about allowing the creative process to do its thing.

[h2]Long term roadmap (definitely over a year, quite likely more than 2 years)[/h2]
The original plan was to aim for roughly 700 hours of unpaused content. And while that's a very practical way to illustrate the size of a game, it's a rather poor metric to steer development to. I don't want to stretch content just to make it take longer. I want to tune content to "feel right". That being said, my current estimation is still somewhere between 20 and 25 total chapters (11 of which are now in Early Access). That ambition falls or stands with "as long as the game doesn't overstay its welcome", which I hope to continue to achieve by staying creative and innovative with mechanics between chapters. Much like chapters 6-8 were before, and chapter 11 aims to be today!

In any case, enough reading. Go play the new content! I look forward to hear what you think about it!

Enjoy!

Gniller

More information about the next steps of development below today's changes. But let's start with what's changed!
[h2]Today's changes[/h2]

• Reduced the default automation unlock requirement by 20% (500 > 400 for jobs, 10 > 8 for constructions/explorations). Actions with specific requirements have been tuned accordingly. New game plus scaling remains the same percentage, but the result is 20% lower by effect (subject to rounding)
  
• Added two options that allow for accumulations of offline time when a menu is open, or the reincarnation screen is shown. Similar to when the game is closed, this causes the game to fast-forward to catch up on time that would have progressed if it was running normally, up until a paused state is reached. Aiming to support less attentive playstyles, if desired
  
• Local saves are now also stored in [installFolder/saves], as a third save-loss prevention layer. For the very rare edge cases where Steam Cloud could fail, and a local disk-cleaner could remove the local file from the temp folder at the same time
  
• Added an auto-backup feature with a frequency setting, allowing you to configure when the game should automatically create a save backup to [installFolder/saves/backups]. The setting defaults to new completions of current content, but can be configured up to every reincarnation. Only works for milestones after downloading this update, because this data wasn't stored before
  
• Added a chapter completions tab to the generation history, to provide more in-depth information about how your playthrough compares (either to your own new game plus runs, or to flex to friends)
  
• Automations that have their requirements reduced by completing another action, now mention which action that is. If that action has been encountered at least once
  
• When automations are unlocked because their alternative was completed, even if it wasn't completed during the generation itself, it now explains that in the tooltip. To clarify a fairly common confusion
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the "prevent auto-refill" priority setting to prevent refilling during combat-stalling when something manual was available, resulting in unintended pauses
  
• Automated explorations that can fail and use "stop before completion" through the setting now re-apply that setting when they fail
  
• Chapter five tools now reduce the automation unlock requirement of their alternatives, since obtaining them all isn't really an option until well after automation is unlocked
  
• Three constructions in chapter seven now also appear when their requirement is missing (but can't be built). To make the effect of an earlier pathing choice harder to miss
  
• Those same three chapter seven constructions now reduce their automation unlock requirement when completing the required fourth construction. Similar to how some other optional things handle automation unlock requirements
  
• The first optional exploration in chapter two now also reduces its automation unlock requirement when moving on
  
• Lowered the automation unlock requirement of a chapter nine job
  
• An early chapter five exploration now also reduces its automation unlock requirement when moving on
  
• One chapter five exploration that requires a resource no longer halts filling-up automation with the setting, if the exploration itself as well as the resource are automated. To require less of a specific automation setup to proceed
  
• Fixed a bug that caused passive jobs to remove the active job when running out of the required resource, if they shared a resource requirement but weren't the same job. It now causes resource automation for the active action to trigger similar to when it's normally started
  
• Fixed a bug in the completion-damage exploration safety-check that caused it to not include decay increases, and potentially considering completion "safe" too soon. This affected one exploration in current content
  
• Fixed a bug that caused queuing the same action as run-once before a fill-up to remove the fill-up from the queue on activation
  
• Added a textual hint to the new game+ screen, indicating that right-clicking perks allows you to freely reallocate dna between playthroughs, to make that harder to miss
  
• Slightly adjusted the order of warning messages when actions can't be ran, to make them a little more accurate to what's most relevant when notifying you
  
• Added additional logic to the tooltip-rendering to ensure they're updated when available actions change, aiming to prevent tooltips of actions that are no longer available from remaining visible until moving the cursor
  
• Added another safety-check to the launch process to verify that the connection to Steam succeeded. Aiming to prevent save-loss when the Steam API failed to connect
  

[h2]So what's next?[/h2]
It has been three months since the last four chapters launched. And it has been quite refreshing to work on quality of life and player feedback for a while. And even though there's still plenty of work left to do in that regard, inspiration is guiding me back to content-creation! That also means this will most likely be the last smaller update for a while (bug-fixes aside), so that I can fully focus on content creation for the foreseeable future.

Details of the next content segment have yet to fully flesh out, but I currently expect it to be roughly two chapters. I do want to experiment with a new feature in one of those, which makes an ETA tricky as it's very much an iterative process that isn't done until I'm fully satisfied with it for release. A rough guess would be between two and four months, but it's highly subject to change. For those of you that are interested in development status updates, I'll be using the development diary as development proceeds. As it gets closer to completion I'll be able to provide some more detail until it's ready to be released. The development diary can be read on either the Steam Community or Discord, whichever is most convenient to you. Both use a read-only format, so you can subscribe to be notified when something new is posted without getting notified about responses. You're welcome to discuss/speculate on all of it in separate topics though!

Of course, once the next content-segment has been completed I'll continue to work on quality of life features and player feedback again too. Early Access isn't even half-way of the ambition!