Dome Keeper News

[h2]Hey Keepers,[/h2]
today is a special day, because we celebrate the two year anniversary of releasing Dome Keeper. Not only that, but we also just hit 1.000.000 players, which is an insane milestone we could not have dreamt of back in April 2021 when we made a small game in 3 days for Ludum Dare 48.
Back then we were hobbyists, just following our passion while working full time jobs. By all means, Dome Keeper has been a life-changing experience for us. You, the players and our awesome community are at the heart of that. From the first larger playtest in September 2021, over the many updates and patches toward the release of “A Keeper’s Duty”, you’ve played a crucial role in making a fun game. Thank you!


Let’s celebrate together! The lovely Jarvs is back and we’ll do a stream today at 17:30 CEST over on YouTube and Twitch. We’ll hang out, chat with you and play the game. I’m most excited to share an awesome thing though, reveal in the stream. It’s not inside Dome Keeper, no new content or plans, but still something super cool game related. Join us and let’s celebrate!

We'll start with one thing we are so happy about. At Gamescom 2023 we gave away Drillbert plushies to people who drew Drillbert. The result was a vast amount of amazing drawings. The breadth of what we see here is simply fantastic, we love it! Check out the full collection via the link below.

https://drillberts.bippinbits.com/


I’m a bit sentimental looking back on all of these. With each update we not only added new content, but also worked to improve the balance and fix a lot of bugs. There were plenty of hotfixes and patches in between, but these were the most important updates:

[h3]Release[/h3]
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3307354336740716276

[h3]Halloween Update[/h3]
bringing the cosmetic skeleton suit and pet.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3409813763388467185

[h3]The Assessor[/h3]
brings in the second keeper, complete with its own full OST.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3428955345103485749

[h3]Caves & Critters[/h3]
added caves into the mines as well as small creatures living there, bringing a bit of variety to the underground experience.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3496511138517853772

[h3]Hard pressed[/h3]
adding the scarab and stab monsters, the Miner mode for prestige and a own world background for prestige.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649634951896445163

[h3]Springloaded[/h3]
bringing 3 new gadgets with Spire, Autocannon, Prospection Meter.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3668782792567448910

[h3]Drillbert Mode[/h3]
announced as April Fools, while doing a switcheroo and actually adding Drillbert mode to the game!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/6384455987842263498

[h3]Re-Assessor[/h3]
reworking the Assessor and changing the mechanics significantly. The old Assessor was definitely an “aquired taste” and the new one proved much more fun.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3716076292751694859

[h3]Mod Support[/h3]
enabling Steamworkshop mods. Raffa in our team made the first mod as an example, the Hydra Launcher.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649653272173229011

[h3]Double Dome[/h3]
adding Tesla and Artillery dome to the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3731852209660535303

[h3]Merry Christmouse[/h3]
adding mouse support to the game, a much requested feature. Also came with a christmas skin for the assessor.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3869217710016267898

[h3]Lunar New Year[/h3]
adding a new cave with a special pet.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4062878364658405866

[h3]A Keeper’s Duty[/h3]
adding Guild Assignments, the Droneyard, 11 new gadgets, Supplements for gadgets and weapons, a new world and 5 new monsters. It’s a bit crazy to list this, maybe it shows how huge that update was comparatively.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4396159337027279925

As you can see, we progressively made larger and larger patches that naturally needed a bit longer to develop. To be honest, the pace was sometimes a bit grueling, but it was also so exciting and fun to see you all get hyped and play the game a lot. Very motivating!


Since the release of “A Keeper’s Duty” we received a ton of balancing feedback. We also saw some new exploits for prestige, and how a countermeasure wasn’t effective.
Right now we are working on a patch that aims to improve balance across the whole game. Many bugs will be fixed and it will also take better care of a few exploits.

With the big balance changes, we’ll start season 7 for prestige. I’ll also clean the leaderboards of season 6 of any obviously cheated runs.

We are also hard at work to bring back full mod support, that broke due to the engine upgrade from Godot 3 to Godot 4. The way many mods worked simply was not supported with Godot 4 anymore, and we are working on workarounds and new ways of modding so we can see more cool mods in the future.


The next big thing for Dome Keeper is MULTIPLAYER. It is by far the most requested feature and finally after adding content for two years, it is time for multiplayer. A Keeper’s Duty was our last big content update, at least for now, and we’ll finish development of Dome Keeper with a bang, i hope.

So how does the multiplayer development look like?
We can differentiate two parts here: split screen local multiplayer and online multiplayer across two or more machines.
The very first test for local coop back in Dome Romantik times.

Local multiplayer is relatively easy to do. It needs a huge refactoring in the code base, but it’s doable. I already implemented local coop last year. It’s playable, but needs a lot of tuning.

The challenge with online multiplayer is much greater, as the game is so far not built to support that. That means rethinking the whole game on a technical level. Usually developers decide at the beginning of a project for or against multiplayer, as such major changes get increasingly harder over time (often prohibitively hard). We still want to take a stab at it and see if we can get it done.

This also means it will get quiet on the development side at least for the rest of this year. We got some implementation to do!
This is also a big reason we want to fully enable and foster mods - more on that in the future.

So how will multiplayer look like exactly? Well, we'll share details in the future. We got plenty of feedback over the past years and lots of our own ideas too. That should be a lot of fun!


Ok, to wrap this up, here are some fun facts!

Fun Facts

• Drillbert was originally planned to be a tunnel digging machine similar to what you see in real life. Anne had the great idea of making it into a likeable animal instead. In the code it is still called “Drillbot” though.
  
• Dome Keeper’s jam version was called “Dome Romantik”, as a pun on “Dorfromantik”, which was very popular back then (and still is a great game from super nice devs).
  
• the biggest influences on Dome Keeper are Kingdom and Into the Breach. Most people expect games like Motherload or Steamworld Dig here, but i never had played them before making Dome.
  
• Dome Keeper inspired some other devs to make related games, like the recently released Feed the Deep. We are really happy about that and see it as a big compliment.
  
• There are 320 upgrades in Dome Keeper, with 35 supplements inside 37 tech trees.
  
• in june 2021 we celebrated the big milestone of having 100 people on our discord, for which anne made a special graphic. Later our composer Cameron got into the habit of making celebratory tracks for the next discord member milestones.
  
• i wrote a post-mortem of the game jam version of Dome Keeper
  
• As April fools in 2022 we announced to rename to “Dome Romantic” and switch direction more into a “The Sims meets Space Mining”. It said
  Build your bachelor dome and get to work in the mines of alien planets. Improve your mining skills, get elegant furniture and expand your dome. When everything's spiffy, invite your hot neighbor over for dinner, because it gets lonely fast in the domes. Don't forget to buy some curtains first, it's a glass dome after all.

[h2]So thank you for (with development time) 3 years of making us happy game devs! See you soon :)[/h2]

[h2]Hey Keepers,[/h2]
It seems we are reaching more stable territorry now, with the fix and change list becoming shorter. Thank you all for the plentiful reports!
I was pushing this forward really quickly because i'm trying to take a few days off this week, before Gamescom madness starts. So if i'm replying less you'll know why, but i'll read everything eventually and keep my eyes open for critical bugs.

Here is what's new for v4.0.4:
[h2]Balance and Changes[/h2]

• added frames around icons for damage dealt statistic
  
• now differentiating between tesla quick shot, orbs and normal damage in damage dealt statistic
  
• anti stall is now disabled for defective weapon assignment
  
• added auto cannon to list of damage dealt entries
  
• auto cannon will only lead shots where appropriate and better deal with ticks
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• fixed mining summary popup being behind run finished popup
  
• fixed tech tree popup overlaying HUD with health bar
  
• fixed potential crash when having no pet selected in loadout
  
• fixed battle zooming in when anti stall was triggered, even though there were still monsters around
  
• fixed probe restoring charges on reloading
  

Thank you again for playing

[h2]Hey Keepers,[/h2]
thank you so much for your feedback. I hope you can see that we really value that.
You might have noticed the fast patch pace. It's the weekend, no QA works at the moment. This means i can fix a lot of stuff, but also some things that i break are not caught before they reach you. So i really appreciate your plentiful bug reports. I'm around :)

Two big things are in this patch:

1. assignment challenge mode is easier now, closer to what it was on v4.0.0
   
2. fonts are not blurry anymore
   

Here is what's new for v4.0.3:
[h2]Balance and Changes[/h2]

• challenge assignments are back to "brutal" difficulty from "YAFI". The impact was too high. Feedback appreciated!
  
• lowered assignment difficulty on some assignments
  
• lowered final wave strength for most assignments
  
• fonts should generally not be blurry anymore
  
• changed anti stall mechanic. Instead of restarting the wave, the countdown to the next one will begin.
  
• battle grid drones will now spawn even if bought during battle
  
• drones can now pick up resources from converter and are a bit hardened against drops that are at invalid positions
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• fixed shopping bag achievement not triggering
  
• fixed repellents toxic fumes not dealing damage any more
  
• fixed converter achievement not triggering when automated conversion is used
  
• fixed primary weapon tech tree being available even when no primary weapon is installed in the dome
  
• actually fixed converter not behaving well with 0.5 iron input
  
• wave meter now properly initialises if there is a wave delay ongoing
  

Thank you again for playing

[h2]Hey Keepers,[/h2]
thank you for the plentiful reports. I pushed a lot today and was able to at least catch up with the bug reports and make a lot of fixes. This is basically a hotfix, so i need to rely on you a bit for feedback again, if i broke anything with the patch. Can definitely happen, but i can fix it quickly :)

I investigated a bit and found many nodes that were not properly cleaned up, similar to a memory leak. This could greatly impact performance over time (but would reset on reload).
Buzz saw was broken, not taking the supplement and vanishing on reload. That's fixed now.
Lastly, Tesla orbs were messed up. Instead of doing 25 damage, they did base damage * 2500%. This meant a ton of damage, but also that they vanished immediately. This is fixed now.


Here is what's new for v4.0.2:
[h2]Balance and Changes[/h2]

• fixed many nodes not being cleaned up properly, which could lead to really bad performance over time
  
• chosen difficulty is now remembered per assignment
  
• converter now spits out resources more slowly, gives them an impulse and makes them float so they don't drop down into the mine
  
• dome resurrection will now trigger before auto repair
  
• invulnerability from dome resurrection now shows proper effect
  
• improved minimap colors for resources in remote station
  
• made resource teleportation via teleporter quicker
  
• added resource teleportation cooldown to upgrade stats
  
• made hornet pause a less long mid air, when flying towards the dome
  
• improved layout of upgrade icons and numbers in damage dealt statistic
  
• removed bolter from projectile hell, removed breeder from heavy hitter assignment
  

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• fixed chainsaw going missing on reload
  
• fixed tesla orbs accidentally doing way too much damage
  
• fixed breeder immensely lowering the difficulty of a wave by limiting how many monsters can spawn
  
• fixed egg not hatching if it was not visible on screen for long enough
  
• fixed modloader exception when disable_all_mods is called when transitioning to godot4
  
• iron worms now account for shortened cycles in prestige
  
• fixed options always showing game options instead of last shown category
  
• fixed bug in cave tree seed when destroying tile it was rooting
  
• fixed issue when picking up cave bomb as assessor
  
• fixed resource teleportation not working for assessor bundles
  
• fixed battle drone release sound playing on master bus, ignoring all sound settings
  
• fixed iron worms bugging out when the tile they are attaching to is destroyed
  
• fixed damage statistics not being scrollable with controller
  
• fixed water from water cave not spawning at the right position
  
• fixed water cave having graphical error when moving far to the sides
  
• fixed crash in loadout when fighting monsters
  
• fixed bug with saving probe markers
  
• fixed side driller behaviour when in combat and when paused
  
• fixed hornet stabbing the dome from a distance if it was stunned on the last leg of its flight
  
• improved hitbox of phaser to play nicer with laser dome
  
• iron worm cage won't attach to tiles if it is carried
  
• improved shield position on arty dome
  
• fixed relic hunt run without monsters not ending properly on relic retrieval
  

Have you seen this awesome assessor artwork?

Thank you again for playing