War for the Overworld News

Darkest greetings Underlord,

Have you ever felt that there’s more to life than amassing your armies of darkness, plundering the towns of innocents, and slaughtering goodly heroes? No? Us neither. In fact, we are so driven by these desires we can’t help seeking out new ways to indulge them.

One such way we have discovered recently is the joyous evil of Wicked Ones, a new tabletop RPG that is currently on Kickstarter. Let’s see here, what do they say about themselves?

This sounds strangely familiar...

“Wicked Ones is a Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG where you play fantasy monsters raiding human lands, hoarding the gold they loot, and building a dungeon to protect it. Your notoriety lures increasingly greedy and powerful adventurers to your dungeon. Can you stave off the inevitable onslaught of heroism that your notoriety brings?”



Well, that sounds right up our tunnel doesn’t it, Underlord? It should, after all both War for the Overworld and our genre-mates have served as inspiration for this game. We like it so much that we have something truly special to reveal today.
 


Those of us who dwell in the dark have to stick together. It is for this reason that we proudly declare a collaboration with the delightfully devilish designers of Wicked Ones, in which our dark world collides with their own.

We are joining Hands of Evil on special stretch goals for their Kickstarter, drawing forth elements from War for the Overworld for your gaming pleasure.



There’s quite a range of content up for grabs: from “True Monsters”, playable classes which put you in the shoes of one of your favourite minions from Kairos, to hero cards for the goodly forces of the Empire. It all culminates in a splatbook which will enable you to bring your games to Kairos, with special rules inspired by War for the Overworld.

If you ever wanted to roleplay as an Augre, crushing the hapless heroes of the Empire with your augmented hands, and then forging the battered remains of their armour into your very own skin - now’s your chance!



Familiar faces join the fray, just be glad they're on your side

What are all the WFTO Stretch Goals you ask? Well get a load of this:

• Augre “True Monster” - ¥1.7M (~$15,800 USD) - Unlock the ability to play as a War for the Overworld Augre, featuring special skills and abilities based upon the smith you all know and love. Crush your foes and augment yourself with the scraps of their destroyed battle armour!
  
• Chunder “True Monster” - ¥2.3M (~$21.4K USD) - The Chunder joins the fight! This portly hammerhead will make short work of any heroic adventurer, with deadly headbutts and viciously viscous bowels.
  
• Heroes of the Empire Cards - ¥2.1M, ¥2.5M, ¥2.9M (~$19.5K USD, ~$23.3K USD, $27K USD) -  What good is being a Monster if you can’t wail upon a goodly adventurer or two? Each of these goals will add another set of hero cards based upon Empire units from WFTO.
  
• War for the Overworld Splatbook - ¥3.3M (~$30.7K USD) - The Big One! With this tome in your hands you’ll be able to create your very own adventures in the realm of Kairos! Featuring special rules, an Underlord mode, a sandbox map, faction details and much more, this will give your group the freedom to explore Kairos like never before!
  

As you can see there’s a whole slew of awesome WFTO content to grab. But how can you get all these fantastic prizes and more? Read on!



Wicked Ones already hit their Kickstarter goal of ¥1,080,000 (~$10,000 USD) and at the time of writing have raised ¥1,614,660 (~£15,000 USD), enough for two of their stretch goals with 13 days to go!

Each session of Wicked Ones will see you striking out into the world of heroes, one of these worlds could very well be Kairos!

But bringing the denizens of Kairos through the rift will prove challenging. The Augre will soon pass the precipice at ¥1.7M (~$15,800 US) but we’ll need your help to take us all the way to the Splatbook.

You can support Wicked Ones via their Kickstarter page. Pledging your support will net you a set of awesome rewards based upon your tier.

Tier 1 - The Game - ¥2,150 (~$20 USD)

This tier will net you the game and all unlocked stretch goals, excluding the Toolkit hero cards and Heroes of The Empire hero cards.



Tier 2 - The Game & The Toolkit - ¥4,300 (~$40 USD)

Grab this tier and you’ll not only get the game but also a set of Toolkit cards with which to manage those heroes who would dare enter your domain. At this tier you’ll get all stretch goals.



Tier 3 - The Game, Toolkit & WFTO - ¥5,000 (~$46.50 USD)

To support the cause we’ve offered a number of War for the Overworld Steam codes to Wicked Ones, adding this new tier to their campaign. If you’ve somehow yet to grab War for the Overworld then this is the perfect opportunity to do so, and get your hands on an awesome RPG at the same time!

• Includes Rewards from Tier 1 & 2
  
• Includes War for the Overworld - Base Game Steam Key
  

It should go without saying that all proceeds from this Kickstarter go to the Wicked Ones project, and that neither the WFTO reward tier nor stretch goals in any way generate revenue for Brightrock Games. We believe that the world deserves more variety of games in this style and we hope that our contributions will help their endeavour to succeed.

That covers everything Underlord. As a final reminder, you have 13 days to back the Wicked Ones Kickstarter and support the cause of evil. We believe that the quality of their work speaks for itself and will be a fine addition to any Underlord’s Archive.

Finally, we’ll be dropping our next community spotlight tomorrow, featuring a set of new community-made maps for WFTO. Keep an ear underground.



Cheers,

– Brightrock Games Team


Visit the Wicked Ones Kickstarter

– Brightrock Games Team

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Darkest greetings Underlord,

It has been some time since we last delved into the depths of War for the Overworld, but as promised we have returned with a not insignificant patch, addressing many of the issues you reported to us on our bug tracker.

But before we delve into the devil’s details of Patch 2.0.7 and the Steam sale we’re currently running, there’s a very special announcement for both the community as a whole, and one very dedicated part of it.



 
When we launched our community translation toolkit with Patch 1.5, all the way back in December 2016, we weren’t sure what, if any, languages we would see introduced by our community. But given our Japanese fans had already managed to translate the game, even before we launched user-friendly tools, we shouldn’t have been surprised that they led the charge once more!

 

 

Throughout every patch and update we released, the incredible team of policeofficer110, CURRY_DAYS, and the War for the Overworld Japanese Localizing Group kept pace, making their translation the most complete on the Workshop.

They were diligent in keeping us updated with challenges they faced and areas we missed with the tools, and we were pleased to have their feedback so we could keep improving. Most importantly they made us aware of the dedicated and growing Japanese fanbase.

It made sense then that our next officially-supported language should honour the incredible support these fans have shown. So we are proud to announce that Japanese language support is now included in the base game!

We’ve worked closely with our official localiser to build on top of the community translation, and to make sure that everything meets both our own high standards and the standards laid down by the community translators. But if you do run into any problems, please let us know!



Whether you’re playing the game in Japanese or not, you’ll be pleased to know that to celebrate this momentous occasion we’ve created a special Worker skin! The Oni Ashigaru Worker is ready to leave behind the bright beauty of this year’s Hanami festival, and step into the darkness of your dungeon. With his visage exquisitely crafted to strike fear into your foes, he will join any Underlord who plays the game before the end of May.



Way of the Worker

If you’ve not recruited him before the end of May, he will resume his ronin lifestyle. But fear not, because he will return from his travels in April each year for Hanami. Once you have him in your employ he shall be yours permanently, such is the fealty of the Oni Ashigaru Worker. So be sure to take up his offer now, or miss out for a year!



 The Worker’s fearsome reputation preceded him of course, and his demands were that the game and its DLC be placed on sale in preparation for his arrival. Naturally, we didn’t want to cross him, so we have indeed arranged a sale for you! From the 17th to the 19th of May, the game and its content will be on sale for up to 84% off on Steam.



 

But that’s not all! With the Japanese release in the works, we took the opportunity to divert our code team's efforts temporarily from our new project, to address the issues you’ve reported to us.

You can read the full patch notes here. Since most of these issues are bugs, there’s not much in the way of headline features. But we’ve made a few small performance improvements, as well as improvements to a couple of Mighty Script features by request (and we were careful to ensure backwards compatibility).

And remember, if you’ve yet to take the plunge into the dark depths of War for the Overworld, there are currently big savings on the game and its content until the 19th of May, with up to 84% off on Steam!

Cheers,

– Brightrock Games Team

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Subscribe to the Steam Collection,

You can now subscribe to all spotlights via our combined collection!

Darkest Greetings Underlord,

Welcome once more to our Community Spotlight, the moment in time where we highlight some of the best, most interesting or peculiar levels to be created by the War for the Overworld community and collect them together in a single downloadable resource for your convenience.

This month we've got some great maps for you and also some news regarding the ongoing maintenance of War for the Overworld. But before we dive right in we should address the democorn in the dungeon.


We set out putting together these spotlights as a monthly endeavor but for 2019 this has not been as consistent as we would like. Initially what started as a month hiatus due to staff leave in February extended beyond our initial projections. In the spirit of transparency and our commitment to doing our best we can for our community we thought we might briefly explain this.

As stated, we announced that February would be skipped as our community manager, Lee, was on vacation. We intended to go ahead with the community spotlight in March and resuming monthly spotlights after that, this didn't go according to plan and was simply a matter of resourcing limitations. As we transition away from War for the Overworld and onto "Project: Aftercare" we have to be careful where we spend our team's time; spending our time efficiently and dividing resources to critical/high-priority tasks is important to the functioning of a small team like ours. Unfortunately ancillary projects such as this community spotlight can fall by the wayside if our resources are overly stretched.

Specifically in March we were working towards a significant milestone on "Project: Aftercare", one that we knocked out of the park, but resulted in us having little time left to cover War for the Overworld. Similarly April faced some knock-on effects as we reshuffled our team's roles to further support development on the new game, and later shifted back onto maintenance efforts for War for the Overworld. Initially April's spotlight was planned to go ahead and was indeed mostly ready to go but a sudden bout of illness cost us a few days at the end of the month slipping the spotlight to today.

We're committed to supporting the War for the Overworld community as we move forwards and we want to avoid cases where we miss multiple spotlights in a row. As such, we'll be aiming to ensure that spotlights are ready for the beginning of a month instead of the end and continue monthly for as long as we are able, which will be as long as you keep creating awesome maps! Inevitably things will heat up in other development efforts and we may find time further pressed. In these cases we'll try to communicate any changes to the schedule and work to ensure we keep disruption to a minimum.

Hopefully that helps to explain the lack of recent spotlights and add some clarity to our plans moving forwards. With regards to War for the Overworld's ongoing maintenance we have further news after the community spotlight, so stick around to find out more!


Now with the democorn appropriately addressed, lets move onto the main event and your awesome creations!

But before we start we’d like to remind you that we include all sorts in our spotlights. Anything creative such as levels made with our editor, campaigns, art, videos, sound, cosplay you name it we want to share it!

If you have something that you think might fit the bill then get in touch via Discord, Twitter or our Steam, GOG or Official Forums! You might just be chosen to receive the coveted Golden Worker skin!



Now let us jump right in with our selection of awesome maps from across the community this month. Remember you can download all these maps individually or as part of our Steam Collection!



You can download all of our spotlighted content from the Steam Collection or download all spotlights at once by subscribing to the primary collection

Deathmatch Levels

• Imperium by Sarah140392
  
• Hourglass by HPoltergeist
  
• The Stronghold of Pin'in by Kio5853

King of the Underhill

• Bloody Dawn by Ph4nToM

Core Shards

• Unforgiving Fire Realm by Polis Ranger

My Pet Dungeon

• Frosty Fortress by Doogy

Scenario

• The Elements by Calebloki

Custom Campaign

• Tales of Dwarfs and Greed by Taktikus

 
Featured Creator

• Crazydragon62040

 

Congratulations to all the creators who have had their work featured today! We’ll be delivering your Golden Worker codes (provided you’ve not had one already!) by the end of the week! Keep checking the private forum attached to your featured work for your code. If you have any questions please get in touch with us directly!


Fanart is one of our favourite things to receive at Brightrock Games, that there are players out there who love our game enough to create something new for us to pin on our wall. It's always deeply humbling when we receive a piece of art. Just today Serioustoni shared this piece of our Official Forums.

Hiding or Ambush? You decide.

Serioustoni commented about how excited they are for the upcoming Patch 2.0.7 and wanted to give something back for our continued support of War for the Overworld, it's always nice to be appreciated! Speaking of Patch 2.0.7...

 
As we promised last year although we were moving away from active development on War for the Overworld we still intended to continue supporting it for some time to come. Over the course of the last month we've moved to do just that, catching up on the backlog of issues you've reported to us on our bug tracker and reviewing a number of your suggestions of where we might be able to introduce some improvements. The result of this is Patch 2.0.7 that we're preparing to deploy next week.

Although this is a maintenance patch we've tried to get as much out of our time as possible so we've fixed hundreds of issues, improved some features particularly those surrounding the Map Editor and addressed some balance issues based on feedback from our dedicated QA volunteers.

In particular, one large issue we identified was a significant memory leak associated with the material management subsystem, this could result in a significantly large amount of memory being taken up by the game over time, eventually resulting in a crash when no more memory could be assigned. This would only occur in some scenarios when certain units or terrain types were present on a level I.e. the Aureate Monolith and should hopefully improve the experience for those of you who were affected by the issue. Curiously the solution for this issue actually came from Project: Aftercare as we found we could port our more robust code from that project backwards to War for the Overworld, a rare case of overlap!

We hope you'll look forward to the release next week, moving forwards we'll continue releasing maintenance patches at irregular intervals so if you encounter any problems once the Patch is out then please feel free to drop us a line on our bug tracker!

 See you soon Underlords!

– Brightrock Games Team

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Most Auspicious Greetings Underlord,

At Brightrock Games we always aim to keep our ears close to the ground, measuring the temperature and tasting the rhythm of the games industry to ensure we stay ahead of the curve.

For that reason we need to sadly announce that our Dungeon Hearts project, formerly codenamed Project: Aftercare, is no more (though you can still play the original demo). It’s clear to us that the PC Master Race no longer values such asinine concepts as true love and romance, so we too have evolved beyond such outmoded concepts.

It’s better to have loved and lost…

Project: Aftercare as you knew it is dead, long live Project: Aftercare! With our noses squarely sniffing out the pulse of the games industry, we’ve heard murmurs that the console market is becoming increasingly viable, for such magnificent creations as those we are able to build on our monolithic PCs. To that end we are pleased to announce War for the Overworld: Console Edition!


For our learned comrades of the PC Gaming Elite, you may be questioning how it is possible for such a technical marvel and masterpiece as War for the Overworld to run on consoles. We understand your confusion, and we can assure you that we have not lost our marbles.

Indeed, consoles have come a long way since we last looked. Gone are the humble days of Atari, Commodore and Coleco. Arrived now has the day of Sony and their impressive hardware – for a console. So it is then that we are pleased to declare War for the Overworld is coming to Sony PlayStation!

The future is NOW!

Madness we hear you cry! Impossible! But rest assured this is no tomfoolery! Behold we have prepared a short video for you, to demonstrate the power of this new console running our premiere Dungeon Management Game.

https://youtu.be/emn0yTM_wio
Our launch trailer is standing by - Behold the AWESOME 3D POWER of PlayStation!

As you can see, the game looks quite spectacular on this new system, a testament indeed to how far the console market has come, and to our incredible programming team. They spent no less than five minutes optimising the port by clicking the “Port to PlayStation” button in Unity.

Of course, we want to make sure that our new console users have the best experience they can, so we’ve filled the new edition of the game to the brim with special features:

• Awesome 3D Graphics – Utilising special blast processing programming techniques, we have squeezed every bit of power from the PlayStation’s GPCPRAMU microchips, to deliver incredible 3D Dungeon Management never before seen on consoles!
  
• Revamped Control Scheme – We have worked around the clock to translate War for the Overworld’s intense control scheme to the strange devices known as “Dual Shocks”. E.g. whilst holding L2 and Select, press R2 twice, R1 a single time, followed by holding down X, O and Start at the same time. This will place a Lair tile!
  
• Splitscreen Multiplayer – For all the incredible strides of the console market, it seems Internet gaming is not quite there yet. To address this shortcoming we have developed an innovative solution of splitting the screen into equal parts, allowing up to four Underlords to battle it out simultaneously on a single TV!
  
• Special Game Modes – Strategy is a foreign concept on consoles and not everyone may want to spend their time building the perfect dungeon. So we’ve included some “console-like” game modes: who doesn’t want to take Stumpy the Blood Imp on a platforming adventure! Watch out Crash Bandicoot!
  
• All Expansions Included – It just costs too much to distribute new content separately without downloads. So we bundled it all together on five CD-ROMs!
  

Having consulted the All-Knowing Gods of PC Gaming, it’s been made clear to us that success on consoles is to reach the audience via print media. So we’ve been hard at work preparing for our eventual launch. At the time of writing, we’ve contacted dozens of PlayStation publications with our proposed full page takeover adverts.


Face-melting graphics require a face-melting poster!

As you can see it’s really hip to the now. Unfortunately these publications don’t seem to have email, so we’ve had to contact them on snail mail; although we thought we would have heard back by now, we’re still confident they won’t be able to turn us down.

We hope you’re as excited as we are to finally see War for the Overworld make this leap to the modern console generation. But when will it be out you ask? Well that’s the thing; since digital distribution is yet to arrive on consoles, we’re hamstrung by the extensive lead times of physical publication and distribution. We’ll let you know as soon as the game disc goes gold!

So come release day (which we hope to call “War for the Overworld Wednesday”) we look forward to you heading on down to your local video game and electronics merchant on the high street (if you still have one), to grab yourself a copy for as little as £49.99 (UK RRP – international prices may vary).

For those Sega and Nintendo fans out there, never fear! We’re planning a Sega Saturn release just as soon as we figure out how these blasted processing units work. And we will have a Nintendo 64 port as soon as we can compress the game down enough to fit it on a cartridge.

For those of you who just want to get your hands on the radical graphics, we’re also pleased to announce that a “PlayStation mode” will be coming to War for the Overworld on PC in a future patch.

Peace out,

– Brightrock Games Team

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