Barrage News

Hello there!
Cody here with a bit of good news!
With today's post comes Barrage version 1.3, a.k.a. the one where we release The Leeghwater Project DLC.

Before you get too excited (as you should), a small caveat: the DLC is "live" on the store and in the current build, but for now is not on sale and accessible only to those who backed the project during the “Legendary Box” Kickstarter campaign.

If you are one of those backers, keep an eye on your mail in the coming days, you'll receive your key to activate the DLC.
For everyone else, I ask for a little more patience. You'll be able to buy the DLC at some point next week, after we send out all the Kickstarter keys.

Caveat to the caveat: if you bough the game during the last "Expansion Pack" campaign on Kickstarter, I've been told that the BackerKit is not closed yet so I'm afraid I can't send you the key just yet.

Even if you are not planning on buying the DLC, here's a few things you'll still get from version 1.3

[h3]Magnification[/h3]
A new button has been added that lets you toggle a handy localized zoom to see things better around the board. You can also toggle the zoom by pressing 'M' on your keyboard; and your mouse wheel will let you slightly adjust the zoom level.

[h3]Faster Animations[/h3]
A new slider has been added in the game options. You can now adjust the speed of all animations from 0.8x up to 3x the normal speed.
Small note on this feature: there is still some work to do, as some animations shouldn’t be influenced by this speed change, llike the blinking light that indicates it’s your turn or the water ripples in lakes and rivers. These animations are currently affected even though they shouldn’t be and they will be addressed in a future update.

[h3]Contract Selection During Production[/h3]
A new mechanism has been introduced when producing energy.
You now have to manually check a toggle if you wish to produce without closing any contracts (if you have them).
This will help prevent mistakes so critical that led more than one person to abandon the game and leave a negative review.
On the other hand, if the additional step bother you, fear not! You can disable this new feature and let the machine spirit handle the checkbox for you, so you can continue to play as before.

[h3]A lot of minor bugs have been fixed, here's a quick rundown of the major ones:[/h3]

- Fixed starting round animation of energy income
- Fixed a bug on Amir where full dams where given as valid target leding to dams holding more water than they should
- Fixed a minor bug on Amir that could cause problems reloading a saved game where he was present
- Fixed a bug on opponent' small player board not showing tech tile tooltip until that player took a turn
- Fixed a bug on alternative cost selection showing with reduced length when longer than vanilla cost
- Fixed a bug that could cause a game to get stuck if started right after completing another game
- Fixed a bug that could cause water tokens getting stuck and not animated when resolving a contract and getting an income of water drops from a free building
- Updated Unity engine version as recommented by Unity Technologies in order to fix a security vulnerability


[h3]Here's a list of some of the minor improvements introduced with this version:[/h3]

- Added animation when using resources from a player warehouse
- Improved water positioning with Amir with automatic type switching if appropriate
- Added output tokens to Water Management actions when used by opponents
- Changed penstock level hover to follow the mouse as long as it’s hovering over the penstock, instead of appearing at a fixed position
- Added random menu background feature with 3 possible backgrounds
- Added Ukrainian language

Have a good dam week!

Cody

Hello there!
Cody here, with another update to bring you up to speed on what's been going on lately.

As you might have noticed, despite my optimistic timetable, the DLC The Leeghwater Project isn't out yet. This is due to a couple of factors.

First off, let me tell you that the DLC is 95% complete. The main reason it's not out yet is that some of the graphic material needed for its completion and release is not ready yet.
This is because—and I hope I won’t get in trouble for revealing this :)—the development of the graphic assets is handled by Cranio Creations, not Cranio Lab. Over the last month they've been extremely busy preparing for one of the biggest board game conventions in Europe: SPIEL in Essen. As a result, the creation of the assets needed for The Leeghwater Project DLC has been delayed until after the convention; that means mid-next week.

The second reason why the DLC isn't out yet is that "Dev 2 has left the game"—a.k.a. our valued teammate Amintiri has left the Cranio Lab cadre. That brought with it a number of complications, including a slowdown in the debugging and bug-fixing phase, as he was a crucial part of it. On that note, let me take advantage of this occasion to be a bit cheeky and say:
Good luck to you, mate! It has been a pleasure working with you over the past 15 years, through thick and thin and many adventures. Your absence will be deeply felt. To quote your favourite character: “Fortune and glory, kid!”—may your future adventures bring you plenty of both.

To close this post off, let me share with you a quick screenshot of another QoL addition coming (for everyone) with this new DLC, what I've dubbed the "No contract double check".



It's a new small panel in the Production popup, designed to prevent making productions without fulfilling any contract. The panel includes two checkboxes and works as follows:

• The checkbox on the right lets you automatically handle this new check. If it’s toggled on, everything will work as before and you can keep on playing as always. The state of this toggle will persist between games.
  
• If you turn it off, it means that whenever you want to do a production without fulfilling any contract, you'll need to manually acknowledge that by toggling the left checkbox. You'll have to do so for every production you wish to make without fulfilling contracts.
  

It might sound complicated when explained like this, but I promise it’s pretty straightforward once you try it (btw, the icon for the right checkbox is one of the assets that is yet to be done)

Have a nice dam week!

Cheers,
Cody

[p]Hello there![/p][p]I hope you're all okay and doing great! [/p][p]I'm here today, not to announce the release of The Leeghwater Project DLC as I would have hoped, but to bring you up to speed with development progress.[/p][p]In short: I'm almost there. [/p][p]I'm currently working on the tutorial for the new features.
Once that's done, the remaining tasks are: [/p]

• [p]Finalising the layout of the 5-player map [/p]
• [p]Localising the new content for all supported languages [/p]
• [p]Testing and bug fixing[/p]

[p]I'm sorry I haven't been very active on the forums—I know I still have a couple of posts to reply to. I've just been super busy trying to bring the development of TLP to a close.[/p][p][/p][p]On the plus side, I managed to sneak in a couple of nice quality-of-life improvements for the DLC: [/p]

• [p]A floating zoom to help you see things better [/p]
• [p]An animation speed adjuster to make things faster[/p]

[p][/p][p]I'll leave you with a little sneak peek of what's coming. [/p][p]Please don't hate on my limited video-editing skills :)[/p][p][/p][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][p]Have a dam good rest of the week![/p][p][/p][p]Cheers,
Cody[/p]

[p]Hello there![/p][p]I hope you had a great summer! Before we begin, a big thank you to all of you for sticking around, giving us feedback, and leaving kind reviews! It all helps! [/p][p]As you might have guessed, this post announces the release of a new AI in Barrage—the very originally named Medium AI! [/p][p]While it’s not strong enough to challenge experienced players, I think it’s a solid improvement over the current Easy AI. It’s not 100% finished yet—there are still a few things I need to tweak, some situations to address, and a few XOs to implement. At the moment, the AI won’t take advantage of Mahiri, Dr. Octavious, and Amir - its ability to use Wu Fang is also limited. [/p][p]Not to worry though—work on the AI will continue, albeit at a slower pace, as it’ll be developed alongside other things. [/p][p]A quick heads-up: the new AI is a bit slower than the current one, so in rare cases it might take up to 10/15 seconds to make a move. Anything beyond that could be a bug. [/p][p]As always, if you encounter any issues, feel free to reach out on the Steam forums or email us at "digital \[at] craniocreations \[dot] com".[/p][p]If you’d like to attach a specific game that’s causing problems, you can find the save files at: [/p]

• [p]Users\\\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Cranio Creations\\Barrage on Windows [/p]
• [p]~/Library/Application Support/Cranio Creations/Barrage on macOS [/p]

[p][/p][p]To round things out, here’s a quick rundown of what else is coming with this update—some bug squashing and a couple of quality-of-life improvements: [/p][h3]Bug Fixes [/h3][p]- AI_Easy – Fixed a bug causing the game to get stuck when the AI had to resolve an optional move, with the “Dam – No Engineers No Excavator” tech tile in the wheel and the “PowerPlant – No Engineers” tech tile available
- AI_Easy – Fixed a bug causing a “CantPayBuildCost” error when the AI tried to build something using the last private action (thus needing to pay the action fee) on a red map slot, while only having 3 credits
- Fixed machinery tokens getting stuck on an opponent’s player board when resolving a 2-machinery income on small boards
- Fixed national resolution animations appearing at the center of the screen instead of on the board of the opponent who closed it, when playing with 3 opponents. [/p][h3]Other Changes [/h3][p]- When building a structure, the selected map slot is no longer reset when changing the tech tile—provided the new tile is compatible with that slot
- Updated the toggle selection effect on the Machinery resolution popup (i.e., when choosing how to resolve machinery rewards). [/p][p][/p][p]That’s all for now! [/p][p]Just for this one, let me bid you farewell with a Barrage-related picture from my small vacation ( a real life level 1 dam in the mountains ). [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Have a good dam weekend! [/p][p][/p][p]Cheers,
Cody [/p][p][/p]

[p]Hello there![/p][p]It has been a while - I hope you're all doing great and having a fantastic (too much?) start of the week![/p][p]I don't have a new version of Barrage for you today, but since I'll be taking 4 days off this week for a little bit of summer vacation, and since it has been a while since the last post, I wanted to keep you updated on what's going on.[/p][p][/p][h3]Medium AI[/h3][p]As promised I am working on a new medium AI. It's going..okay.[/p][p]It's not 100% complete but it's good enough to be released. [/p][p]What's still missing is some optimisation and some code specifically designed to take advantage of more complex XOs—namely Mahiri (from the base game) and the promo XOs—which are currently being disregarded by the AI.[/p][p]This is a bit of a compromise I had to make to stay on schedule, since I really want to release the first DLC by the end of summer (aka mid-September). As a result, the time I can dedicate to the AI is limited. I also have a list of bugs to fix and quality-of-life improvements to implement.[/p][p]That said, I didn't want to release the AI and then ghost you all for a week, so it'll be released at some point between the 18th and 29th.[/p][p]Regarding the in-game performance of the new AI, I was aiming for an average of 130 points in a 2-player game and 100 in a 4-player game. [/p][p]Unfortunately, at the moment it's more like 100/110 ± 30 points in 2-player games and 70/80 ± 20 points in 4-player games.[/p][p]There are still some situations that I'm trying to address, where it can get stuck and underperform but, all in all, it plays better and more consistently than the current Easy AI.[/p][p]I know it's a bit of mixed bag situation but I wanted to be honest about it, especially because it's not a done deal yet. I will continue to work on it, every chance I get, alongside other tasks.[/p][p][/p][h3]The Leeghwater Project + 5-player map and gameplay[/h3][p]As stated before, the new DLC is on it's way and we are aiming for a mid September release. [/p][p]We still have a few concerns about certain gameplay elements, especially considering all the feedback you awesome folks have shared with us, but we'll do our best to meet the deadline we’ve set—fingers crossed.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]That's all for now, folks![/p][p]Wish you all a dam-tastic week—and happy summer vacations to the lucky ones![/p][p]Cheers,[/p][p]Cody[/p]