Empires of the Undergrowth News

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Welcome to September, the worst month of the year (or so I'm told). I'll do my best to ensure you don't have to listen to Green Day on repeat to get through it, with some lovely news about achievements, map contests and difficulty changes coming to Empires of the Undergrowth. If you think that'd cheer you up, read on.

Leafcutter ants swarm over a huge whip spider in this shot from Steam user Bananta

As the art team and two out of three of our devs press forward with tier 5 work, one of our devs has been making changes to the difficulty options to Empires of the Undergrowth which were detailed in the most recent vlog last month. Before we get onto all the ins and outs of that, let's talk about the recent map contest!



In August we launched a map contest, mainly advertised on YouTube (you should absolutely subscribe to our YouTube channel - we post a whole bunch of great stuff there).

The contest closed at the start of this month, and we have had in the region of 200 entries all told! The brief was to submit an idea for a freeplay or custom game map, which we will then judge and turn our favourite into a fully-fledged map in the game.

John and Mike discussing map designs, whilst John makes an example map (which we will be finishing and adding to the game also!)

We want to do the judging live, so our current plan is to do a livestream at some point towards the end of this month. It would have been earlier but several of our team members are away for the Tokyo Game Show at the moment (more on that later in the newsletter). The exact timing of this is yet to be nailed down but we hope to stream at a time where most people can watch live in some form, hopefully on a weekend.

We're going to have to cut down the entries to 20-30 for the final judging, or we'd be there all night trying to get through 200! Please know that we appreciate all of the entries, and I'll do my best to make sure everyone who sent in an entry is credited for it, even if the entry doesn't make it into the final selection.

Keep an eye on our socials, and on here, for news of when the judging is happening! Remember - it'll likely be a weekend towards the end of this month or the start of October.



A common criticism of our difficulty choices is that the jump between them is not very linear, and in particular that the difference between medium and hard is more than a little unfair - with hard being closer to insane than to medium. We've decided now is the time to get the difficulty selection in its final working order before we finish the project, so one of our three devs has spent a lot of time recently working on that whilst the others crack on with tier 5.

Handy chart showing intended difficulty changes relative to the old standard

As you can see in the chart above, the intent is for difficulties between 'easy' and the new 'extreme' (which sits where the current 'hard' difficulty is) to be a gentler slope upwards. There's lots of reasons for this, and we hope the renaming of 'insane' to 'impossible' gives more people pause for thought if they want to attempt it on a first try (perhaps we should gate off this hardest difficulty on a first playthrough - what do you think?).

The increased resolution in the options outside of the toughest one will, we hope, allow people to make a more appropriate choice for their early playthroughs with better-fitting options for their skill level. There will be four options to choose from outside of the toughest - easy, medium, hard and extreme. We know plenty of people have chosen hard for the first playthrough of a level which, by no fault of their own, lies outside of their current skill level, being 'insane-lite' in some respects. 'Hard' should indicate challenging but achievable with sound game knowledge if not level-specific knowledge - we think that should now be the case.

See the vlog linked below for the full video form of this discussion - the segment begins at 2:38. Also, a reminder that the vlogs also come bi-monthly, in between these newsletters.

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We spoke about the achievement additions in the previous newsletter, but we've now had the huge list of new ones in testing for a week or so and they should be arriving in the next patch (tentatively scheduled for October)! We've tried to include a selection of nice standard ones (complete level X on difficulty Y, that sort of thing, similar to the existing ones) along with quite specific challenges for the more adventurous. Here's a small selection of what you can expect (artwork pending), specifically some of the more interesting ones for 2.2 Queen of the Hill. Which ones will you be going after first?

If you don't get the Lord of the Rings reference, we can't be friends



Although we’re not ready to officially reveal the setting and theme for the fifth and final tier of the formicarium story, I can talk a little about how it’s progressing. As we’re bringing to a close the tying-up of other loose ends for the project (freeplay, achievements, etc) most of the dev team is currently working solidly on the fifth tier, and a good 70% of the source control commits that come in are related to it.

After revamping the beach assets for the July update, our environment artist has recently sent in his first completed models and textures for the as-yet unrevealed fifth tier setting. Several more creatures are completed, including some of the more exciting titan-class ones and some others that have novel mechanics associated with them.

New systems (which along with artwork always represent the biggest time sink for a new tier) are coming together and beginning to work in unison, and the species we’ve homed in on for tier 5 requires several of them! One such new system involves a local-scale dynamic change to the environment occurring in one of the levels.

Internal discussion has led to the consensus of a more controlled build-up to how we release information about tier 5 compared to previous marketing cycles. Although as the community manager I’m itching to get that information out there, I understand the team’s desire for a firmer marketing regimen given that it’ll be the last of the truly huge updates as we leave early access. As soon as I have the goahead to start sharing more concrete information, I shall!



Last month, the team travelled to Cologne, Germany to attend Gamescom. Empires of the Undergrowth was represented there as part of the Hooded Horse booth (they're our co-publishers on EotU) - a member of our team was manning that section most of the time! I had my camera with me, and took enough videos to cobble together a travel vlog which was fun to do. It was great to meet some of our players, old and new, from the continent and chat about the game with them. It was also lovely to meet our colleagues from Hooded Horse in person for the first time (for most of us)!

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We like to use these public events as a way of gaining a little hands-on feedback from new players, as well - as work-from-home developers, we don't very often get the opportunity to directly observe people who are completely new to the game interacting with its systems, so we take that chance when we can. One thing that came from this particular event is some changes that will be made to 3.1 The Harvest - we'll be introducing a few early game objectives for that level, which should serve as something of a mini-tutorial for leafcutters (very similar to how The Crucible, the leafcutter demo level, works) as well as fully implementing some cut narrator dialogue about refuse chambers. Look out for that in the next update.

EotU developer Matt and environment artist Dan C at Gamescom

Slug Disco were also there with Robert Kaufmann, developer of Horticular - a beautiful garden-building pixel art game that Slug Disco is publishing, but not developing. Horticular was at the Indie Arena Booth, and Robert also got the chance to meet a whole bunch of you and gain some valuable feedback. Horticular development is continuing apace and we're really excited to see everyone's reaction to the finished game - it really is a remarkable project that we're very proud to be representing.

The Horticular station at the Indie Arena Booth

Gamescome is absolutely gigantic, the largest such event in the world, and its 2023 incarnation was an unforgettable experience as the world emerges fully from the shadow of COVID-19 that has loomed for the past several years. It’s always great to have the team together and we cherish those times that we can do that. We’re not quite done with events this year, which leads us on to…



TGS kicks off a few days from the time of writing, and Slug Disco will be represented there with three of our other publishing projects - Horticular and Adapt will be together at the dedicated Slug Disco booth, and Ecosystem will be there as part of the Indie Select 80. Our co-publishers Hooded Horse will be there, too.

Although we don't have a Slug Disco booth for Empires of the Undergrowth, if anyone is there and has a strong urge to play it we will boot it up for you - tell Liam and Dan that Mike sent ya and they'll oblige. If you’re nice.



We’ve had some beautiful screenies of the beach environment since its release in July, and so this month for Screenshot Central we’ll focus on that.

If you’d like to submit a screenshot, the easiest way is to join our Discord and post on the appropriate screenshot channels. You can also upload to the Steam Community page, and I will occasionally look through there. To get great screenshots, hold shift whilst you enter photo mode (F9 by default) - this will uncouple your camera from the ground and allow you to get some better angles on the action.

Attack of the crabs from BrickyGraph631

The beach in all its glory from Orion (Dilphy)

A wood ant queen safe in her burrow from Pumadog

From now until September 4, you can save 20% on Empires of the Undergrowth at the Steam Strategy Fest. Come check the game out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHFamaHashM

https://store.steampowered.com/app/463530/Empires_of_the_Undergrowth/

In Slug Disco Vlog 6, Mike goes over changes to the difficulty settings for EotU and also the map contest that is currently running. We're expanding difficulty to have 5 options instead of 4, with better gradiation between the lower ones - this should help people who want to step up or down to a different difficulty get a better feel for that.

Except for the most difficult, of course, now renamed to 'Impossible'. That's just as punishing a challenge as it ever was!

Dan also gives a brief update about 3 of our other publishing projects - if you want to skip the section about the other 3 games and get straight to the EotU content, the timecode is 1.44.

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Thank you everyone who has supported, tested and played the recent release! We're very happy with the reception, and it sets us in good stead to press forward to the completion of the campaign. There are some issues that have cropped up, and those are at the forefront of the next patch that is likely to come in a few weeks, along with some other stuff.

A six-spotted tiger beetle swarmed by fire ants by Gimpsimian on our Discord

This newsletter will mainly concentrate on what you can expect from that next patch, and what is more likely to trickle in over some smaller patches afterwards. The team is very keen to press forward with completing tier 5 now, so that is their primary focus - but there are some other things that will be coming very soon.



This was an unusually large update - the patch notes themselves took over an hour to write up! There were some fairly large changes to the game, and we're glad to say the changes have (mostly) been well received. There's always anxiety when pushing an update that makes some fundamental changes and of course we didn't expect everything to be universally accepted across the board, but things went better than expected in that regard.

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Whilst everything is now in place with respect to the freeplay AI changes, it's clear that there's still some work to do there and we'll detail that in its own section after this one.

Almost everyone seems to be enjoying the new beach artwork - with one exception, the dead fish asset! The new one is higher fidelity and is more fitting for the rockpool setting, looking partially decomposed and consumed. I think the fact that people can no longer imagine dropping the fish straight into a hot skillet with some chilli oil and crushed garlic may account for some of the disgust!

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Billy Bass is so done

There’s a few more tweaks to come for the beach art - some seaweed has recently been added, and we want to make some changes to the living sea urchin before we move it to make it a bit more visible! You can currently see the sea urchin by going into photo mode and looking at the far east of the map in 2.2 Queen of the Hill.

A sea urchin!

While we're on the topic, I thought I'd just write a paragraph about our versioning convention. Although the build number of the most recent release starts in 0.31, that does not mean the project is only 31% complete. When we release the final campaign levels we'd be at version 0.4 with the current rate of versioning, but it'll just be that during testing - when we release it completely to the world, what by this convention would be 0.4 will be 1.0.

It was never a linear or particularly well-documented convention. If this all sounds convoluted and weird, that's because it is.



The new custom game AI system is vastly improved over the old one in all aspects - it can plan attacks, help allies, guard resources and make analytical decisions on when to attack or defend. As part of this, we felt some confidence in changing the way cheats are applied to AI.

Cheats were always intended to help make up the shortfall that an AI colony has compared to a human player, and we’d hoped that the much more capable AI would need significantly less help. Whilst this is generally true, it’s clear that there’s some ways to go in optimising the AI and helping it with getting the best out of its new brain.

It’s now a modular system, and new behaviours (processes) can be bolted onto it. Liam, who has coded the new system, would like some feedback on how it can be improved, but there is a caveat - he is keen to continue working on tier 5 from now on and therefore additional time he gives to the custom game AI needs to be carefully thought out.

AI leafcutter colony underground construction

An example of a process that would likely help out the AI is one that would allow it to harvest food from defeated colonies - that would take quite some time to implement, so decisions on making new processes like this will be more carefully considered before being put into development. However, some changes are very quick to make and these are likely to come first.

We are interested in feedback on the ordering and priorities that individual colony types should have. An example of this was done during the beta test - leafcutter ants were told to only make minor workers until their first chamber is completed, and this better organises their priority list. These kinds of changes are very quick to make.

If you have suggestions (for all kinds of colony) please post them on our discussion boards with an appropriate title. I’ll be collating the feedback and presenting it to Liam, who will decide which simple changes are best and which are worth investing some more development time to make new modular processes.



The roadmap we released back in May has been mostly fulfilled, and when the time comes to update the roadmap again we'll be expanding and detailing what's left to complete to get us to 1.0.

Done that, done that, haven't done that...

It's looking very much like the "true interim update" that is detailed on the left-hand side will indeed be broken into several updates that will come over the next few months. Some things are just around the corner, and we’ll detail those now.

[h2]Achievements[/h2]

A full achievement list for the rest of the currently existing game is very close to being ready, so this is one of the first things that will arrive! There will be achievements for all of the campaign levels, as well as some special ones for seasonal levels. Perhaps we can tempt you back to the Festive Spider level later this year with this one?

[h3]Some Naughty Some Nice - beat the Christmas spider level with at least half the gifts remaining under the tree.[/h3]

...or maybe you’d prefer this one for 4.1 inspired by a classic British dish?

[h3]Toad In The Hole - tunnel out all underground food by the second night and beat the level on hard difficulty.[/h3]

All told, we’re shaping up to have well over 100 achievements for those of you who like to go hunting. There’s both the more standard ones (ie, beat level X on difficulty Y) and the more fun ones like Toad In The Hole detailed above.

[h2]Freeplay Maps[/h2]

There is at least one freeplay map arriving shortly, but it isn’t the one that’s on the roadmap. That one - Wetlands - is currently awaiting the completion of being able to save fire ant bridges in a custom game.

That’s a more complicated task than it may appear, and for that reason we may release a beta version of a swamp map that has fire ant bridging with the proviso that level saving will, initially, be disabled for it.

That way, we can gather some feedback about how bridges (and competing fire ant colonies trying to build bridges) work in a custom game before the saving system is fully completed - do you think that’s a good idea? Would we be better off just waiting until things can definitely be saved, or would you be okay with testing a custom game map without being able to save it? Let us know in the discussion forums.

[h3]Sand Spit[/h3]

So let’s talk a little about the map that is much closer to being completed, and it’s a quite uniquely shaped one - Sand Spit, which is designed with skirmishes in mind (although you can absolutely play any freeplay setup on it) in a 3v1 format.

Sand Spit from the player's side (work in progress)

The player colony lives on a spit of land protruding from the edge of the mainland. With this unusually asymmetrical layout, the map still has the characteristic lower ground that is awash (pun intended) with resources that carry that inherent extra flood risk.

Sand Spit overview (work in progress)

As you can see from the top-down overview, the map is clearly intended to be played against 3 enemy allies - their nests are close together and they’ll be gathering resources mainly from the same area. You can absolutely alter the setup to have every colony for themselves, but it’ll be a little cramped over there on the mainland if you do that!

Sand Spit from the enemy alliance's side (work in progress)

We’ll update you all on the progress being made on getting fire ant bridge saving working closer to time - but for now, Sand Spit is very close to completion and it’s looking very likely it’ll be arriving sooner rather than later.

[h2]Not Coming Immediately - Tier 4 Challenge[/h2]

For the time being, tier 4’s challenge mode is being pushed a little further down the schedule.

It’s an important addition and we want to do it justice, but we thought we should let you know that the plan is currently to circle back round to the fishing spider’s debut once the current development push for tier 5 is further along. All 3 of the developers and our environmental artist are now focused on the final formicarium tier - we don’t want to lose the good momentum we’ve recently been building on that front.



Starting on the date of publication (20th July, 2023) Empires of the Undergrowth will be taking part in SimFest 2023 on Steam! The game is currently at a historic discount of 20% off, and if you’ve somehow read all the way through this newsletter without owning the game already then firstly, I salute you, and secondly I thought I should let you know about that!



Most of Slug Disco’s other publishing projects are also involved in the festival - Ecosystem, Adapt and Horticular are all present and correct.



Empires of the Undergrowth will be at Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany next month! The entire team will be there, so if you’re attending then please drop by to say hi. There will be more details in next month’s vlog which will be closer to the time.



If you’d like to submit a screenshot for this part of the newsletter in the future, by far the easiest way is to join our Discord and post on the appropriate screenshot channels. You can also upload to the Steam Community page, and I will occasionally scroll through there looking for some standouts. To get great screenshots, hold shift whilst you enter photo mode (F9 by default) - this will uncouple your camera from the ground and allow you to get some better angles on the action.

A green lynx spider is mounted by fire ants from NappyB_TheDankest

Ratatouille - EotU edition from Gimpsimian

The amblypygid's end, also from Gimpsimian