Urban Strife News

We're pleased to announce Urban Strife has been handpicked as one of the featured games at the upcoming Steam NextFest, coming February 6th. To celebrate this, we've taken your feedback and polished even more the Prologue Demo. This time you will be able to enjoy it fully, from day one of the festival and well beyond after NextFest ends.

Because we promised you an early comeback and because being a featured game requires one to have a press demo, tonight we will reactivate our regular build, the one you've seen Zemalf, Splattercat and other content creators play. You can, of course, download and have fun with it, but it is meant to be a demo for journalists and the un-patient ones. Just remember to be back here on February 6th, or you'll miss a lot of things.



If you're curious what exactly there is to miss, here's a tentative list of NextFest Demo features:

• All the industry NPCs have now a quest to build a specific shelter upgrade; spend materials and you'll get to see the shelter change under your eyes
  
• You can now salvage items and weapons at the Recycler Workshop and obtain building materials
  
• There are 4 new facilities you can build: a garden (+food), a jail (+morale), a pharmacy (+health) and a garage
  
• The items now have a trade value and the traders will be openly displaying the cut they take so you can do your trading math correctly
  
• The backpack has been completely redesigned, with carry slots now clearly separated from equipment slots and filters;
  
• Speaking of filters, all containers have item filters now and a SORT button for easier inventory management
  
• Item generation and manipulation has also been redesigned to lower memory use that sometimes lead to crashes
  
• We have added much needed hover information on the main HUD (and we plan to expand this to other parts of the interface)
  
• Targeting cursor has been adjusted to convey extra and more accurate information; loot cursor now is animated for easier detection of interactable objects
  
• The city map has been re-drawn, showing the local attractions, districts and a streamlined road layout
  
• Also on the city map, we have a new sector info chart, with new information about the places you plan to visit
  
• RPG has gone through a new overhaul round, dialogues are now less stuffed; you can still read the lore, but you can do it at will, after you settle in
  
• Finally, there is a whole new intro sequence to the game for more immersive story telling
  

List will continue as we add more features - expect an update closer to the festival.

This is a re-run with the best moments of the awesome Urban Strife #TBF Demo Launch Party we've had over on twitch.tv/Zemalf stream. This new Prologue Demo, prepared for the #TurnBasedFest event, includes a year worth of new features and, while the setting is similar to the demo we've run in 2021, it plays a lot different, with dangerous waves of zombies rising from their spawns, shelter plunged into a real survival crisis and enemies more cunning than ever. And, just as an added bonus, a 4k interface redesign.

Download and play for free from our Store page. Demo will only be available for a limited time, while the festival lasts.

We fixed a hang during the zombie turn in the Old Port area. Game would enter an non-breaking loop when a specific spawn was triggered. Problem was identified with a duplicate spawn waypoint and should be fixed now.

Please update your game, you should get a small 20mb download.

We are launching a new Prologue Demo for Urban Strife live on https://www.twitch.tv/zemalf, thanks for the #TurnBasedFest event. Come join the devs for an ad-hoc Q&A and a chance to win a full game key. The demo is free for all and you should see it on the game Steam page.

For our new players we have prepared a special "cheat sheet" with introductory information about our interface and mechanics. You can open image in full screen with right-click, save it, and keep it at hand for a bit of quick help if you skip through the ingame tutorials too fast.



Enjoy! And do not forget to try other #TurnBasedFest awesome games, too:

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43077188-TurnBasedThursday/sale/turnbasedfest

The new Urban Strife demo is launching Friday, December 9th, during an official launch party hosted on Twitch.tv/Zemalf, starting at 12 EST (17 GMT).

Urban Strife is joining another 300 turn-based games or so for the #TurnBasedFest event and you'll be able to download and play the demo for the entire duration. We'll come back with an updated demo in January and again, in February, for Spring NextFest!

The new demo is built on the latest production Unreal Engine (4.27) and thus comes with native 4k support. The entire interface has been upgraded to this new resolution, with some changes/improvement and additions to the shelter economy and looting HUD.

Speaking of looting, the entire system has been reworked, based on Loot Areas (more details in our DevBlogs) and container item preferences and should make more sense. No more pants found in fridges and no more spam cans rescued out of toilets. Cars and containers also change visual state when looted - that will also come in handy to quickly figure out what's up for grabs.

Combat wise we're on the second AI iteration and working on third already. The weapon load-out has been adjusted for all INTENDED enemies to fit the early game states of the Prologue. There are still main factions representatives present as an introduction to the game story and you can attack them, but beware, they're much well armed than a poor scavenger.

Finally, the main RPG quest lines have been streamlined for more logical completion. And there will be a looming shelter crisis you need to keep an eye on due to low resources, so make sure you do not forget about the folks back home. There will be NPCs in the base that will take your looted food (Kitchen Chef), medicine (Doctor) and morale (Mayor) items if you care to donate them.

Hope you'll enjoy the updates to the game and have a good time playing the demo!