Monster Crown News

Hey guys,

Most of the work this week has gone into work on the next Content Pack and work on late-game elements, but in the meantime, enjoy the much asked for Achievements and new Card Booster Set!

Achievements have been added to all major points in the story as well as for finding a wild hybrid and a brilliant monster (those are the rainbow, one in a thousand ones).

These achievements are rewarded retroactively so you're very likely to get a slew of ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED! popups when you first load your file but of course for new players it'll be a more seamless process.

The new booster set, Perilous Plains, can be found at shops just like Raging Riverbed. Which one appears each time you visit the shop is up to a coin flip, so when you see the one you want, stock up!

General TCG menu improvements are included as well to more easily enjoy this feature.

As for the next two content packs, they are fairly substantial so now's a great time to get caught up on the current monster roster, cause it's gonna expand real soon, as well as the story!

Have a good weekend folks!

Happy Friday Tamers!

This week we've got some bugfixes, but before we get into BOOORING fixes, I just wanted to say that two new cards have been added to the Raging Riverbed set, Harveskin and Nautlus, so those cards are out there now to collect!



The next booster set is almost ready, but I've reached a BIG internal development milestone that I'm so happy about, but has kept me super busy this past week, as well as a bug that really, did everything in its power to evade my detection.

Recently we had to upgrade Unity versions and that seems to have caused an issue with players of certain languages (so far Dutch and Spanish confirmed) in our last build. After some serious debugging and feverish testing, we found that save files would fail to load properly on specific PCs with specific languages. This was very hard to debug as I couldn't get my hands on these systems for myself and could not reproduce the issue on my own system, regardless, eventually I hammered it out.

It seems on this new version of Unity there is more implicit region/localization support, which caused a small pool of players in regions that use commas instead of decimals to denote the decimal place in non-whole numbers to have their game begin writing their savefile with incorrect characters. We've fixed this throughout all areas of the code and it will not be an issue going forward, we've added specific controls to enforce this.

The bad news is players that were affected, your savefiles have a degree of corruption. If your game was writing to your savefile using commas due to your region, when you load your game next this will auto-fix and the game will load properly on this new build of Monster Crown, however, if your game saved without writing the symbols at all then your monsters with attack, say, 23.4567 will load as "two hundred and thirty four million, five-hundred and sixty-seven". This obviously poses an issue! So when your game loads if you're part of that small pool of players (not everyone in those regions/languages are affected) your monsters's stats will be reset. Unfortunate, but allowing monsters to exist at that level of stats will cause issues down the road, unfortunately we're dealing with specific data loss on these, but it was important to me to recover your savefiles and monsters as best we could - I'm always heartbroken when I hear of players losing monsters and I know I'd be very sad to lose my own.

Overall this week's patch is mainly about delivering a more robust version of last week's with a few additional fixes, hope you guys are looking forward to the next expansion pack - it's almost ready!

Hey everyone!

It's been a while since we've done a challenge! From now on we won't do challenges every week anymore, but rather for every Content Pack that gets released. And as you might know, Content Pack #5 was released last Friday! Read all about it right here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/830370/view/3057350018514997250

Holo Card challenge
All right so this one is simple. First, click the link up above and read how you get your cards and how you get them to become Holographic. Once you've attained a Holographic card, take a screenshot and post it in the #monster-crown channel of the SOEDESCO Discord server (https://discord.gg/soedesco) with #HoloCardChallenge

-OR-

Post it to Twitter with #MonsterCrown and #HoloCardChallenge (so we can find it)

Complete one (or both lmao) of these options by Monday February 8th 3PM CET to become the Monster Crown Content Pack #5 champion + this special Monster Crown care package of in-game items including a BRILLIANT version of the monster displayed on your Holographic card screenshot :O!

- Brilliant Monster
- 10 booster packs
- Atomic Clock
- Super Gro
- 3000 Gold
- 15 Normal Pacts
- 10 Aloe Leafs
- 10 Gualchops
- 15 Campfire Logs
- 3 Move Orbs (Enrich)
- 3 Move Orbs (Inferno)

Entries are limited to 1 per user, please only post 1 screenshot. Winners will be picked at random. Good luck everyone! If you have any questions, feel free to ask :D

-Marten

Good Evening Tamers!

[h2]It's time for CONTENT PACK 5![/h2]

What's this content pack all about? Well, it brings the My Card Collection feature to Monster Crown!

Are you one of those kids (I was) with a binder full of your favorite collectible cards? Proudly displaying your rare, holographic finds on the first page and flicking through to show off your favorites? I know I was. All that hard work opening booster packs, trading with friends to create an awesome deck and an awesome binder was such a great feeling to pull off - even if someone conned me into trading away my Ultra Rare Magical Hats for a Toon Blue Eyes White Dragon. No regrets really though, that dragon could shine!

There's a kid just like that in Empathy Kingdom, the same town you found Gyn in and learned about the crown indicator for breeding, he's right next to the Storklift, don't believe me? Here's photographic proof:



Visit this kid to get your very own Monster Trading Card Binder. You'll be able to buy booster packs at any store, but your first hit is free as this guy spares you a booster. Once you've opened your pack you'll receive a random assortment of cards for your collection. You can examine your collection from this button on the main menu:



Once you're in, you can select any card and get lost in gazing at it (I know I have been guilty of this) and find yourself daydreaming in a procedurally generated dungeon! Various powerful crossbreeds will chase you, phasing through walls, hunting you down. You must locate the stairs to the next level of the dungeon and fight your way out to survive. Along the way you can tame these rare crossbreeds and collect all kinds of gold.

If you die though, you're gonna wake up from your day dream empty handed and disappointed! to add insult to injury, your card will have vanished for good. However, if you reach the end of the dungeon you'll get to keep any mysterious dream crossbreeds you've tamed as well as the horde of gold you've amassed and ALSO your card will turn holographic.

Once your card is holographic you can visit the dungeon as often as you like without worrying about losing the card.

One last note - this new system will let you get access to monsters you may have missed up until now, such as Jungro, Hooclaw and Roedra!

[h2]Monster Breeding Preview[/h2]



So this one is a bit of a game changer! Before you commit to breeding a monster you'll now be able to preview the moveset, base stats and which ones come from which parent before you ever commit to creating that egg! You won't be able to see how it will look (only the egg is shown) but this will make breeding much more beginner friendly and just plain useful to you expert breeders out there.

P = primary parent attribute
S = secondary parent attribute


[h2]Other Changes[/h2]



A big change that was made over the past two weeks (and the reason we delayed last week's update to this week) is a full increase in the resolution of the screen. Small screen players may only notice a small improvement but those of you playing on large displays will have a much easier time appreciating the game at an appropriate detail level without appearing too stretched out, and a much easier time reading the text size on-screen. As you can imagine this lead to me needing to adjust every menu in the game to make sure things still displayed properly. There still may be a thing or two I have to adjust but I believe I have caught almost everything.

The game's RAM usage has been significantly reduced (down to a little over half) and additional ambient effects (like fish in rivers, fireflies at night, bat-monster Romninoct flocks instead of Mimika at night and a revamped night visual) have been added. Changes were made to Chiefs to encourage you doing them in any order you wish as well, increasing your level by 1 rather than to a specific level and having auto scaling teams depending on your current level.



The tamer card has also been finished up, which you can view by pressing tab/toggle on the overworld menu to see a preview of yourself and your full monster team for quick screenshotting and sharing online or with friends so they can admire your expertly crafted beasts!

The next content pack will feature a story expansion and will have you reach the "middlegame" of Monster Crown's story, so I hope you look forward to that while trying out this latest new feature!

For the full changelog see below:

Changelog

EA v1.57
----------------------
+Monster breeding offspring preview added
+Completely revamped resolution and menus realigned
+Wild monsters and following monsters are now always animating like in-town monsters
+Heavy RAM usage reduction
+Additional environmental aspects
+Chiefs now do not set a respect level they increase whatever it is by 1
+Chiefs now have scaling teams for your current respect level to make approaching them in whatever order more fun
+Tamer card fixed, press Tab/Toggle on the overworld menu to see you and your team in all your glory (I'd love to see pictures!)
+Additional text audio added
+Roedra's forms have been added, this time the sprites were done by my good friend and incredibly talented artist RacieB! I'll be working with her a lot more going forward to increase the speed at which we wrap up monster art. be sure to check her out at:
http://racieb.meowcorp.us
https://twitter.com/RacieBeep


***Due to the volume of changes this update includes it will remain in the ea-beta branch for one week.***

Second path of 2021 here we go!

Development is going well, cleaning up content and bugs and generally working on optimizations/QoL aspects. In this build the process the game goes through loading has been completely overhauled, which won't make a big impact on the average PC player but is definitely going to benefit those with older hardware and of course eventual console versions down the road.

Controllers have gotten heavy focus this week too, with players that prefer using analog-stick over dpads getting a lot of attention, For new players, these new changes will be seen seamlessly but if you've already installed Monster Crown it may be worth your while to go into the button mapper (now much more reliable) and reset the config. Because the old default has been written to your registry this is a great way to make sure you get the latest button configs. No real need to do this for most players but if you're an analog-stick user it'll make the game a lot easier to play and navigate.

Overall the game runs a bit smoother when navigating the world, a few small submenus have gotten touch-ups (the in battle pact/item select), the box system has had some cleaning up after last update's revamp, etc. Foe AI now properly considers synergy so situations like Gigadrile spamming a synergy-requiring move won't be an issue going forward.

I've also been working on wild monster AI, you'll notice that they're better at getting to you and moving around obstacles, but this is still a work in progress so expect more improvements.

Gridag has received a shiny new set of proper crossbreeds and with Meerlin taken care of last week the hermit's sidequest monsters are all functioning as they should in breeding.

Myrkrsormr has recieved new overworld sprites so expect him to be far less boundary breaking, we've put him on a diet :)

Have a great weekend tamers and thanks so much for your support!

EA v1.56
----------------------
+New Gridag crossbreeds
+Improved Controller controls (particularly when using joysticks rather than d-pads)
+Improved framerate and performance
+Improved game loading process (may not be very noticeable on PC)
+Improved wild monster path finding
+Monster battle AI now considers synergy requirements (looking at you Gigadrile)
+More fluid camera movement