Ruinarch News

Hi everyone! Apologies that this was delayed from our initial end of July target. With this update, the game's full structure is complete, paving the way to final gameplay balance and tweaks, and then hopefully more content after we launch 1.0 (albeit at a slower pace).

One major issue remaining is the rudimentary state of base building, which will be a focus of the last pre-1.0 update. The game isn't really a base building game at its core so we don't intend to expand on this significantly but we agree that it needs to be much more user-friendly to customize your territory if you want to.


We've introduced the new Goals tab on the top menu. The Goals tab consists of six Goal categories, each having multiple thematically-related tasks. Winning the game is now quite straightforward - the player must just complete 13 of any of these tasks. This allows for some flexibility regardless of your Archetype.

As usual with these new features, it would take a few iterations to balance - new tasks may be introduced, numbers may be tweaked, etc. The current version is probably going to be quite easy for veterans. At the same time it would give new players some ideas about what's doable in the game. PRO-TIP: Hovering over each Task will give hints on how to accomplish it.

Once this is in a much more final state, a portion of the Spirit Energy needed to upgrade the Portal will then also come from completing these tasks.


Victory is no longer directly linked to upgrading your Portal but the tasks you can accomplish are still dependent on the Powers you unlock. So we had to tweak this a bit. As you reach Portal level 6, you will now get to choose from some of the most useful Powers from the other Archetypes. This should give players more tools overall and should allow them to accomplish more Tasks regardless of their Archetype. Portal Level 7 used to be simply the Victory Condition. Now, unlocking it will also provide new Powers from the other Archetypes as well.

In a way, this also reflects how the Ruinarch player is getting back their full potential as the Portal's connection to the world gets firmer.


We've went through some of the more boring spells and introduced some ways to make them either more useful, or just more fun.

[h2]Manifest Food[/h2]

There are two new actions players can do with the Food produced by Manifest Food.

First is Lure. You can lure a Stored Target so that they will be forced to go and eat the Food. They have to be within a certain distance for this to work, though.

Second is Infuse. Use this to apply a negative effect on whoever eats it. You can choose from Bloated, Food Coma or Rabid. Infuse becomes available at Manifest Food Level 3.

[h2]Locust Swarm and Poison Cloud[/h2]

You can now control the direction of the last casted Locust Swarm or Poison Cloud. It will follow the mouse cursor if you move it close enough to them.

[h2]Brimstone[/h2]

We added more of a fun effect for Brimstone rather than something super useful. It now leaves behind Cinders on the ground it hits. These Cinders continue to spread fire to adjacent tiles but can be removed when hit by Water or Ice elements. As you upgrade Brimstone, it becomes immune to these elements as well, until at Level 4, it even explodes and deals damage when hit.

[h2]Iceteroids[/h2]

We added more of a fun effect for Iceteroids rather than something super useful. It now leaves behind Ice Blocks on the ground it hits. These Ice Blocks obstruct movement and can only be removed when hit by Fire or Lightning elements. As you upgrade Iceteroids, it becomes immune to these elements as well, until at Level 4, it even explodes and deals damage when hit.

[h2]Earthquake[/h2]
Earthquakes are now meant to be extremely powerful against structures but pretty useless against living beings. Structures will always get destroyed by Earthquakes. It doesn't deal damage to Villagers, except if they are within a structure that it destroyed. In that case, they will instantly die as the building crumbles over them.

[h2]Splash Water[/h2]
Splash Water will now wake up sleeping Villagers and make them Irate. Villagers are also now unlikely to sleep on Wet beds.


This is just a small tweak on how Villagers get alerted about hostiles in their Village. Before, anyone entering could instantly trigger the alert. Now, these Ward Lights serve the role of setting off the alarm. Any hostile that enters its range will alarm the Village and wake up some combatants to defend.


We have completed our localization text and it is now being translated to different languages. The following will be available in the next update:
- German
- Simplified Chinese
- French
- Japanese
- Spanish (LatAm)
- Polish
- Turkish


- Migrations will no longer occur within 3 hours of losing all Major Factions.
- When new migrants arrive, there is now a chance that they won't occupy abandoned Villages. This will increase the frequency of abandoned Villages getting permanently destroyed.
- Increased rate of Preach action.
- Reduced relationship decrease when Preach fails.
- When you share Intel about assault by hostile characters, the recipient will attack the hostile if it is nearby and its assault target is an Acquaintance, Friend or Close Friend of theirs.
- Unoccupied landmarks will now last up to 5 days (previously 3).
- Added description for Hallowed Ground.
- HP damage dealt to objects will now also be displayed similar to HP damage to characters.
- Added a new setting to adjust Log limit. This will adjust how many events are stored by the game. Reducing the Log limit may help performance issues.
- Placing lumberyard and mine should not take into consideration existing blueprint limit.
- Cultists will no longer destroy manifested Food.
- Criminal Cultist Leaders will no longer join the Bandits faction.
- Entering public structures will no longer be considered Trespassing.
- Because spawning them are required Victory-related Tasks, you can no longer select Lycan or Vampire Clan as starting Factions.
- Mushrooms taken from caves will now eventually respawn.
- Spooked Villagers are now much less likely to sleep.
- Adjusted volume of Migration Events.


- [FIXED] Sometimes, when a Villager leaves a party, the reason text is blank.
- [FIXED] Landon did not earn any money after bringing a wolf back from hunting quest.
- [FIXED] Blank relationship label.
- [FIXED] Divine and Nature Cults have their Faction Info unlocked by default.
- [FIXED] Sometimes, hovering over an empty tile will display tooltip related to a non-existent object.
- [FIXED] There is an empty notification related to Heatwave death.
- [FIXED] A pet Wyvern joined the Demon Cult faction but its master did not.
- [FIXED] Wrong reaction when assaulting Monster Spawner.
- [FIXED] Susan was raised as a skeleton while being carried by another skeleton.
- [FIXED] Hunters are picking up wolfs already placed in the city center instead of the freshly killed wolves in the den.
- [FIXED] Turning a faction into a demon cultist faction does not decrease the number of existing faction.
- [FIXED] Witches that increase chaotic energy cost can be killed to reduce costs again, but when reloading after killing them, the costs go back to being increased.
- [FIXED] Faction exclusive to Female but there are males in the faction.
- [FIXED] Two non-combatants are stuck due to pathing issues.
- [FIXED] Cultist keeps releasing the target of Snatch Villager.
- [FIXED] Repeated log entries called "[Village Name] has completely fallen into ruins."
- [FIXED] Whole village disappeared even though a faction resides in it.
- [FIXED] Error sometimes occurs when storing a city center as target.
- [FIXED] Various errors that causes the game to get stuck.
- [FIXED] Various loading errors.
- [FIXED] Various incomplete text replacement errors.

Hello. We've applied a few fixed to critical issues recently reported:

• [FIXED] Witches that increase chaotic energy cost can be killed to reduce costs again, but upon saving and loading after killing them, the costs go back to being increased.
  
• [FIXED] Anytime a werewolf transforms, they lose all their equipment even after reverting back to original form.
  
• [FIXED] Issues when loading due to some errors in load order of Intels.
  
• [FIXED] Issues when loading due to missing Structure data.
  

We keep a lot of internal data to keep track of Villager and game states for our Save Files. But, we try to minimize this to reduce loading times. Due to this, when major updates occur we occasionally miss out on some data that may turn out to be needed on rare instances. This is what causes most Load issues where the player gets stuck while loading a Save File. Please if this happens to you, we request that you submit a Bug Report using our in-game tool so we can resolve them as soon as possible. The Save File and the log file would be really helpful.

Hi everyone! Our newest update is here! While the update title is called Grudges, perhaps the biggest change here is the revamp of the Portal Upgrade tree. This is an important step that makes us much closer to being ready to exit Early Access this year. Our next update will now switch focus to changing the game's Victory Condition and further progression tweaks. We're also ready to begin localization!


Villagers may now develop Grudges against each other. This has a chance to occur in the following situations:
- a Villager experienced betrayal
- a Villager experienced resentment while in Bad or Critical Mood.
- a Villager felt rage towards another Villager that is not within vision

While a Villager has a Grudge, the following behavior will take effect:
- if they will ever judge a crime of the Grudge target, they will always punish with death
- they won't help even if they see them unconscious, restrained, etc
- as party leader, they won't take up quests that will help their Grudge target
- as party leader, they may kick out party members they have a Grudge on
- as party member, they will eventually leave the party if they have a Grudge on the Party Leader

In addition, players may now activate a new Ability called Trigger Grudge. This will consume a Grudge in exchange for a choice between 3 negative actions against the Grudge target.

We originally planned to also introduce Favors but there's not much interesting things the players can do with the idea we had. So it was scrapped for now.


Player progression has been significantly revamped! Players can now see their Upgrade Tree. Some slots unlocked in the Upgrade Tree now asks the player to choose between 3 different Powers. This includes random lower-tiered Powers from the other Archetypes. This allows the players to make their Powers more well-rounded regardless of their Archetype without fully losing each Archetype's thematic focus.

As this is the first iteration of the new Upgrade Trees, expect some slight pacing issues. Please don't hesitate to provide gameplay feedback so we can assess player thoughts while we balance these Trees.

This is only the first half of our Progression revamp. On the next update, Victory will no longer be linked to fully upgrading your Portal and will instead require the player to perform a variety of tasks.


Monster Spawners can now also be placed in the wilderness. It will then spawn only one random monster. If there is enough empty space around the Monster Spawner, the monster may build a new landmark around it. This effectively allows the player to create new landmarks in the world.

We want the world to be a bit more dynamic so most landmarks will also now eventually be wiped out if it is not occupied for several days. In future updates, we intend to enhance this dynamism by allowing more instances of monster and villager occupation of different landmarks.


We've introduced more Powers to fill out the newly updated Portal Upgrade Tree. This includes:

• Stampede
  
• Hellspawn
  
• Finger of Death
  
• Summon Skeletons
  
• Lich Graveyard
  
• Trigger Grudge
  

Now that we have most Powers we want pretty much in the game, the next step is to ensure usefulness of all existing player Powers. In particular, we intend to make different damaging Spells have more specific purposes rather than simply having different Elemental types. This will probably be done by adding new Flaws for Villagers that can be activated/exploited when hit by the required Elemental damage.


Finally, some more Sound Effects! We ended up having to use premade sound effects from different sources since our contact Sound Designer was no longer available but we hope these are at least satisfactory in providing additional audio feedback for game events.


- Map Sizes have all been slightly increased.
- Slightly increased the number of landmarks spawned on world generation.
- Sped up migration when there are no more major factions in the map.
- Empty villages will be completely cleared if it is not occupied within 3 days.
- Landmarks will also be wiped out if it is empty for about 3 days.
- Ankh of Anubis will disappear after spawning a fixed amount of Ghosts.
- Villagers will now only be considered Missing from their Village if they are restrained, paralyzed or stoned somewhere outside their home Village. They will be considered Found the moment they return to their home Village.
- Players can now undeploy a Demon Party by right-clicking on the Lesser Demon and choosing Undeploy.
- Immigrants to Wiccan and Divine Church factions will be of the appropriate religion but won't already be Witches or Clerics on arrival. This will allow the players some time to prevent their conversion.
- Previously, Villagers are unable to rescue your prisoners if they are unaware of your territorial location yet. Now, combatants may search for your presence. You can still stop this by zapping them or using other distractions.
- When Raiding, the player may now choose between Harass Villagers, Destroy Structures or Destroy Supplies.
- Added new monster: Ifrit.
- All characters will now be aggressive while patrolling a Village.
- Villagers will now repair a structure that is less than 2/3rd remaining walls or less than 50% remaining HP.
- A popup will now also display to notify player when a Lesser Demon charge is refreshed.
- Increased negative mood modifiers of Griefstricken and Traumatized.
- An "Attack Village" button has also been added beside the Monster Spawner nameplate.
- Sleeping monsters will be awakened when the player uses a Monster Spawner's Attack Village ability.
- Hovering over Element icon should show the Element text tooltip,
- Villagers will no longer Booby Trap torches.
- Villagers will no longer trigger their own Booby Traps.
- Landmines will now also stun characters.
- When a non-lethal attack would reduce the target's HP to 0 or less, it will now set it to 10% of max HP and render them Unconscious.
- Villagers will no longer return just to open very distant treasure chests or items.
- Stalkers will now destroy Werewolf Pelts instead of picking them up.
- Lightning and Arrow Towers will no longer attack Unconscious, Restrained, Prisoners and carried hostiles.
- Parties on Exterminate Quest will also destroy Monster Spawners.
- Reduced success rate of Brainwash for Priests and Great Witches.
- Added a separate SFX meter on Game Settings.


- [FIXED] Some Villagers react negatively when they see a Faction-mate assault a hostile monster.
- [FIXED] Snatch Party occasionally kills their target.
- [FIXED] Parties still sometimes get paid even when they prematurely drop the quest.
- [FIXED] Crimes of Faction Leaders are ignored even when reported to a different Faction.
- [FIXED] Character goes into endless loop when trying to pick up a dead monster while carrying a food item.
- [FIXED] If hovered over a corrupted tile, right clicking to deselect summoning monster consumes Chaotic Energy.
- [FIXED] Intrusion to a Ratmen cave may increase Retaliation.
- [FIXED] Villagers don't pick up dead bodies of those killed through Psychopathic ritual.
- [FIXED] Demonic defenders attack prisoners released by the Player.
- [FIXED] Succubus sometimes do not transform before seducing a Villager.
- [FIXED] Target Menu did not disappear after clicking Join faction.
- [FIXED] A Devout Evil Witch can turn into a Necromancer but not become the Undead faction leader.
- [FIXED] Reconciliation Ritual may improve relationship to a dead character.
- [FIXED] Some Villagers may still attack an already apprehended criminal.
- [FIXED] Repeating notifications about a Villager becoming the Bandit's Faction Leader.
- [FIXED] A Snatch Party may stop moving if their target gets stolen.
- [FIXED] Wyvern Rider HP may sometimes not decrease during combat.
- [FIXED] Beast Lairs leave invisible walls when they are destroyed.


We quietly launched our 2nd game's Steam Page! Please wishlist it. More Wishlists would help a lot in making the game more visible on Steam.


Nona's Game is envisioned to be a party multiplayer game like Among Us but plays much more similarly to the TV Show called Survivor. We originally want to self-publish the game and will ramp up marketing once we have a good gameplay video. But, there are a few Publishers that have reached out to us and if we get a good funding offer, we will likely consider going for that.

Hello everyone. As we mentioned last time, we took a break from Ruinarch for the entire month of February. Aside from rest, we also spent some time working on a new game to get our creativity flowing. We'll give a short preview of that at the end of this post.

We are all now back again developing new content for Ruinarch for all of March and April and will do testing, tweaks and balancing on May. We plan to have the next update released around the 3rd week of May.

Here's what to expect from it:

[h2]Reworked Archetypes[/h2]
This is a significant rework. Essentially, choosing an Archetype will still provide the player with a different starting loadout, but each time they upgrade their Portal, they will learn a couple of fixed Powers but will also now be given a few choices from both their Archetype's pool, as well as from other Archetypes (but from a lower Portal level). This is intended to make each Archetype more well-rounded as well as to make repeat plays more interesting. Even the same Archetype could feel vastly different depending on the choices made per Portal level.

The next step which will be added on a different update, is to separate the Victory Condition from the Portal Upgrades. There are a lot of exploits to produce Chaos Orbs easily which right now makes winning the game sometimes a matter of tediousness. We are still discussing how best to approach Victory Condition but we are currently leaning towards providing the player Archetype-based goals or challenges.

[h2]New Powers[/h2]
With the reworked Archetypes System, we also needed to introduce more Powers to round out all Archetype's Upgrade Path options. There will be 8 new ones available. We also intend to improve some existing ones to make them more useful and interesting.

[h2]Grudges[/h2]
Villagers may now develop Grudges towards other Villagers. A Grudge affects a Villager's behavior, they may quit a Party if they have a Grudge on its Party Leader, they won't assist a Restrained or Unconscious Factionmate they have a Grudge on and they will harshly punish a Criminal they have a Grudge on. The player can also eventually consume a Villager's Grudge using Trigger Grudge (one of the new Powers) to make them perform a deadly action against the Grudge target.

[h2]Improved Emotions[/h2]
We're taken a second pass look at Share Intel and Emotions. We want Share Intel to have more useful effects when used by the player. Since it gives the target various Emotions, our approach is on making the effects of these Emotions a bit more intense.

[h2]Manipulating Mood[/h2]
There will be more ways for Players to exploit a Villager in Critical Mood. One new approach for players will be to turn a Villager's Mood to Critical and then activate Exploit Mood on it. This will provide the player with a few choices randomly available based on the situation. They can make the Villager go berserk, murder a Rival, leave a Faction, etc.

[h2]Sound Effects[/h2]
Finally got to add more of these to the game!


Nona's Game will be the second game coming out of Maccima Games! During the height of the pandemic, one thing that kept us entertained are streamers playing multiplayer games like GTA RP, Raft, and most significantly: Among Us. Now that the Among Us craze has died down, we wanted to develop something that could potentially take its place without being another clone of it. This is a complete departure from Ruinarch's genre so we do think there may not be a lot of overlap in terms of audience but it is refreshing to work on something very different for a change. We'll discuss more details about the game soon!

So that it will not distract from development of Ruinarch, we've hired a full second team to work on Nona's Game concurrently. Aside from me who also works as the game designer, there is a tiny but complete team working on it separately.

It's quite risky taking on multiple projects at the same time but we do feel that there is a void left by Among Us for Streamers that we want to possibly occupy as soon as possible. We're hoping revenue from Ruinarch could continue funding both teams but we do expect there will be months (like March) where we go into negative and draw from savings instead. Something that players may not be aware of regarding revenue for games is that the dev team gets only around 30-50% of the base price due to tax, chargebacks, discounts, cheaper price on other countries, revenue sharing with Steam and publisher (even though our Publisher has already closed, we still have revenue sharing ongoing with them). The good news is that we do get some sales bump whenever we go on sale and usually that should be enough to sustain us for that month. We hope our sales continue as they are now at least for the entire year and we should be able to develop the two games in parallel without too many financial worries.

We'll leave you with a Promo Art for Nona's Game:

We have a small update today to fix a critical performance issue and tweak down some of the new features. This should reduce frustrating situations.


- Reduced the drop rate of Structure Scrolls from Treasure Chests.
- Devout characters will turn into Cleric or Witch at a slower rate.
- It will now usually take multiple Preach actions before a Villager will turn into a Cleric or a Witch.
- When a Faction transforms into a Demon Cult, Divine Church or Wiccans Faction, there will now be more Villagers that will decide to leave. There are other factors to consider but Villagers decide whether to leave or stay mostly based on their relationship with the new Faction Leader.
- Clerics can no longer disable Demonic Structures.
- Nullchild and Jinxed are much rarer now.
- Reduced how quickly succeeding Beast Pens, Lightning Towers and Arrow Towers are built.
- Slightly reduced chance that a Chaos Orb will be produced by player-sourced Poisoned, Burning and Ensnared Villagers.
- Golems spawned by Monster Spawners will no longer begin as Hibernating and Indestructible.
- Removed the possibility that Lycanthropy can become a crime on a Lycan Clan faction.
- Removed the possibility that Vampirism can become a crime on a Vampire Clan faction.


- [FIXED] Newly added Traits are missing from a Psychopath's criteria list.
- [FIXED] Game may sometimes lag especially on large maps.
- [FIXED] Killing Clerics may sometimes not release the Power they stole.
- [FIXED] Legendary Weapons are also dropped by wild monsters and demonic minions.
- [FIXED] NullExceptionError may sometimes occur when relationships between a new Faction Leader and other characters are initialized.