It’s been a year since my last post of sign of life. Many of you asked about my health, and thank you for your messages, the liver I got fortunately works fine, I keep taking my meds and visit my doctor every three months.
I’m sorry but I still haven’t progressed enough to bring you screenshots of the next game. I could come up with all sorts of excuses from chronic fatigue to microplastics, but my main debuff is that I’m a black belt procrastinator, I have to work on that as well as on the game itself.
In the mean time, I wish all of you a peaceful holiday season.
Just wanted to wish every one of you a happy and peaceful holiday season and next year. Sorry for the pile of unreplied emails… I’ll write as soon as I have something ready to show about the next game.
Sorry for the long absence. I was in hospital for 3 months over the last year. In a nutshell, I had PSC and needed a liver transplant. After some rough times, it seems I’ll live and can keep on making games. 🙂 My priorities are still making a non-GemCraft game next before returning to the series, possibly including remakes of the old chapters. I have tons of unreplied emails, I’ll try to get to them as well. I’ll write again when I have something worth showing.
The Iron mode, known from the previous GemCraft too, is now added, giving veteran wizards a new flavor of playthrough with the rules tuned for challenge. All previously missing trial fields have also arrived for Frostborn and Chilling game modes.
A great bunch of bug fixes and QoL updates are included too, you can see the full list in the main menu.
GemCraft Frostborn Wrath has finally arrived to GOG.com! Also, the Steam Summer Sale has started! You can get GCFW on both GOG and Steam with a 25% discount!
After a long silence, the Chilling Update for GemCraft Frostborn Wrath has finally arrived! And, for a few days the game is at -15% on Steam as part of the Tower Defense save event.
And if you’re waiting for a GOG release, there might be good news for you too, the game might get on GOG as well soon!
Chilling Update details:
The initial difficulty of the game got a mixed reception, even after many smaller attempts to make the game’s overall feeling less unforgiving. So now, in addition to the original “Frostborn” difficulty, a new “Chilling” Game mode has been added for those players who just want to smash through the monsters and feel the mana flowing through their veins.
Existing Frostborn saved games can be switched to Chilling mode, so you don’t need to start over again for a monster-shredding freezing-edge experience. (Going back to Frostborn is not possible though.)
Chilling Mode features:
Freeze spell is given at start
+3 gem damage at first grade (causes a dramatic damage increase at higher grades)
3 free buildings (except walls) can be built in every battle
+300 mana when a battle starts
3x shadow cores drop from monsters
2x xp on kills given by monsters in Journey battles
Reduced first wave hit points on later game fields (where first wave would be above 70 hp)
Other changes and fixes have been added as well:
Added many formerly missing trial fields
Range can be decreased for lanterns and pylons
Vital link trait power reduced from 10% to 3% per level
Hp multiplier per wave is set to 1.1 for all endurance fields (it was varying between 1.1 and 1.11)
Getting different slow rate gem hits works properly now
New option shows larger info panels when at higher resolution than 1920×1080
Disabling weather effects works now
Hatred and Awakening battle traits have been severely nerfed
Random special enemies have less hp, especially in later waves
Decreased strike spells’ skill level charge time decrement bonus by half
Halved the hp percent loss taken by shrine strikes
Gems reach hit milestones sooner above 1.000 hits
Changed the redundant talfrag property to ‘extra hp taken by ice shards’
Added range circle to the pylon placement helper
Fixed missing lines in the talisman summary list
Added all formerly missing journey note illustrations
GemCraft Frostborn Wrath is finally out, actually it’s been out for one week by now, but it was such a crazy rush that I didn’t have the time to write a proper post about it yet.
UPDATE: The game has passed the Steam review process, and it will be released on the 10th of January!
Happy New Year Everyone!
Hopefully only a few days left until the release of GemCraft Frostborn Wrath! When I write this, the game is under review by Steam, if they give the green light, the game can be out on in time. The planned release date is still Friday, 10 January 2020, 07:00 PST / 10:00 ET / 16:00 CET, but as of now the Steam admin page also says: “Earliest possible release: Jan 11, 2020”, and it was “Jan 9” two days ago, so a few days’ delay is possible if this process takes longer than expected, but I hope this is only an automatic text and once the review process is over, the game can get out.
I will refresh the release date on the game’s Steam page as soon as I know more, and I’ll write an update post too.
GemCraft Frostborn Wrath will have a price tag of USD 12.99, or a similar amount converted to your local currency. There will be no paid lootboxes or other microtransactions, only the one time price.
The game will be playable to the end and you can fight in Endurance mode on all the fields as well, but some of the content we wanted to get done will have to wait until after the release date. To-be-added content will include: -Some additional sounds -Some of the journey note pages -Playing some of the fields in Trial mode (all fields will have a handcrafted challenging battle) -Some quality of life features that came up during testing -We will continue polishing and fine-tuning the game after release
I also admit I aimed too high with my plans for the amount of achievements, but still, the game will have 636 achievements to collect, and possibly more to come later. Steam also has a 100 achievements limit I was unaware of and only bumped into while I was uploading the achi data to Steam. As it turned out, this limit is applied to new games automatically now and might be lifted once a game reaches some kind of a confidence metric. This is hopefully temporary and only affects Steam achievements, the game itself keeps track of your in-game achievements and rewards you with skill points for gathering them, and I hope I can steamify the rest of the achievements soon after release. Any achievements you earn in the game will be automatically unlocked on Steam when its Steam equivalent will become available and you load your saved game, no need to collect them twice.
The game will be officially available on Windows. I heard there is a Linux emulator that makes many Steam Windows games playable, and since this game doesn’t have any possibly problematic feature (3rd party server connection, DRM), it’s worth giving a try if you have Linux. I hope a similar option will be available for Mac as well.
In case of the game running into an error, a calming green screen will pop up with the “stack trace” of the code, telling which line I should have a look at. I’m sorry in advance for any errors that you might encounter, the coming weeks will be spent actively fixing errors so they should appear really rarely after a while. (If you still find an error, please copy the text and send me via e-mail as seen in the green screen. Thank you!)
There is no official age rating for the game, but if you are a parent with small kids, please note that the Steam store is for ages 13+ and that GemCraft Frostborn Wrath contains blood and demons.
It’s impossible to make the game equally comfortable or challenging for everyone. I think Frostborn Wrath is geared towards being harder than Chasing Shadows was. Here are a few tips if you get stuck: -You can go back to previously beaten fields and enter Endurance mode or try Journey mode again for more xp, which gets you level up, which eventually gives you more skill points. -Don’t spend all your skill points, as unspent points give you starter mana. -As you play, you’ll find talisman fragments. Add them to your talisman to get their bonuses. Frags that give extra starter mana can help a lot, and they can be found from the beginning. -It’s well worth playing fields in Trial mode. In this mode, you face the same challenge no matter how high your wizard level is. They are all beatable, and give you 9 skill points if you win. -Open wizard stashes by firing or dropping gem bombs at them. You can get skill tomes and more. Wizard stashes can be found on every field, but some of them are hidden in Endurance or Journey mode. -You can always pause the game and think about moving or combining your gems, or dropping a gem bomb in an emergency.
Thank you for your ever lasting support and patience, we hope you’ll enjoy exploring the game!
Having 3 weeks left until the winter holiday, I had to realize that we still need just a bit more time to finish everything, and that the inevitable initial bugs would have to be fixed while sitting under the Christmas tree if the game was out last minute before the holiday season. I’m sorry if you had some GemCraft plans for the holiday, but I hope you’ll have some time another 3 weeks later to dive into the game:
GemCraft Frostborn Wrath will be released on Friday, 10 January 2020, 07:00 PST / 10:00 ET / 16:00 CET.
Have a great winter holiday, and see you in January!
First, let’s see the current state of progress of the game. There still is a chance to release the game before the winter holiday with some luck and by tapping all the energy reserves for a final push. Some features will be almost surely left to be added after release, for example, a new game+ like thing similar to the iron wizard mode in GCCS.
I plan to have two more posts before release, the next one showing the trailer for sure, and the final one telling about release details and last minute info morsels. (the game is already in a trailer-ready state, so it should arrive before December, I just try to cover the development time more or less evenly with blog posts.)
So this time, I raked together some of the new creatures and buildings which still haven’t been revealed, without spoiling the game.
In addition to the already shown wizard stashes, lanterns, pylons, 3 looks of walls, barricades, wraiths, and reworked shrines, here are a few more to be encountered in the game:
The jar of wasps is a building that can be destroyed to unleash gem wasps, those tiny lit creatures also created by gem bomb explosions, attacking foes on their own. Gem wasps became more useful as they deal their gem’s specials when they sting, and they also follow your mouse pointer so you can lure them where they are needed.
Monster eggs can be found lying around in many places, they contain swarmlings that can be unleashed by cracking the egg with a gem bomb, or the egg can hatch on its own after a while.
The watchtower is a new building that attacks everything, including your towers. If it launches its spinning projectile, you’d better hit tab to pull the targeted gem to the safety of your inventory. The good news is that it can be brought down eventually, just keep firing and stay vigilant. 🙂
And finally, a foe that the corrupted wizards of the Spiritforge sent to hunt down rogue wizards like you, the wizard hunter is obsessed to get to your orb, and can launch shades of itself to tear down your buildings, along with the gems inside if you don’t act fast.
I’ve probably mentioned before that I’m an avid achievement hunter, it’s such a blast unlocking one achievement after another and finally facing the really tough ones. Achievements are not as dumb as some players say, they can teach the basics like a tutorial, or show other ways to play a game, leading the player to unfold the game and discover hidden paths. Achievements can give another layer of completing the game, or comparing your standing against other players (thanks to the public achievement stats for each game on Steam). So I didn’t want to aim low this time, there are more than 900 achievements planned (Steam has a technical limit of 1.000 achievements to prevent achi-scam games that once flooded the store, but if that can be bypassed somehow, I’ll be happy to add even more achievements after release).
Drawing all the 64×64 pixel images (official Steam achievement icon size) for the achievements would have been a tedious task though, so as a compromise, I tried a pixelated retro feeling approach. I made tiny 20×20 pixel icons that the game uses to generate the 64×64 px icons, along with an 86×86 px version used in the outcome panel.
This is how it looks like with 3x zoom:
Last time, in Chasing Shadows, achievements were only unlocked when winning a battle’s regular phase, in endurance, achievements were locked. This time endurance is a separate battle mode, and all achievements (unless specified in the achievement’s description) can be unlocked in journey (regular), endurance (lots of waves), and trial (fixed challenge) mode, even if the battle outcome is defeat. Once the “achievement unlocked” panel pops up, it’s a granted loot in the outcome panel. This change makes many achievements easier to get in the long run (waiting to get to long enough endurance runs can make achievements like “create a grade 16 gem” unlock naturally), so there will be more achievements added into the pile that will require a really high wizard level or a high player skill to unlock.
Some of what’s still waiting to be revealed might be shown in the trailer arriving next time, and the rest is waiting for you to explore in the game itself. See you again with the trailer by the end of this month!
