build id: 666A0693

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

MISSION OF THE DAY CALENDAR
Along the lines of Grind Mode I have been thinking a lot about the ways in which SBTF has generally lacked any sense of high level progression that is found in most games these days. As has been noted by some players "numbers in SBTF go down", while it is my experience that in modern games "numbers go up." There are certainly strong human emotions attached to all of this, and I feel it is important for the player to feel like the game is acknowledging and respecting the investment of time played, as well as the game having clearly presented and achievable goals.

Part of the problem is of course the original "permadeath" design of SBTF - while you get to keep your upgrades if your character survives a mission it is very easy to make a tiny mistake and lose all of that at any time. The same goes for all the science you may have earned. There is indeed a lot of statistics tracking for your character as well as a "rank" for all of that experience but this has no actual effect on the gameplay. While perhaps this can be motivated by saying that the game is "hardcore" I'd still have to call it "bad design" - especially in 2024.

As many of you know Grind Mode was an attempt to create a more "classic" shooter progression - character progression is stored each time you complete a mission and death will restore you to that point and allow you to try the current mission again up to the "win" of completing 35 missions (in what is still an infinite campaign). I realized however that while this is a good addition to the game your "progression" will still be voided and disappear whenever a new week rolls around, so at a super high level the game is still the way it has always been - there is no real persistent progression.

For these reasons I decided to do another experiment - namely take the log running Mission of the Day (MotD) and transform it into a system of permanent progression. In this mode your character progression works the same as in Grind Mode, i.e. on death you are always restored to the state you were in upon last mission completion. Additionally there is now a "calendar" that allows you to play and track the completion of every mission of the day starting from January 1, 2024 and moving forward. There is as before a new MotD each day but now you can potentially complete them all.

These changes have a lot of (in my mind) interesting implications. For the first time the character you roll (names are still randomized) in the MotD slot is truly persistent, and you will gradually over time progress to a character that is fully upgraded and very powerful (including the highest ammo tier and extreme re-arm rates). This in itself moves SBTF into a very intense but still manageable space where the player is able to eventually acquire a lot of power to pit against the enemies.

For those of you who like statistics the new MotD mode effectively grants you a character that is "forever", and all your hard work will be reflected in experience and rank.

The missions themselves are as before - Randomize All settings with maximum map size (compare this to Grind Mode which also uses Randomize All settings but with map sizes that start small and grow with campaign). The result is that MotD is brutal and unpredictable and can generate quite difficult missions. This is offset by the fact that it is now possible to strategize greatly around which mission to tackle next in your progression from a green recruit to a full upgraded galactic beast-slayer.

From a purely psychological standpoint I personally find it extremely satisfying that the growing set of MotD missions now represent "official" and "permanent" challenges for players to tackle as a community. Some of this psychology has always existed with Explicit Seed mode (as those missions are always the same) but conversely there are simply too many permutations there (billions) for it to be meaningful to try to "complete them all", not least because Explicit Seed mode lacks integrated completion tracking. Grind Mode has obviously evoked some of the psychology of "official challenges" as there have been lengthy discussions about some of the campaigns over the years, but still this progression "goes away" after a week so there are diminishing returns there.

I sincerely hope that all of you will feel some of the satisfaction of progression that I have felt while developing this new twist to SBTF. Indeed the new MotD is somewhat of an "overlay" upon the evolved and incremental design of SBTF (so it isn't perfect) and as with Grind Mode some hardcore purists might not like the idea of character snapshots / restoration, but as always the new MotD is optional and everything else legacy about the game remains intact.

I personally feel even more motivated to play the game in the new MotD mode than I did with the addition of Grind Mode (I feel like Grind Mode starts a bit slow), and as with a lot of other games I play I get a lot of satisfaction out of being able to "light up all the icons". I have iterated quite a bit on the design and visualization of the MotD calendar to make it as pleasing as practical within the constraints of the game, taking care to celebrate and animate completion in a similar manner as in Grind Mode (which has also benefited visually from this work).

Of course I realize that a very compelling way to play is to be able to collaborate and tackle the difficult missions that will doubtless arise in MotD mode together in a networked team, and I'm happy to say the there is full support for this. In networked games completion of each day is indicated simultaneously for each player so it is easy to see who in the party has completed what. Upon mission success each networked player will have completion recorded locally so you will always be credited with completion if you were in the mission when it was won. In this way it becomes meaningful to "get help" with MotD completion if you so desire, as well as to help others with missions that you yourself have completed and have some tactical insight into.

Note that as with legacy progression systems in SBTF you have separate characters and progression for local and for each network (LAN and Steam).

MODERN RENDERER
As a result of finally realizing what the problem was with shader model 3.0 on AMD (i.e. "bad programmer, no cookie") I have implemented a "clean" shader model 3.0 renderer that is now called "modern shader model 3.0". This is now the default (but check your settings) and the main difference is that it supports a greater number of dynamic lights than before.

The main goal here was to allow for each player to have a dedicated and visible lamp as well as for other player and sentry fire no longer "stealing" the single dynamic light away from the local player. Things are still satisfyingly strobey (it's SBTF after all) but lights no longer look glitchy, and the addition of dedicated player lights is subtle but pleasing as you can see a light preceding a player that is moving down a hallway.

Both legacy render paths ("legacy shader model 2.0" and "legacy shader model 3.0") are retained for performance / compatibility.

MISCELLANEOUS

• space windows now correctly emit a small amount of light (visible when power is out and player lamp is disabled)
  
• the visuals of lab sections have been updated to have a more focused palette (more focus on whites and cool blues, and reds are largely removed)
  
• panic room doors have been redesigned to look more like actual doors
  
• Grind mode medals have been updated to be more visually rich (as a result of work on MotD medals)

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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build id: 6547A592

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.

MAINTENANCE UPDATE
This is a general maintenance and compatibility update, seeing as my general codebase has been mutating for over a year since Update 62, and it's always a good idea to have the deployed version be as close as possible to what I'm working with in the interest of finding and adressing potential bugs.

EXPANDED USER OPTIONS
In those modes with fine-grained control over various plan generation and rules settings certain settings have been expanded to include a new "unknown" value, which simply means that the game will randomize a value for you. These new settings are also available when creating user plans, and all existing user plans have been migrated to the new format.

SHADER MODEL 3.0 SHOULD NOW WORK ON AMD GPUS
The long-standing issue of materials "disappearing" on AMD GPUs along with the mess of trying to detect your gpu, forcing your settings to shader model 2.0, as well as the whole stop-gap of shader model 2.0 to begin with SHOULD now be resolved. The issue turned out to NOT be a bad implementation of the DirectX9.0c specification by AMD (as I had suspected for well over 10 years) but rather a LENIENT implementation on nVidia's partt which allowed me to (erroenously) specify "mixed" shaders where the vertex shader was 2.0 and the pixel shader was 3.0. This is explicitly forbidden by the specification, and the error was entirely mine.

As usual I have limited ability to test all of this, but I have verified that shader model 3.0 works on my own AMD hardware. I would appreciate reports from anyone who has an AMD GPU in the forums.

While I await broad verification that shader model 3.0 works on all AMD hardware, as well as in the interest of potential performance gains, I have left shader model 2.0 i the game as an option.

MISCELLANEOUS

• fixed bad XP calculation
  
• showing N / A when next rank is beyond maximum
  
• made list / grid buttons consistent with new blue / orange tab scheme
  
• fixed fancy space windows to work in shader model 2.0 (were erroneously requiring shader model 3.0)
  
• fixed lamp mode switch crash on shader model 2.0 - this is apparently because "legacy lamp" uses more too many shader ops for shader model 2.0 (65 of 64 available), and as a result "legacy lamp" is disabled when running shader model 2.0
  
• fixed security table collision bug that occured when the security table was too close to the reactor
  
• live sentries (pulsing diamonds) display is disabled on the tracker/map when the power is out
  
• removed PvP tags from store page
  
• added LAN co-op tag to store page

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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build id: 631B9588

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.


INTRODUCING GRIND MODE
As you might imagine the release of SBTF out of Early Access after 7+ years brought quite a bit of clarity as I was able to take a step back from constant iteration and maintenance of the game. The prior update (61) was very satisfying to deploy as it let me fix a lot of quality of life issues and in general address some rough edges that remained.

In observing the feedback that started coming in via various video reviews I began to realize that the practical effect of the Instant Action pipeline was for new players coming in to quite naturally simply play the game via this mode / button. However as many of you know Instant Action leads to Randomize All rules that can result in a quite unforgiving experience, especially for new players.

This is conjunction with some prior experiments relating to Campaign of the Week (CotW) led me to realize that the game has always had a real problem with any kind of meaningful progression. This has certainly been discussed at length in the forums and I was never really satisfied personally with the macro-level feel of the game. While of course surviving a mission would let you keep your upgrades it has still always been the case that any small mistake will quite brutally take this progression away from you.

Of course that while this has always been one of the main premises of the game (in being a roguelike) it still didn't feel very good to me. The addition of CotW was certainly interesting in that it both added a time-limited linear sequence of missions to attempt (that also had some kind of difficulty curve) but in practice this mode was really even MORE hard-core in that any small mistake would not only wipe your character / upgrades but also put you back at the beginning of the campaign. I personally was never really incentivized to attempt any given CotW more than once.

All of this got me thinking about how the game might feel with what I view as a more "classic shooter progression" - what if the game saves a checkpoint at the beginning of each mission, and death in any mission will simply restore your character and upgrades back to that point and allow you to re-try that mission any number of times? Initial experiments were quite positive but I was quite aware of the fact that this idea conceptually clashed with a core premise of the game being about "disposable heros" - effectively this idea leads to the scenario that your character cannot ever REALLY die, at least not in terms of progression.

However due to said increased insight into / objectivity concerning the new player experience I decided to look into actually adding a more "casual campaign" as per the above. The result is what I'm calling "Grind Mode" which is a new type of campaign of the week but with the addition of casual / persistent progression. This means that you can hammer on / "grind" any difficult missions in the campaign as much as you like until you complete them, culminating in a audio/visual reward of sorts once you have completed 35 missions. This number of missions corresponds to parts of the mission generation algorithm relating to size that will max out after 35 missions. Since the Grind campaign is infinite (in the same way as CotW) it is possible for those who want further challenge after 35 missions to continue indefinitely, but conceptually you are "done" after 35 missions. This creates something that is reasonably attainable within one week's time.

Personally I've had lots of fun playing Grind Mode during development, so much that I strongly feel that it should be (and now is) the default selected experience for new players coming in (and if you delete your game app data). It makes me feel that something like this should have been in the game for a very long time and checks a lot of my personal boxes when it comes having the game feel "meaningful" to play. Indeed I believe (in hindsight) that the main problem with SBTF in terms of progression has been that it did not quite feel like the game respected your investment of time / effort, and Grind Mode offers at least some kind of solution to that problem.

Of course I know by now (after all these years of development) that ANY change I make to the game (optional or not) has great potential to be contentious. I hope however that all the hard-core players out there can appreciate Grind Mode as an attempt to make the game more inclusive to a more casual type of player, and that if they don't hold with the idea of this kind of progression then they can simply ignore Grind Mode - indeed all the legacy game modes that you've come to know and love about SBTF are intact with the exception of the Instant Action pipeline (which in itself was a "casual" type of feature).

In the best case scenario I hope that even hard-core players / fans of roguelike progression might still have some fun if they decide to try Grind Mode after all - I personally feel that Grind Mode makes the game "even more SBTF than SBTF" due to the fact that it makes a highly upgraded character much more attainable, and the kind of gameplay that occurs in high intensity missions in conjunction with a highly upgraded character is something that I believe not very many players have experienced yet.

The way that science grants higher ammo tiers is different in Grind Mode than in other modes. This has been restored to the legacy setup for all modes except for Grind Mode (in order to make CotW more reasonable again) and in Grind Mode it basically takes more science to upgrade your ammo. This has been tuned during development of Grind Mode so that it is harder to max out your ammo tier before the end of the 35 mission campaign. Science / relation to ammo tiers has now been visualized in a more clear fashion in the mission setup screens as well.

I've cleaned up mode selection quite a bit (a drop-list instead of always visible buttons), redesigned the various information tabs, and am automatically selecting the last mission outcome tab upon mission end which amounts to a more "proper" mission outcome. There are more animations in general in the intermission / setup screens, and also a new system of "medals" that will light up as you progress through the Grind campaign that will hopefully stimulate your low-level brain and bring some satisfaction. The aforementioned "reward" for completing the campaign I will leave for you to discover on your own.

I hope you will all agree that Grind Mode is a fun new addition to the long long (long) development of this game. This update also serves as the official end of development of Space Beast Terror Fright (excluding of course future quality of life changes / bugfixes). I sincerely thank you all very much for accompanying me on this unprecendented journey of exploration and discovery.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Lurking beasts is now an immutable option - this means that they will either lurk or not for the entire mission (excluding during reactor overload when no beasts will ever lurk). The reasoning here is that this works better with all modes that mutate rules at runtime, resulting in more varied gameplay overall.
  
• Upgrades in last outcome and team statistics screens are now shown in the same way as in the obituaries list - as icons instead of text.
  
• Hopefully more robust user plan download and decoding.
  
• Infestation has been suppressed so as to not cover certain important interactive level elements such as sentry control panels and door / fence controls.
  
• The game now displays useful tips while loading a mission.
  
• CotW and Grind Mode now utilize hashing / security in multiplayer as well as singleplayer in order to protect against tampering as well as to support campaign timeout at the end of the week.
  
• The pub party list is now more descriptive.
  
• The game now explicitly prompts the player to open the reactor shield prior to disabling coolants.
  
• There is now a setting for "fancy space windows" (default on). This shader is inspired by work on the Grind Mode completion "reward".
  
• The reactor shield is now shown on the security map table as well as in the player tracker / map.

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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build id: 62D1761D

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.


POST-RELEASE BUG-FIX / QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATE
This update includes miscellaneous bug-fixes and quality of life improvements for the game.


CHANGELOG

• The user interface will now prompt you if you have unpublished user plans.
  
• User plans that don't pass playability tests are not selectable for play.
  
• User plans can now be filtered by completion status: unattempted, attempted, failed, succeeded.
  
• You can now use text search to filter user plans.
  
• The user plan list can now be navigated with home / end / pgup / pgdown in addition to mouse scroll wheel (+SHIFT to go faster).
  
  
• Fixed mission experience not counting towards character rank.
  
  
• Door integrity is now displayed at all times in the id-field.
  
• If power is initially off, doors can now have an arbitrary track position as well as open / closed state, achieving a more abandoned look to the maps.
  
• Reactor safety protocol (all barriers automatically opening during overload) will now always open any doors where the player is immediately.
  
  
• Breakers spark a lot when reset.
  
• Breakers spark a little when recharging player battery.
  
  
• Some enemy broods now have red blood.
  
  
• Core text colors and screens have been adjusted to work better on higher brightness levels.
  
• Core albedos have been significantly desaturated.
  
• New design for core frames / support structures.
  
  
• New fence shader (fancy fences) setting (requires shader model 3.0) and is on by default.
  
  
• Adjusted download times to (10, 7, 5, 3.5, 2.5) from previous (10, 8, 6, 4, 2).
  
• Ammo type upgrades for science now occur at 8: MEDIUM, 16: HEAVY, 32: ULTRA as opposed to previously 4: MEDIUM, 8: HEAVY, 16: ULTRA.
  
• Each science now increases re-arm rate by 1 instead of 3.
  
  
• Instant Action is now Random Seed with default options. This was previously Randomize All which could be a bit brutal on new players.
  
  
• Right / left aligned plan preview (ascii) legend text.
  
  
• Breaches now drip moisture and spark much less.
  
  
• The replay screen now notifies that only local replays are recorded (not networked).
  
  
• There are now three modes for network pub chat: PUBLIC (send to everyone), PARTY (send to your party only), and DEAF (send to / receive from your party but not receive public chat). When DEAF is selected while not in a party you will not receive any chat whatsoever.
  
• It is now possible to block / blacklist players in the network pub by clicking on the button with their name on it. You will not receive any chat from blocked players nor will the be allowed to join parties you host.
  
  
• The game now attempts to detect AMD GPUs (via driver description string) and will automatically set shader model 2.0 for maximum compatibility upon startup. You may still change the setting to shader model 3.0 at runtime but all evidence points to this not working properly (geometry not drawn) on all AMD GPUs.
  
• Shader model 2.0 now more properly incorporates material roughness on PBR materials, achieving a look that is far closer to shader model 3.0 (albeit with simplified reflections). Players may in general want to play on shader model 2.0 in order to potentially increase performance.
  
  
• System glitch sounds are now suppressed for all dead players.
  
• System glitch sounds are now only played for your own systems while you are ALIVE in a networked game, but play for all players while you are DEAD (waiting for reinforcements / spectating).
  
• Fixed miscellaneous erroneous player text colors due to infravision being activated.
  
  
• POTENTIAL bugfix for audio errors on linux (untested): I have removed aggressive audio playback positioning code which I suspect has been the cause for audio errors on linux.

As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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After many years I've finally decided it is time to release this little thing I built called Space Beast Terror Fright.

I can't say I really know how I feel about this; maybe this is what a 7 year pregnancy feels like. If course I never intended nor imagined that I would be working on this for so long, but as they say life does tend to get in the way.

From the original Greenlight submission to getting amazing press right off the bat, getting Greenlit in 2 weeks, realizing that I needed to quit my day job, finding an office, growing the team, shrinking the team, switching to working from home, shrinking the team some more, being homeless, to being forced to balance continued development with other jobs in order to pay the rent.

Then came the day my accountant started laughing at me because I was too afraid to check my bank account; that was when I realized that this thing was sort of working out and that I could do this full-time (albeit on a shoe-string). That was the day I decided that I would either succeed or be left standing in a really expensive crater.

Honestly this whole trip has been a coming of age story for me as a game designer. I've been in the games industry mainly as a programmer for many years, but over time I realized that I really do have an insanely opinionated creative agenda which eventually led me to starting nornware and trying to take myself seriously.

But it has been the interaction with the SBTF community that has been absolutely instrumental in pushing the game far beyond where it all started. The experience of "pants down" development of a product that has been both constantly functional and slowly expanding over all these years has taught me the value of balancing my own vision with the needs and desires of the actual players. And ultimately it has been all of you who have finally allowed me to emotionally lay my monsters down and realize that this game really has been finished for years now.

I stand today as a much more confident designer / programmer / director thanks to all of you. And there are still so many games left to make; there are still "worlds in there" for us to explore together.

sincerely,
/johno

build id: 61FED270

nornware AB is happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.


NEW EXPERIMENTAL NETWORK PROTOCOL (SHI6)

In an effort to improve the overall network experience, this update includes new and experimental netcode from 2022 (SHI6) along with the legacy 2018 netcode (CLSV1).

In the interest of being able to honestly compare the old and the new in this build it is possible to play both Local Area Network and Steam games using both protocols.

Please note that the front-end menu colors will be different (green rather than blue) on purpose to denote that you are playing on experimental netcode (SHI6).

I hope that you will all take the time to honestly compare the two variants and feed me back on your experiences.


MISCELLANEOUS

• Added unofficial Discord and community guides links.
  
  
• Updated Infravision shader, works better across legacy and vpbr materials.
  
• Contrast of aim assist icons and text vs Infravision
  
  
• Coolant ambient plays regardless of power state
  
  
• Explicitly polling for XBox360 controller connections when the drop-down is opened.
  
• XBox360 controller menu navigation has been completely removed.
  
  
• Fixed third person muzzle flare positions.
  
  
• Fixed erroneous weapon swapping on chat toggle.
  
• Fixed erroneous weapon swapping on mission menu toggle.
  
  
• Fixed / reset spectator / split-screen modes on reinforce (avoid getting stuck in non-self view).
  
  
• Displaying CotW scoring criteria in the leaderboard screen.
  
• Fixed CotW difficulty / power failures progress, guarding against infinite loop when selecting max difficulty (always happens at mission 32 (zero base)).
  
  
• Anisotropic filtering defaults to on (uses max for current device).
  
• Showing actual anisotropy setting.
  
• Showing GU description in settings.
  
• Fixed vertical text alignment of slider settings / better slider element collision.
  
• More mouselook range.
  
• Gui scale is now a drop-list with fixed settings.
  
• Better VPBR reflections (legacy simple reflections are now an option).
  
• New flashlight / lamp shape (legacy lamp is now a setting).
  
  
• White airlock in holotable (just like tracker).
  
• Scientist blip on tracker is always base color (not changed with Infravision).
  
• Reactor shield now shown in tracker.
  
• Drawing of security console and reactor shield (in tracker) obey normal map discovery rules.
  
  
• New level styles: Adamant(flipped), Bastion(flipped), Oracle(flipped).
  
• Iterated on labs.
  
  
• Fixed barrier frames during reactor overload.
  
• Fixed door numbers on control boxes during reactor overload (respect reactor safety protocol).
  
• Fixed missing target icon on broken barrier control boxes.
  
• Fixed erroneous crosshair disable when reactor safety protocol locks out frame control boxes (doors and fences).
  
• Disabled interaction prompt on frames during overload with respect to reactor safety protocol.
  
• Airlock door now opens immediately with reactor safety protocol enabled.
  
  
• Suppressed mist around doors, panics, and reactor shield in order to prevent clipping.
  
  
• New sounds for weapon swapping and Infravision toggle.
  
• New sounds for electronics system glitching.
  
• Relevant sounds converted to mono, saved 3.5MB.
  
• Fixed strange audio panning looking at feet (straight down)
  
• Fixed music to not go out of sync during power failures
  
  
• No longer distorting doors in z-axis, makes decals look better (also avoids popping doors out of door frames).
  
• Fixed broken airlock mesh when surrounded by alt-walls.
  
  
• Completion status for user plans is now shown in the list (and stored on disk locally).
  
  
• Modulating frequency of reactor shield while opening.
  
• Moved path nodes outside reactor shield (improves beast movement).
  
  
• Player rank is now displayed in various places (based on purchase date).

Please note that as it has been a while since the last update there may have been bugs introduced. As always, thank you for your support and patience.
/nornware AB c/o johno

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