- AI Bug Fix & Updated Weather UI - 22 June 2026
A quick update to fix a couple of issues with the current build.WEATHER UIAdded some informational UI elements to the weather system to help make it clearer.Selecting a weather icon now displays a popup explaining the duration and effect of that weather, and highlights the sea route.Selecting a unit that has movement being blocked by a storm will show that sea route in red to indicate it's currently unavailable.INTERMITTENT AI FREEZEWe've pushed a change that should fix an occasional bug on Windows machines where the AI opponent would stall out on the first turn of a practice game or campaign conflict and never take it's turn. Hopefully these changes will have the AI being a reliable opponent once again!LEADERBOARD BUGFix for occasional issue where the special event leaderboard wasn't always sorting correctly at the start of a new event.
- Campaign Mode & New Demo! - 16 June 2026
It sure has been a while since we posted an update! While it may seem quiet from the outside, we've been busy as ever, balancing life challenges and game dev, and we're excited to finally share what we've been working on.Mostly it's been quiet because we decided to focus all our efforts on working on the game, and step back from promotion and updates for a bit. It takes a surprising amount of work to keep up with posts and builds etc, and as a tiny indie team we felt we needed to focus all our energy toward getting the game finished.Challenging TimesIt has also been some pretty dark times lately, in the world, the game industry, and in our personal lives. As most people probably know, the game industry is in a state of crisis with more layoffs and closures every day. We're lucky to be in the home stretch on our game, but even so as freelance work gets hard to come by some team members h…
- Hot Fix: AI Starving Units Movement Bug - 8 April 2024
Quick fix for a rare error that occurred if the AI opponent needed to scatter starving units, but only had one neighboring region. Should be all good now!
- Updated Demo & AI - 5 April 2024
Hey folks! We just pushed an update to the demo that includes a whole bunch of stability and bug fixes, as well as our latest pass on the AI opponent! Updating the demo will reset your game limits, so even if you had previously maxed out the available matches you can try out the new build with another round of games. A fresh start for everyone! UPDATED AI OPPONENT We've been working hard on the AI and it is now much more dynamic and puts up a proper challenge. We fixed a bunch of issues that could sometimes cause it to hang, added some new features (it should now be able to handle most actions in the game), and tuned it's responses to be more varied so it shouldn't be as easy to bait or get stuck in loops. But the most exciting thing is that the AI now runs on it's own background thread - this means that it calculates it's turn at the same time as you, instead of waiting for your orders…
- Melbourne International Games Week! - 25 September 2023
We're honored to have Spies & Soldiers included in the Melbourne International Games Week Steam showcase! Jim and Luis will be streaming the game, so come and see what it's all about. We'll also be hanging out in our community Discord, so swing by and say hello! JOIN THE SPIES & SOLDIERS DISCORD! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1094450/Spies__Soldiers/
- New AI Opponent! - 24 March 2023
Things have been quiet lately, while we have had our heads down working hard on building out the single-player side of the game. We've been busy with a couple of big features - prototyping a single player campaign mode (more on that at a future date!) and overhauling our entire AI system. While it's still going to be a while before we have anything from the campaigns to show, we're excited to have the first version of AI 2.0 ready to share! Initially we intended to simply update the existing AI prototype, but it turned out that we had to rebuild it from the ground up to get the features we wanted. It's still using our original utility system, but has been extended and made more modular so now it can consider much more complex actions, and most importantly - be tuned and extended further in the future. We still have another whole phase of AI development on our roadmap, but this version i…
- Game Design Chat - 2 October 2022
Come listen to the developers talk about the new features we've been working on for Spies & Soldiers, as well as a sneak peek at some future plans...
- AI Deep Dive - 30 September 2022
Interested in AI? Come and listen to Luis Van Slageren and Liam Houston, two of the coders from the Spies & Soldiers team, as they dig into the details of how our new AI opponent works. We are doing regular dev streams for Melbourne International Games Week over the next few days, including a design chat about new features and a sneak peek at our upcoming plans, as well as the devs playing the latest build. Swing by and say hello!
- Hot Fix: Game Notifications Bug - 17 October 2021
Fixed a minor bug that sometimes caused in-game turn notifications to stop working.
- Hot Fix: Squashing Bugs - 5 October 2021
The flood of new players following our Melbourne International Games Week showcase has helped us flush out a few sneaky bugs, so we've pushed a new build with a handful of fixes. === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.24.3 === - Fixed a bug that would cause errors the first time a player joined an online game, if they disabled email notifications. - Fixed an issue that occasionally caused the game to hang on the claimant screen, making it impossible to submit the first turn. - Demo end info text now pops up automatically when returning to home screen after the game limit has been reached. - Selecting an empty slot when keeping a title now disables all buttons while loading the title into that slot. - Formatting tweaks to the title screen while the title is being generated. KNOWN ISSUES - Copying match codes from the Play Friend window doesn't work. Paste works fine though. - City and castle portrai…
- Melbourne International Games Week Steam Showcase! - 30 September 2021
We're excited to announce that Spies & Soldiers has been invited to be part of the Melbourne International Games Week Steam showcase! We'll be featured from Sept 1 to Oct 4, with our fresh new demo build and regular livestreams of the developers playing the game. We'll also be hanging out in our community Discord, so swing by and say hello! JOIN THE SPIES & SOLDIERS DISCORD! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1094450/Spies__Soldiers/
- New Build: Title Collections & New Location Art - 30 September 2021
High time we had a new build! Not a huge update, but it does include some cool new features, including being able to collect more than one title, and new procedural portrait art for castles and cities. We've also tweaked the endgame conditions slightly, to allow for losing players a better chance at a comeback. === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.24.1 === You now need to hold five castles for two turns to win, instead of one. Added the ability to save more than one title. Can now select your displayed title from any you have stored. Added claimant names to title reward screen. Procedurally generated castle and city portraits. Added mouse click sounds back to the home screen. Minor clarifications to Guidance text. KNOWN ISSUES City and castle portraits still show the old generic portraits during turn resolution. Slim chance of issues migrating old titles to the new system. Let us know if you lose…
- New Build: Bug Fixes & Stability - 10 July 2021
The influx of new players from Next Fest gave us lots of great data, so we focused this build on bug fixes and stability improvements. Resolved some very quirky crash bugs, UI glitches, and a missing spymaster claimant who deftly hid themselves in the code... Thanks to all our players who have been reporting issues in both the bugs channel on our Discord server and the in-game feedback form, it's been a huge help. So good to see our community of players growing and enjoying the game! === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.23.7 === Spymaster revealed! Fixed bug that was causing the rank 3 spy claimant to be hidden, appearing only under rare conditions. Fixed bug that caused the game to hang if you played three practice games in a row. General stability improvements to help reduce situations where the game becomes unresponsive. Fixed memory leak in the name generator (thanks @Garbage#8809 for catchin…
- Hot Fix - Updated Welcome Text - 20 June 2021
A quick patch to correct the welcome text so that it no longer refers to the old home screen.
- Developer Stream - Gameplay & Strategy Chats - 19 June 2021
The Ghostbat Games team will do a live play through of our nifty new demo! We’ve been practicing our streaming technique, so you can watch both sides of the battle as the developers demonstrate their strategic skills in a head-to-head match. We’ll run through the basic mechanics of the game, as well as more advanced strategies required to build a victorious empire! The stream will start Monday 21st of June 8pm EST. You can set a reminder to get an alert when we kick off. In the meantime, come say hello in our Discord, or follow our progress on Twitter!
- Dev Update: Demo On The Horizon - 11 June 2021
There's been quite a bit going on since our last post. Unfortunately, a sudden covid lockdown in Melbourne means that everyone has been stuck at home for the past two weeks, and sadly we had to cancel our local event at Pixel Bar. It’s been a tough year for everyone and after months of relative freedom here in Australia, this was a reminder that the world is still in middle of a major crisis. But our wonderful team is very supportive of one another, so we are able to keep morale up and stay focused on our big push toward a demo build for the upcoming Steam Next Fest. We're very much looking forward to taking the game for it's first big public outing! So, what's everyone been up to? LUIS Continuing on from the last dev update, Luis and Ben teamed up to tackle re-configuring the map system to support our new single player campaigns. This is a major overhaul, and one of the biggest bits of…
- Developer Stream - Gameplay & Strategy Chats - 7 June 2021
The Ghostbat Games team will stream a live play through of our nifty new demo! We’ve been practicing our streaming technique, so you can watch both sides of the battle as the developers demonstrate their strategic skills in a head-to-head match. We’ll run through the basic mechanics of the game, as well as more advanced strategies required to build a victorious empire! The stream will start Wednesday 16th June 8pm EST. Set a reminder to get an alert when we kick off. In the meantime, come say hello in our Discord, or follow our progress on Twitter!
- Dev Update: Steam Next Festival! - 25 May 2021
We’re back with another dev update, but first some exciting news. Spies & Soldiers is going to be part of… …STEAM NEXT FEST! We’ll have a shiny new demo available to play, some fancy live streams throughout the event, and Spies & Soldiers will be featured alongside many other amazing new games. The festival runs from June 16 – 22, so we’re currently hard at work polishing the game and implementing a few new features in time for the launch. Meanwhile, a new update to the Steam build went live last week, featuring the ability to save practice games, a few bug fixes, and a big overhaul of the screen display system that means the game is looking crisper than ever. You can try it out over on the playtest on Steam. Lastly, we have an upcoming event at Pixel Bar in Melbourne which is looking super cool. Come along for a beverage and a chance to go head-to-head against local opponents. Details…
- New Build: Unified Display System & Single-player Save Games - 13 May 2021
Been a while since we pushed a new build! There's been a few big changes behind the scenes, the most significant of which is the new unified display system. The game should now scale across all screen sizes consistently, maintaining crisp visuals and UI layout. Getting this resolved was a big task we needed to sort out before moving forward with more art updates. Feels great to have it done! Please let us know if you see any screen size related oddness... We also added save games for practice mode, so now you can return to AI matches easily. The rest of the update is mostly bug fixes or UI tweaks here and there. With this build out of the way, we've been free to work on some really cool new features for the future. Procedurally generated unit portraits and a proper solo campaign mode are both on the horizon! === BUILD NOTES: VERSION 0.22.0 === - Added support for saving practice games.…
- Dev Update - Mid-May - 12 May 2021
Maddy here! We’re trying a new format for our dev updates, something a bit more conversational, chatting with the team about their recent work. I’ll start. Over the past few weeks I’ve been looking into cool things for our discord (tournaments are in the works), as well as a fun physical event that could happen soon! If you’re based in Melbourne keep an eye out for that one. We’re also preparing for something big in June that will be announced shortly, so I’ve had my hands full getting ready for that. And now onto the important dev updates! It was a super busy week for everyone, as we prepare to push a small playtest update to Steam, while wrangling a couple of other big design additions. Let’s check in with the rest of the team… BEN Ben’s been doing awesome work getting the new procedural image generator implemented, creating random portrait art for units. Basically, it’s a system that…
