- Alpha 20 released - 14 June 2020
A small update to SpellShokked! that introduces our smart particle technology - used in this release to add some nice animations to your right hand. The particles you see are actually small free-flying agents that try to keep each other's company. We have developed this as part of the an 'insect swarm' AOE spell that we want to deplyoy in the future as a tactic to force oponents to move to other blink locations. Also, we are very sad to announce that this will be the last Mac release since Steam has discontinued macOS support for SteamVR. SteamVR is essential for SpellShokked!, and we currently see no financially viable way to bring the game to a macOS-supported alternative.
- Alpha 16 released - 16 January 2020
On January 2nd, 2020 we had a breakthrough: After almost a solid month of engineering and completely losing playability, we got SpellShokked back to running. This was no small feat, because the new version contains the following changes A completely new network layer. Spellshokked was originall built upon UNet, which uses a relay server (which is expensive) and a paid-for third-party matchmaking infrastructure that did not work very well. Technologically, it also used UDP frames that, although fast, don't work well with demanding games, and (worse) often get filtered by many common firewalls. We now use straight TCP/IP which is not as performant, but additional network latency of 10ms is covered by predictive movement code. The end rsult works much more reliably, and is compatible with most (if not all) firewalls Instead of a relay server, we now use Peer-To-Peer connections. This furth…
- Alpha 15 is live - 13 December 2019
Another month, another update. Progess on the network front is frustratingly slow, and we are looking at completely re-thinking our approach. Still, we finally completed the haptics feedback module (which is a very looking-down-your-nose way of saying 'shaker'). When your spells are ready to cast, the right-hand controller now will start pulsing to give you a tangible feedback. Because, obviously, aural and visual wasn't enough. We've also started on compatibility work with the valve index controllers, and hope to remove any lingering issues with the next release in January. So, shokk around the xmas tree, folks!
- Alpha 14 released (Nov 2019) - 3 November 2019
The network migration (yeah, 'notwork migration', as we call it) is proving to be more difficult than we expected. So, in order to not have anything for you,, here's a tiny update that features some seasonal stuff for the home screen and restores the butterfly's AI in the home room We bet you didn't know that the little butterfly (which you only see if you turn on the lights around the rostrums) has an AI, huh? Well, it does, and it's not in any way a simple piece of software, as it has to mimick the 'butterflyish-ness' behaviour of fluttering about, changing direction near-but-not-quite randomly avoid obstacles while fluttering about OK, so it's not that complex, but still...
- Alpha 13 released - 21 September 2019
We are progressing the network update, and it is as bad as we thought. Changing network infrastructure is ugly in the best of cases, and this is not a good case. But we have some progress nontheless. Alpha 13's network code itself has not been touched, as we are working on a branch for this, so you can still duel with your friends. Other than that, we have added some minuscle visual touch to some scenes. The background here is that we were working on some of these effects for over four months, but had not had the opportunity to deploy them, as the levels they are intented for aren't complere yet. So we took some of the effects, toned them down, and added them to the game in order to test-drive them, If you look closely, you might see them, but they are subtle (hint: they all involve particle systems).
- Alpha 12 (August 2019) - 23 August 2019
We did it! We moved the entire game to the new infrastructure, and made it run. There are some inconsistencies, some rooms have different lighting, and some shaders don't quite work as before, but that's small fry. Network duels function, but their life is on a lease, which is why we'll need to prioritize that part in upcoming releases. The update clocks in at a couple hundred megs, which is due to a complete re-compile of all scripts and shaders, plus some re-mapped textures. Under the hood a lot has changed, but you should not see much inside the game, except perhaps for some small-scale performance improvements. Oh, and – except for the main room – we've taken out the moving dolly at the start of some of the tutorials, as too many people have complained about motion sickness caused by the movement. Sissies.
- Alpha 11 (July 26, 2019) - 26 July 2019
Another month, another alpha. With apologies to "Spinal Tap", this one goes to 11! This release is entirely about bug-fixing. As it turns out, supporting multible avatars across network duels has the little critters multiply like crazy. Even though most of them aren't of the game-breaking kind, they do distract and annoy. We should now have eliminated most of them, but are still tracking an especially annoying one that involves invisibility. This release has some debugging code baked in to help us get a better cross section of debug info. Note that we can't access this info ourselves. It always requires your active and willing participation to get that data to us. Should you contact us with a bug report, we might therefore ask you to copy and paste that data into an email to us.
- Alpha 10 (June 16th, 2019) - 16 June 2019
Ok, so we were a bit optimistic about how long we'd take to bring multiple avatars to networking. And yes, there's still the aberrant optical glitch occasionally when you blink in network play (although we think it's specific to some graphics hardware). Anyway, you now can take on your favorite avatar to unleash the fury of your spells on some hapless denizen of the internet. Other changes are minor tweaks to the way the sound is mixed (which should cut down on the clicking noise some of you may have experienced), and a complete re-build of the internal messaging engne that was causing some performance bottlenecks during scene switching.
- Alpha 9 (March 2019) has arrived! - 16 March 2019
This is a big update (and not just by download size). Alpha 9 brings a host of improvements: Player-selectable avatars: Until today, you always played as 'Aria', the hooded wizard (the one you also faced off in the Shield tutorial and one of the Solo Duels). Now, you can choose between five different Avatars, Aria among them (the others being: Zediuk, Fionna, Kas'Danel and Artemis. Let's see if you can match the names correctly to the Avatras). Note that we need to tweak the individual avatar joint bending routines. We are currently using a general reverse-kinetic routine that works for all skeletons, but since all Avatars have slightly different skeletons, the currently might look strange for certain movements or if your height doesn't fit that of our testers. Solo Level multi-avatar support All the Solo levels (but not the networked) now support the new multi-avatar system. This only…
- Alpha 8 released - 15 February 2019
As you probably have noticed, there was no January update – the reason for that being that we took a long-overdue break after spending the last two weeks of the Year battling the (still on-going) hack attempts on our site, and celebrating various superstition-based events. We returned mid-January to work with renewed zeal on SpellShokked. This (and the next) release will feature improved graphics. Since we got our long-overdue graphics hardware update, we were able to finally test the update to the graphics that underly the 'I want even more pretty stuff' preference. The graphics tune-up is on a by-scene basis, as we must hand-tune each scene individually. For each scene, we individually calibrated color saturation, contrast, and hue. We also provide (in some scenes) a subtle sub-pixel sharpening. The last update is causing is some headache (luckily not literally, just a figure of speec…
- SpellShokked Alpha 7 (December 2018) - 18 December 2018
We have just released Alpha 7 to Steam. This is basically a 'Mac Compatibility' release, as the Mac versions had some show-stopping bugs that we had to address first. We also are in the progress of updating our range of test machines, and getting all the graphics cards set up correctly does take some time - especially when dealing with Macs and eGPU (those things may eat some performance, yes, but HECK do they allow you to beef up yourtiny Macs gfx abilities!). We also continue to be under attack from asocial elements, averaging some 2'000 hack attempts per day, most of them automated, and most of them originating from Russia (that's not to say that the Russians are attacking us, but there sure are a lot of machines located in Russia that are targeting us). This, unfortunately, has also been a drain on our ability to add more levels ans spells to SpellShokked. Finally, we are looking at…
- SpellShokked Alpüha 6 (Novemer 2018) released! - 18 November 2018
So there's some good news and some bad. The good news is that we deliver the November release on schedule. The bad is that we weren't able to add all we wanted, nor in the quality we usually ensure. The November update is a purely graphics update: we have spent almost two entire months on two major improvements: - Anti-Aliasing - Ambient Shadows Anti-Aliasing is especially important in VR because we move our heads in minute ways, and horizontal or vertical lines that only change slightly begin to shimmer noticeably. Anti-Aliasing technology has matured lately, moving onto GPU and providing decent relief at reasonable performance cost. Unfortunately, traditional Anti-Aliasing doesn't much help in VR, so the newest solutions rely on a relatively new technology called 'Temporal Anti-Aliasing' (or TAA for short). We have started integrating TAA into SpellShokked, and the PC version now can…
- Alpha 5 (October) released! - 14 October 2018
Today saw the release of Alpha 5, a milestone release that brings a tremendously tactical spell to the duel levels: Invisibility. If you thought that fighting at close quarters was hair-raising enough, you'll definitely lose it when you know that your adversary might be lurking a few yards away, cloaked, and probably grinning. Alpha 5 also adds a new tutorial level that doubles as a shooting range, and comes with a host of smaller additions. Invisibility is enabled in all network levels, but may require some additional debugging before it fully works as intended. Also, due to the nature of Invisibility, we may need to re-balance some of the duel levels.
- Alpha 4 (September 2018) live - 15 September 2018
The new (September) release of SpellShokked is now live on Staem - update now. This release contains lots of small improvements (bug fixes, additional ambient audio, upgraded graphics for spell casting in solo levels, in-betwen level loading), new achievements, and a completely new network level ("The Bridge", titled 'though shall not pass" for reaons some people might understand). The new network level is adversarial with a new twist: standing close to the center of the bridge will start conjuring allies for your that start attacking the other player's bridge head. Player dynamics are very complex in this game, and we need to properly balance it. Also, there are some lingering bugs on the client side, but it's enough for a first peek. This build is for Mac and PC
- Alpha 3 (August) has been released! - 18 August 2018
The new release for SpellShokked is live on Steam - update now. The new release delivers tons of tweaks to the network versions of the channeling spells (as you may have found out, they were a bit erratic). We've also added a new network level, with a new twist: it's co-op. You don't try to off each other, but prevent the skeletons from reaching the door. Yeah, 'hold the door!'. We've also included an number of quality of life improvements, mostly under the hood, but you'l notice general increase of responsiveness when not in combat. And if you make your way to the library, you can try out the new glyph generating visuals that we are about to bring to all combat levels. No longer chunky lightnings, but smooth energy flows. The new visuals look absolutely great, but require some performance tweaking, and need to be integrated with network code, which will take some significant changes.
- Alpha 2 available now! - 16 July 2018
Alpha 2 has been released with the following enhancements: 3 new spells: guided missile, channeled shield, lightning The new spells are available in network (requires more extensive testing), library, and the new ‘darkness’ level 2 new levels: Channeling Tutorial and ‘Darkness’ The new level and tutorial are available once you complete the ShokkRange, or check the relevant override in the Game Settings menu Additional Audio and animations for spellcasting Numerous bug fixes, enhancments to the tutorials spell mechanics: fire balls can be shot down tweaks to light quality in many levels The new release is live on steam
