#radicalfishgames

It’s finally time for a new version of CrossCode! And boy it has a lot of new stuff! We have menus, story, content and… Linux and MacOS versions in store! So let’s get right to it!

The Story Continues

As promised the story of CrossCode will continue with the 0.5 release. After arriving in Rookie Harbor you’ll now get a proper introduction into CrossWorlds and what this game is about:

You’ll also get the chance to have a duel with a certain someone:

It’s time to see who the better Spheromancer is!

Huh? What about Emilie? Ah! Of course we can’t forget one of the biggest new features we added to CrossCode:

Party Members

That’s right! Emilie joins the fight as an AI-controlled Party member. And just like you might have guessed she will be using a lot of close ranged attacks combined with quick dodges. Now you can pummel foes with even more style! Perfect Guard an enemy and let Emilie finished the job, no problem! We’re really happy about this feature and we hope you all have a lot of fun with it.

But fret not if you think Emilie will steal the show! You can adjust her behavior by using the new Party Strategy Menu in the Quick Menu:

All party members will follow your lead immediately. So if you rather want to fight alone, you can still do so. Some parts of the story might require you to keep a party member for a set amount of time but you will be able to switch them out eventually. How, you ask? Why, through the Social Menu of course!

This menu lists all your contacts and let’s you invite them into your party (which can consist of up to 3 people). You can also just contact them if you want to chat:

Speaking of menus, we also added a bunch of new menus that were long overdue!

Encyclopedia, Records & Monster Fibula

After a certain point in the story you will now gain the Disc of Insight which grants you access to 3 new menus in the Synopsis section.

Encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia is a compendium of all the lore in CrossCode, that includes your Story progression, Characters, in-game lore of CrossWorlds and Real World lore which covers topics like the M.S. Solar cargo ship or what company created CrossWorlds. Each entry can have multiple paragraphs and pages. The progress for each one is reflected by the completion percent on the right side of the entry.

Records

The Records Menu is CrossCode in numbers. Everything from “Total exp gained in combat” to “Number of times Lea said ‘hi’” is included (Yes, we count those). You’ll also get some nice percent view of your total progress in CrossCode via this menu. For as long as the Early Access is active these percentages might be off from times to times as we add new stuff.

Monster Fibula

Finally the Monster Fibula. In this menu you find detailed information about every enemy you fought (and defeated). Once you defeated an enemy a certain number of times you’ll unlock the second page which contains what we call Reports. Reports are information on an enemy you found somewhere. However, the first entry is always unlocked. Currently not all enemies have reports so expect more of them in the next releases!

Analyze Mode

Something we’ve planned from the very beginning has now found its way into the game, too! You can now analyze your environment!

Using the Scope button in the quick menu you can hover over points of interest to reveal their purpose. To tell them apart each point can have a different color. For instance violett stands for traders or shopkeepers while blue is for regular NPCs. Their are also special types like the red ones in the screen above! Those are for enemies. By Just opening the quick menu you can see the level of an enemy. Hovering over an enemy reveals its base stats:

Better watch out…

Quest NPCs will also be visible immediately once you entered the quick menu. This way you’ll always know where you can find an important quest-related character. This also allows us to create interesting quests where you have to use the Analyze Mode to find something otherwise hidden.

Other Updates

Beside these big new features we also changed small things and worked on existing features and areas. One of those is Bergen Village which finally gets more crowded. It’s not quite where we want it but still, it’s an improvement:

As you can see Bergen now has it’s own set of NPCs graphics! The Quest Hub in Rookie Harbor also got a make over and is now swarming with players:

Apart from this, there are smaller changes like the new Tutorials which will only popped once when you first took on a quest or learned a combat art.

Also visible here are the new updates messages you get when finding a landmark. This will also pop up when solving a quest task. If you rather want to use the old style on the right side of the screen you can change the setting in the Options Menu! Speaking of the Options Menu, since we added the Social Menu we decided to move the Options Menu to the Pause Screen to avoid having to much menu options in the main menu.

And last but not least we also have new sounds for various actions in CrossCode as well as a new theme for Bergen Village! Check it out right here:

https://soundcloud.com/interovgm/bergen-village

Linux and MacOS Version

We finally took some time to work on the Linux and MacOS Versions of the game, or better the build process and getting it to run in Steam. With the 0.5 version we’ll be providing a first build for both systems. However it’s very much a work in progress and errors might occur. Hopefully everything will work right away!

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Phew~ Alright! That’s all for the 0.5 Version! Or wait… there is one final thing…

AUTOSAVE!

We finally added it! Who needs saving anyway?

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Okay, but that was really all we got.

Here’s a link to the steam store page in case you need one: Click on Me!

Cross Week

Now to something else, the CrossWeek. Last week, right before the release some of us met and worked on CrossCode a whole week non-stop. We discussed a lot of upcoming stuff like dungeons, areas and monsters. Frececreated two new pieces of concept art for the heat dungeon and made a video of them:

We also took some tasty pictures of our endeavors:

Buying food for the week. Fun fact: all the healthy stuff is covered buy the junk food, money shot!

The future of CrossCode hangs in balance as we try to open cans without an can-opener.

Veggie Burger! … with bacon! #norules

Of course we brought our trusty mascot too! Over the time it gained more and more hats.

As always the CrossWeek was amazing for our progress and we’ll definitely doing it again sooner next time.

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Alright everyball, that’s it! We hope you enjoy the new version just as much as we enjoyed working on it! We’re eager to hear your feedback (both good and bad). We’ll have a follow up next week to tell you more about our milestone for 0.6 so stay tuned.

Hello everyone!

Since we introduced the Hi-Lights of the week you get regular updates with new stuff we’ve been working on. Still, we kinda missed out on telling you about the next Milestone Release. We want to do this today: It will be very soon!

Milestone 0.5

With our last release 0.4 we added a major part of content with the Cold Dungeon and Bergen Village. With Milestone 0.5, you will mostly get two things: Features and Story! We plan to release the Milestone 0.5 in Feburary 9, 2016!

Here a quick summary of what you will get!

Lore Menu! You can now collect all kind of background information about CrossWorlds and more. In the Lore Menu, you will find all the details in one place!

Stats Menu! … where you can see all the stats of your current game. (still WIP, you’ll get proper icons in those tabs!)

Enemy Menu! You’ll be able to see the basic stats and item drops for all the enemies you have encountered on your journey!

Analyse Quick Menu! You can use this one to anaylyse your enemies… among other things!

And then…

Party Members! Finally other players will join you on your travels and help you during combat! It also comes with several connected features such as…

… the Party Member Menu, where you can see the detailed stats of your party, and…

… the Party Member Strategie Menu! Sometime you want to make sure, your party behaves appropriately, right?

And finally: More Story!

Impressions:

CrossWeek

Next week, we’ll have another CrossWeek! That means many of our team members will meet together (again in Hannover, Germany) and work full-time on CrossCode for almost a full week! We’ll use this as some kind of final sprint to get that Milestone 0.5 done in time, among other things!

Our last CrossWeek was a long time ago, back in 2014. So it’s about time we do this again! This time, we’ll try to also post regular updates about all the stuff we did! So stay tuned for a whole bunch of new stuff!

And that’s all for this DevLog, until next time!

After the holidays we finally got our developer mojo back. Of course this also means a new Hi-Light is here!

We added a small holiday quest which you can still try to finish! It will stay for a while.

Stefan added the Lore Menu! Here you can get intel on various topics, like characters and the world itself.

He also started work on the Enemy Menu! In this one you will find stats, drops and small info texts about every enemy you come across. To make show enemies in menus, Felix added a new option to show even bosses! Neato!

Additonally Felix started work on the Story again and implemented a private message interface for key scenes.

Alright, that’s it. Over and out!

It’s about time! And indeed here we are again, with the update we promised you! Read on to find out more about this release. We also got a smallCONTEST for you to win a guest role NPC!

Bergen Village

After the long ascent along the Bergen Trail you finally reach the second town of CrossCode! You can now explore Bergen Village with its complex structure of stacked building. It comes with several buildings that can be entered, a hand full of NPCs and even a small quest! Admittedly, it is still lacking the proper density of content that you’d expect from a town/village, which is something we of course plan to improve on in future updates. At least there are plenty of cool platforming puzzles! … Sorry.

The Bergen Tempel Mine

The main attraction of this demo will be the Bergen Tempel Mine, which is also the first real dungeon of CrossCode!

And what a dungeon it is. We were surprised ourselves how damn big it became over time, with all the puzzles that got added one after another. And yeah, this time we got a lot of bugs that are actually pretty damn cool though!

Also of course: there’s a new boss. And what a boss it is! It’s probably one of the most impressive pieces of pixel art you can currently find in the game – which is precisely the reason why we don’t show a single picture of it! … Well… for once we don’t want to spoil the surprise for you.

In fact, we want to make a small competition out of this! Read more about it below!

Heat Mode

Most of you will be familiar with the Element Modes “Heat” and “Cold” that have been part of CrossCode since the first demo.

Well, now you can finally get the “Heat” the official way and an entirely new skill tree including (so far) 4 new combat arts!

An entirely new level of destructive power awaits you! Also we added a couple of new passive skills for you to explore.

Well, and you will also need it in many puzzles inside the new dungeon, of course. Those Ice blocks aren’t gonna melt themselves after all!

Perfect Guard

With the 0.4.0 update there’s also a whole new gameplay mechanic we were eager to add since we planned it: Perfect Guarding. Now, when you guard you have a brief time called “Perfect Guard”. Any damage is completely nullified and you can even counter some attacks. Tired of the Spindash from the Hedgehogs? Counter them with Perfect Guard and deal big time damage to them.

Contest: Defeat the Boss!

Make a public video of you defeating the new boss of the Temple Mine (Youtube, Twitch, doesn’t matter) and send us a link [email protected]. You can add your live reaction or leave it out, whatever you prefer!

Among the first 10 people that send us a video, we’ll randomly choose a winner to receive the following price:

You get your personal NPC guest role in Bergen Village! You know, like someone bragging about defeating the boss! You can choose the character class and appearance and together we’ll come up with a cool dialog!

Final Deadline: Sunday, December 6, 23:59 PDT

Next Milestone 0.5?

And that’s all for this milestone! You may have noticed that something is missing. “What about the story?!” I hear you scream. So yeah, unfortunately we didn’t get around writing dialogs, adding characters and implementing all these precious cutscenes. But fear not: this will come next!

Milestone 0.5 will focus on continuing the Plot starting at Rookie Harbor and hopefully going all the way to Bergen (and beyond?).

Also: a more complete heat circuit, more menu content and new combat features.

Here we go! We finally release the next Early Access Version 0.3 of CrossCode! This release comes with major changes and additions, a longer story, and one major feature update: the quest system! 

Your Steam Version will update automatically. Our Indiegogo backers will find the new DRM free version at

central.cross-code.com

You can get the Steam Early Access version here!

The Story continues

Now you can find out what will happen after the cargo ship: Lea’s adventure will finally continue!

See new places!

Meet new people!

Explore the dungeon of the puzzle mode properly integrated into the plot!

Enter the CrossCentral.

And finally enter Rookie Harbor the proper way. That’s right, the story now finally includes the puzzle and exploration mode!

Skip to the new stuff with Save Presets

With the new release, the Puzzle and Exploration mode are gone forever! Ha! There is only one mode to start the game now: The Story. Of course, not everybody will be very excited about playing the whole story all over again, just to get to the new stuff. We feel you and got you covered!

Incoming: Save Presets! They allow you to start the game from a fixed point within the plot! There is a preset to start the game right in front of the puzzle part and one before the exploration part, so it’s very similar to the previous game modes!

Second: Your old saves will still… well… sorta work! You will be able to load your old saves at your own risk. There’ll most likely be errors but they may not all be game breaking. Just be aware that balancing will be a mess and there might be several strange situations. Have fun playing around!

The Quest System

Version 0.3 comes with one big major new feature: the Quest System! (insert reverb effect) 

This finally allows you to do quest the proper way!

You got a proper quest accept and solve dialog!

You can see the current state of the faved quest.

Of course you also get a list of all your quests in the menu.

You will also find many new quests with all kind of different tasks, like this amazing Parkour Quest.

Bergen Trail Extended

You can now climb that mountain of Bergen Trail even higher!

Along the way, you will even find a couple of puzzles!

And of course new enemies, too! And also, Bergen Trail finally got his own BGM. And it is epic! 

https://soundcloud.com/interovgm/bergen-trail?in=interovgm/sets/crosscode-original-soundtrack

Experimental Linux and OSX Support for Backers

For all our Indiegogo backers with Explorer Perk and above we now offer experimental support for Linux (32 and 64 bit) and OSX! You can download the version from CrossCentral. Please tell us if things work! Once it turns out that those versions run stable, we'll start uploading them to Steam as well.

It was a close one

Because we’re masters of time management we decided to crunch toward the end and did a lot of content and coding… like…today. Anyway...this means there will most likely be bugs. If you find any of them, please send error reports our way via mail or the forum and we’ll make sure to fix it in the 0.3.1 which will happen probably very soon!

What’s next?

There’s no time for a break for us! We already planned out Version 0.4.0. Also, we really want to push the teleport system. So much that we want to release it before 0.4.0 arrives. So expect some sort of 0.3.5 Version very soon! With this you’ll be finally able to quickly teleport from one point to another without having to talk to an NPC or backtrack. Also the next DevLog will include the usual preview on Version 0.4.0. So keep your eyes on the blog!