Wayward

The day has finally come. We can finally confirm the date for the Steam Early Access release of Wayward.

Wayward will be released on April 22nd, 2016. We have a new trailer here:

We have a new website here:
http://www.waywardgame.com/

And of course, our brand new Steam page is here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/379210

Oh, and that Discord thing? Yep, we are doing that too now! Come hang out and chat!
https://discord.gg/wayward

Two of the questions I get asked the most is “When is Beta 2.0 coming out?” and the next one is “Is this dead? What is taking so long?”. Well, you now know the answer to the first one, and for the second, wait… that’s actually two questions. Jeez, one at a time please. It’s a bit of a long explanation. But here goes:

I (and everybody now involved) work on Wayward as a part-time hobby. Because I found a couple new guys to help me on the project, beta 2.0 has taken a lot longer than I thought. We have scrapped most of the old code. We have a brand new rendering engine (new graphics), we have a fully-featured modding system/support (through Steam Workshop), and a lot of things were re-written. This is on top of the massive changelog of other new features/changes and fixes.

New updates will not take a year+ to bring out. And because we are on Steam now, those updates will get pushed out sooner than before and make their way to everybody, automatically (well, if you have auto updates on Steam). We will also be doing a special developer branch in case you want to try brand new shiny features before everybody else. Steam Workshop will also make it easy for players to make their own changes, add content, features and more – and you can add it to your game in two clicks.

Yes, Wayward is Early Access, and Wayward is beta. Early Access can get a bad rap on Steam. Early Access means the exact same thing as beta does to us. I have no plans to stop development on Wayward. I hope our work over the past 4-5 years has convinced you of this.

Thanks to all that have helped on Wayward in some way over the years! Your support is awesome!

Stay tuned!

Some of you are getting antsy about beta 2.0, and rightfully so. Our default answer about when it’s coming out is “soon”. It’s mostly been said as a type of “in-joke”, but I can see how that would be a bit frustrating if you weren’t in on it. So when is beta 2.0 coming out?

The truth is, we don’t know. That is why we say “soon”. You could replace that with “when it’s ready”, “when it’s out”, or any other form of indeterministic sayings. When we know, you will know. The Steam page will be up where our release date will be shown to all.

For now, we can offer some new screenshots and some updates to what I said in the last developer log and the last post.

Oh ya, and it really is “soon” now, as you can see by the nearly barren Trello. We are in final testing and polishing mode.

Screenshots

Updates of Note

• You can now drag and drop to the ground from your inventory.
• You can now place containers within containers.
• Crafting now will look through containers in your inventory to find valid items for recipes.
• Containers will now show their contained item weight in the title/tooltip.
• You can now use items from containers inside your inventory.
• You can now sort crafts by category (shows up in unique formatted listing). Many new item categories added with this change.
• A completely overhauled interface/UI has been implemented with new art and design.
• Craft recipes will now unlock if you have only a single of each item required in the craft.
• You can now “Drop All” in to water.
• Fog of war added (black areas that you have not yet explored).
• A new dither style of fog of war/line of sight has been added. You can toggle between the two via options.
• All monsters now have facing direction graphics and attack animations.

This is just a taste of things to come. You can read about the other things in the Changelog as per usual.

If you’ve missed our last social updates with the field of the view, line of sight and other lighting things, here’s a handy history of stuff since our last progress video:

• Some line of sight changes: shadows now start AFTER the obstacles as suggested by some peeps
• Preview of new fog of war (black) mixed with previous line of sight (grey)
• Preview of new monster AI, fog of war, and monster animations in GIFV form

I’m here tonight to showcase some new experiments done by Sassafrass that plays around with a neat dithering effect. We have also done away with the limited black radius around the character, and re-added the mini-map functionality, in a new way, while zooming out. There’s also some lighting changes thrown in for good measure. Without further ado:

Beta 2.0 Progress Video

I do that thing I do and ramble on about the upcoming beta 2.0 changes.

You can view the full beta 2.0 changelog here.

Newsletter

Many of you have probably noticed a subscribe option on the site when commenting or registering. I was eventually going to use this feature to mail out announcements and the like.

Unbeknownst to me, this wasn’t actually saving any data, so it looks like we are going to start over. If you want to keep in the know on everything Unlok and Wayward, then you can head on over here to subscribe:

Umm (lol), wow, it’s been awhile. Here’s the much requested developer log #10. I go over a lot of the upcoming changes in beta 2.0. I miss a few things as usual, but you should get the idea. A lot is changing!

Special shout-outs to Sassafrass, Spacetech and Goaticide!

Follow Wayward’s progress live as I develop on Twitch: http://www.twitch.tv/drathy

It’s been awhile since I’ve done an update on the blog. As some of you know, I have been streaming Wayward development quite a lot, but otherwise, I haven’t been doing the proper blog updates. A lot has been done for 2.0 so far, and while we are getting close, there’s still a long road ahead from the looks of it. For day to day updates, make sure to check out the Trello Todo page. If you want to see how much work has gone into 2.0 so far, make sure to scroll through the giant “Done” list. Wayward is not dead.

You may also notice the immediate Wayward team has grown a bit in the last little while. We now have 5 active contributors with us:

• Sassafrass (Programming)
• Spacetech (Programming)
• Dusty “Goaticide” Melling (Illustrations, Art)
• Vaughn “Drath” Royko (Design, Programming, Art, Sound, Public Relations, Website)
• Richard “Orillian” Hobson (Programming)

But enough about that, here’s a preview of what Wayward looks like so far in beta 2.0 through the help of the new Wayward team! Keep in mind, it’s still a work in progress (no lighting/no line of sight).

Not only does it look better with all of it’s fancy tile-mapping and new graphics, it also performs better. Wayward has moved to WebGL, making rendering blazing fast. None of this would be possible without the help from Sassafrass, Spacetech or Goaticide, so special thanks for them are in order.

Stay tuned for more “Coming in Beta 2.0” posts.

Sometimes less options are better, as we’ve come to find out with gathering.

I gave every player the option to gather with any item they wanted. Which lead to confusion and unwanted cases where torches, shields and other valuable items were sacrificed unknowingly. Coming up in 2.0 we will see gathering get an overhaul.

1. “Gather” is now a specific item use. If you do not have a “gathering” item equipped, then you will use your hands. Things like torches and shields do not have gather capabilities.

2. Gathering no longer randomly chooses a hand. If your right hand has a gathering item, it will use that. If not, it looks at your left hand next.

3. There is now a text-based and sound feedback when the tool you are using is effective or not for the certain type of gathering you are performing.

4. There is a new “gathered” message type visible in messages instead of simply “picked up” which was used before.

5. Adding an option to gather with a non-equipped item.

6. A bug was preventing higher tiered tools from benefiting gathering at all (besides durability). Now the attack value, mixed with the effectiveness from each tool will be used as extra chances at gathering. For example, using an Iron Pickaxe (+6 attack) for mining will give you the chance to get up to 8 items from a single gather. If you tried to use that same tool for lumberjacking, it would give 2 chances (it’s not effective for lumberjacking). 2 chances is the base amount for gathering with any tool, which is why the Iron Pickaxe gives 8 (6+2) for mining.

Have any other ideas on how to improve gathering?

Some of you may have been experiencing some slow down and freezing with the latest 1.9.2 downloadable copy of Wayward. Rejoice! Porting over to the latest node-webkit has shown both an increase in performance and a stop to all the freezing some people were experiencing. This was only reported for Windows and OS X users, so this update only applies to those two platforms. Unfortunately the new node-webkit crashes Wayward in Linux, so Linux users will have to wait for beta 2.0 or the next node-webkit version if there is indeed some problems. Simply re-download and enjoy!

Downloads:

• Windows (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• OS X (10.7+) 32-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• OS X (10.7+) 64-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)

In other news… well, I plan to talk about some new beta 2.0 information coming up in a later post. For now, check out the new layout for the mods. If you haven’t looked in awhile, there’s some new or newly updated mods by various community members.

In 1.9.2 we are seeing a deepening of the combat system and potential strategies in regards to armor having different resistances and vulnerabilities. This follows the same model as damage types for your weapons against monsters; now monsters also have a damage type or types against you and your equipment. Combat messages will reveal if you are properly equipped to take on each foe, just like in the last version where it displayed if your weaponry was effective against them.

This will most likely be the end of the line release before beta 2.0, which will ideally see the long-awaited Steam release. There’s still a lot of things up in the air about that, so I can’t reveal or comment on too much of it.

Play Online:

http://www.unlok.ca/wayward/

Downloads:

• Windows (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• Linux 32-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• Linux 64-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• OS X (10.7+) 32-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
• OS X (10.7+) 64-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)

Bugs

Fixed a bug where:

• The offline/downloadable clients would not allow mods to be loaded (node-webkit issue).
• Quality of tiles did not transfer between setting down and digging/gathering them back up.
• Slime Gelatin would decay into Rotten Meat.
• Magical “Essense” typo fix.
• Attack and defense values would not be updated after an un-equip.
• When attacking a creature, you will no longer also pick up items from under it in the same turn.

Improvements/Changes

• Water routing ability (digging adjacent to water) and chances now depend on how much water you are trying to route and dig from. If the pool of water tiles is too low, it will not be able to spread naturally; however, above that, the chance for water to route is based on the amount of water tiles in the pool. The more water, the easier the water is to route.
• There is now a 32 and 64 bit versus for the offline OS X version of Wayward (previously only 32-bit).
• Fixed the tile/world perspectives on Forge and Anvil and Wooden Chest and a few other miscellaneous graphic edits.

Armor now has specific vulnerabilities and resistances and monsters now have damage types to be used in conjunction.

Attack and defense labels now have hover-over information which includes a more in-depth break down of damage types, resistances, vulnerabilities and skill bonuses for each.

Transmogrify, Repair, Reinforce, and the new “Preserve” now show up in each item menu to specifically perform item on item action instead of having to drop the item on the ground to perform the actions.

New

• A new “Preserve” ability has been added to be used on extended the life of foods.
• A few new items including a unique, rare weapon and a new resource (and tile).

This month we have another significant patch to the beta 1.9 series. I think there will be another couple of these as we continue patching and adding new features up until the bigger/huge changes coming up in beta 2.0. This one includes the long awaited inclusion of chicken farming. It’s a bit rudimentary at the moment, but some simulation is there in terms of hatching and egg laying. Eventually, we will see this applied to other animals as well as adding young and male/female counterparts for increased depth and simulation.

Play Online:

http://www.unlok.ca/wayward/

Downloads:

Windows (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
Linux 32-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
Linux 64-bit (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)
Mac OS X (10.7+) (Mirror #1) (Mirror #2)

Those players also being annoyed at the outdated and messy wiki can now rejoice and take a gander at the brand new documentation that will automatically update as Wayward does. As always, read all the changes below:

Bugs

Fixed a bug where:

• Multiple errors could be triggered when using a container that was in the first slot in your inventory.
• A typo that caused some creatures not being able to spawn on shallow sea water.
• Plant Roots was spelled “plant Roots”.
• Fire decay rate status was not being calculated per type, so furnaces for example would always be raging to start and last for a long time. The message is now more accurate.
• You could duplicate items by holding an item in your cursor and picking an item up.
• Sounds would sometimes not play properly in the offline, downloadable version.

Improvements/Changes

• Decode verbiage changed to make more sense with gather treasure changes.
• Aberrant Living Mushrooms now drop/carve into Red Mushrooms instead of the normal white mushrooms.
• Living Mushrooms no longer bleed.
• Removed attack from actions as it caused issues with timing/turns and there’s no option to disable auto attack anyway, so it was confusing/unnecessary.
• The Bull Boat no longer requires treasure, and no longer has a “win” state applied to it – it can now simply be used to travel to a new world.
• A new, more advanced boat has been included to replace the old Bull Boat’s functionality.
• Ammo and fire consumables (tinder, kindling, etc.) will now be checked throughout all containers in player’s inventory, not just those that are equipped.
• Chickens now longer spawn by default, they have been added to a higher tier.
• The container menu/window will now display the name of the container that is currently open.
• Slowed down plant spreading chance by around 75%.
• Speed up fire spreading chance by around 25%.
• Blood removal now has a custom message and no longer loops as a second action.
• Plants may now randomly, and rarely spontaneously grow (not just from spreading from another as previous).
• Performance of the offline, downloadable version should be improved a bit.

New

• Complete documentation and hint/help guide added. Caution: heavy spoilers! Let me know if you can see any improvements to be made on this.
• Added unique corpses to aberrant creatures.
• A few new items and item uses added.
• Eggs have been added and can now hatch into chickens, or be laid by chickens.
• Help and donation buttons added to the main menu.

Developer/Technical

• spawnMonster now has an extra parameter for forcing aberrant status.