Good day folks, and thanks for checking on Mud and Blood. I wish I could tell you that the game appreciates you being here but that would be a lie. Mud and Blood is just brutality, chaos and desolation. It hates everyone equally. As a matter of fact, if you look inside it is packed with mini AI soldiers who cannot wait to dispense hate and discontent to anyone foolish enough to enter the fight :)
Today I'm going to tell you about 0.1.7 patch that just dropped to the alpha testers. This iteration introduced command abilities. Every time the player gets promoted he/she gets to pick one command ability from 3 cards randomly selected. These abilities are very powerful and can range from being able to call in a Sherman tank, a B17 bomber strike or some nasty White Phosphorus. There are 17 different abilities to choose from, and these abilities can have different tier/rarity increasing their power. You have complete control over what you decide to select. No skill tree, no hand-holding. You wish to have a fleet of Sherman by the rank of General that is my friend, entirely up to you.
The second feature of this patch is Battle Conditions. In gamer speak, these are mutators that are added randomly from a pool of 50 (yup) to the mix when the game generates your battlefield for the day. This can be weather conditions, enemy dispositions, strategic events and even logistical actions. This will bring an extra layer of emergence in the mix ensuring that Mud and Blood become this battlefield chaos generator that we are expecting it to be.
This said, let's roll in the change log, shall we?
0.1.7
- Red text in the intro scene is brighter.
- Fixed a crash with the dday medal given to your soldiers.
- Fixed a crash with the tooltips about stealth.
- Added additional and pertinent tooltips.
- Jam fix text will not appear on troops that fix their jam but are either out of the line of sight or stealthed.
- Added 1 Springfield to the beach loadout in order to pimp the range of new players.
- Panicking soldiers will now retreat 1280 pixels (That is one screen away).
- Added a minimal distance for flamers to attack.
- Adjusted text for the medic skill to represent the new mechanics.
- Fixed a crash when a vehicle is firing at another vehicle while exploding.
- Soldier will not be able to throw stuff while pinned.
- Gunner's second-tier and third-tier skill timers working properly now.
- *intensive care affect med-pack
- Officer morale buff is now +5 if your morale is under 30, +2 if under 60 and +1 if under 90
- Frag grenade throw chances are augmented when the player soldiers are grouped.
- Same goes for Molotov.
- Combat creep augmented by 50%.
- Reduced by half the LOS blocker capabilities of the coloured smokes.
- Reduced the amount of equipment the Germans have on the beach.
- Fixed a visual glitch where the soldier that needs to unjam his weapon while moving was forcing the unjam animation.
- Added a check so soldiers would prioritize CQC over other actions such as reloading or unjamming weapons.
- Coded 17 command abilities, every time you are promoted you can pick one ability out of 3. This allows you to create a personalized profile.
- Coded 50 battle conditions, these are mutators such as weather, strategic advantages or restriction that will affect your next battle. Every deployment will be affected by 3 battle conditions creating endless unique scenarios. Combine this to MNB procedural map generation and you have, my friends, the mother of replayability.
- Created UXOs, or unexploded ordinance. There is 1 chance out of 1000 that around doesn't explode when it comes into contact with the ground. UXOs are still very volatile however and can explode at any time, especially if there are troops around them. UXOs are also susceptible to a chain effect.
- Reduced the size of fires coming out of Molotovs by 50% giving a fighting chance to the poor fellows catching one of these in the face.
- Fixed a timer in the Panzer that would let them stick around for too long.
- Adjusted tables so that German armour doesn't spawn on the beach.
- Added the state of confusion/stun in the Psychology Engine. A confused soldier must roll under his experience in order to perform an action or else that action will be spent being useless. Currently, confusion is triggered by being shell-shocked.
- There is now an experience save roll for morale loss when your squad sustains a casualty. Hardened veterans do not let their feelings get in the way.
- Morale loss for the squad that notices the death of a fellow soldier will be proportional to how long the soldier has been in the squad.
- Fixed the "total ground" stat for the soldiers, it should increment correctly now. will be displayed in increments of 1000s
- Made the map scaleable within the engine and dynamically which means the map can increase or diminish in size on the fly. This is still under test but so far it responds well to in-game events and engine commands. It is a fairly core functionality in the engine so I was hesitant to mess with it. Turns out it became necessary for some player command abilities and battle conditions. Let's see how stable all this is.
- PPSH41 and M38 have been added to the loot tables of the gun crates.
- Fixed a timer issue when using the tier 1 engy skill (bazooka).
- Fixed a timer issue when using engy tier 2 skill (TNT).
- Hits on target increase morale only if the target was is alive.
- Contextual tooltips that were active will be deleted at the end of a map.
- Rejigged the Vire biome to make it more urban and as per historical description.
- Independent skill cool-down timer has been added to run independently of actions. It is affected by the soldier's experience.
- Added a progressive equipment list to the German army. As you progress in the game they will have more and more equipment options to chose from. The new gear will be indicated in the mission brief.
So this resumes what I have been doing for the past two weeks gents. Currently starting the 0.1.8 process which will essentially be a polishing phase, making sure all the new mechanics are working as they should and flippin a couple of dials left and right on the balance side of things.
This said I wish you a good summer, stay cool (literally) and If you haven't wishlisted Mud and Blood and it's something that sounds acceptable for you, then I invite you to do so. Until then stay brutal friends.
Respectfully,
urb
Let's gooooo