Workshop log

The workshop gets a new coat

This is the biggest update the site has had since it went up. The first page of a visit now lights up like a forge, pages open from wherever you click, and embers drift behind everything. The mouse is a brass ring that reacts to what’s under it, and the dot at its centre is drawn by your system, so it keeps up however fast you move.

There is a search too: press Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) or / on any page to jump to a game, a section or a log post. If the motion is too much, choose “Calm the effects” in the search and every page keeps still. Your system’s reduce motion setting does the same.

Haboon Orbs has a page of its own now, with all 51 looks side by side, how to get started and the notes for every version, and the feedback form takes Orbs reports as well. A link that goes nowhere lands on a page where you can hold the gate for a while, and a few other things are hidden for the curious. I won’t say where.

Under the hood, the pages now do about half the work they did while you’re just reading, so they should feel lighter on older computers and phones. If something looks wrong or gets in the way, tell me.

A town to fight through

Build 0.2.19 is out for Windows. The streets were boxes until now; this build dresses all ten chapters in buildings, rooms, clutter and props, from the shops of Front Street to the stone of the Fort, with a landmark in each chapter to steer by. Some of those landmarks are still stand-ins.

The Fort’s finale is finished: after the Fire Ship come First Light and the last stand on the Mole. The crowd has learned to pounce, so keep a shove ready, and the Physician now carries a bone saw.

A friend can now drop into a game already under way and take over one of the cast where they stand. Versus gets a second map, the Market Square, and a first version of campaign versus, where friends steer the specials against the survivors. There is gamepad support, an Accessibility tab, a music score and first-time hints.

It is still early access. Get everyone onto 0.2.19, and if something breaks, the main screen’s “Report a problem” saves a report you can send me. Download the build or read the release notes.

Over 340 bug fixes

HaboonUI 1.2.5 is a bug-fixing release: every module was gone through line by line and over 340 bugs were fixed. With the portrait off, the player, target and focus frames get bar art that fits the bars and a soft glow behind the name. Nameplate buff rows no longer freeze in combat, /r opens your latest whisper window, the damage meter asks before deleting saved fights, and profiles keep each class's own settings. Read the complete 1.2.5 notes.

21 new level-up styles

HaboonUI 1.2.4 gives the full-screen level up a Style dropdown with 22 looks: a rebuilt golden sunburst, eclipses, runes, frost, fel and more, a crest in the colour of each class, and the Horde and Alliance emblems landing with a flash. The rest of the interface fades away while it plays. Twelve combat text fonts are back, the XP bar can be one solid bar, and a shift-click puts your XP in chat. It also fixes blocked-action errors from the world map's quest pins in combat. Read the complete 1.2.4 notes.

A cursor ring, loot roll rules and a What's New page

HaboonUI 1.2.3 adds a ring around your mouse cursor with ten shapes and ten trail effects, so you never lose it on a busy screen. Loot roll rules can pass on gear your class can never use, greed on greens, or Need on everything. Open containers automatically opens the bags and clams you loot, one at a time. And a new What's New page makes everything an update added glow NEW in the settings, so nothing gets missed. These changes still need in-game testing. Read the complete 1.2.3 notes.

Buff and debuff rows on nameplates

HaboonUI 1.2.2 gives nameplates buff and debuff rows of their own, with every aura the game lets an addon see, so you can finally see the buffs allies have from other players. Put each row on any side of the bar, sort it, and choose which auras show: everything, only important ones, defensives, dispellable, crowd control or your own. The HUD also gains a pet portrait, a separate look for the XP bar's living fill and buff timers below the target frame. These changes still need in-game testing. Read the complete 1.2.2 notes.

Five new liquids, and glass that catches the light

Haboon Orbs 1.1.0 adds five richer liquid animations, Crystal water, Molten glass, Rolling waves, Silken currents and Vortex, plus Dark glass: a saturated liquid with shaded edges and a quiet surface. 1.1.1 follows with glass glints on all 51 looks and reflections fitted to every potion bottle and vial. Both are on CurseForge now.

Work No. 05: Haboon Orbs stands on its own

Health and power as living liquid, in 51 ornate orb, potion and vial looks. Haboon Orbs now has its own settings window and runs without HaboonUI. The first standalone build is out on CurseForge.

A smaller suite, and a separate home for Orbs

The next HaboonUI update separates Orbs into its own addon, keeping all 51 looks there and cutting the suite download by about a third, from 150.5 MB to 101.4 MB. Last active orb looks and positions carry over when you install Haboon Orbs; suite profiles and setups will no longer change them.

Feedback keeps recent HaboonUI errors for reports, the Dungeon Journal loads its full data when first needed, and alert sounds share a channel setting. Fonts, health numbers and window controls have also had a consistency pass. These latest changes still need in-game testing. Read the complete 1.2.1 notes and update instructions. The current public file is still 1.2.0.

Three outdoor zones, a full skill tree and a larger cast of monsters

The internal build now has three connected outdoor zones and 38 authored room layouts that the generator can turn and place along the route. There is another waypoint to find, and the path runs from town through the new zones and back home.

The Ashcaller has twelve skills across fire, frost and storm, with four slots on the skill bar and a second set held on Shift. Burning ground, chains of lightning, frost protection, haste and resistance weakening give the tree more ways to fight. The selected forked lightning effect is now in normal play.

Eight monster families each have two attacks in the internal build. Character and party panels, solo/host/join screens and sound controls are also being worked into the slice. The art still needs its final in-game review, the Keeper fight and later quest work are unfinished, and most of the new sound cues are still waiting for their recordings. This is development progress, with no public download or release date yet.

Powder to the water, steel for the crowd

Build 0.2.17 is out for Windows. There are ten chapters to fight through with up to five friends, from the Wharves at night to the Fort at dawn. Empty places in the team are filled by the cast. Six perks, their skills and four difficulties give you different ways through the same streets.

The Fort now has its Fire Ship: carry six powder kegs aboard the sloop, work the two ropes together, light the fuse and get ashore. It drifts out burning to break the harbour boom and set the frigate alight. That is the first part of the new finale; the later beats are still being built.

The infected have new climb, fall and landing animations, and crawlers now have a low body to match how they move, so aim down. Companions fight as they walk and stop for a crowd ahead. I have also made a balance pass over the perk skills, including Parry, Headsman and Sweep the street.

It is still early access. Companions can get stuck, the later chapters are rough, and some infected moves are unfinished. Get everyone onto 0.2.17, give it a run, and tell me which chapter caught you out. Download the build or read the release notes.

Nameplates, look previews and a round of fixes

1.2.0 adds Nameplates and the original bundled Orbs, previews throughout the look dropdowns, one menu for HaboonUI windows, flight timers and an alignment grid. Enemy Radar, Quest Progress and Flying Coins & XP have their clearer names, while saved settings carry over. The release includes fixes across the suite and an updated setup with a backup before it is applied. Read the full 1.2.0 notes.

Nine new modules and profiles for each character

Tooltip, Mail, Toasts, Kill Feed, Loot & XP, AFK Screen, Quest Announce, Markers and Dungeon Journal joined the suite. This update also added shareable profiles, Europe or USA spelling, dungeon maps, new portraits, living bars, spell sounds and fixes across the existing modules. Read the full 1.1.0 notes.

Work No. 04 is not a game: HaboonUI

Between the games I play World of Warcraft: Forever, and I wanted one interface for it instead of a folder of addons that each ask for their own settings. So I made it. HaboonUI is a suite of 24 modules for Forever: bags, maps, chat windows, tooltips, a damage meter, battleground stats, timer bars, a dungeon journal, a kill feed and more, all set up from one settings window. Every feature starts off, so nothing changes until you turn it on, or you can start from my own setup in one click. It is free on CurseForge, and its page here keeps a changelog of every version. Get it on CurseForge.

The third work: Project Hollow

Work No. 03 is on the shelf, under a working title for now. Project Hollow is a dark gothic action RPG seen from above: you click to walk, fight and pick things up, up to eight of you in one game online. The land outside town and the dungeons under it are rolled fresh every game, so no two runs share a map, and every item is rolled when it drops. Loot is free for all, so whoever grabs it first keeps it. It is set in a drowned parish where the burial bells have started ringing under the marsh, and the dead come back carrying the stones from their own graves. On my PC you can already make a character, walk out of the first town, fight down into a dungeon and come home with your finds. The first class, the Ashcaller, a caster of fire, frost and storm, is getting its full set of skills now. It is in development, so there is nothing to download yet and no date to promise. It is coming to Steam. The picture on the works page is the title screen’s art.

One Maelstrom, and every tower can go deep

The endless Maelstrom past stage 50 is now one difficulty for everyone. Whatever your campaign is played on, a descent starts with six lives and the waves, speeds and bosses of Insanity, so a depth means the same thing on every save and the Hall of Legends can rank them all on one board. If you had a best from before, the camp keeps it next to the new one as “before the rebalance”. Down there the towers are tuned so that every build has a real run in it, not just cannon and frost. Basic and frost towers hit three times as hard. The cannon hits a little over twice as hard and its shells fly half again as fast, so they stop sailing past the rush waves. The sniper hits nearly twice as hard. In exchange, the frost tower’s slow is lighter, shorter and narrower, and it no longer freezes. Each tower’s card spells out what changed on its Attuned line. Every single-tower build and every pair I tried now reaches about as deep as cannon and frost, where before some of them fell at the first boss. None of this touches the campaign.

Every wave leans a little harder

A cannon and a frost tower at the start of a stage could hold off most of it before the rest of the map even mattered. That is backwards: inside a stage, each wave should get further down the road than the one before. The waves are now sized against what your gold has really bought by that point, rather than against a fully upgraded field, so the middle of a stage asks for the towers you could have built by then. A wave also can no longer bunch up so tightly that one shell catches half of it. The cannon was the other half of the problem. Everything near a shell’s target used to take half its damage, and now it takes a fifth. The target itself still takes the full hit, and the rank-five cluster bombs are unchanged, so cannons are still the strongest towers late in the campaign. That part is on purpose. Three empty pads that no tower could use are painted out of their maps as well: one inside the road loop on stage 22 and two at the bottom of stage 47.

Achievements and cloud saves on Steam

The Steam edition has 68 achievements, picked from the game’s own honours: kills, waves, finished runs, gold, towers, flawless stages, the Maelstrom and the campfire tales. If you already have progress when you first start it, everything you have earned unlocks the first time you play. Your saves follow you through Steam Cloud too. Start the game from your Steam library on another PC and your profiles are waiting. Window and screen settings stay with each machine, so a laptop does not inherit a desktop’s resolution.

Dreadmarch is coming to Steam

Dreadmarch has a Steam store page. The game is going out there as version 1.0, a full release rather than early access, for Windows. Everything the beta built up is in it: the fifty stages, the ten lands, the campfire with its favours and tales, the Maelstrom, and the Hall of Legends, which only the Steam edition can write to, so the leaderboards open the day the game does. Wishlist it on Steam and Steam will tell you the moment it is out; the Dreadmarch page has the button too. Two things change on this site today. The Windows download is gone: on PC, Dreadmarch is the Steam edition from here on. If you have the zip from here it keeps working, and because the Steam edition reads the same save folder, your progress is waiting for you the moment you install it on the same machine. The Android build stays where it is, a sideload at 0.7.0. It is a Windows release.

Build 0.8.3: every tower stands in the middle of its plot

Each build plot is painted into its map, and the spot a tower actually stands on is set separately, so over time the two drifted apart. On most stages the hover ring and the tower sat a few pixels off the painted pad, and on the World-Heart all ten had been pushed toward the road when I redrew it, so the towers hung off the front of their platforms. I went through all fifty stages plot by plot, and every tower now stands in the centre of its pad. Two maps had spots that were never really plots. On the Sporefield, three sat on graves, rocks and bare grass with no pad under them, so they are gone, and the empty pad in the top-right corner finally has one: seven plots now. On the Splintered Crown, the two bottom plots were painted where the road never goes, one of them too far away for any tower to hit anything, so they are gone too: eight plots. Centred, the World-Heart’s towers sit a little farther from the road, which made the last stage harder on Hard than it should be, so its waves are slightly lighter to make up for it. The update is small: 410 KB from 0.8.1 and 616 KB from 0.8.0. If you already have 0.8.2 it downloads by itself; on an older build, press UPDATE TO 0.8.3 on the title screen, then close and reopen the game. Your save carries over.

Build 0.8.2: updates that fetch themselves

A tiny patch, and it is about the updater itself. Until now the title screen told you a new build was out and then waited for you to press the button, and once the download was done, RESTART TO UPDATE did nothing when you pressed it: you had to quit and start the game again yourself. From 0.8.2 the download starts on its own as soon as the title screen finds an update, and RESTART TO UPDATE closes the game and opens it again on the new version. You can also ignore it, and the update applies the next time you start the game. This one still arrives the old way, because that is how the build you have works: press UPDATE TO 0.8.2 on the title screen (73 KB from 0.8.1, 336 KB from 0.8.0), then close and reopen the game. Nothing about battles, towers or stages changed, and your save carries over.

Build 0.8.1: a small patch

The first update since 0.8.0, and it is a patch this time. If you have 0.8.0, the title screen offers it: about 300 KB, and it takes effect the next time you start the game. If you are still on 0.7.0, the title screen sends you to the download page for the full build, which is 0.8.1 now. Your save carries over. A win that earns new stars now offers to spend the skill points right there: the victory card has a button straight to the Skills board, and Back from there brings you to the stage map as before. Replays that do not beat your best keep the single map button. Each tower’s talent board has diagonals now, so a build is no longer locked into two lanes: tier 2 of Ferocity or Vigilance also opens Tempo’s tier 3, and Tempo’s tier 3 opens tier 4 on both sides. Nothing else about the trees changed, and your spent points stay where they are. Vine Snare finally stacks with frost: before, a chilled enemy standing in the vines walked no slower than it already was. Now the two multiply, down to a floor of a quarter of normal pace, and anything caught in the vines wears a mossy tint so you can see who is held. The tower card, the Abilities and Supplies drawers, the Maelstrom roster and the Field Guide can be dragged by their title, resized from a corner and folded, and they stay where you put them; Settings has RESET MENU LAYOUT to put everything back. And before the first wave, red chevrons march along each road from the entrance to the gate, so you can read the route at a glance.

Build 0.8.0 for Windows

A new Windows build on the download page. This one is a full download rather than a patch: the new tips needed a change to the game’s core setup, and that is the one thing a patch cannot touch. So 0.7.0 will not update itself this time — its title screen will say a new version is out and bring you to the download page. Your save carries over. The campfire is more than a place to replay intros now: each companion offers a favour you carry into your next stage, a scouting report on the next stage in their land, and fireside tales in their own voices that open up as you clear their zone. A small player at the fire lets you pick any of the seventeen tracks. The PC build has proper video settings — window mode, resolution, VSync, a frame cap, brightness and the size of the battle HUD, with F11 or Alt+Enter for fullscreen. New players get one-time tips that point at the next thing to tap and never pause the game; a save that already has progress sees none of them, and Settings can turn them off. Android stays on 0.7.0 for now. From 0.8.0 on, updates go back to being small patches.

The next game: The Last Muster

The second work on the shelf has a name. The Last Muster is a six-player co-op zombie survival game set in Gravesend Harbor, a fictional New England port in 1775. Smallpox has taken the town and a blockade has closed the sea, so nobody is sailing out of this one. It is shaped like a campaign in the way Left 4 Dead is — you walk a route together and the game decides how hard to lean on you — but the fighting is melee first. You make room with steel, and your one shot is worth saving for the moment that needs it. It is in prototype, so there is nothing to play yet, and no date to promise. When it is ready it is coming to Steam, and only Steam. The picture on the works page is concept art to set the mood, not the game running.

Dreadmarch updates itself from now on

On Windows the title screen now checks whether there is a newer build, and if there is, it says so in the corner. What it downloads is only the parts that actually changed — the jump from 0.5.0 to 0.6.0 would have been about six megabytes that way, instead of the 266 MB you had to fetch by hand. You click it, it downloads, and it applies the next time you start the game. If an update ever misbehaves there is a button in Settings to throw it away and go back to the build you installed. This one is the exception: 0.7.0 is the build that adds the updater, so it has to come down in full one more time. Your save carries over, and Android is unchanged — it installs straight over 0.6.0. The version number now sits in the bottom-left corner of the title screen as well, which mostly matters when you send me a bug report.

Build 0.6.0 for Windows and Android

A new build on the download page, and everything below is in it. Your save carries over — nothing here wipes a run. On Android it installs straight over 0.5.0. The diamond packs in the camp shop work for real now instead of reading COMING SOON, though nothing in the campaign asks you to buy any.

The stage paintings move now

All fifty stages got their own layer of weather. Torchlight flickers, water runs and ripples, embers drift up out of the forges, mist settles in the low ground, snow falls over the passes, smoke and steam leak out of the ruins. Each one is painted against that stage’s own artwork rather than one effect reused everywhere, so a place moves the way that place should.

The Maelstrom repainted

The endless run past stage 50 has a new sky: a deeper galaxy, a wider vortex turning at its heart, and a road laid in six passes of stone instead of three so it reads as something built rather than drawn on.

New roads through Kingsroad Ruins and the Slag Procession

Stage 27 keeps the Dead Kingdom look it shares with its neighbours and changes its road instead. Stage 39 now runs a broad causeway around the molten basin, turns through a hairpin and climbs to the skull gate. Six other stage paintings were redone in the same pass.

Losing costs more, and bosses are priced to their stage

Salvage after a defeat drops from three quarters of your field to 40%. At three quarters a retry opened with almost the position that had just lost and more or less played itself; it is meant to be a leg-up, not a rebuild. Zone bosses are now priced off the field their own stage actually pays for, so a boss is a wall you prepare for rather than a coin flip.

Plots you can actually click, and an arrow you can see

Tower plots now take a click anywhere they look like they should, instead of only on a smaller patch inside. The red arrow marking where enemies come in no longer hides underneath the battle HUD.

Dreadmarch is downloadable: build 0.5.0 for Windows and Android

The whole thing — fifty stages, ten lands and the Maelstrom — straight from this site, no store needed. Windows is a zip you unzip and run; Android is an APK. The art and music that used to sit inside the Settings menu are now separate packs on the same page, which is why the game itself is a third of the size it was.

Gold stays in the stage, and a wide field beats one tall tower

Gold no longer carries between stages: each one starts you fresh, and if you lose, three quarters of what you had built comes back for your next try at that stage. Tower ranks are now capped by zone — rank 2 through Grimwood, rank 3 to stage 15, rank 4 to stage 35, then no cap — so the answer to a hard stage is more towers, not one monster.

Insanity, and a Normal with some grit

A fourth difficulty. Insanity gives you three lives, relentless waves and bosses built to end runs; you were warned. Normal was retuned in the same pass so it asks you to mix your towers and spend every coin instead of coasting, while Easy still lets any single tower carry you. The choice is made once per save.

Every land has its own music, and bosses bring their own

Ten tracks, one per zone, from the pines of Grimwood Frontier to the End of the World. When a boss steps onto the road the zone’s track gets out of the way for a boss track, and the two boss takes alternate, so back-to-back fights never sound the same.

The Campfire

A new screen: every guide you have met on the campaign, off duty, seated around one fire. Only the ones you have actually met on their stages take a seat, so the circle fills in as you push down the road — ten by the end.

The Steam build is ready on Windows

Store art, screenshots and the gameplay trailer are done. The store page goes live once the App ID arrives.

The Maelstrom opens after stage 50

An endless mode after the campaign. Its map is generated, not hand-drawn, and the waves never run out.

Dreadmarch runs on Android

Letterboxed for phones, and the Back button does what you expect on every screen.