Fictorum Update 24 - Kickstarter Wrap Up & Newest Alpha Version Incoming

This page is one of the Dev Logs for the Fictorum development track as published by Scraping Bottom Games.

Contents
Hey there, spellcasters! We’ve been in the thick of our Kickstarter and fulfillment over the last several weeks but we wanted to fill you in on what we’ve been up to. The TL;DR is that our Kickstarter alpha build of Fictorum has been distributed to the majority of our alpha tier backers (which has been really exciting!) and we have made massive gameplay and visual improvements recently, either for the alpha build or for our latest version, which will be released on Steam and IndieGameStand today!

Kickstarter
Writing about our experience with running Fictorum’s Kickstarter could easily become a massive blog post with countless lessons we’ve learned, things we could’ve done better, what we did well… and maybe we will write that up later, but suffice it to say that we were successfully funded by over a thousand friggin’ awesome people and that we learned a whole lot. There’s a good chance that you’re one of our backers and if so, then we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We have a boatload of work to do over the next year and we’re stoked to do it in order to make this game incredible for you.

Fictorum Alpha Access
We’ve had several people ask us if there is a way that they can play Fictorum outside of Kickstarter. Well, there is now—we are currently selling keys to the Fictorum alpha for $30! If you’ve been curious about the game, we invite you to buy yourself a key here (this key will remain active beyond release as well!).

Latest Alpha Build
We’ve been working tirelessly to complete new features and resolve bugs in our latest build, which will be available to those with alpha access later today!

Major enhancements

 * Male Non-Player Character (NPC) improvements (we’ll be improving female NPCs in the coming weeks)
 * Model/texture improvements to character meshes
 * All male NPCs will be wearing randomly generated clothing and armor
 * Enemy fear system implemented
 * Enemies will run from you in terror as you decimate their squads’ numbers
 * VSync added to Video Settings
 * The player’s stamina is now shown below health and mana

Bug fixes

 * Performance improvements to troublesome visual effects
 * We’ve gotten several reports of issues from those of you with AMD cards, that certain effects can cause massive visual bugs. This should no longer be an issue.
 * FPS can now be greater than 60
 * Holding right shift/left trigger to sell in between levels now resets properly in the new level
 * Rune slots are now ordered properly on the runes panel
 * Fixed a bug where clicking the “Story of [Player Name]” would open the history screen behind the “Game Over” screen
 * Fixed a bug where players could be attacked by a melee enemy, even though the enemy is disabled
 * The corrupted shambler can no longer explode when disabled/killed
 * The player camera will no longer collide with other NPCs and will clip through structures much less frequently

Coming Weeks
We’ll be taking a break from our Twitch stream for the next few weeks so that we can focus on getting work done on Fictorum, which will allow us to show you even more fun new stuff! We will most likely host another stream on 9/6 at 8pm PDT.