Hey guys!

This update will be a written one. To be quite honest I’ve tried to record it several times, but it just turned out really horrible or half-finished, and right now I feel that it’s more important to give you something than that it’s specifically a video.

Personally, I’m buried in work at the moment and it’s very difficult to find the time to work on Flowstorm. Oh how I wish that was work!

What I wanted to tell you about today (more like a week ago, but still) is medals and achievements. We’ll probably cover this again, in more depth, a bit later on, but it’s just such a fun subject that I can’t not talk about it now!

We’ve been lacking some kind of rewards for all the players who aren’t fighting for the top 10 scoreboard positions, and since the final game is meant to have medals and achievements, we figured it’s about time we add some. So that’s the next big thing to tackle, and should be implemented to some extent when the new Kickstarter is launched.

Medals - on each level, you can win medals by getting high enough scores; bronze for finishing the level, silver for a slightly-better-than-average time, gold for a great time and ruby for those really outstanding runs.

Achievements - we are also looking at achievements, which is something that we will want to have plenty of in the final game, but hopefully it won’t be that long before we can start adding at least a few. We’re starting with the ones that are based on info we can grab off the database, like if you’ve completed all official levels in counter-clockwise or completed all timers on a specific level.

Trickier stuff that might take a bit longer to implement will just have to wait for now, since there’s a lot of other stuff that wants doing before the new Kickstarter goes live.

There’s a great thread on the forums where some players, and myself and Joachim of course, (how could we possibly stay away from it?) have suggested achievements for the future, and if you’ve got one too, do share! If you think it’s too crazy, we’ll probably like it.

A tough question lately has been how to deal with the medals on all the custom levels. Either it could be automated, based on the author’s scores or on samples from the scoreboard, or simply have no medals at all. But automating it could lead to several issues, such as getting very inaccurate time limits if the author is not playing half as much as he is building, or if the samples that are used just happen to be unusually high or low. We will probably write up some kind of short guide to how to most accurately set the score limits for each medal and let the level designer run with it. That way you’ll stay in total control of your levels too, which is something we like the sound of!

That’s all for today, thanks for reading and we’ll see you on the forums!

Goodnight! :)

//Sranine

Out second devlog is now up! It's rough and awkward, but we'll hopefully get more used to speaking a non-native language in front of a camera as we do more of these!
Forum thread
IRC web chat (irc.freenode.net #flowstorm)

Yeah, it's sad. But it's only the Kickstarter that is nearly over. We are not ready to give up!
So we'll re-kickstart it in a few weeks, and as a part of making this whole journey even more interesting, we'll start making dev logs. Which we have no clue how to make. But hey, let’s give it a shot and figure it out along the way! :)
Come discuss devlogs with us over at the forums in this thread
A massive thanks to all of you who supported both the project and us during the Kickstarter!

Yes, we're on Kickstarter! It has been quite complicated to set the whole thing up since we're based in Stockholm, Sweden, but it is finally, finally live!

A huge thanks to Rogue Planet Games for helping us with the legal necessities in order to launch our Kickstarter campaign!

As you can probably guess, we've been super busy preparing the Kickstarter campaign, the web version, the website, and the heaps of paperwork and corporate technicalities that come with it. And as a result, here are a few of the things that has happened since our last update:

• Two community-made levels in the web alpha, made by 4t3one and Ravidge.
• 1v1 combat with local multiplayer!
• The Oscillatory; an experimental level with force fields!
• A tutorial level where you get a fairly basic version of all current gameplay elements.
• Level Center update; you can now give awards and feedback on levels.
• We now also have our own forum, where we can discuss the game, share gameplay footage, find new tricks to get better times, report bugs, show levels in progress and much more.
• If you're interested in the history and future of the game, check out the About section. We'll link to old builds, articles and more in-depth info about what the game has been and will be.

The website will be under continuous development just like the game. You can log in with your existing account! Click your name when you're logged in if you want stats.

Oh, and did we mention that we're on Kickstarter now? Go back us if you're into that stuff, and tell us about it! We want to know, because you, backers and players, are what makes this happen. We do everything we can for the game and the community...and one day, after countless sessions of keyhammering and cg-brushing we will say... (scream, probably...maybe cry too) it's finished! And we want to know who you are, who helped us on this journey.

See you on the scoreboards! And the forums, we hope! :D