… It really has been a while hasn’t it? Most people reading this will likely be stuck in quarantine or practicing social distancing. Here in Germany, most companies are switching to home office – which is something Radical Fish Games has been doing for many years already. So at least in terms of CrossCode development: things will go on.
Today we wanted to give you a small update about what we’ve been up to. But before that we have an exciting announcement: One Step from Eden just released and Lea is in it!
Lea skin in One Step From Eden
One Step from Eden is a deckbuilding roguelike with a battle system reminiscent of Megaman Battle Network. And you can play as Lea as well!
Our blue-haired Spheromancer is an unlockable skin for Saffron, one of the main characters of the game!
Lea from CrossCode is Officially unlockable in-game! A big thank you to @RadicalFishGame !đź’™
We’ve been working on a lot of different things and almost all of them related to the upcoming Post-game DLC. We’re making good progress, but there’s also still much to do.
Instead of getting into details, we will just leave you with a number of screenshots and GIFs so you get an idea about what’s coming:
Keep in mind that pretty much all of this is still work-in-progress!
As for the console versions: things are moving forwards, submissions have succeeded. We’re getting close, but we still don’t have a release date yet. Sorry!
And that’s all!
Stay safe, everyone. And remember to wash your hands!
as we announced a few weeks back, we finally follow up with the small promised technical update of CrossCode! With version 1.2.0-5 we update NW.js to a newer version and also add basic support for the SteelSeries Engine.
NW.js Version update
With this version, CrossCode now runs with NW.js version 0.35.5, which hopefully fixes some of the memory leak issue several players have reported on Windows, as well as crashing issues on Linux and OSX. If you have issues with the new version (or past issues remain), please let us know via E-Mail (contact@radicalfishgames.com) or in the Steam Forum.
For users of the nwjs_old branch, things stay the same.
SteelSeries Engine 3 Support
SteelSeries Engine 3 is a tool that let’s you adjust all the funky periphery that SteelSeries has to offer. It also doubles as a kind of local server, allowing applications to register themselves as “Games” and illuminate your hardware. SteelSeries asked us to integrate this into CrossCode and being avid gamers ourselves the only logical answer was to say “yes”.
All jokes aside, what this means is that we can highlight certain keys on your keyboard based on in-game context. We are currently supporting all Steel Series Keyboards that have Per-Key-Lightning.
Once Game Sense is activated in the options menu of CrossCode your function keys will turn into a Health-Bar, while the number keys will light-up to the corresponding element. Future updates might extend this feature as players request cool stuff or we come up with more ideas.
Big thanks to SteelSeries who provided us with the hardware and tech support to implement this.
And that’s all for this update! Sorry for the lack of new content, but as we mentioned before: new things are being worked on! Expect more in 2020!
Quite some time has passed since the last Update so we wanted to let you know what we’ve been working on recently and what Updates you can expect next!
Recent Progress and upcoming Updates
With the Newgame+ Feature completed we’re now focusing our work on the Post Game DLC that will add a little Epilogue to the current end of CrossCode. Among other things it will feature things like an extended Rhombus Square, more Quests, and a proper Final Dungeon. And also a few answers to some of the questions you might still have at the end of CrossCode’s story.
Here’s a screenshot without context to give you a little something:
We don’t have a release date for the Post Game DLC yet, as it will still take some time to develop. We’re currently targeting Q2, 2020.
As we’re currently focused on the DLC, we unfortunately don’t have a lot of content ready for regular game update. However, you can expect an upcoming technical update in the next 1-2 weeks, as we plan to update NW.js, the software/engine we use to run CrossCode. We hope that this will fix some of the Crash issues people experience on Linux as well as Memory Leaks on Windows. There will also be a little feature added to that, but more on that later!
Now, a lot of you were most likely waiting for something else from CrossCode this years… those console versions!
As our Publisher Deck13 Spotlight is working on the port, here’s a short message from them about how things are going:
CrossCode for Consoles when?
Greetings everyball,
Michael here from Deck13. Publisher of CrossCode and the folks who are porting the game to consoles. And yes, we’ve been reading your tweets. Your posts on reddit. Your messages on Facebook. The outcalls on Discord. And we’re pretty sure there have been some Tik Tok videos, too. And as promised via Twitter, we’ll talk about the state of the console versions a bit. Also Switch, yes.
First of all: We’re still working on it and we’re making really good progress. That being said, we hoped for a 2019 release earlier this year. And – as you can see – this did not work out as intended. We underestimated the amount of work a bit. Or, in other words, it became… complicated. Especially the performance became a major challenge. Lea would say: Why?
That’s why: CrossCode is written in HTML5. And that means that there is tons of JavaScript. And live compiling it in a Chromium Browser is causing security issues on consoles and is forbidden on most platforms as hackers could attack the hardware through that. So we had to find a solution. Which is basically an interpreter which translates the code but locks it up in a cage. That also means: We had a performance bottleneck. As the code was read by the interpreter and then translated into something the console would understand and then read by the console. It is like watching a movie in a movie in a livestream. Yet: We have it under control now. We’re still ironing out the last issues, fixing some broken bosses and quests (which also have to be interpreted which means the interpreter must be able to read them etc.). But we’re getting there.
More details can be found in this video, where Robert, who is working on the interpreter, is sharing some details:
Sadly, Lea isn’t able to say the word where yet. But the question would be: Where are we at right now? We are currently focusing on testing the Xbox One version of CrossCode. If everything works out as intended, this should be the last major playthrough. We’re hunting the last performance killers, the last broken quests, the last weird behaving enemies. We are close to the first submission. We are already in the optional submissions. Yes, it runs (most times, but we’re working on that) at 60 FPS by now. And yes, it plays as fluid as on PC.
How? How can we not mention Switch. Well, we’re doing it now: We’re focusing on the Xbox right now for no specific reason but just to focus on one platform. Technically, with the way the interpreter is working, the step to other platforms is rather easy from there. Okay, for the Switch we need to do some further optimization, but that’s, compared to the rest, just some minor stuff. After that we’ll “just” need to pass the certifications.
When will CrossCode release on consoles? We’ll announce that once we have a fixed date set. Expect an announcement on a rather short notice here as we are, obviously, also in discussions with the platform holders about that. To shorten the wait, we’ve prepared a small trailer for now:
Thanks. Bye, Michael, Bye.
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And that’s all from our side as well!
You’ll most likely hear from us one more time this year. Until then!
