Ah, summer. A time for growth, frivolity…. and oppressive heat. It’s also a time for optional betas in Empires of the Undergrowth, so that’ll be the main topic of this July newsletter. I’d better finish writing it before my office gets unbearably warm.

A bullet ant ambushes a jumping spider from Destiny_Bound on Discord[discord.com]

We’ll be going over a perhaps unexpected feature that is coming along with the ability to save your freeplay game setups, which we think should allow for some really creative and fun games. Spreadsheet based freeplay setup editing will be discussed later on, but first let’s chat about the upcoming beta that it will (hopefully) be a part of!

In the very near future (just a few days, with any luck) we’ll be releasing an optional beta for the game. If you’ve not participated in one of these before, they’re a way of testing out fixes and sometimes new features to identify problems with them before we publish them for all players. Let’s go over what we’ll be looking to test this time around. 

Character artist Jack has been continuing a pass of creature artwork in the game, and this coming beta will be testing out new art for the devil’s coach horse adult and the slavemaker ants. Both of these currently have much older than most creatures in the game, being there from the very first early access release all the way back in 2017.

The devil's coach horse and the slavemaker ants clash after their respective glow-ups

As well as the usual list of bug fixes - such as a pesky controller issue with unit selection - and small improvements, a long-requested feature from the distant past returns this time.

In days gone by, it used to be possible to save your custom game setup as a template. Lots of people play freeplay as their primary game mode, and it’s convenient to save your favourite settings as a template for when you want to start a new game, instead of spending lots of time tweaking things to the way you like them every time. You could also share it with others via a copy-pasted string. While this system worked, we held off on re-implementing it while we made our UI changes and thought about how it could be improved in the meantime. 

The new setup saving button dumps all the settings to a loadable CSV file

In the new system that should be arriving with this optional beta, freeplay setup templates are saved as human-readable CSV (spreadsheet) files. They are now a simple list of settings or variables, which can be easily read with any text editing software. Sharing them is a simple case of sending the CSV file to your friend and having them put it in the appropriate folder.

The list of variables a freeplay CSV template saves might seem daunting - but it’s really straightforward. It’s just a list of all of the things that you can edit in the freeplay setup menu - most of which are simple true or false values, creature names, or numbers. This is only the basic functionality of the spreadsheet-based setups, though. With a little know-how, they’re a rather powerful tool.

With some editing of the freeplay template files in any text or spreadsheet editor (Notepad, Excel, TextEdit, etc) some really funky stuff can be brought into existence. 

There will be a whole bunch of variables that cannot be changed from within the game - things that are best experimented with by curious people who want to produce something fun! Let’s go over an example, just to give a little taste of the kind of stuff that can be achieved. We think we’ll include a few of these example scenarios in with the beta package to give an idea of how these things work.

In this freeplay scenario, the idea is that the player is playing as a super-powerful version of an ereptor colony under near-constant attack from a whole plethora of ravenous uber creatures. The spawn chance of ubers and the speed at which uber spawns ramp up, as well as the grace period at the start of the game, are changed by adding the following lines to HuntTheUbers.csv:

ENVIRONMENTAL_GRACEPERIOD,0.1
ENVIRONMENTAL_UBERSPAWNCHANCE,12

ENVIRONMENTAL_UBERRAMPSPEED,12

This makes uber creatures begin spawning almost immediately, makes them much more likely to spawn, and makes the ramping up of spawns much quicker.

A screenshot from this Hunt The Ubers scenario - most of the red dots on the map are uber creatures!

We can also edit the player colony to be super powerful by adding lines like the following, which maxes out the piercing minor improvement stat for bullet ants in the custom colony we’re using:

CUSTOMCOLONY_BULLETANT_PIERCING_IMPROVEMENT_1,200

This is just one small example of many otherwise uneditable things that can be altered by making a custom freeplay template then editing it outside of the game. Other things that can be changed include choosing a starting location and underground for each colony in play, changing the life span of landmarks, and the frequency and spawn location of attack waves, as well as many more. Certain variables can also be set to random.

Again, it does sound daunting, but it really is just setting some values in a spreadsheet. Along with or shortly after release of the beta, a document will be published (both as a guide on Steam and on the Slug Disco website) that goes through how things are set up, and lists all of the variables that can be experimented with. With a little time, we think some really amazing setups may emerge - and we look forward to seeing the community come up with scenarios that we haven’t even dreamt of yet!

I’m not going to reveal anything here, but I thought I’d give a little non-spoiler update on where we’re at with the major DLC scheduled on our roadmap for either later this year or early next. In short, it is going very well. Things are starting to come together, new systems are being tested and there are even the faint murmurings of internal testing on the horizon.
The current roadmapSadly, our long-serving environment artist Dan Coates left us last month, but he had completed the prop and asset creation process for the DLC before his departure. We’re very grateful for the five years he gave to Empires of the Undergrowth and we wish him all the best for his adventure!

A short while ago, the entire original soundtrack for the game - including a couple of bonus tracks that you won’t hear in it - went live for streaming on lots of different platforms! Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and more - it’s on pretty much all of the major ones.

Around the time of the World Appreciation Festival in April, we released a teaser trailer for our next in-house project here at Slug Disco Studios: Ants Times Infinity! The short 20-second teaser didn’t show a huge amount, but it is still very early days on this project yet. In Ants Times Infinity, a lot of the gameplay might feel familiar but different at the same time - collect resources, spawn more ants, send them out, collect more resources, and do it all over again until you have a colossal army. A fully fleshed-out champion system for ants with unique abilities and a strong underground element will round this off.

This project, which is intended to have a much faster development cycle than EotU (he said pleadingly), is all about growth and, more importantly, numbers. We intend the player to have colonies numbering in the thousands by the end of a particular game. 

You’ll note that the art is deliberately very different to EotU - pushing a more stylised look, with bright, bold colours and dark outlines to contrast the realistic feel of our other work. Fire ants, of course, live in volcanoes and leafcutter ants emerge from the safety of rafflesia flowers. Why would they not?

As mentioned, this project is very much in its infancy and it’ll be a little while until more solid details emerge - but the idea of talking about it now is to get it on the radar of ant fans. We’ll be talking more about it a little later in the year.

Finally, I know this is the Empires of the Undergrowth newsletter, but it felt wrong to not congratulate Aberrant Labs and the publishing team here at Slug Disco on the hugely successful release of biology-themed twin-stick shooter Pathogenic! The game has reached 75,000 sales in just a few days and has been awarded the "Overwhelmingly Positive" badge of honour by reviewers. Impressive!

It’s also been given the Verified badge for those of you using a Steam Deck - so if this kind of high-octane, rogue-lite bullet hell looks like it might be up your alley, I suspect you might just enjoy it.

Ever my favourite part of writing a newsletter, in Screenshot Central I choose three submissions from the community to highlight. If you’d like to be considered for a future edition, the best way is to join the Discord[discord.com] and post in the appropriate channel there - or post on the Steam community tab, which I will also browse through from time to time.

Pro tip - to uncouple the camera from the floor and get some more interesting angles, hold shift while entering photo mode (F9 by default).

Now you listen here you little critter - from tibikee on our Discord

A clash with coach horses from Akilay Williams on our Discord

An overview of the savannah from BHA queen (maybe) on our Discord