Update 0.5 – “Fire Walk With Me” is finally here!

It’s taken us some time to finish, but we hope this update was worth the wait, as it’s the biggest one yet! Here are some of the highlights:

Once a firefighter, he found himself in a somewhat unhealthy relationship with burning flames. Though unpredictable and impulsive, his true nature is that of a kind soul who’ll walk through inferno to help his comrades survive the hell on Earth.

Pyro is a specialist character, offering both melee and ranged damage options. Focusing primarily on fire damage, he can be incredibly resilient, as his tolerance for pain has allowed him to not only survive the fiery hells, but also allow the entire team to gain strength as they lose health!

As he is tied to an update that introduces elemental damage mechanics, he not only excels at dealing this type of damage, but also boosts all elemental damage dealt by the rest of his squad. We hope you’ll find Pyro a fun addition to your teams, and that his flames will heat up this cold winter season.

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One of the reasons this update has taken so long to complete is because of the amount of under-the-hood code changes we’ve made to the game. We’ve improved the number generation mechanisms on several fronts, both the obvious ones and the more cryptic ones.

We’ve tweaked all the stats for every single one of them so that the higher the number you get, the better the outcome. Say goodbye to “the lower this statistic is, the better”. We’ve also tweaked the armor stat, which had a bit of a wonky implementation before, being a flat amount of damage reduction. Now it’s a percentage, so if you have 50% armor, you take 50% less damage from every single source.

In addition to the stat tweaks, we’ve also added brand new ones, from the previously missing Critical Chance and Damage to the fan-favorite and much-requested Ability Area and Duration. But that’s not all! There are now four additional damage modifiers tied to each of the game’s elements: Fire, Ice, Electric and Chemical. Investing in these will hopefully increase build variety, but more importantly, it’ll allow us to introduce new fun synergies in future versions of the game!

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Here’s a fun addition to the gameplay that we hope you’ll all enjoy: In addition to normal leveling during a run, you’ll now be able to earn new powerups that, when collected, will directly increase your team’s stats. These upgrades are per run only and can be earned indefinitely, so when you run out of weapons and abilities to choose from on the leveling screens, you’ll be then offered these passive upgrades instead.

Items that served a similar purpose in the past have been reworked and repurposed to both add interesting new gameplay effects and serve as “pros vs cons” gameplay modifiers to provide more build variety. Note that in a future update (hopefully 0.6), we’ll also be adding an option to customize the pool of available items, allowing for further customization of each player’s gameplay.

With the introduction of infinite upgrades, we’ve also had to implement hard caps for some stats, as in several cases, stat celling was required. For example, reaching 100% in either Dodge Chance or Armor would make your characters invincible, and most of us can agree that wouldn’t make for very exciting gameplay in the long run. Don’t worry though, both the stat scaling and the caps are subject to change as more content is unlocked in future updates.

Some of you may remember the cool and catchy tunes we had in our previous title, Fury Unleashed. These were created by our friends and industry veterans who also worked on titles like The Witcher, Bullet Storm, and Shadow Warrior 2.

Well, Adam Skorupa & Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz are back in action, and we’re happy to let you know that they’ll be handling the audio side of things for YAZS. Since the game is still in Early Access, both the OST and sound effects libraries will grow over time, and we’ll be incorporating their work into our game from now on!

With the introduction of the 0.5 update, we’re adding new music to the game, which currently consists of the main menu theme and two music tracks for each of the available maps (five tracks in total). In addition, the level music now consists of an intro theme and a separate loop for when the gameplay unfolds and the action really gets going.

Different game modes also offer music of different intensity: Normal & Nightmare variations of the songs. In the future, we’ll be exploring new ways to incorporate music into the game to create an exciting and heart-pounding experience, so be sure to let us know what you think of the new OST!

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• New playable Survivor – Pyro. Melee/ranged hybrid focused on fire-type elemental damage.
• Enemies now drop a new power-up – Military Training. Collecting 4 of these grants a choice of 4 random per-run passive stat improvements.
• Elemental damage system and new stat scaling for set Survivor’s weapons and abilities: Fire, Ice, Electric, Chemical.
• New stats: Ability Duration, Ability Area, Ability Critical Chance, Ability Critical Damage.
• Stat reworks: Armor (percentage damage reduction), Ability & Weapon Cooldown Reduction (+% instead of -%).
• Passive stat options are now offered indefinitely instead of money/health in cases of empty reward pools.
• 17 new items added, 28+ item reworked (item banning / pool customisation planned for Update 0.6).
• 18 new achievements + redesigned item rewards for most of past and current ones.
• Completely new, original soundtrack, with different intros & loops and separate normal & hardcore versions of songs.
• New sound effects and improvements to existing ones.

• UI/UX reworks and QoL tweaks for multiple different interfaces.
• Items now show their maximum stack amounts at the selection screen and in their popups (e.g. 1/3).
• Active ability effects are now displayed above the Survivor’s in-game position.
• Damage numbers are now also colored to show what damage type is being dealt.
• New level-up description system implemented: “Current >> New” instead of “New (+changed by)”.
• New accessibility option: HUD Transparency (for abilities and item icons).
• New accessibility option: Arachnophobia mode.
• Weapon volume option added to sound settings.
• “Toggle Auto Fire” key added to control binding options (defaults are: T key / left thumbstick button).
• Improved default controller binding to better take 4 options in selection interfaces into consideration.
• Large numbers now show spaces as separators (e.g. 12 734 125 instead of 12734125).
• SWAT’s “Pistol” weapon changed from an unspecified handgun to a Desert Eagle.
• Language/translation improvements & terms unification, such as:
  • “Weapon Fire Rate” renamed to “Weapon Attack Speed”.
  • “Weapon Reload Speed” renamed to “Weapon Cooldown Reduction”.
  • “Team Level” in main menu and skill-tree renamed to “Account Level”.

• Potential fix for rare cases of save game being reset.
• Achievement panel now displays correctly on ultrawide resolutions.
• Potential fix for freezes related to V-Sync being enabled on some of the 60+ Hz displays (if problem continues, please check if turning V-Sync off and limiting FPS to 60 in game’s options fixes the issue).
• Yet another set of improvements to aiming AI and game’s overall optimization.
• Other minor fixes.

• New items added: Detective’s Pipe, Icon of Cinder, Icon of Stillness, Icon of Tempest, Icon of Pestilence, Spoil Canister, Special Snowflake, Jacob’s Ladder, Plague’s Visage, Zugzwang Hypergaster XD, Glass Cannon, Bells & Whistles, Camping Set, Pocket Watch, Golden Key, Jewel of Life, Jewel of Death.
• Armor stat values of multiple items were adjusted for the stat update (flat damage reduction amount changed to percentage-based).
• Items modified to offer an extended or more interesting stat variations: Axe, Wrench, Bolts & Nuts, Compass, Duck Tape, Electric Perosnality, Frozen Heart, Frying Pan, Giant Enemy Crab, Lucky Bill, Slingshot & Toilet Paper.
• “Chocolate Box” now increases armor by 20% (from flat +70) when its effect is active.
• “MedKit” now also instantly restores 25% health points but decreases Movement Speed by 50% for 5s.
• “Health Potion” now instantly restores 100% health points.
• “Congratulation Letter” now has a new effect: Increases Movement speed stat by +50% for 5s after gaining a level-up.
• “Coffee Cup” now has a new effect: defeating a boss increases the Ability Cooldown Reduction and Ability Duration by 25% for 3s.
• Items “Barrel Roll”, “Power Glove” and “T-Pose Doll” reworked so that they offer different bonuses than invincibility frames.
• “Apple” now has a new effect: For each 200 points of maximum HP, increases Health Regeneration by +1/s.
• “Suspicious Pendrive” now has a new effect: Opening an Item Chest creates an explosion around the Survivors, pushing enemies back.
• “Self Care” now has a new effect: When HP drops under 20%, vaccums all healthpaks from the map. Effect can activate up to once per minute.
• “Pills” now has a new effect: You are now able to collect health pickups when at max health. Each health pickup collected this way gives you a damage buff of +100% for 5s.
• “Teddy Bear” now has a new effect: Every charge of Lockdown, Reroll, and Banish now have a chance to not be consumed.
• Fan favored “Annoying Trumpet” reintroduced, with a new effect: When you get hit, you have a 25% chance to create an explosion around the Survivors, pushing enemies back.
• “Potato” now has 1 stack (from 3) and its effect is boosted to 50% (from 15% per stack).

• Level-up selection screens now always offer 4 options, instead of 3 + 1 on full teams.
• Item chests now always offer 4 options, instead of 3.
• All weapons & abilities now have 4 levels instead of 5/3.
• All weapons & abilities stats tweaked accordingly to the new leveling curve.
• Most stats now have hard caps, which can be displayed in their popup windows (these clamps will be tweaked with future content additions).
• Base yellow XP gems value increased from 10 to 11 (blue gems scale 5x of this value).
• One Hit: Vile Wasteland wave definitions rebalanced to offer a fairer challenge.
• “Protocol: Critical” became a passive ability, which focuses on buffing Ability Critical Chance and Damage.
• Engineer’s weapon “Laser” now deals continuous damage.
• Other balance and number tweaks.

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As mentioned above, there are a few things we want to do for the next major update. While we have a lot of things planned, we’d also like you to enjoy smaller but more frequent updates, so some of the upcoming features may come in pieces rather than one huge patch.

Our next goals for 0.6 and beyond are (among others):

This also means new enemy types/variations, new stage hazards, and new music tracks. It goes without saying, but there’s more to making a new map than just the level design, so we appreciate your patience while you wait for more of this content. We’ll do our best!

We’re well aware that many of you have filled it up way back in the past and are longing for more meta progression to be added. We’re thinking about a new implementation that will hopefully give you many more skill nodes to spend points on, as well as an easy way for us to implement new ones in the future. Thank you for your patience!

Yes, there are a lot of items in the game, and we couldn’t help but add more >_

While we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, there is a real possibility that the next update will bring a pretty big performance boost. With the help of some of our friends’ experience, behind-the-scenes code tweaks, and planned updates to many of our tools and the engine itself, we expect the game to continue to run better and better. Even if it would turn out to be a small improvement, get ready for one coming soon!

While we already have “normal” bosses in the game, and we’ve always thought about the possibility of adding stronger main bosses, we’ll try to take a step back as we’ll most likely first implement the elite variants of each enemy. We hope that they will serve as an exciting addition to your standard gameplay loop, as they will both be more challenging to defeat than standard enemies, but also offer greater rewards when defeated. What do you think of this idea?

While we originally planned for these to come sooner, we’ll try to implement different ways for things to work well together. We’re discussing possibilities, such as the element, item, and ability combinations working together to create additional effects. We’ll try to implement some of those in upcoming updates!

This consists of both our and your ideas for content additions. There are a lot of them! We’d like to keep the scope of the game realistic, but after reading some of your suggestions, we can’t help but wonder what else is in store for us in this adventure together!

Thank you for being with us, playing, giving us feedback, reporting issues, and leaving us reviews on Steam! Be sure to check out our roadmap to see what we are currently focused on: https://trello.com/b/Ipc33X20/yet-another-zombie-survivors-roadmap

Special thanks to all of our beta testers who helped us make version 0.5 a great update (we hope!). We are always grateful for your support, but those who have played this public beta know how much YAZS has changed for the better based on your suggestions and feedback. Thank you so much!

If you’d like to, be sure to hop on any of our social media profiles and/or our Discord server:

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ㅤ  @AwesomeGamesStudio
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ㅤ  @awesomegamesstudio
ㅤ  https://discord.gg/m4JfXuS

Thank you everyone! Show the Horde the meaning of FIRE!

ㅤStay awesome,
ㅤㅤAwesome Games Studio

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