Town of Salem Game Forums

Hey Townies!

For those of you that don't know, I am Shapesifter13, Community Manager for BlankMediaGames. You might see me lurking around in the suggestions, feedback, ask questions, announcements, and bug reports sections of the forums. I am the link between the community and the devs. I am here today to bring you all a few updates on what we have been working on over the past few months.

As some of you may, or may not know, we launched the mobile version of Town of Salem back in October. This launch was pretty major as the mobile version is using our Unity code base that we are currently working on back porting to web/Steam. This launch was important because the web/Steam versions are currently written in Flash, a coding language that will no longer be supported in 2020. This port has been our main focus since the Coven expansion, and is close to being fully released.

We are currently working on finishing up a few different UI's that still need some tweaking/improvements, but then we should be able to launch a beta for the Unity port. This beta will be limited to Steam users, and will be an opt in beta. I don't yet have an exact time frame for this. We are still a few weeks out from having anything solid to say, but maybe next update I will have a time frame. Tons of optimizations have been made to this port of the game, and we can't wait to get into users hands to see what feedback you all have!

Some of these optimizations included normalizing asset sizes such as houses, or pets that when the art was done they were maybe made to small and had to be upscaled, or to big, and they had to be downscaled. In terms of programming we have been working on getting everything working on a local Steam build.

YAY! You do an awesome job guys and all of the problems from the last 6 months didn't help you but you made it so congrats!

Thanks for starting these up, it's good to be able to see what's being worked on.

Great! Me is happy. I'm not exactly sure about the new art, I like what we have now- but Just getting it out of the way is all most of us are really asking.

Oh my God a Steam beta. Am I dreaming? I've been hoping for this ever since the mobile beta, but I never thought it would actually happen. I'm so hype!

Any news is always good news.

Now we just need to know about the next ranked season, unless the assumption of it will come will come with Unity public release is correct.

IWrath wrote:Any news is always good news.

Now we just need to know about the next ranked season, unless the assumption of it will come will come with Unity public release is correct.

Its planned to a have new season come when they are able to brign something new, as in some additions to gameplay, and/or role changes. Thus it will likely happen a short time after the port is done when they got the chance to update something or add a new role.

Jerme wrote:

IWrath wrote:Any news is always good news.

Now we just need to know about the next ranked season, unless the assumption of it will come will come with Unity public release is correct.

Its planned to a have new season come when they are able to brign something new, as in some additions to gameplay, and/or role changes. Thus it will likely happen a short time after the port is done when they got the chance to update something or add a new role.

TBH you should make a poll seeing how the community responds to answer of it's not even coming with the Unity release.
I for one, would still do my normal gameplay and trials, but most of the people I know are already gone or at wits end.. Ranked Masters has reached such a saturation point, it's not worth the effort without putting together a queue. Even the reports are starting to show that at this point, not just the queues. Playtime has vastly overtaken the people with skill still willing to play 3 games a day and that base gets smaller and smaller.

Thank you guys for the really good news. I love it whenever Developers, whether Indie or a large corparation, gets in touch with their community and fans and updates them every so and often. BMG all the way.

Leharn wrote:Thank you guys for the really good news. I love it whenever Developers, whether Indie or a large corparation, gets in touch with their community and fans and updates them every so and often. BMG all the way.

That's the biggest blatant, racist lie I've seen.

BasicFourLife wrote:

Leharn wrote:Thank you guys for the really good news. I love it whenever Developers, whether Indie or a large corparation, gets in touch with their community and fans and updates them every so and often. BMG all the way.

That's the biggest blatant, racist lie I've seen.

Yew wot m8

BasicFourLife wrote:

Leharn wrote:Thank you guys for the really good news. I love it whenever Developers, whether Indie or a large corparation, gets in touch with their community and fans and updates them every so and often. BMG all the way.

That's the biggest blatant, racist lie I've seen.

u wot m8. u wont to fite me m8 1v1?

Leharn wrote:

BasicFourLife wrote:

Leharn wrote:Thank you guys for the really good news. I love it whenever Developers, whether Indie or a large corparation, gets in touch with their community and fans and updates them every so and often. BMG all the way.

That's the biggest blatant, racist lie I've seen.

u wot m8. u wont to fite me m8 1v1?

im just speaking the truth mate, if you look at the past year or two its been pretty bad, not to mention the fact how roles such as Retributionist (and a bunch of other roles) havent been changed or have been but those changes were awful, its been almost 5 years since ToS came out and BMG to this day has been too ignorant, the bot thing/unity have only taken about 2 years from them, they had 3 other years to do anything about it

There have been other changes and stuff that was worked on, the Coven expansion, for example. BMG is not a big company, so its not always possible to have balance changes released every 2 weeks.

Jerme wrote:There have been other changes and stuff that was worked on, the Coven expansion, for example. BMG is not a big company, so its not always possible to have balance changes released every 2 weeks.

its not every 2 weeks, its not even once per month, its not even once per 2 months, its more like 1-5 minor changes every 3-4 months

KatiyaKramer wrote:

BasicFourLife wrote:

Jerme wrote:There have been other changes and stuff that was worked on, the Coven expansion, for example. BMG is not a big company, so its not always possible to have balance changes released every 2 weeks.

its not every 2 weeks, its not even once per month, its not even once per 2 months, its more like 1-5 minor changes every 3-4 months

Again, BMG is a very small team, and considering that Flash has the impending date of doom coming in a year, they need to get Unity up and running with as few bugs as possible before then.

And before you say 'They've had years to prep for this', you need to recall that they had the Mobile port to take care of, which is on the Unity engine. That is up and running with some issues yet, but it's up. Then there was the botter issue, which took quite some effort to deal with and has resulted in the jump to P2P. Then there was the Data breach over the holidays, and BMG had to suddenly work to make the servers more secure, send out the mass email, etc.

Yeah the excuse of Unity is getting old, but that has, understandably, been their top priority because getting the game up on that engine is a point of do or die for TOS, and they need all hands on deck for this.

Before Unity, the changes were still minimal.

The also created an other Mobile client, before the change to unity happened, also the Coven expasion wasn't created in a short time, along with the quite controversal roles of the Vampire and the Vampire Hunter.

Jerme wrote:The also created an other Mobile client, before the change to unity happened, also the Coven expasion wasn't created in a short time, along with the quite controversal roles of the Vampire and the Vampire Hunter.

The Coven should have never been created to begin with. And what about Vamp/VH, there wasn't much done with them.

BasicFourLife wrote:

Jerme wrote:The also created an other Mobile client, before the change to unity happened, also the Coven expasion wasn't created in a short time, along with the quite controversal roles of the Vampire and the Vampire Hunter.

The Coven should have never been created to begin with. And what about Vamp/VH, there wasn't much done with them.

I agree with that 'The Coven' was external Kickstarter project (alongside with Steam and Mobile version), and it's a "P2P DLC" so with Kickstarter money they could've done it without leaving the main game without real updates for centuries.

@BlueAnubis: Keep in mind that then the expansion would still not be released, or recently, since as I said, the devs are not many, thus they cannot do a couple of thing simultaneously.

An admittedly crappy question, but is there a rough ETA on Unity at this point? The ranked saturation is destroying my soul and I was wondering if you guys have any thoughts about how the reset will look after Unity? I'm all for a complete ranked wipe where nobody has anything on the new update to balance all the time we've had to grind since last year, I think that could be a good time. I hardly recognize most of the people i'm playing with at the 2100ish mark and that didn't used to be the case

Kaladef wrote:An admittedly crappy question, but is there a rough ETA on Unity at this point? The ranked saturation is destroying my soul and I was wondering if you guys have any thoughts about how the reset will look after Unity? I'm all for a complete ranked wipe where nobody has anything on the new update to balance all the time we've had to grind since last year, I think that could be a good time. I hardly recognize most of the people i'm playing with at the 2100ish mark and that didn't used to be the case

Current ETA is “when it’s ready.” I don’t think BMG wants another situation where Unity gets promised within a time range and then doesn’t come out over two months after that time range has ended. My guess is that we probably won’t know when it’s coming out until a week or two before it’s ready to ship.

I will be posting the next update Sunday I believe. We are going to get some nice screenshots to post so you all can see the new Ui for Steam/web.

shapesifter13 wrote:I will be posting the next update Sunday I believe. We are going to get some nice screenshots to post so you all can see the new Ui for Steam/web.

It’s Monday morning. What happened to the update?

It's coming I'm sure - these are definitely a great move overall, and I for one am willing to wait a bit to see one.