Hey squad,
We're happy to announce the new Challenge Creator is now live!
Challenge Creator is a major update to The Horde Wants You Dead that allows you, the players, to setup challenges how you want to. This isn't just about tweaking how big the horde is or how strong enemies are, instead we've exposed most of the game's systems to the Challenge Creator. We wanted to give you the ability to alter as much as we reasonably could. Here's what you can play with in the Challenge Creator:
Horde - What enemies appear and their spawn patterns.
Enemies - Their properties, such as health, speed or attack damage.
Players - Their starting stats and how much they can improve with upgrades.
Weapons - The selection available to players, and modifying all of their stats.
Supply crates - How many should arrive, or disable them entirely.
Upgrade cards - What cards appear and the upgrade values they provide.
Med Packs - How often they spawn and how much they heal you.
Length of the game.
Want to become crazy OP and mow down the horde? You can create that.
Want to setup a fiendishly difficult challenge for you and your friends? You can do that.
Want to tweak the game's existing 1-5 challenge levels? You can do that too - we've provided our current challenge levels as templates for you to start from.
The Challenge Creator is fully integrated with the Steam Workshop to allow you to share, collaborate and rate challenges.
Uploading challenges to the Workshop is encouraged but not required. You do not need to upload challenges to the Workshop to be able to host games with your own challenges. Likewise, you do not need to subscribe to any challenge in the Workshop to be able to join a squad.
The Challenge Creator may appear technical and daunting on first sight, but don't fret, as we've written a comprehensive guide to help you. It covers everything from creating new challenges, to explaining all the sections of the Challenge Creator, through to publishing your creations! Do let us know if anything needs further explanation.
You can view the guide here.
We have created and uploaded some official challenges to start things off. We took each of the 5 challenge levels from the main game, and created 2 varieties of each one:
One with all weapons unlocked.
One with 150% horde size.
Note that these are very basic examples based on our first demo and a frequent request to use all weapons on all challenge levels. You're able to do considerably more than these simple changes!
Have a look at the available challenges here and remember to subscribe to them in order to play and host games with them.
You can host and play custom challenges that you're subscribed to in the Steam Workshop, or join any squad with any challenge, but for now the Challenge Creator is disabled on Steam Deck as it's an intricate UI and we need to make sure it works nicely on the device with all the text input and controls. We hope to rectify this soon.
The Challenge Creator has a dedicated channel on our Discord, so head on over there to discuss authoring, ideas, give feedback and to play other people's challenges.
We're hoping that the launch of Challenge Creator goes smoothly, but it's a significant new feature that touched a lot of the codebase. Please report any bugs that you may find in our Discord bug channel and we'll aim to fix them quickly. Thanks.
We're also introducing a brand new way to find squads in this update! The Lobby Browser will list the squads available for you to join, showing you the selected challenge, number of players and ping.
The lobby also had a small facelift. You can now find the lobby discovery option at the top of the screen, next to the squad code.
They're coming! We promise! We plan to share more on this very soon. Thank you for your patience.
Thanks for reading this far! We're excited about Challenge Creator and we're looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with and what become your favorite type of challenges.
Happy creating!
Martin & João
Bellyflop Games