Here we go, new level!

With the Sky Archipelago, continues my vision for the second path in the game, with the first one taking to the depths of hell, and the second one up to the sky. The next level will be the last for this path!

New content in this update is strictly related to the new level, in the next one I will go back focusing on adding a few more smaller things: I have a set of new cards for the mage in mind, as well as at least one or two new pets.

• (Level) Sky Archipelago

• (Enemy) Yawarasaphire

• (Enemy) Light Elemental

• (Enemy) Amethyst Tortoise

• (Enemy) Spuma

• (Enemy) Corallum

• (Enemy) Elemental Cluster

• (Enemy) Ophanim

• (Card) Slow Punishment

• (Card) Wind Dance

• (Achievement) Sky Explorer - Warrior

• (Achievement) Sky Explorer - Mage

• (Enemy) Attack Duplicarta and Skill Duplicarta will now perform their action based on the number of your cards (attack or skill) plus 1. Which means they will perform at minimum a single action even when you have no cards in hand.

• (Enemy) Ghosts' status "Ghostly" changed to give the owner Evasion only if it currently has less than 2 Evasion.

• (Enemy) Updated Emerald Tortoise's visuals.

• (Card) Changed the description for Fancy Bottle, Spring Water and the Mysterious item cards, to hopefully make summoning pets for new players less obscure.

• (Card) Complete rework for Stance Change. It can now be used only if you have no attack cards in your hand. Will draw 5 cards and give 1 SP out of combo, 5 SP in combo. Combo value changed to 3.

• (Mage) Reduced cost for most Mage's initial cards. Also increased the healing from Healing Dew. While I still want to keep the concept of "Mage's cards should cost a lot out of combo", I understand that as it currently stands, the beginning of every run is too slow, difficult, and feels like a chore. Hopefully these changes will make starting a new Mage run more fun.

• (Event) Added Spring Water and all pet Item cards to the pool of cards that "float back up" in the Pond event.

• (UI) The game window can now be resized in windowed mode.

• (Level) Retouched some lights and colors in Hell.

• (Challenge) The challenge that would make you not heal between levels will now heal you for half your max HP. (With the addition of new levels and difficulties I realized that it's very tough to win bosses with a reasonable amount of health, and that having low health would restrict your choices in the next level too much).

• Fixed an issue where the game would not save the Blood Bank's deposited amount of blood.

• Fixed some issues when selecting different screen modes.

• Fixed a softlock in the tutorial.

• Fixed cases where you could play cards while drawing them at the beginning of fights.

• Fixed Meditate card showing its healing value in red.

• Fixed the map not showing the right icon and tooltip for a Mini Boss room, when the level's difficulty would include "force a mini boss".

• The last update completely broke the card Grand Strategy. It's now back to a working state.

• Fixed an issue that would call the score screen twice if you spam clicked after beating the final boss.

Thank you as always for the support!

If you have any feedback or want to discuss about the game, join my Discord server.

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• The Data Deck now opens to the inventory screen by default

  It will no longer stay on the options tab if you closed it there, helping reduce confusion for players unsure how to return to their inventory.

• Shop item descriptions now indicate which items are metal

  (Items that can trigger the metal detectors)

• Slightly increased the range for full-volume proximity chat

  Players can now be heard at full volume from up to 3 meters away instead of 2.

• Fixed a missing voiceline from the examiner in the 2147 narrative sequence

  (Both sequences can be accessed by inputting 1988 and 2147 in the "Memory Access" terminal from the main menu.)

Over the last few months, many new and reimagined elements of SCP: Secret Laboratory have emerged. From the assaults of a living gun, to the reimagining of SCP-106’s dreadful pocket dimension — forever ingrained in these shared moments, we see your creativity, your expressions, interpretations, and so much more. We are excited to share many of the new inventions from our community since the last Community Showcase. Your creations continue to hold a special place in our heart, and we invite you all to take a look and enjoy some of these pieces!

We held a contest in April encouraging the community to share their #StrangelyContainedPlushies on our X and Bluesky. You all shared so many amazing images, and we are delighted to highlight the two winners here!

An absolutely adorable collection of all our plushies contained with you on your road trips! Not sure how well they all get along there though…

It appears dogs and cats can get along after all! Such a peaceful method of containment is a rare sight nowadays.

Much time and dedication went into this beautifully engaging animation. Having kept an eye on it for over a year through progress showcases, it certainly deserves a highlight, as it wonderfully captures both SCP:SL and the original video the short is inspired from.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vVJxVcZmImc

Wielding SCP-127 in full Class-D attire is already awesome on its own, but Grongo brought it to the next level by giving it the ability to speak, truly making them partners in crime!

In honor of our new SCP-106 plushie, sharing this cute and silly artwork of him protecting his son is very fitting! We hope you all cherish it as much as he does.

This image comes from Pyrkon in Poland, a convention that a few of our staff, including Hubert (pictured above) attended! We thought this cosplay, along with the jailbird, was so cool! We hope to feature more cosplays from you all in the future!

When it comes to self-expression and incorporating personal ideas into SCP: Secret Laboratory, plugins have long been a driving force behind creativity and customisation. This ability to modify the game reshapes the experience of playing SCP:SL in many different ways — whether for cosmetics, moderation, or game mechanics.

Scripted Events acts as a plugin akin to a programming language with a community dedicated to mutual support, aid, and learning. It grants its users the ability to create their own event scripts, enabling many opportunities through the automation of simple tasks. The tool provides an alternative pathway for people to try to weave in new concepts for their servers! Scripted Events establishes its potential to recombine many existing aspects of the game by working with a text-based parser. It is the combination of its simplicity along with the expression of most critical plugin-creation concepts that allows for particular beginner-friendliness as well as a broad spectrum of possibilities.
Elektryk Andrzej is the most recent maintainer for SE (Scripted Events) and is currently tackling the development of its successor, SER (Scripted Events Reloaded), aiming to work with the LabAPI plugin framework. A special thank you to him for helping us learn more about this community plugin! Former and initial maintainer Thunder300 has also helped us greatly.

The idea of scripts running custom events in SCP:SL first originated from a plugin called EasyEvents. Initially, SE was intended to recreate this functionality with a crucial quality-of-life tweak. Thunder’s concept included a custom yielding system, as opposed to specifying a time for each step in one’s scripts. With this initial spark, the process of a dedicated community forming and evolving soon began. At first, solutions offered for previous limitations brought people together, giving this new take on the concept a chance. Certain milestones, like the introduction of automatically-executing scripts, later raised the ceiling for what could be created, from simple event scripts closer to the functionality of plugins.
In March of 2023, Andrzej first joined Scripted Events. He originally wanted to create plugins for SCP:SL, but with the conventional solution of programming in C# seeming a bit intimidating, he gravitated to SE.

“SE is a much more approachable alternative compared to making a plugin by yourself using C#, and I know that from experience. Even though I knew languages like Python back then, trying to grasp every aspect of C# and EXILED made me think I was not the type of person for plugin development. Then I found Scripted Events, a plugin which lowered the entry point for server customisation, which was the thing I needed to start.” - Andrzej

There are many individual achievements and additions that could describe the transformation and progression of SE, maintaining its simplicity in use while expanding its potential. Whether it’s allowing people to create custom commands or introducing IF and GOTO statements, at its core, the community’s participation, mutual support, and creativity is the driving force behind the many ideas that come to life.

 “\[…]The scripts that people would share publicly were amazing! One of the very first public scripts in our server was CISpy, which is a classic SCP:SL plugin that spawned a disguised Chaos Insurgent in the MTF wave. When I saw that someone had created CISpy entirely using ScriptedEvents and no C# coding at all, I was blown away and knew that I had created something truly amazing. The talent I saw in the server using my plugin only grew from there as more features were introduced into the ‘language’.” ~Thunder300

While SE’s functionality has steadily increased and grown, the base implementations and design choices dating back over two years have started to pose more challenges. And so, after becoming SE’s current maintainer and developer, Andrzej set out to integrate plenty of updated features and create Scripted Events Reloaded, or SER for short. Elektryk Andrzej is addressing this technical debt and current obstacle from several perspectives, building completely from the ground up. Components like arguments, control flow and variables are receiving a full rework, while documentations, tutorials and a more robust help command are getting added.

As it stands, Scripted Events is bothan entry point of unique simplicity for new server owners and a project expanding towards more complex possibilities. In its existence as a social hub and shared context, it offers many commendable examples of collaboration, all the way up to co-creation.

We are excited to see how the journey ahead unfolds. Best wishes! Current progression and repository for SER: https://github.com/Elektryk-Andrzej/ScriptedEventsReloaded Official server-side plugin loader and framework LabAPI: https://github.com/northwood-studios/LabAPI

Finally, we wanted to thank everyone who came and greeted our staff at Heros Dutch Comic Con! We had a lot of fun meeting some of you and seeing your cosplays. We hope to see you all at future events!
And as always, see you in the dark.
 - Northwood Studios

Thanks to everyone's incredible support, Ratatan has won the Vermilion Gate Award at BitSummit the 13th (2025)!

This prestigious award is given to the most outstanding and noteworthy title of the year at BitSummit.
To everyone who played the game and supported us, thank you so, so much.

Ratatan was first revealed two years ago at BitSummit 2023, alongside a teaser trailer.
Starting from scratch and with the support of so many, it gradually took shape
And now, we are honored to stand on the BitSummit stage as an award winner.
The road from that initial announcement to this point has been far from easy.
But with our indie spirit at heart, the development team has worked together, overcoming challenges and refining the game step by step.

This award motivates us even more as we continue full steam ahead toward the Early Access launch.
We sincerely appreciate your continued support for Ratatan!
Check out the store page for the full Ratatan game by clicking here:


Visit the Full Ratatan Store Page

Milo Demo V1.8.3 Patch

-popped/eaten corpses now spawn perma-blood

-reduced smoke opacity from particle systems

-increased spread of "fake" PPSH FX

-increased the amount of points you get from hits and kills

-lowered cultists health scaling

-fixed some issues with cultist entrance logic and animation

-fixed a bug that cause the 'switch weapon' ability to temporary disable firing even when you weapon switch occurred

-removed dormant "rat-call" ability from UI etc.

-more improvements to gore/blood FX

The next major update changes land battles from entirely 2D UI based to 3D with land units that can rank up and be built out with modules like ships.

This update is continuing along the lines of trying to improve the things players say are the weakest links in the game. (With the last update being highly requested 3D buildings instead of 2D icons.)

Along with the land battle improvements, this update will ultimately come with a fresh start for the server, which is something it seems at least half the playerbase wants. (And the land units are changed in a way that busts everyone's ground defenses.)

What this means: The game was supposed to be seasonal with really long "seasons", that's why it said "Welcome to Andromeda Season 2" when you login.

The idea was to give everyone a fresh start once things start stagnating (Which could take years), and allow new players to join without being over a year behind.

So basically the next update will be the start of Season 3.

BUT this should* be the final season.
*Barring the off chance of something catastropic happening without a viable backup.

A Beta build has been uploaded to Steam Betas on the "testing" branch and a test server seperate from the live server is running for people to do some testing on and kick the tires before release.

The save data on the test server is from the live server a month or so ago, so existing players should have their stuff from then to test with.

The test server may be rebooted to apply the latest changes, so if you are kicked from the server it's probably that.

Land units and land unit modules can now be build on the production screen.

Once created units are not lost in battle like before, they just need repairs when they die, allowing you to rank them up from combat and equip modules to them, and setup a permanent army.

The defender that holds the planet can build stationary defenses that can fight alongside their defending army that are comparatively cheap with high stats but are fully destroyed when they die.

These stationary defenses completely replace "Planetary Units" that were locked to a planet before.

Star Movement Freedom:

Starmap level FTL blocking seems a bit overpowered, allowing one person to wall off an entire section of space for themselves. (Which is how it was intended to work)

With the goal of removing stuff that makes it easy for large corporations to snowball, and reduce the need for seasons to level the playing field again, Overclocking FTL disruptors to block starmap travel has been removed.

Since starlanes mostly exist because of overclocked FTL disruptors, starlanes don't have to exist anymore either, meaning you can jump to any star you want like it was originally.

FTLs will continue to fulfill their planet-level role allowing you to make a "Gate" planet with an FTL disruptor on it and put a fleet and army on that planet to defend all the other planets in the system.

Many of the changes made including the land battles overhaul are intended to make PvP viable again like it was in the old days.
Several other changes such as nerfing Citadels a bit already happened last update to make PvP more viable, while giving the defender a large home-turf advantage.

This update contains major refactoring to reduce the number of objects in the scene, and asset loading improvements to only load stuff in when it's actually needed to reduce memory use.

Several UI screens such as the production screen have been converted away from being in the scene disabled to only being created when needed, resulting in hundreds fewer inactive objects in the scene.

Lots of optimization tricks have been applied, like merging all the land battle scene rocks into one object.

Land battles are the heaviest performance addition yet, but the game still runs medium/high settings at 40-60 FPS on a Samsung Galaxy Note 8, a phone from 2017, so people on Steam hopefully shouldn't have an issue.

Happy Saturday!

Time zones exist, which means that, statistically, it's not currently Saturday for most humans. Still, by Orion Arm Senate Resolution #51,319, Second Half Games LLC was appointed exclusive rights and control over the definition of "Saturday" here on Planet Earth, the Home of Humanity.

So, here is your legally-mandated Saturday: Saturday @ Second Half #26 — Setting Boundaries

Read all about it on our website:

https://secondhalf.games/news/2025-07-19-ssh-26 style=button

- Quest Trigger fix "Green Shorts"
- Miscellaneous bug fixes

Patch Notes:
- Updated the button prompts for the pre-finale warning to show keyboard if player is playing with keyboard and mouse

Yikes, sorry about that title. I should have gone with Ghost In The Shell Script. Actually, shh, forget I said that, I'll use it another time.

Ok here's whats new!

- Not a lot.

- New Autosave in Day 5 (at the start of the third/final round of questioning) (did you know Day 5 is a murder mystery?! because it so is.)

- Cleaned up some code in Day 5 that prevents a rare issue when questioning Pendleton (thank you PsyD Mom!)

- One time, the word Irish was said and it wasn't capitalized. So. Now it is.

- Another time, there was an extra "a" in a sentence. And now it's not.

Oh! Something fun! There's a super cool Player's Guide/Companion to all the must-see moments in the game and it's now included in the PC version's game folder! It can also be found on the website:

Player’s Guide- Can’t-Miss Companion to The Phantom Fellows

Also, while I strongly recommend you instead use the in-game hint system, there is an official walkthrough on the website as well!

Finally, if you enjoyed your time with my game and haven't already, I'd greatly appreciate a positive review, it really helps out a solo dev like myself :)

And as always, thank you for playing The Phantom Fellows!