Hi all, Ivan here (our team's animator)

To celebrate International Animation Day, I thought it could be fun to share some of the behind the scenes process of creating Éalú. Warning for those who haven't completed the game: There are spoilers ahead but I'll use Steam's feature to hide them unless you want to see!

Today I'm excited to share:

• The physical setup for animating Éalú.

• How we planned & stayed organized during production.

• Some of my sources of inspiration for the animation in our project.

The world of Éalú was built inside my roughly 2.5m x 4.5m (8ft x 15ft) garden shed, on top of this beast:

That's my 1250x1250mm CnC routing table I normally use to build parts for live theatre sets, and is also the tool I used to carve all the wooden parts for the maze, puzzles, puppets and set pieces for our game. It doubles as an excellent stopmotion animation table, as it's massively heavy & quite rigid and therefore doesn't vibrate much or shift position if you bump into it or lean against it. Add in the fact that, with the lights switched off, my shed is dark inside even in the middle of the day, & you have the makings of a pretty decent place in which to animate... especially considering our lack of budget!

As space on the table is limited, I made the sets for Éalú modular. I created 3 walls with doors cut into them, and 3 solid walls, and some other custom walls for special rooms. This way, instead of needing enough space to build all 74 rooms of the maze ahead of time, as I animated I could select the appropriate walls, build a single room, set up my lights, animate said room & then tear it down and get ready for the next one. Here's an example of a room set up and ready for animating:

And a screenshot of what that room looks like in the completed game:

Once I had a room set up, the next step was animating every action the mouse could take in that room, one photo at a time! The room in the above screenshot required 7 animations: An entry & exit animation for each door, and an "idle" loop animation of the mouse rocking in place in the center of the room. To get everything just right, I would use a still frame of the end of the "idle" animation loop as a reference point to start/end the other animations. Here's an example of a different room where I was testing the mouse entering from the front, and stopping just before the position where the "idle" animation in that room should start:

With 74 rooms in the maze, and 512 animation clips needed, something absolutely essential which we planned out before creating a single frame of animation was....

All of the animation and back end development for Éalú was done by just 2 people; myself and Ben Orr. Due to our commitment to making everything in the game hand-animated, we knew we would need to stay very organized or get buried by what we set out to do, so the first thing we did was create a way to easily pass work back and forth to each other & track our progress.

At the beginning a drew out our map of the maze with pencil & paper, and then I created a digital PDF map of the maze & turned each room into a clickable button. MAJOR SPOILER - PORTION OF MAP:

Clicking on any room in our PDF would open up a tab in a google spreadsheet with an animation shot list for that room, along with the status of each animation:

And within that shot list was a link to where completed animations would be stored, for easy access by Ben during development:

All of this was absolutely essential and it helped Ben & myself a lot that we built an organizational architecture together before we started. This way we could always easily see what was done, what still needed doing & where are assets all were. While corridor rooms (rooms with only doors in them) were relatively simple, puzzle rooms get pretty darn complex. This puzzle room, for example, was made from 28 separate stopmotion animation clips, and Ben put them all together using the media player in Unity and a lot of careful thought and imaginative thinking to make it all work based on mouse click inputs:

That spider web of connecting lines is the state machine he built to track the state of each circle in the puzzle, how full it was, which portion of the corresponding animation was to be played based on the next button clicked, etc. Being a programming & dev novice myself, I'm in absolute awe of how he made this all work. For all the careful, methodical detail I had to put in animating each frame by hand, Ben was doing the same behind the scenes to build our world out of the huge pile of animation files I handed to him.

We probably could have saved ourselves a ton of work by generating a sprite for our mouse based on sequences of photos, but I really wanted the mouse to truly be in-situ to get all of the perfect, subtle reflections, shadows and lighting that comes from real photography. A lot of this is because of the people who were...

Ever since getting really into stop motion animation, I've taken inspiration from and wanted to emulate animators who have become heros of mine. In this project, I'd say the biggest sources of inspiration for me were Lotte Reiniger & Jan Švankmajer. Both of them had projects they created that were beautiful silent films & I very much wanted Éalú to feel like an interactive silent film. Individually their work spoke to me in different ways.

My wife first introduced me to Lotte's incredible works many years ago. In addition to her co-invention of the multiplane camera & creation of the first surviving feature length animation, I was very inspired by her resourcefulness. The fact that she created her earliest silhouette stop motion by cutting a hole in her table & converting it to a light table with a camera mounted above is a testament to creating complex art with minimal equipment & being creative with what you have on hand.

I greatly admire how surreal and tactile Jan's work is, and the dark & even humorous nature of some of his most macabre short films. Many of his pieces also play with confined space & constrained camera angles, both of which were very useful sources of inspiration in attempting to create the feeling of a restrictive maze for the mouse to inhabit.

If you're reading this far, thanks for taking an interest in a portion of how Éalú was made! If there's things I didn't cover here you're curious about, or you wondering something more in depth about what I did share, please feel free to ask! Ben and I have no desire to be closed off or secretive about how we made Éalú, as we both learned so much from the past work of others to make this possible and we would be thrilled to pay it forward.

Hello from Dinogod and thank you so much for playing Bounty Star! Today's update contains stability, performance, and quality-of-life improvements, along with a number of additional bugfixes.

• Bounties with a specific loadout subtask now show the required loadout on the Memories screen when playing via the Revisitor

• Screamers now affect humanoid and dino enemies even if they currently have Stability

• Adjusted drop rates from the Loot Drone to favor unique items rather than curios/scraps

• Added unique SFX to the Combat Shield for improved audio feedback

• Optimized several particle VFX that were particularly costly

• Optimized assets to reduce draw cost for several elements in the Garage and citrus trees in all levels

• Optimized certain AI calculations affecting bounties with many enemies

• Fixed a crash that occurred if you hatched more chickens or microtheros than you had room for and they were later re-homed by building more coops, selling an existing critter, or replacing a dead critter

• Fixed a soft-lock if you pressed the button for Photo Mode in the cutscene pause menu. Photo Mode is intended to be unavailable in cutscenes, since they are staged for fixed camera angles.

• Fixed a specific bandit sniper occasionally falling under the world in the bounty Thermal Madness

• Fixed plant bed upgrades being craftable without all the required materials

• Fixed Fan the Hammer not resetting the streak when restarting a bounty. It will remain awarded if it was already awarded.

• Oh Talilah and Ambush no longer play their story post-bounty cutscenes when replaying them with the Revisitor.

• Improvements to AI pathing in Citrus Plains, Kap's Cavern, Gecko Rock Baseball Field, Short Spire, Rosewater Bluff, and Skytown

• Removed empty chests from the bounty SOS (Save Our Sprinklers!)

• Fixed Talilah being able to accompany Clem on Revisitor bounties when unfed.

• Fixed visual errors in Citrus Plains, Rosewater Bluff, and the Garage

• Fixed the Gangbuster, Balloon Spinkler, and Noisemaker being capturable by the Chain Binder, which was unintended and caused visual errors

• Fixed placement of a chest in Gecko Rock Baseball Field that could trap the player when opening it from a certain angle

• Fixed cutscene animation and audio issues in Ambush, Final Battle, and Gladley-Stone's visit to the Garage

• The Geopython is now correctly affected by the EMP support system

• Ghost of the Past now correctly requires the Cooldown Repairer instead of the Burst Repairer, to match the raptor from the Prologue. It will remain awarded if it was already awarded.

• Fixed collision traps in Short Spire and Rosewater Bluff

• Fixed missing props when upgrading the Garage / workbench the final time

• Corrected water collision in The Oasis, Rosewater Bluff, and Kap's Cavern

• Fixed MOU support system sometimes dropping inputs near the end of the game when the Raptor's stats are highest

• Clem's raptor in the Epilogue cutscene now shows the correct paint job and support equipment, like in the Garage

• Fixed certain items (e.g. chickens and microtheros) showing incorrect count in the store when in Sell mode

• Fixed the jukebox playing two copies of the same song if you kicked it during the chapter Into the Night

• Fixed music not playing during the final credits sequence

• Corrected the UI label for Traditional Chinese to more clearly distinguish it

• Fixed certain accented letters displaying as capitals when the language is set to Polish

Thanks so much for playing and sharing your feedback—it helps us make Bounty Star better with every patch. We hope you enjoy these updates and we’ll see you out in the Red Expanse.

Heroes of Arkesia,

The corruption that began in the depths has crossed over the Kurzan Abyss, tainting the seas. The long-lost body of Kazeros has begun to take form within the fog. What will befall Arkesia in the future?

This update introduces the Kazeros Raid Prelude: Destined Trajectory, October Ark Pass, Lucky Box event, Korean balance patch that arrived alongside Kazeros, Proving Grounds competitive match season 7, and more. Downtime will begin on October 29 at 1 a.m. PT (8 a.m. UTC) and is expected to last 6 hours. Check out the Fog of Diaspero Release Page for the full list of new content, events, store offerings, and other changes.

Thanks for your support! We'll see you in Arkesia.

▌║ｏｔｈｅｒｗｏｒｌｄ▌║ ᵇᵒˢˢᶠⁱᵍʰᵗ ʷᵉᵃᵏ ᵖᵒⁱⁿᵗˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ʰⁱᵈⁱⁿᵍ ᶠⁱˣ▌ ᵒᵗʰᵉʳʷᵒʳˡᵈ ᶜᵃⁿ ⁱⁿᶜʳᵉᵃˢᵉ ᵏᵉʸˢ ᶜᵒᵘⁿᵗ ᶠⁱˣ

,̷.̷,̶ ̴.̷.̸ ̸,̷.̴.̴ ̴,̴ ̸.̶.̵🎃,̸.̴.̴,̴ ̸,̷.̴,̵,̸.̴.̴.̵.̴ ̴,̴ ̸.̶.̵ ̶,̴,̷ ̶.̴.̴,̴.̵.̴ ̴,̴ ̸.̶.̵ ̶,̴,̷ ̶.̸.̸ ̵,̸ ̸T̶.̵,̶ ̴.̵.̶R̷.̷.̸,̵.̵3̷.̸.̴,̶4̵.̷,̴.̵,̷T̶.̷,̸.̵.̷5̴.̵,̷,̵.̷.̵ ̴,̸,̴,̷.̷,̶ ̴.̷.̸ ̸,̷.̴,̵,̸.̴.̴,̴.̵.̴ ̴,̴ ̸.̶.̵ ̶,̴,̷ ̶.̸.🎃 ̵ ̴,̴ ̸.̶.̵ ̶,

I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE BEEN ENJOYING THE EARLY ACCESS LAUNCH! I have been keeping a keen eye on things and believe i have fixed everything possible (so far)
As promised the Seasonal Halloween Update is HERE!

There is a TON of quality-of-life upgrades that i finished this weekend along with the new Halloween update! If you sign in this week youll see a brand new Corn maze outside the pizza shop, get to the end of the maze to unlock a LIMITED-TIME cosmetic!


ADD-ON's:- CORN MAZE - Magazines now have better chance to spawn the more important items
- Cosmetic items now effect the overall grade of the shop
- Vacuum now completely gets rid of regular enemies and stuns General Broil
- Backspace button on the Upgrade terminal so you can switch between pages without leaving.
- Names and Personal Best in lobby
- Chat goes to the last line of text




FIXED BUGS:
- Failsafe for opening up the shop
- Fixed the Hamburger maker getting stuck + clients not being able to see Bodies
- Audio problems
- Grade of the shop fixed between Server/Client (harder to get to S rating)
- Fixed Drink Replication issues -Fixed Ability to buyback equipment + Healthbar on Double Stove
- Drive through customers not spawning
- Fixed Balloon Animal attacks + Sounds
- Some nighttime songs have been extended so they don't automatically loop
- The Seed incubator can be used more then once

KNOWN BUGS:
- Interact Overlay Stays on screen for the upgrade terminal, Fire Extinguisher, Upstairs Cabinet & the Toilet
- Pizza Box & the Dough are getting stuck in Clients hands - (trying to get this fixed ASAP)



FUTURE PLANS:- Community Poll Winner- Voice Chat + Settings for Voip
- More Weapons, More Bosses
- Night 50 Celebration
- End Game Wrap-up (UI that shows how many enemies, how much money, & how many waves you survived, Etc etc)
- Soundtrack release
- Leaderboards




JOIN OUR DISCORD TO STAY UP TO DATE WITH UPDATES, DEV-LOGS, & COMMUNITY POLLS

THANK YOU,
ERIC

Fixed an issue where squads were incorrectly given the "Unassigned weapon" debuff

Fixed an issue where vehicles would automatically generate fuel when fuel was 0 (lmao)

Fixed an issue where warehouses did not transport supplies according to the "Resupply when below this value" setting (thanks Andrew Ladder)

Fixed various issues related to the medical system

Fixed an issue where gunshots were not affected by sound settings

Fixed an issue where logistics teams could not recover friendly corpses from casualty evacuation points

Fixed a rare issue where save loading could fail

Fixed an issue where logistics teams did not follow task priority

Adjusted the calculation logic for available operating rooms

Fixed an issue where FOBs could not transport supplies when inventory was below target stock

Fixed some French texts

Fixed some Russian texts

Fixed some Traditional Chinese texts

Fixed an issue where logistics teams could not reach their destination after loading a save

Added an automatic correction feature for logistics teams when loading saves

Added cigarettes to supply orders

Optimized the scroll smoothness of the supply list

Get ready to make a deal with the new brand OrganiCo, where you’ll be packaging 80 fresh organic produce items for even more profit!
Experience a greener, more sustainable side of your business as you expand your product line and boost your reputation!

• New Brand: OrganiCo
  
• 80 new organic produce items
  
• Visual and performance improvements
  
• Bug fixes and balancing updates
  
• UI and tablet input fixes
  
• Optimized brand control and price check

In addition to the new brand deal, this free update comes with lots of bug fixes and performance optimizations to make your gameplay smoother than ever!



We’re celebrating the launch of this new content update with a 50% discount on Steam!
Now’s the perfect time to grow your vending empire!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3496000/Ship_Inc/


Become a cashier at a charming local supermarket! Scan, bag, and total up groceries for a quirky stream of customers. Each checkout is cozy, complete with mini-games. Carefully bag your customer’s items, keep the line moving, manage special requests and upgrade your cashier station.

Wishlist now and get notified when we release a free demo!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3894830/Next_In_Line_Supermarket/

• Removed unnecessary Total Coin UI

• Added and Fixed the Total Coin for GameOver UI

• Stability improvements

we have just released Hotfix 12.0.3 with the following changes:

• Fixed: Animals could spawn in enclosed rooms.

• Fixed: On larger servers, animals took notably too long to load in.

• Fixed: Animals didn't reliably register hits during specific animations.

• Improved: Non-Aquatic animals that get stuck in water will now drown if they can't get out.

• Fixed: Mining sounds didn't play correctly in first person view.

• Improved: Adjusted footstep sounds for Bighorn Sheep, Elk and Mountain Goat for easier differentiation from player footstep sounds.

• Changed: "Tax from All Accounts" will now always first try to tax the Personal Account.

• Fixed: The setting for "Tax from All Accounts" wasn't respected when set to "No".

• Fixed: When a tax law used "Tax from All Accounts", it would fail once it unsuccessfully tried to tax an account instead of continuing to the next potential account to tax.

• Fixed: When a vehicle was sold via the "For Sale" feature it retained the sale settings after being purchased, still being up for sale by the new owner.

• Fixed: Cultural deeds beyond the foundation deed didn't provide influence.

• Fixed: Settlement markers didn't show to other citizens of a settlement.

• Fixed: Destroying a plant by placing an object on it was not caught by the "Harvest or Hunt" trigger.

• Fixed: A comparison with "Greater than" would show as "Greater than or equal to" in tooltips.

• Fixed: Chimney requirements for kitchen objects were ignored after a server restart, leading to them providing housing points despite the object not being valid due to not having a chimney.

• Fixed: Dropping a carriable item onto a storage slot of an object that doesn't accept carriable items displayed a wrong error message about the storage being too full instead of it not accepting such items.

• Fixed: Fixed an issue where spoilable fuel burned excessively fast in light sources.

• Fixed: Rocker boxes couldn't be placed directly next to each other in grid placement mode.

• Fixed: When moving a vehicle with the hammer failed, calories were consumed nontheless.

• Fixed: An issue that could cause moving a vehicle with the hammer to fail without a reason.

• Fixed: Eating while pulling a cart resulted in a broken animation.

• Fixed: Hand feeding elk didn't work in third person view.

• Improved: Wood pulp is no longer highlighted when targeted while holding a carriable block that can be placed. This behaviour could lead players that were also holding an axe and intending to chop the wood pulp to assume that they can chop it despite the chop interaction hint not being visible due to still being too far away to chop it.

• Fixed: Some turkish users couldn't see the placement preview for many objects and hence not place them.

• Fixed: Another issue that could lead to "SetPath" error messages being spammed.

• Fixed: Some graphic options still didn't appear in specific circumstances.

• Fixed: The brightness slider didn't work correctly.

• Fixed: Korean and Russian symbols didn't display in chat.

• Fixed: Non-latin symbols couldn't be used on signs.

• Fixed: An issue that could cause achievements to trigger multiple times at the same time.

• Fixed: An issue that could cause the laser activation to display once per laser.

• Fixed: Implemented a potential workaround for Unity bug UUM-117450 that under specific conditions causes the wheels of vehicles to clip into the ground and skid steers to propell into the air.

• Fixed: Vehicles wouldn't stay locked on barges when "Q" was used to lock the ramp while driving instead of interacting with it with "E".

• Fixed: The stack size multiplier was applied twice to stockpiles. (This could lead to stacks that no longer fit into the stockpile to be moved to the void storage on migration - in that case, please have the owner of the stockpile check the swirly SLG icon in the bottom right, to the left of the minimap area to get the items back.)