Dear Comrades,

Hello everyone! Thank you all for your love and support for The Patriotic War! Today, we bring you a major update, including a new mode and the China-Japan battlefield. Let’s dive into the new combat zones together!

Classic Mode consists of multiple campaigns, each containing several levels. On the mission selection screen, players can configure various squad templates, adjusting personnel and equipment. After entering a mission, you can deploy pre-configured templates within deployment limits, freely combining troops and tactics to complete diverse combat objectives flexibly and secure victory for your army.

Currently, Classic Mode includes a tutorial and 6 campaigns with a total of 13 levels：

• Battle of Taierzhuang

• Battle of Kunlun Pass

• Hundred Regiments Offensive

• Battle of Stalingrad

• Battle of Kursk

• The Great Counteroffensive

• Chinese Faction has 6 types of heavy weapons and vehicles and 11 types of small arms:

  Including iconic weapons such as the C96, Hanyang 88, SIG M1920, and ZB-26

• Japanese army has 8 types of heavy weapons and vehicles and 12 types of small arms:

  Including iconic weapons such as the Type 38, Type 11, and Type 14 Nambu.

More equipment for both armies will be added in future updates.

• Great Wall of Blood and Flesh

• Smash the Cage

If a squad is equipped with corresponding items (e.g., sandbags, deployable weapons), both players and AI can build fortifications, set up heavy machine guns and mortars during combat.

The Engineer class officially joins the battle. They excel at building fortifications and assembling heavy weapons. In Classic Mode, they can also equip items like grenades at a lower cost.

The Knee Mortar, a unique equipment piece for the China-Japan battlefield, has been added. It features rapid deployment, high rate of fire, and squad portability, making it a core item on this battlefield.

Railway armored cars and armored trains are now available. They can only move on tracks and currently appear in the Hundred Regiments Offensive and the Great Counteroffensive campaigns. The Soviet armored train in the Great Counteroffensive is heavily armed and highly durable, serving as a key unit in this level.

A new fortification type, the MG Bunker, has been added. It boasts powerful firepower but limited firing arcs and is completely immune to bullets. Explosives or heavy firepower are required to destroy it. Currently, it appears in the Battle of Kunlun Pass in Classic Mode and will be introduced to more modes and maps in the future.

• In Battlefield Mode, the Chinese Faction uses the Hawk III as a ground-attack aircraft.

• Added bayonet charge functionality. If a weapon has a bayonet, you can hold V during a charge to execute a bayonet charge.

• Improved animations for stationary bayonet thrusts.

• Some levels in Classic Mode will feature poison gas shells.

• Enhanced visual effects for flare shells.

• Balance adjustments for firearms, vehicles, and other equipment.

• Implemented bipod deployment for submachine guns, applicable to the FG-42 and Thompson Sichuan.

• Enhanced feedback and screen shake effects for kills and explosions.

• UI upgrades with additional information prompts and interactive features.

• Added and upgraded various UI icons.

• Added map preview functionality for Battlefield and Classic Modes. When selecting a level, the core scene of the map will be displayed on the right side of the screen.

• Numerous other detail optimizations.

• Fixed several bugs.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1647310/_/

Finally, thank you all for your support—you are our greatest motivation to keep moving forward!

Big Update for Just a Gigolo!

We’re excited to share a major update that improves the overall experience of Just a Gigolo. This release focuses on enhancing visual quality and streamlining navigation, making the story more immersive and easier to enjoy.

✨ What’s new in this update:

• Upgraded image quality for a more polished and consistent look

• Improved navigation for smoother progression through the Visual Novel

• General performance and stability enhancements

Thank you for playing and supporting Just a Gigolo! We’ll continue working to bring you the best experience possible.

☀️ Fixes & Improvements Based on Community Feedback

Small Patch Notes 0.1.1c

•  Added Outbounds cross promo menu item (redeemable via code)

•  Enabled Steam cloud save ☀️

Note: Save games & game data are now synced via Steam cloud. However, the flag weather the game has started for the first time isn't synced at the moment. Meaning if you start the game for the first time on a different PC, it will trigger the prologue cutscene and restart level 1. When you switch back to menu, all your unlocks and Level progress should be there though.
We will address this in the next patch 0.1.2.

The best place to give feedback is our Discord server. There, we are running a Smart Ticketing System: Leave feedback, vote up change requests and bug reports from other users, and help us to prioritize tasks in the further development of Star Birds.

🙏Thank you so much everyone for the overwhelming response, all your feedback, comments and bug reports! This helps us a lot to prioritize and identify issues with the game. We're trying to address the most critical issues as soon as we can. Please be patient though, since we're a small team and might take a while to address specific issues you're experiencing!🙏

We’ve overhauled enemy movement for our standard zombie units.
They now shuffle, stumble, and truly shamble their way toward you — giving off that slow-creeping horror feel while still posing a real threat in numbers.

This new "shamble-walk" blend replaces the old default navigation and adds unsettling realism to how basic infected close the gap. It’s subtle, but deeply immersive.

Surviving the first 60 seconds used to be easy. Not anymore.
We’ve introduced tiered horde escalation — enemies don’t just increase in number, they get smarter and faster over time. You’ll feel the pressure build, wave after wave.

The radioactive variants now visibly react to your attacks.
We’ve added a new take-damage animation, making combat more satisfying and readable when these volatile enemies get hit. Expect clearer visual feedback as they soak up your firepower.

Healing is now more than just a number ticking up.

• Regeneration mechanics now heal based on a percentage of your max health every few seconds, rather than a flat rate.

• Floating green healing numbers now appear above your survivor — clean, readable, and non-intrusive.

• The healing FX no longer block clicks or menus and are timed to show only meaningful amounts.

We’ve confirmed that all Safehouse meta-upgrades — like damage boosts, move speed, and healing rate — correctly apply at runtime and stack cleanly with in-run passives.
This means you now truly feel stronger across runs as you invest in permanent upgrades.

• The selected character now persists properly across all scenes and carries their upgrades into the run.

• Attack Speed upgrades now function correctly across weapons — including RadialBurst and Boomerang Axe — and don't cause unintended slowdowns.

• Fixed floating UI elements that blocked menus or cluttered the screen.

• Overhauled the backend for stat tracking, health regeneration, and passive upgrade stacking, laying the groundwork for future survivors and enemies.

• Extraction mechanics and permadeath handling.

• New characters and map environments.

• Boss variants, weapon evolutions, and more responsive UI polish.

Let us know what you think — and stay vigilant.
The protocol only delays the inevitable.

In less than three days, 324 players have already left a review for Star Birds – and 95% of them are positive. That absolutely blows our minds. 💛

For a small indie studio like ours, reviews mean a lot. They help Star Birds get discovered by players who might love it but haven’t heard of it yet. Your feedback directly helps us stay visible and keep making games we care about. As a thank-you for all the love and support, we’ve put together a few little surprises for you. We hope there’s something in here that will make you smile!

If you haven't left a review yet, you can help us immensely doing so and spreading the word 💯✅

But first of all, important to mention: We’re reading all of your feedback – every review, every comment, every bug report – and we’re working hard to address the most urgent issues as quickly as possible. Thanks to your reports, we discovered a few hiccups in the tutorial flow, resource balancing, and High Score tracking right after launch.

With yesterday's patch 1.1.1 and toda's patch 1.1.1c we hope we’ve fixed what could have been game-breaking. Thank you for letting us know so quickly!

https://steamcommunity.com/games/2719750/announcements/detail/511843343389425745

Back in June, many of you playing the demo had a lot of fun with the Captain’s Mug — so we thought: why not let you customize your command bridge even more? Over time, we’ll be adding a few new main menu items so you can make things feel extra cozy for your bird crew.

And if you just woke up from your cryo-egg and are wondering, “What mug?” — click the little gift icon in the main menu and enter the code -> getmug25 <- to help the crew to some coffee! ☕

At gamescom we met our new friends from Square Glade Games, the devs behind the highly aniticipated Outbound and we've teamed up to bring something realy cool to you!
Freshly flown in for the release, there’s now a special item for all indie lovers — drum roll, please! 🥁 — you can now unlock a minifigure of the iconic campervan from Outbound for your main menu.

To get it, simply click on the button with the gift icon 🎁 to redeem, then enter the code "outbound" in and hit the checkmark button.

Outboundhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/2681030/Outbound/?utm_source=starbirdsis an open-world exploration and crafting game where you begin with an empty campervan and build it out into the home of your dreams—alone or with friends—scavenging, crafting, exploring, adapting to changing environments, and decorating as you go. The studio team of Square Glade Games puts a lot of love into modular building systems, exploration, and cozy customization. No wonder the birds are putting the Outbound van right on the dashboard!

In addition, we’re collaborating with Timberborn on a special Star Birds + Timberborn Steam bundle.

If you’re still on the fence about picking up Star Birds and you love cozy building games, here’s your chance to save a little coin — and maybe spend it on your favorite tea or a pair of cozy autumn socks instead. Beavers and birds, two species building their own civilizations — what could be a better match?

In Timberborn, you lead a colony of clever beavers in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are gone. You build dams, manage water, use vertical architecture, and terraform the land to help your beaver folk survive in changing conditions like droughts. Mechanistry, the indie studio behind Timberborn, is crafting complex, beautiful systems that feel alive. This game could be right up my alley if you like water simulation, 3D terrain, and thoughtful city building.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/59172/Star_Birds__Timberborn/Thank you to the Outbound and Timberborn teams for making these collaborations possible—and thank you, our Star Birds community, for flying with us. We hope these new additions bring a smile to your faces and more adventures to our much beloved bird crew.

Again, if you haven’t yet, leave us a Steam Review! In return, we’ll send you lots of indie love. 💛

Star Birds is an indie project by Toukana Interactive and kurzgesagt. We are over the moon to have such an amazing community. You are the reason why this project exists. If you want to support us, download the game here on Steam, and tell your friends about it. If you would like to be the first to read content like this and are looking for more in-depth insights, we recommend our newsletter – sign up at https://toukana.com/starbirds.

Added the pickaxe

Added the ability to mine

I'm currently refining the world to prepare for a second testing session very soon!

Hey there!

Thanks to your feedback, I've decided to redone the entire movement system in the free roam sections. The original one was quite problematic to a lot of you, because of the uncontrollable sliding. Here's the entire changelog:

• Redone the movement system in the free roam section. You’ll no longer slide around and the aiming is even more precise. 

• Local Football Player now screams before he attacks. This should give you one more second to react to his attack from behind. 

• Optimization fixes. The game should run better (especially during barricade sections).

• Fixed the Masked Mutant audio channels in the barricade sections.

• Fixed rain SFX disappearing after aiming down sights with a rifle.

Have a good one!
PB