Greetings, noble adventurers!

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been busy slaying one bug after another, and last week I managed to upload a version of the upcoming free demo, which is now being tested by a small group of enthusiastic testers! This marks a major step forward, and if all goes well, the demo will be publicly available in December.

Oh yeah... and the „Coming soon” demo page is now public!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4060670/The_Guiding_Spirit_Demo/

The demo features the first chapter of the full game’s story and introduces all of the core gameplay systems — including:

• Character customization, with dozens of ancestries, capability traits, personality traits, skills, domains, followers, proficiencies, and special abilities to choose from.

• Story features such as Decision Points, relationship mechanics, and dice rolling.

The first chapter already includes over a thousand handcrafted scenes, brought to life with detailed, hand-drawn illustrations in a classic gamebook format. Every choice you and your heroes make truly matters.

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Personality Traits Preview

In the demo, you can explore a wide variety of Personality Traits, which include categories such as:

• Root, Interests, Habits, Belief, Bond, Expression, Characteristic, Faith, Fear

Some of these traits are Challenging, offering additional difficulty and unique complications as you navigate your heroes’ stories.

Here are just a few of the Personality Traits you can select in the demo:

• Might-Above-All: Mat believes might governs all, and the strong shall prevail over the weak.

• Arcane Foe: Mat harbors a deep disdain for the Intellect.

• Self-Defeating: Mat has a knack for undoing his own efforts, often acting against his best interests without realizing it.

• Lunatic: Mat's mind dances on the edge of reason, untamed and unpredictable.

• Paranoid: Mat trusts few and suspects many.

• Often Neglected: Often, Mat's deeds go unnoticed, stirring quiet discontent within him.

• Exaggerator: Mat's words are often larger than life, painting deeds in grander hues than truth allows.

• Secretive: Mat's mind is a locked chest, and few may glimpse its contents.

• Burden-Bearer: Mat shoulders his trials in silence, revealing his torment to none.

• Born Liar: Don’t trust a word from Mat.

• Dictatorial: Mat forces obedience, caring little for the thoughts or freedom of others.

• Power-Hungry: Mat has a strong desire for power.

…and many more await to shape your heroes’ personalities and story experiences, offering countless combinations of strengths, flaws, and quirks to explore.

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Tales Worth Exploring

I’d like to give a hearty shoutout to some upcoming indie adventures worth your attention: Knights of the Frontier Valley (a demo is coming soon!) and The Secret of Weepstone (a demo is already available!). If you love memorable characters and the excitement of choice-driven stories, be sure to check them out!

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Stay Connected for Sneak Peeks

Curious for more sneak peeks? Follow me on Bluesky or X to catch the Trait of the Week series and discover more tidbits from the making of The Guiding Spirit.

Stay tuned, brave souls! As always, thank you all for your support, feedback, and patience—it truly means the world to me.

Catch you next time when the demo’s out,
Dice Impact

Tablet

• Added in-game notifications system to the player’s tablet.

• New reminder framework to surface time-sensitive alerts and tasks.

Tablet ↔ Gangs

• Connected tablet to gang reputation & debt systems.

• Player now receives reminders to pay gang dues, including status and deadlines.

World / Zones

• Introduced city zone system — each zone now has its own rules (permissions, enforcement intensity, commerce limits, etc.).

• Internal hooks added for future zone-specific events and balancing.

NPCs

• Expanded NPC spawn logic with smarter distribution across zones.

• Assigned persistent homes to NPCs for more natural daily routines.

• Added working NPC system (job roles, schedules, and basic behavior loops).

Graphics

• Updated sky & lighting — day/night transitions look smoother and more vibrant.

Misc

• Under-the-hood adjustments to support new notifications, zones, and NPC data.

Non-public update. For internal testing only.

Hello, friends!

It seems we’ve finally found and fixed the old infinite loading bug that some players encountered when launching Ash of Gods: Redemption.

Thank you to everyone who reported the issue and helped us track it down!

Hello Commanders!

Actually, hang on just a minute, I need to hop in this helo to ride out to the front. Or wait, was it the truck to the far flank? Hold up, let me check my plan.

In all seriousness though, transport plans are an incredibly complex thing. One of the biggest challenges is creating a system that gives players the versatility to do weird, wacky things but which also has the simplicity to be understood. Let’s start with a reference look at what the Pros use when they are planning this stuff.

Figure 1: What the Pros use to plan these things

Well… that’s a lot. How can we make that easier for players to fill out quickly? Fortunately, some of that is pretty easy. Players don’t have control over individual squads, so the game will handle which squad or vehicle gets carried by whichever vehicle is most appropriate. And while timings are important, in general in our game everything is done ASAP. So the units need to know the timings, but the player just needs to know that the units will do things without delay.

Another thing we can do is to break this up a bit. The table above is for what is called a Lift, which is the plan for all the units involved and will take the different units to multiple locations from multiple locations. We’ve broken this down into the players only needing to plan a single Serial at a time. A Serial has a single, specific pickup location and a single, specific drop-off location. With those changes in mind let us see what we have left.

Figure 2: Sample Plan

This is a pretty simple plan as all things go, but it serves as a good example for looking at the various elements at your fingertips. The top section is pretty similar to the Air Movement Table above, showing us which transport unit is carrying which passengers. Below that we can see the path the transport will take, where it’s going to pick up the passengers and where it will drop them off. I have utilized the ability to set six waypoints to have the transport helicopter do some exfil as well. In the next section we can see which units have been attached as escort duty to this plan. Issuing this plan will give the respective orders to all of our units involved.

Escorts and Transports will move in formation with each other, great for keeping your transports under the protection of any escorts and avoiding having your troops arrive one at a time where they can be easily be picked off. If you already saw our pre-release stream then you know these plans can involve many more units of course, but in case you didn’t and want to check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYp0TSCFVqI

Now, I think it’s great being able to do this sort of thing. But I promised you versatility, didn’t I? So let’s see what that can look like.

Figure 3: Now it gets weird

Since it’s probably not immediately obvious, let me explain the madness I have concocted here. We have a transport unit consisting of a couple of Chinook helicopters. Inside each of those Chinooks is a platoon of America’s brave men and some friends. But the transport mission those Chinooks are going to undertake is to go pick up a couple of Kiowa helicopters. How are they going to do that? Well the Kiowas will get sling-loaded underneath the Chinooks. Now that’s a bit strange, but why stop there? If you’re not familiar with the Kiowa, on the outside of it are a couple of benches that Joe Smith and a few buddies can ride on. So while the Kiowa is getting strapped in we’ve got a couple of mortar teams lashing themselves to the side of these Kiowas. Why are they riding the Kiowas instead of the Chinooks? I don’t know, I guess they just want to feel the wind in their hair. Or maybe it’s ‘cuz I told them to for this arbitrary example.

Alright, you probably don’t want to do that, but what might you actually use this for? You could use this for transporting some wheeled units with some infantry that can use the wheeled transport to sneak close to an objective or observation point. With any luck we can expand this to cover other transport types like amphibious landings in future updates and content.

There are a lot of nuances that Tactical Transport lets us utilize and explore in the game. An entire new range of possible scenarios we can develop and add to the game as we continue to support it and expand the series in the future. For any wily users who want to make their own scenarios or even edit the unit data the potential here is immense. If you’re as excited as I am about this, post your favorite picture of an unlikely military transport in action. Here’s mine:

Figure 4: Ok, so the chopper isn't being carried, but it's still funny.

Fellow Hunters,

The Ravenous Horde Dedicated Server tools have been released! You can find a small guide over here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2179490/discussions/0/725769023703355993/

The timer is ticking down and it's only 2 days till launch day. Here's what is going to happen on launch day:

• The demo game will be taken offline, and the demo servers will be converted to the launch version.

• Your demo save files will be converted to the release version once you open the full game.

• The full game and DLC will be available at the indicated time on the store page.

• I'll be monitoring the servers in case they catch fire or if additional servers are needed.

I'm already at work for the upcoming patch 1.1.0 which will introduce NPC Hunters and in-round perks to be bought. I wanted to add another map too, but I decided to split it into 2 separate patches so that you have the better experience quicker. I'm expecting to be done in about ~2-3 weeks.

The NPC hunters will have 'roles' and will act based on the role they got:

• Leader NPC Hunters will roam around, shooting whatever comes on their path.

• Camping NPC Hunters will camp spots on the map and move occasionally from one spot to another.

• Follower NPC Hunters will follow leaders and players, they'll try they best at protecting their target. leaders and players can have more than 1 follower.

Here's me and the NPC boys: https://i.imgur.com/HAiRzDA.mp4

And a pic of the latest map, Carnival, available on launch.

It's been a long ride, thanks to everyone who supported me so far!

- Rinke

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2179490/Ravenous_Horde/https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856080/Ravenous_Horde_Support_The_Developer/

Hello! This is an announcement from SoulWorker.

Let's kick off November with a special celebration for Iris' birthday!

Join us in commemorating this occasion with a lineup of themed costumes and exclusive items prepared just for the event.



Don't miss out—log in during the period below to claim your rewards and celebrate Iris' birthday in style!

Event Period:
November 4th 10:00 ~ November 11th 09:59 GMT
November 4th 02:00 ~ November 11th 01:59 PST
November 4th 19:00 ~ November 11th 18:59 KST
November 4th 18:00 ~ November 11th 17:59 GMT+8

Login now during the event and get this costume~

PLAY ▶

Static. A face flickers. Someone whispers: “They updated it again.”

• The price of the invasion prevention item “Dreamcatcher” has been reduced.

• The price of the weather re-roll item “Old Weather Chart” has been reduced.

• Doppelgängers can no longer invade in boss areas.

• The money previously required for co-op multiplayer has been removed.

• When invaded by a Doppelgänger while Special Requests are active, the Special Requests will now be temporarily disabled.

• Optimized certain processes to slightly reduce the game’s processing load.

• Added 800×450 and 1024×576 resolution options to the “Resolution” settings in the Options menu.

• Fixed an issue where some enemy damage reactions were incorrect.

• Fixed an issue where the player could become unresponsive after returning to their room from co-op multiplayer.

• Fixed an issue where unnecessary character models could appear after returning to the room following a victory in invasion multiplayer.

• Fixed an issue where Justine’s model could sometimes become invisible during certain cutscenes.

• Fixed an issue where repeatedly pressing buttons during the weapon enhancement mini game in the casino could cause the player to become unresponsive.

• Fixed multiple UI-related bugs.

• Fixed multiple text display and localization-related issues.

From Osaka to wherever you are in the world!

- White Owls Inc.

Hi Workers,

The wait is almost over. Fish Stick Protocol launches tomorrow, November 5 at 5 PM CET, and we could not be more excited to finally share it with you.

To celebrate, we are hosting a special live launch event on our Discord, and you are invited.

We will be counting down to release together, pushing the launch button live, and hanging out with the community to answer your questions in real time.

Join us for some laughs, chaos, and the very first moments of Fish Stick Protocol going live.

Join the Discord

See you there, and get ready to dive into the madness tomorrow.

Cheers,
-VirginRedemption and the entire Maracas Team

Freedom's greetings, Helldivers!

Release Captain Morris here, coming to you this democratic Tuesday with a Freedom Delivery.

For this ongoing minor update, stability and balance improvements were the focus of the team.
We look forward to hearing how you feel - we're keeping the galaxy (and democracy) running smoothly.

• Fixed crashes, including some hotjoining and stratagem-related crashes.

• Reducing framerate stutters during drop-in sequence.

• Fixed issues related to unused textures loaded into memory.

Crashes

• Fixed a crash after hotjoining a game that just started, and when the existing players use certain stratagems

• Fixed a rare crash when enemies fall through the ground

• Fixed a crash that occurs during missions when an encounter is triggered

• Fix rare crash on mission load

• Fixed crash which could occur when interacting quickly with the weapon customization menu

Miscellaneous

• Extraction shuttle will no longer get into the landing stage when bumping into tall structures near the landing pad

• Fix an issue with missing haptics when gamepads disconnect/reconnect

• Fixed ragdolls falling through ground during certain sections of the Tutorial

• Fixed issue where some unused textures were being loaded into memory accidentally on certain planet types

Optimizations

• (PC only) Fixed for textures sometimes appearing low resolution even when memory is available

• Reducing flashlight reaction on muzzle smoke on all weapons for a better FOV

• Reduced frame rate stutters during the drop-in sequence

• Optimized destruction on various tree assets to maintain performance when lots of trees are being destroyed
  
  
  Known Issues

Greetings Ballers,

We will be having our Weekly Server Maintenance on
[color=yellow]November 04, 2025 23:00 to November 05, 2025 03:00 (PST)[/color]

[color=orange]Maintenance Details[/color]

[color=gold]I. Server Maintenance[/color]
- Server Stabilization


[color=gold]II. In-Game Update[/color]

[color=gold]III. Reward Distribution[/color]

• November Crew Master Rewards
  
• October Creator Activity Rewards
  
• Discord Event Reward

Be free to create your own style, Freestyle!

- FreeStyle 2 Team