Hello everyone,

We know we have been quiet for a while, but we have good news - we merged the earlier announced hotfix with a huge Content Update and we can confirm the release date for it - September 28!

We are super excited about this, as everyone who tested it so far really loves the update and confirms that it upgrades HYPERVIOLENT to a whole new level of gameplay, much closer to the immersive sim and horror atmosphere that we are aiming for. It's not just the content we have previously announced, but the overall atmosphere and base mechanics are being improved. For example, you will now be able to sprint or loot corpses of your defeated foes and we have done a lot of rebalancing and changed a lot of ammo placement.

We will publish a new trailer showcasing all the new mechanics, but for now, here's a little teaser of the Neurotether gun at work, letting you control an enemy for a time:



Please note that due to changes in the core gameplay, this update will invalidate save files from the previous version. Save files going forward will be compatible with new versions, and we will be including an option to start a new game at the beginning of the newly added content, if you don't wish to start over (but we still recommend to give it a go, a lot has changed in the early levels!). More details on that once the update is live.

Development on further updates continues of course, learn more details about what we're preparing for you in the official roadmap here.

Make sure to add HYPERVIOLENT to your wishlists so you have all the info first-hand!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1409200/HYPERVIOLENT/

Attention Survivors!

Do you have what it takes to make the whole of Chernobyl laugh, or is it just another dead zone abandoned due to the radiation levels being too high?

Get ready to impress not only the community of STALCRAFT, but the Team behind the development by submitting your best meme on YouTube and linking it in the Discord.

The top 3 spots will win a Steam gift card and an in-game item, while the 4th - 10th place will only get an in-game item.

The contest runs from September 15th - 22nd on the Discord server of your region. You will find the rules for the event in the channel #video-meme-contest. Make sure to take a good look over the rules to not get confused about how to submit your meme.

• 1st - 6th Place winners will be picked by the Devs
  
• 7th - 10th Place winners will be picked by the community through reactions on Discord

• 10 winners per Discord will be selected (30 total winners)
  
• 1st - 3rd Place - Armour "Albatross Scout Armored Exoskeleton", "wooden crate" and 30$, 20$, 10$ respectively
  
• 4th - 6th Place - "wooden crate" and 1000 Stalcoins.
  
• 7th - 10th (Audience Award) - "wooden crate" and 10k exchange currency.

To join the events, here are the links to the Discord servers:

• If you are from SEA, here is the link.
  
• If you are from NA, here is the link.
  
• If you are from EU, here is the link.

Good luck out there survivors and may the best memes win!

1. Only 1 entry per contestant.
   
2. All entries must be in the English language.
   
3. The video meme must be uploaded to YouTube and submitted as a YouTube link in the channel.
   
4. The video meme should be at least 720p or 1080p, 16:9 or 9:16 for dimensions.
   
5. Duration must be a minimum of 15 seconds and a maximum of 30 seconds.
   
6. The video can be unlisted, however, it cannot be private so that it can be viewed.
   
7. NO content allowed that can be construed as pornographic, NSFW, religious, or political. If we find any content like that, you will be permanently banned from any future events hosted, as well as STALCRAFT itself!
   
8. No communication is allowed in the channel of the event, the channel will purely be used for submissions and reactions only - If we find any communication or hate speech between community members, you will be disqualified from the event and can no longer participate in it.
   
9. After the entry period is complete, we will lock the channel so that no more entries can be submitted.

Update Content

In this update we will add some new content to the game:

Character abilities now function correctly, added some additional elements for a better gaming experience.

We will also be fixing many bugs that have been found in the game. These fixes will include:

• Fixing bugs that can cause the game to crash.
  
• Fixing bugs that can cause the game to misbehave.
  
• Fixes for bugs that may cause the game balance to not work properly.

Difficulty rebalance

We will also be changing the difficulty balance. These changes will aim to make the game more balanced and accessible to players of all skill levels. Also depending on the difficulty you will be able to encounter different mobs.

Hello everyone!

We're delighted to see you enjoying our game.
Some small problems have been reported to us and we have corrected them in this hotfix.

• Text correction
  
• Sheep now give more wool.
  
• Factories follow the evolution of buildings instead of disappearing.
  
• Loading screen animation changed.

If you encounter any problems, please report them in our Discord.

Hi folks!

Hooray! We have successfully survived Gamescom 2023! 🎉
For us, Gamescom is something very special every year. Since the founding of Paintbucket in 2018, we have been there with one of our games in every year the fair has taken place. 🎮



It's incredibly stressful, hot, crowded and loud, but it's also a wonderful reunion of indies, gamers, people from the press etc. every time. - and it's just nice to meet once a year in this setting.

On Tuesday, Jörg, Mona, Jona, and Hanna arrived and set up our stand in the Indie Arena - it turned out quite well, didn't it? 🤗



The next day we already started - it's trade visitor day. The first interviews about our game are in the can and also Hanna, our newly appointed Community Manager, gave her first interview in her life. And with success! 🧡

We can't complain about the press response either, we were streamed on IGN, and got a few articles, including on Heise, and for SPIEGEL Online The Darkest Files was even one of the ten highlights of the fair, alongside heavyweights like Starfield! 😮

Here are a few examples (all in German, though):
Heise | Tagesspiegel | Spiegel | Spielpunkt

The people from Game Two also came to our stand and played The Darkest Files and reported on it in one of their latest videos.

The press and their opinion is of course important for us and one of the reasons why we show our games at Gamescom. But even more important is the community, the gamers, many of whom have seen The Darkest Files for the first time. ☝️

On Thursday, Gamescom was open to everyone. Our 4 game stations were manned throughout. People were often waiting and we didn't miss the chance to talk to them and tell them about The Darkest Files and the development!



Later, our Lead Artist Viv also arrived in Cologne to help out at the booth for the next few days. In the evening we went to the annual industry party right on the Rhine. We ate delicious food, met up with old friends and shook a leg. 💃🏼



But not for too long, because we had to go back to Düsseldorf! There we stayed in a hotel for the Gamescom. The hotels in Cologne are usually booked up well in advance, so it's impossible to get a room in Cologne that's affordable for small indies like us. And hey, the train is a quick way to get from Düsseldorf to Cologne and back, right? RIGHT???
The trains were full. Very full. And regularly late. As I said at the beginning: Gamescom is stressful, hot, crowded and loud - and that's even more true for the Gamescom trains.
It was ... terrible ... I won't lie. But somehow we always made it back. 🧡



From Friday afternoon onwards, it was just Hanna and Viv at Gamescom, looking after the stand! From the Indie Arena there was coffee and tea, and at lunchtime there were always vegan hot dogs. That, and the fruit and fruit bars we brought with us, was all we ate. 😁

Fortunately, the temperatures were mild. Last year it was a good 30 degrees in Cologne, but this time it even rained and it was a pleasant 20 - 25 degrees.

On Sunday evening, Hanna and Viv also went back to Berlin. The stand was dismantled, the equipment given out by the Indie Arena was returned, merch was packed up, and then it was off to Cologne main station. The train was on time, and there were free seats! Woohoo!



If you want to see more of our time at Gamescom, check out our Tiktok channel . There we uploaded a video every day during the fair. We also kept our Twitter and Instagram account busy with pictures. 🕵️‍♀️

If you haven't played The Darkest Files demo yet, you should do so! A demo from the beginning of the year is available for you to play on our shop page. Feel free to put the game on your wishlist if you haven't done so yet, and what helps us especially is if you also follow us on Steam! If you do, you'll also get regular updates from the production and behind the scenes - like this one.



Thank you! 🧡

Have you ever been to a Gamescom? And if so, how did you like it? And if not, would you like to go there?

What appeals to you about such an event? The games, the developers, the influencers?

Let us know in the comments, in the forum or on our Discord!

When discussing game development, people often gloss over the audio side a little bit. It is quite natural, to be completely honest. New graphical developments are immediately noticeable. Beautiful shadows, reflections, and other effects make modern games a visual feast. At the same time, revolutionary gameplay mechanics and rich storylines ensure that we remember what we played for years. The sound is an outlier here. Since we can replicate and create almost any sound on most audio devices, we got used to its high quality and tend not to notice it most of the time. Still, it is a big part of a game’s presentation layer, and we want to tell you a little bit about it today.

Most of the media in this article are videos, which you should watch with sound on.



Whenever we add something to The Riftbreaker, be it a new weapon, building, or creature, we need to think about the sounds it is going to make. Over the course of our lifetime, our brains develop a subconscious expectation of what kind of sounds we can expect from any given object or phenomenon. Small creatures make squeaky, high-pitched sounds, hiss and snarl. Large monsters with gaping maws make your insides tremble with their mighty roar and shake their surroundings with their footsteps. You can always hear clanging and rumbling from inside a factory… The list goes on and on.



Even though most of the things we design sounds for in the Riftbreaker do not exist in the real world, the game's visual aspect is often quite enough for us to know what kind of sounds we are looking for. We briefly describe our ‘expectations’ for our sound designer. Then, he scours thousands of sound samples from various libraries in search of the perfect one for the occasion. More often than not, the perfect sound does not exist - finding a perfect sample for the effect you want to achieve is hard. Then, the sound designer has to get creative and mix a couple of samples to get the effect he wants.



We’re going to use a simple example here. When we were looking for a good sound for our rocket launchers, we wanted the sound they make to be both punchy and booming with bass. We found a sample that cut through the chaos of battle pretty okay but was lacking in the low end of the sound spectrum. Luckily, there is an entire “genre” of sound samples called textures. They are not meant to be used on their own. Instead, you can use them to beef up other samples. We found a couple that worked well but couldn’t decide on just one… So we used all of them instead! The result is what you know as the rocket launcher shot sound in the game today.



Other times, creating a sound effect is not that easy. One of the most complex sounds in the game is the one tied to Mr. Riggs’ movement. It has a lot of layers - the servomotors moving the mech’s body parts, the clanging metal from all the parts of armor, and the footsteps themselves. We wanted to cover all the bases with just one sample at first. You can hear our early attempts in the video below. Safe to say, we were not happy with the results for two reasons. First of all - it didn’t sound good enough. That could be fixed with a bit more work. However, the second problem lay a lot deeper. Due to the free movement of the mech in the game, the sample often got cut in the middle of playback. That had to be solved with the help of programmers.





We decided that combining the samples of the mech's entire ‘walk’ cycle into one sound was not the way to go. Instead, we separated all the portions of the sound we told you about earlier. Then, we attached all those individual sounds to various moments in the ‘running’ animation. Once the game detects that the mech is moving, it plays a short loop of servomotor sounds that sound good, even if stopped abruptly. Footsteps are played back only when the mech’s foot touches the ground. This also allows us to detect what kind of a surface you’re walking on and play a sample prepared for that type of terrain. That allowed us to finally solve all the problems. And that was just the walking sound!



At some point, we realized that the scope of The Riftbreaker was so large that we wouldn’t have the time to do all of the sound effects justice. We decided to give the job to Marcin Pukaluk, our music composer. As a professional musician, he has the necessary experience, skills, and tools that are needed to pull this kind of job off. He is the author of the vast majority of The Riftbreaker’s soundscape. The next time you don’t notice a sound because it blends with the environment well, you know who to thank for that!

Speaking of Marcin, he was also responsible for The Riftbreaker’s entire soundtrack. When we started our collaboration, we told him that we wanted the game’s soundtrack to feature a recurring theme that could ‘come back’ in various songs featured in the game. When you think of it, many popular pieces of media have a music theme. We decided to learn from the best: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Uncharted, and even Doom. Other than that, Marcin had complete creative freedom when it came to the composition of the tracks. We are really pleased with how it turned out. If you haven’t done it yet, give the soundtrack a listen. We put it up on YouTube. You can find it right here:



The portion of the audio that was left for us to prepare on our own was the dialogues. We have already told you a little bit about what working with dialogues looks like in our article about Mr. Riggs’ voice. We have worked with three voice actors on The Riftbreaker so far: Francesca Meaux as Ashley, Ryan Laughton as Mr. Riggs, and Tori Kamal as Colonel Norstrom from the prologue mission and the X-Morph consciousness. Audio technology is so good and affordable these days that we can collaborate with our actors fully remotely. We send them dialogue lists with all the lines we need them to read. The actors record the lines on their home audio equipment and send us a WAV file. We cut the file into samples and put it in the game - simple as that!

The “Into the Dark” DLC added a new difficulty modifier to this model. We added another character with dialog lines in the form of the Anoryx Worm. However, we decided to experiment a little. We knew we wanted the creature’s voice distorted and otherworldly. This allowed us to ignore the fact that none of us are native speakers of English and record the audio ourselves, as all the minute details in pronunciation would not be nearly as noticeable. Our volunteer for the task was voidreaver. He waited until everyone left the office to come up with the silliest voice he could muster. This is the raw result:



Obviously, this was not ready to be put into the game. We have done some research on how we can make void sound like a monster and discovered a sound-processing plugin that was quite promising. The plugin could transform any sound in a couple of ways with just a few turns of a virtual knob. Here’s a short presentation of how it works:



After we dialed in a sound that we liked, we added a couple of additional effects to make the sound a bit more ‘ethereal’ and ‘otherworldly’ (a very specific set of qualities, isn’t it?). We think that the end result was pretty okay for a first attempt - let’s see if we repeat this in the future!



We could talk about a million more things, but let’s leave some content for the future! We hope you learned something new today about the often underappreciated world of game audio. Let us know what other aspects of game development you’d like to read about! We’re waiting for your comments here and on our Discord at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. We’d also like to invite you to our streams at www.twitch.tv/exorstudios every Tuesday and Thursday - we’re going to start previewing the new biome from World Expansion III next week (hopefully), along with our regular co-op progress previews.

See you soon!
EXOR Studios

In the upcoming West Balkans map expansion for Euro Truck Simulator 2, you'll come across various water bodies that add to the region's scenic beauty. Let's take a deep dive into what these new digital landscapes have in store for you.


As you explore the West Balkans DLC, you'll notice a diverse range of water bodies, such as rivers and lakes, that really amp up the overall experience of driving through the region. Take the legendary Danube River, for instance. This iconic waterway flows right through the heart of the West Balkans, passing by cities like Belgrade and Novi Sad.



Then there's the charming Neretva River, passing through the city of Mostar. While its banks will offer a number of exciting views that will leave a lasting impression, make sure to not forget to keep an eye out for the Neretva hydroelectric power plant nearby - a subtle yet fascinating landmark.



In addition to other smaller hydroelectric power plants, there's another cool detail to make it all feel even more real: bridge signage. As you drive across those impressive bridges, you'll spot signs displaying the names of the rivers you're crossing. While truly a minor feature, we believe it's these little touches that add a bit of authenticity to the game, making the connection with the region even stronger.














To sum it up, the West Balkans DLC will provide a captivating lineup of water bodies, from rivers and lakes to details like bridge signage. So, get your trucks ready and add the map expansion to your Steam Wishlist to show us how excited you are. And don’t forget to give our social media profiles a follow (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok) to always stay in touch with all the latest news!

NEW MAP: Get ready to pass Go with Monopoly Rush!
NEW STUMBLERS: Check out Monopoly Stumblers and others in the Shop!
EVENTS: Play the latest events with Monopoly Rush and new milestones.
New Server updates and general bug fixes

• Weapon XP is now also earned during skirmish, challenge, random and community missions (not only campaign missions)

• Fixed the heavy SWAT skins missing some customization options (no helmet and more)
  
• Fixed initial damages counting in the campaign mission score

Sker Islanders, thank your patience as our team work toward this latest patch! Check out what they have been working on...a very special change to Episode 4: Deadly Lover's Fortress.



DEADLY LOVER'S FORTRESS BOSS RE-DESIGN

- Boss Room redesigned
- Encounter now has 2 more phases triggered at 66% and 33%
- The main target is no longer the Praetorian
- The main target now gets shielded at 66% until all enemies around are defeated
- Praetorian is now an additional enemy during the encounter
- After Phase 1 wall blockers get enabled randomly around the room

ADDITIONS & ISSUE FIXES

- Fixed an issue where the "DNA Room" area was marked as active for enemies before anyone entered it in "Deadly Lover's Fortress"
- Fixed an issue causing an escort interact during the "Cages of Torment" for the "Deadly Lover's Fortress" level to be enabled at the wrong time
- Fixed an issue causing certain abilities to not start at the correct time if they had a health percent requirement
- Fixed various errors that would cause the game to sometimes halt

COMING VERY SOON: Miracles - Introducing Tier 4/Combos

- Added 8 Tier 4 Miracles, which provide more passive modifiers to the player and abilities. To access Tier 4, you must have at least 3 miracles by 2 gods each (6 in total), which will show you the new ones of that type



May Lucky's luck be with you as you experience this latest patch!

Once again, thank you for supporting Sker Ritual and our team! We hope you're enjoying all of the improvements and updates, and look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below and over on the Sker Ritual Discord!

If you also have a spare moment please do leave the game a review over on the Steam page which supports our Early Access Beta journey!

Wales Interactive Team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1492070/Sker_Ritual/

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