4:38am

The Secret Story 2025-2026 Big Update Roadmap

THE SECRET STORY - Prologue - PandaTV

The Secret Story 2025-2026 Big Update Roadmap

We’re thrilled to announce some exciting news for all fans of The Secret Story franchise!

A major update is coming in 2026, featuring brand-new content and gameplay experiences you won’t want to miss!

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1. New Chapter!

Get ready for Chapter 2, continuing the story with a new protagonist, fresh storyline, and completely reimagined gameplay systems.
Experience multiple story paths and various endings based on your choices!
Make sure to add The Secret Story: Car Owner to your Steam Wishlist today so you don’t miss the launch!

The Secret Story - New Chaptor 2 Wishlist Now!!

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2. New Game Mode!

We’re also introducing a brand-new Guest Mode in The Secret Story!

In this mode, players can freely explore the hotel, take on part-time quests and jobs to earn bonuses, and use their earnings to buy items or unlock exclusive rewards in the shop.

The Secret Story CH1 - prologue Buy now!!

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At UDAGamelab, we’re committed to the continuous development of this game.
We have no intention of abandoning our players — in fact, when The Secret Story: Car Owner officially launches, we’ll be giving special rewards to our loyal players from the original game!

Follow us on Steam, YouTube, and Discord to stay up to date and be part of our growing community.
Your support means everything to us — you are the reason we can continue developing and improving The Secret Story together.

Thank you so much,
UDAGamelab

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We value every piece of feedback! 💬✨ Please consider leaving a positive review to support us! ❤️

We are actively developing new content updates for The Secret Story 🕵️‍♂️👻 in the future—more excitement is guaranteed! 🎉🔥

4:27am

v2025.11.3

Monarch : Medieval Remastered - StPapi

Current Version

v2025.11.3: A new save file is mandatory; otherwise, errors will occur

New Additions

✅ Map Completion Function
✅ Mongol Invasion Event
✅ Final Battle: Obtain multiple fiefs with claims in one go
✅ Optional Toggle: Disbanded army groups cannot be reestablished
✅ Feudal Title Display in Fief Interface: Shows the current feudal title name
✅ New Kingdoms/Empire: Kingdom of Armenia, Two Kingdoms in the Rus Region, Cumans Kingdom, Mongol Empire
✅ Four New Expedition-Related Skills
✅ Two Additional Mercenary Legions in Slavic Cultural Regions

Adjustments

✅ Adjusted the damage reduction probability of Order Knights to 70%
✅ 100% Trigger Rate for the Repeatable Skill of Knight Guards
✅ Army groups with special skills are now directly displayed in the recruitment panel
✅ Adjusted the Requirement for Establishing the Han Empire: The number of living characters with Han culture is reduced from 100 to 50
✅ Mercenary groups with more than 100 members are now eligible to enter the candidate pool for hiring

Bug Fixes

✅ Fixed the issue where non-special army groups also displayed the number of blacksmiths
✅ Fixed the category label error in the army group recruitment interface
✅ Fixed the nickname display issue
✅ Fixed the error that occurred when opening the army group interface if the player was not a king
✅ Fixed the error that occurred when clicking the "Clan" button while selecting a character
✅ Fixed the issue where manors on the battlefield would automatically surrender when a war broke out
✅ Fixed the issue where imprisoning a character did not reduce the relationship level

4:24am

Coffee Diary - November 2025

Exanima - Zetheros

Hey Exanimates,

At this point we're mainly putting the final layers of polish on the new content. This is mostly material work, to make everything look good and cohesive. Making detailed and realistic materials for modern graphics is very difficult, and making sure all the colours are balanced and that all the materials, the dirt and grime etc. belong together and their environment is like a giant game of whack-a-mole.

Even Madoc who is our main programmer has been mostly helping with getting art finalised. When Madoc gets involved in the art pipeline there's a lot of finding tool based solutions to improve results and avoid lots of brute force work. Why fix a problem once when you can fix it forever? While making the game and our own engine, in total we probably spend more time developing our content and asset creation tools. We have our own unique way of doing everything from physics, animation and AI to rendering, with many unique features; our tools are the backbone that allows us to take advantage of these features, and to develop them in the first place. When there's a major advancement in what we're able to do in the game, it usually has more to do with tools than anything else.

Our tools are extensive and designed around creating instructions for how something is made, so that the process can then be rapidly repeated and iterated on. Adjusting or improving any step of the process is relatively quick and easy, as well as creating more assets using the same or a similar process. We're proud of our tools and they're how our tiny little team is able to consistently produce cohesive, high quality, original art and content. Exanima has grown to be quite a large game, but mainly it has an enormous amount of carefully crafted stuff in it. Our most recent addition to the team, a second programmer (Jimmini), has been almost entirely dedicated to expanding our tools and content creation pipeline. These range from improving on what we can do with engine features to brand new tools which will play a major role in how we make content going forward. Some will be used for the content in the Exanima 1.0 release, but we are gearing up for what comes after.

We typically avoid showing any new content before release, but we'll make a small exception with screenshots of one asset to illustrate our art pipeline. Beyond some low poly modelling work, this was created entirely within our tools and uses our newest features, also in terms of rendering. Everything down to the brickwork and roof tiles is created entirely from scratch, giving us complete artistic control. This asset is part of a highly modular "kitbash", meaning we carefully make many individual elements (e.g. the segments of an arch) which combined in many ways and with some tricks can a large number of different assets, that still look well integrated and varied, while using fewer resources. We aim for a certain level of quality and immersive visuals that contribute to the game's atmosphere, while using approaches that are very performance friendly to keep everything running well, even on low end hardware.

And here is a detail of the roof tiles which shows the kind of thing we're able to generate using procedural methods in our tools.

In our last diary we mentioned we were overhauling our 3D grass. The main goal was for the grass system to support not just grass but also small plants and dense undergrowth, as this would be more scalable and efficient in terms of performance and especially in terms of level design. We've made a large number of all new grasses, plants and flowers, more detailed and much higher quality than our previous assets. To make convincing 3D plants we also had to use more advanced rendering methods and there were a number of difficult problems to solve with this. We're using dense grass in environments with lots of lights and high contrast lighting, making grass not look flat or polygonal while preserving lighting detail is difficult, and performance is a concern when so much of the screen is covered in layers of grass being lit by many lights. Indeed our previous grass was heavily reliant on shadows for any depth, which are not always possible. Another common and difficult 3D graphics problem is blending, the grass in our game is small therefore thin, and we really wanted to avoid the pixelated or fuzzy look this often produces, so we needed some clever solutions.

It took a lot of fixing, tweaking and adjusting to finally get everything working and looking how we wanted, and once again adding some features to our asset creation tools was critical to getting it right. We solved all the problems we mentioned and developed some fancy custom shading that is also highly optimised. It looks great even on lower settings and blends perfectly with the ground and all its variation.

Here is an example of dense undergrowth to fill in more vegetation heavy areas. We can now quickly paint this in with a brush and it will dynamically adapt to changes in the terrain as it is edited or modified.

Here is a large amount of grass showing the variation and how it adapts and blends with the ground.

While the ground is not intended for such close-up viewing, this zoomed in shot shows the lighting detail, including specularity and translucency. It looks convincingly 3D even under high contrast lighting:

As well as a new NPC thaumaturge, in this update we're adding four new non-human encounters. The most we've added at once until now was two, and adding new creature types requires a lot of rigging, animation work, careful tweaking of physics, combat AI, sound design etc. So far we've been developing the features to support each new creature and its unique physical and other behaviours as needed and the result is a lot of custom hard coded rules and systems. With four new character types added now and more on the way, this is becoming cumbersome, but importantly this hard coded system has been a big problem for modders who like to add as many modified versions of them as possible. Modders have been very limited in this regard and when we add new creatures it takes away valuable slots they rely on and undoes their work. They've asked, and we promised modders a better system some time ago, so we decided it was finally time to add it.

We developed a proper "race" system which allows adding virtually unlimited character types featuring a massive number of properties and parameters for their appearance, physical properties, animation behaviour, AI, sound and voice effects, stats, locational resistances, equipment use, blood effects and generally how they interact with every game system. On the back of this we've made various improvements to some of the underlying mechanics and tools. We're now able to make adjustments to physics and animation in real-time to immediately see the effects in game, which really improves our workflow.

The biggest change we made though is to how character motions are managed. The new system can create custom motion sets on the fly based on race parameters, equipment, skills and combat styles and effects like special properties on items, powers etc. Motion sets are mixed and matched dynamically allowing all these conditions to provide highly specific overrides while also finding appropriate fallbacks if a motion for specific combinations is not provided, which is also great for modders. We've been wanting this sort of functionality for a long time, but understanding all the requirements and mechanics for a data driven system was a difficult problem. This is also the perfect foundation for changing motions for different weapon grips and even layering motions to support things like performing actions while running or dynamically changing stances.

In general we've been trying to work more closely with modders recently and we've been putting a lot of work into developing polished, user-friendly visual interfaces for all our tools as well as versatile systems to eventually pass on to them. We hope to begin releasing some of these soon and we're quite excited to see what the modding community comes up with. Already with these new systems we expect there's a whole lot they'll be able to do. We're a little restricted with the relatively serious and realistic tone of the game, but modders can be more daring and tend to push at the limits of what our game can do.

We do mention our tools from time to time, but only briefly and usually without specifics. We realise it's not what many gamers get excited about, you just want more content nao, and the amount of effort we put into the back end or seemingly small additions to the game might seem insane, but while Exanima might now be close to its 1.0 release, we're only just getting started and there is so much more we plan to do with these systems and tools. We're in it for the long haul, and to create something special. We know the long development cycles can be frustrating, but we're still here, as dedicated as ever and we will continue to deliver more and better game. The 1.0 release is ultimately an arbitrary milestone.

Best,

Bare Mettle