Madmind Studio presents a brand new trailer for PARANOID, first-person survival horror taking place in the 80s. The game combines an extensive, psychological story with dynamic and brutal combat, and is planned to launch exclusively on Steam.

The game is designed with the next-gen hardware in mind, featuring raytracing and 4K resolution. The trailer is focused on introducing our protagonist - Patrick, showing his struggles with a progressing mental illness. The voices in his head grow ever stronger, affecting his behavior and pushing him towards the unthinkable.




The game tells the story of Patrick Calman, a 31-year-old man who has lost his entire family under mysterious circumstances. His parents died violently, and his sister went suddenly missing. Trauma associated with the loss of his loved ones destroyed Patrick's psyche. His own apartment became his prison.

One day Patrick gets a call, and the voice on the phone seems to belong to his sister. Thirteen years after the disappearance, she announces her comeback. To learn the truth about everything, Patrick will have to leave his secluded life, exposing himself to horrible experiences that will put him on the verge of madness.



Take care,
Madmind Studio

1. We have terminated in-app crystal purchase. You can still use crystals already bought before they expire (150 days).

Hey everyone,

today we are releasing Wallpaper Engine 1.4 with a ton of new features, various improvements and bug fixes. On top of that, we are launching our new designer documentation website, which provides in-depth guides for the Wallpaper Engine Editor and should make wallpaper creation much more accessible to newcomers and existing users alike.


The first major new feature we are introducing is Puppet Warping. With the new puppet warp feature, Wallpaper Engine can analyze the geometry of imported character cutouts (and even character sheets). Wallpaper Engine allows you to define the skeleton and the limbs of your character and then apply complex animations to them. This is a multi-step process that opens up completely new ways to animate characters and we are very much looking forward to seeing what users will do with this new feature:



Puppet Warping even includes physics simulations for objects and advanced users are even able to create interactive wallpaper elements with it, like the following jelly which can be grabbed by the mouse cursor:



Puppet Warping is usually reserved for complex professional applications. We have adapted it for Wallpaper Engine while trying to make it as accessible as possible and created a set of in-depth tutorials on it. If you are interested in giving a try, please have a look at our new tutorial series:

Puppet Warp Tutorials (Only in English for now)


We have also added a completely new key-frame based timeline animation system to the editor. This new system is used in puppet warp animations but we have also enabled it to work with all properties in the editor. This allows you to configure effects to change over time, you can also move, resize and turn elements across the screen on a predefined interval.



In the example preview above, you can also see the new Refraction effect freezing over a window with a timeline animation. The new refraction effect is especially well-suited to simulate frozen glass or similar surface patterns - just in time for the winter season!

Just like with Puppet Warping, we have created a series of extensive tutorials for the new timeline animation system that you can find on our new documentation website:

Timeline Animation Tutorials (Only in English for now)


Another new feature is HDR Bloom that allows for more advanced light glow effects on wallpaper elements. The effect is especially visible when bright and dark objects meet. We have updated the existing Razer Bedroom wallpaper to support HDR Bloom. If you would like to give it a try, set Post-Processing to the new Ultra setting which is turned off by default for now:



HDR Bloom is a new option in the editor scene options, if you would like to learn more about how to use it in your own wallpapers, please have a look at our new bloom tutorial:

Bloom HDR Tutorial (Only in English for now)


We have added a few new customization options to all Scene and Video wallpapers. You can now choose more alignment options, including a Free Alignment option, which gives you the ability to freely position a wallpaper on your screen and zoom it in and out as needed.

Additionally, we have implemented another popular feature request to give you the ability to change the brightness, contrast and saturation. On top of that, we have added a hue shift functionality which allows you to completely change the colors of any wallpaper if they don't happen to fully match your taste.

You can find these options on the right-hand side when selecting any installed Scene or Video wallpaper:



In the video clip above you may have spotted another new feature: Clicking on any slider value in the wallpaper settings will now allow you to manually type in a value - this was also another popular request that we have implemented.


We continue to overhaul the user interface to make it easier to use and also improve the look and feel. You can now see followed users and favorite wallpapers in the Discover tab by clicking on the new buttons in the top section.

We have also created a new download animation and added a blur effect to all pop-up windows. If you don't like these effects or if they cause any technical issues for you, you can turn them off in the General tab of the Wallpaper Engine settings. When hardware acceleration for the user interface is turned off, they are also automatically turned off to make the interface more performant.

The Wallpaper Engine editor has become very capable and includes many functions also found in professional applications. For this reason we have worked hard to create a new documentation website which we are finally revealing today:


The website is still a work in progress and still missing a few important tutorials. However, all new features have been fully documented and we have also already created a new Getting started with your first wallpaper guide that is a great way to get started with all the basics of creating your fist animated wallpaper with Wallpaper Engine.

The new website offers multiple advantages to us over using Steam or an external wiki: Since we have full control over the website, we can structure tutorials the way we like them, incorporate a large number of helpful video clips and even create translations which will make the Wallpaper Engine editor more accessible in the long run.

The documentation for HTML-based Web wallpapers is already done, while we will likely finish the documentation for image-based Scene wallpapers in January 2021. Once we are done with the documentation, we will start translating the website into other languages, so if your English is not the greatest, be sure to check back later or simply give machine-translation a try!

We highly value your right to privacy: Neither the Wallpaper Engine app or our website utilize any user tracking at all. For this reason, we absolutely rely on personal user feedback. If you think any of the tutorials are unclear or if you have a suggestion for a future tutorial topic, we're happy to hear from you, just post on our forums or send us an email. Any constructive feedback, be it positive or negative, is very much appreciated and we will incorporate it into future updates of the website and the app.


Last but not least, we wish all of our users that celebrate any of the ongoing or upcoming festivities around the world happy holidays and we wish everyone a happy new year. We know there are more important things going on in the world than an app for animated wallpapers, but we hope you will like the features we have added with this update and hope that it will inspire people to try out some of the new or existing features of the Wallpaper Engine editor.

We personally will take off some time to spend Christmas with our families starting the 21st of December. Should you run into any technical issues over the Christmas holidays, we would like to apologize in advance and ask you to check out our Troubleshooting & FAQ website first - it really covers all regular issues in great detail and most problems can be solved easily with the help of it. If you cannot solve these issues on your own, just write us an email or come by our forums in January and we will be happy to help you out as we usually do.

• Added timeline animation system for properties.
  
• Added puppet warp deformation and animation system.
  
• Added HDR bloom rendering.
  
• Added new "Ultra" post-processing option to enable HDR bloom, it's disabled by default for now.
  
• Added script access to texture, property and puppet warp animations.
  
• Added refraction effect.
  
• Added precision option to user property sliders.
  
• Added order input to sort user properties a bit more easily.
  
• Added direct user property editing in wallpaper browser by clicking on the label.
  
• Added general colorization options to scene and video wallpapers.
  
• Added animations to wallpaper download progress (can be turned off by disabling the new UI effects option).
  
• Added background blur modals in UI similar to Windows 10 transparency effects (can be turned off by disabling the new UI effects option).
  
• Added additional UI hardware acceleration option to toggle it on again after it was disabled with the third Steam launch option.
  
• Improved keyword behavior in Workshop tab.
  
• Added designer documentation button to editor startup screen.
  
• Replaced help overlay with new section in file menu.
  
• Various minor user interface improvements in the app and the first-time setup.
  
• Added image layer preview image to properties in editor.
  
• Improved general input responsiveness of editor by making FPS limiter more lax when input is sent.
  
• Added new 'center' and 'free' alignment options to videos and scenes (renamed old 'center' alignment to 'fill').
  
• Made image import dialog simpler with texture format guide.
  
• Improved quality of mass-imported static image wallpapers.
  
• Added setTimeout/setInterval functions to engine in SceneScript.
  
• Changed particle systems to immediately turn invisible when a user property toggles them off.
  
• Fixed per-wallpaper LED effects option not being applied on start up sometimes.
  
• Added automatic VRAM stop option that turns Wallpaper Engine off when your VRAM becomes exhausted (experimental, disabled by default).
  
• Reduced rare issue where wallpapers reload or flicker after booting with the high-priority automatic startup.
  
• Added CTRL / Shift hotkeys to brush editor to change size/opacity of brush more easily while editing.
  
• Added Shift hotkey to increase camera movement in editor.
  
• Added new "followed content" section to Discover tab where a list with new wallpapers from followed authors is shown too.
  
• Added background blending option for god rays and shine, when they are used on transparent images to improve blending behavior.
  
• Moved camera paths into dynamic window that is hidden by default (open it from edit -> camera paths).
  
• Added a connection overlay while Wallpaper Engine is blocked by Steam to confirm the initial connection.
  
• Updated Steamworks SDK to 1.50.
  
• Updated FreeType and Harfbuzz libraries to implement security updates.
  
• Added time rollover to scene wallpapers to fix animations breaking after weeks of uninterrupted use.
  
• Completely removed DirectX 9 and OpenGL in favor of DirectX 11.

• Fixed FPS limiter inaccuracies over 60 FPS - 144 FPS were previously only 120 FPS, now they really are 144 FPS.
  
• Fixed x-ray effect to work even when it's not the last effect.
  
• Fixed color picker on multi-monitor systems sometimes not working right.
  
• Fixed DPI scaling of title bar covering buttons on high DPI.
  
• Updated iCUE SDK to 3.0.361 and fixed LED count on multiple devices of the same class.
  
• Fixed scale gizmo in editor to maintain aspect ratio of scale.
  
• Fixed texture stats in editor to not take certain dynamic buffers into account.
  
• Fixed CEF global muting not being applied.
  
• Attempted to fix brush panel sometimes not appearing.
  
• Fixed combo box property not saving with a default value unless the creator chose one.
  
• Fixed bug in transparency cropping that turned some images invisible.
  
• Fixed audio stream being opened by OS even when wallpapers are globally muted.
  
• Fixed move wallpapers menu not showing all folders.
  
• Fixed nextWallpaper command line not being applied to all playlists.
  
• Fixed playlist images not showing on certain file paths.

• Fixed DirectX crashes on some systems.
  
• Renamed internal colorization properties to avoid conflicts with existing wallpapers.
  
• Fixed scene audio response not disabling when there are multiple wallpapers with audio response.
  
• Reverted Steamworks to previous release until we can verify compatibility further.
  
• Fixed problems with image compression when updating an existing wallpaper.
  
• Fixed crash when a puppet warp with one bone was created.
  
• Fixed tray icon not appearing on some systems.
  
• Fixed issue where some wallpapers would not be displayed correctly.
  
• Fixed yellow-black checkerboxes appearing when update is not fully installed.

• Fixed various issues with static image wallpapers.
  
• Fixed issues with disappearing elements in the editor.
  
• Improved puppet warp bone index sorting.
  
• Fixed border on "Fill" alignment on Windows 7.
  
• Updated to Valve's latest preview image URL scheme to fix some broken preview images.
  
• Fixed issue where sprite sheets where disabled when HDR was enabled.
  
• Optimized particle loading by reducing JSON copies.
  
• Fixed Refraction effect causing errors on wallpaper upload.
  
• Improved texture animation timer precision.

If you have any questions or issues with the update, please have a look at our help site as it covers the most common issues with application:


Should you run into any issues with the update or Wallpaper Engine in general, you can always write us on our Steam Discussion board and we'll gladly help you out. If you run into any issues or bugs, please post on our forums rather than commenting on the news as it's difficult to provide support in the news comment section. Please keep in mind that we will take a few days off during the Christmas days.

Some Nvidia users have reported crashes at startup with the 460.79 drivers ("Cyberpunk 2077 Release Drivers"). If you are using these drivers and Wallpaper Engine crashes at startup mentioning an issue caused by the Nvidia drivers, please revert back to the previous stable drivers.

There is a rare bug which can cause extremely high CPU usage when Razer Synapse is installed which appears to have started since the most recent update to Razer Synapse. If you have recently started noticing high CPU usage and have Razer Synapse installed, turn Wallpaper Engine off and reinstall Razer Synapse, afterwards restart your computer and see if the issue persists. In that case, turn off the LED Plugin in the Wallpaper Engine settings for the time being.

Hello, guys!

2020 was definitely one of the hardest years we’ve had due to the world pandemic, but with your help, we created a lot of games and learned a lot of things.

As a way to retribute your support, today we’ve launched “Bring me a man, Santa”, a short and FREE music game in which you collect candies to remove the clothes of some of our guys. You can plat it right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468180/Bring_me_a_man_Santa/

If you feel like supporting us more, we’ve launched a DLC too with all sketches and characters naked from the game. It costs only $2 (20% OFF during its launching week) and it can help us a lot.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1495330/Bring_me_a_man_Santa__Adult_Art_Pack/

Last but not least, we really want to say to you all: THANK YOU!

We hope you enjoy our upcoming releases.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468430/Freezer_Pops/

Don't forget to follow our Steam page. We are heading to 300 followers on Steam!


Victoria

________________________________________
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/maledollstudio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maledollstudio
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maledollstudio/
Discord: https://discord.gg/4y4bwRh
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studio_maledoll/

Hello, guys!

2020 was definitely one of the hardest years we’ve had due to the world pandemic, but with your help, we created a lot of games and learned a lot of things.

As a way to retribute your support, today we’ve launched “Bring me a man, Santa”, a short and FREE music game in which you collect candies to remove the clothes of some of our guys. You can plat it right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468180/Bring_me_a_man_Santa/

If you feel like supporting us more, we’ve launched a DLC too with all sketches and characters naked from the game. It costs only $2 (20% OFF during its launching week) and it can help us a lot.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1495330/Bring_me_a_man_Santa__Adult_Art_Pack/

Last but not least, we really want to say to you all: THANK YOU!

We hope you enjoy our upcoming releases.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468430/Freezer_Pops/

Don't forget to follow our Steam page. We are heading to 300 followers on Steam!


Victoria

________________________________________
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/maledollstudio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maledollstudio
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maledollstudio/
Discord: https://discord.gg/4y4bwRh
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studio_maledoll/

This dev diary post was originally posted in 2019 - now it's slightly updated and re-uploaded (because of nostalgia, and- ) to celebrate the release of the game.

Bánk, the project's writer-director, gathered for us which games were especially influential in creating Chicken Police's story, world, and characters. They might not come as a surprise, but the reasons are. ;)

Bánk "I wanted to be a videogame developer since my childhood. Among other things, these games were the ones that eventually drove me to this journey and even played a huge role in the development of Chicken Police."


Well... what can I say? To me, Grim is everything! It was maybe the most definitive gaming experience of my childhood and also turned out to be one of the most determinate experiences of my adulthood too. Unforgettable characters, endlessly exciting and insane story, the music, the art-direction, the voice-acting, simply everything! For a long time, I only had the demo version of the game, which I've completed about 10-15 times, if not more. I didn't even understand the text completely, I learned English from video games, and then I was less than a beginner. So I came back to it again and again, and I understood more and more every time. Not just the text, but what the game really wants to say...

Grim taught me that no matter how great your setting and your story is, the characters are always your most important assets! - That's why I've created my (silly and strange, but effective) character generation formula, which I use ever since, and Grim, among others, made me fell in love irrevocably with the noir genre, and movies like Gilda, The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity or Casablanca. (which is not even a real noir, but that's another topic)

Manny's adventure also taught me that music is one of the most important elements of moody games like these. "Un dos tres cuatro... ta ta taaaaa!"

Huge heartfelt thanks to Tim Schafer, Peter McConnell, and Tony Plana, amongst many others, who made this gem of a game a reallity!




Heh... a no-brainer, eh? Yeah... not even a question. By the time this game came out, noir was already one of my favorite genres. L.A. Noir was not only an almost perfect story with a fantastic mood but the definitive investigating simulator. Unfortunately, the project was bleeding from a few wounds (Somewhat the full open-world structure and the lack of focus on the main storyline hurt the experience a little), but it still inspired us immensely. So, huge respect and thank you, Team Bondi!




Both of them are amazing detective games in Mr. Kojima's unique storytelling, featuring real, alive characters (and hilarious dialogues at times). Policenauts is maaaaybe a little closer to my heart because of the buddy-cop feel, which Chicken Police also borrowed in the end. If you thought about it, it's Lethal Weapon in sci-fi version, and it's hard to come up with anything cooler than that...

Furthermore, these games' gameplay is similar to what we created, with dialogues and interrogation being the main focus. Cult classics, that's true, but still undeservedly ignored. (REMASTER, anyone???!)




When I first saw it as a child, it made my brain almost-literally explode (it still does even today, when I get back to it from time to time). Hardcore noir-adventure with great mini-games and even some action sequences, and that "camera-photo" riddles (I don't know how to address them) were almost surreal like I've never seen again ever since.

I also LOVE the original novel by Philip K. Dick (and all of P.K.Dick's works to be honest), and the movie version is very close to my heart too, so it's a no-brainer BR is in my top games. (and yes, Deckard was an android! - at least in the movie...)




An undeservedly ignored game. Wake masterfully twists the literary topoi of classic pulp-horror novels and their movie versions. Simply a forgotten masterpiece, a never made Twighlight episode in a game form. I've completed it a thousand times, and - when I'll have time to play anything -, I'm sure I'm going to reach for it again.
"Previously on Alan Wake" I'm never going to get this sentence out of my head.




Shame or not, I've only run into this game in my adulthood. I started to play with it at the insistence of our programmer, Péter, and its humor, breakings of the fourth wall, and the irresistible chemistry of the two main characters just blew my mind. How the cluck I don't played this already a hundred times???!

I'm still trying to recover from it, with more or less success... (probably less)




For me... there's Bioshock, and there's everything else. Narrative design, writing, characters, setting, music, mood - Bioshock is one of a kind! Whatever game I'm working on, or will be in the future, Bioshock always affects me one way or another. It's definitely on my bucket-list: I'll have to shake hands with Ken Levine once.

"Would You Kindly" - is still the best plot-twist in every game ever!




This... this is maybe the strangest entry in this list yes, but hear me out! How is Thief a noir??? Well, the original Thief series (especially Thief 2) borrows heavily from the film-noir heritage. A grumpy, morally compromised anti-hero with inner-monologues, distorted shadows, and silhouettes, a dark city with corrupted cops and politicians, seemingly endless nights, complex mysteries, and even a great femme fatale! (you are the best, Victoria!)

But what was even more important as an influence, than the medieval-noir setting, was the amazing and still unmatched worldbuilding of the first three Thief games.
These games (and especially the second one - The Metal Age) inspired me to always give no1 priority to the well-thought-out structure of the world and the deep, carefully-written lore, no matter what kind of story I'm creating.



"To sum it up: Maybe the most important thing is that the mood and the atmosphere must be coherent. In creating narrative games, you must pay attention to a lot of things that the player maybe won't even notice (or will be affected only subconsciously), but all in all, I believe everything stands on the characters, who we'll learn to love or hate in order to be breathing with them within the world they live in."


- Bánk & The Wild Gentlemen

A lucrative offer. A simple job. Infiltrate Chimera.

We're excited to announce that StarCrawlers Chimera will be coming to Steam Early Access in 2021!
StarCrawlers Chimera will be a turn & grid based cyberpunk dungeon crawl featuring a lone crawler on a job to locate Dr. Cerberus in the depths of the Chimera BioPharma building.

Build your character from a variety of skill trees inspired by the StarCrawlers universe, grab some gear, and jump in. Grow your power and level up to unlock new abilities, gear, and secrets as you explore and battle.

We'll have more details to share soon both here and on the StarCrawlers Chimera Steam page!

Hello, guys!

2020 was definitely one of the hardest years we’ve had due to the world pandemic, but with your help, we created a lot of games and learned a lot of things.

As a way to retribute your support, today we’ve launched “Bring me a man, Santa”, a short and FREE music game in which you collect candies to remove the clothes of some of our guys. You can plat it right now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468180/Bring_me_a_man_Santa/

If you feel like supporting us more, we’ve launched a DLC too with all sketches and characters naked from the game. It costs only $2 (20% OFF during its launching week) and it can help us a lot.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1495330/Bring_me_a_man_Santa__Adult_Art_Pack/

Last but not least, we really want to say to you all: THANK YOU!

We hope you enjoy our upcoming releases.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1468430/Freezer_Pops/

Don't forget to follow our Steam page. We are heading to 300 followers on Steam!


Victoria

________________________________________
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/maledollstudio
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maledollstudio
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maledollstudio/
Discord: https://discord.gg/4y4bwRh
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studio_maledoll/

We are amazed by your continuous positive feedback on the game! It’s heartwarming to hear how much you’re enjoying Yu and Kay’s story. We’re releasing today a second patch with some of your most pressing feature requests and some fixes to improve the experience.
We appreciate your feedback, your help reporting those issues and your patience as we fix them.


Version 1.0.165

• Automatic backup save before ending: a save is created for those of you who will want to go back and explore the game before the end. For players who have finished the game already, when loading your epilogue save, a backup save will be created before the take off, giving you a change to revisit.
  
• Co-op with Keyboard & Mouse and one controller: Ability to play co-op with Keyboard & Mouse + one controller (local and remote play).
  
• Accessibility: Option to disable camera wobble.
  
• UI: Ability to choose what button prompts are displayed

• Gloves upgrade: Fixed a bug where Yu says she has enough hyper rust to upgrade the gloves, although this upgrade is not accessible yet.
  
• Combat soft lock: fixed a bug where the characters would become unresponsive after using Help in combat.
  
• Misc bug fixes

A new patch for Stirring Abyss is now available, including French localisation and other fixes.

General:

- French localisation now available!
- You can now rename your divers. (Look for the small icon of a pen on the personnel sheet)
- Easy is now the default difficulty when starting the game for the first time.

Balance:

- Reduced the crafting costs of most consumable items.

Bugfixes:

- Fixed a bug that could cause Salvage and Extermination missions to immediately complete or fail on the first turn of the mission.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the Wards in the "Enemy at the Gates" -mission to become unresponsive upon loading a saved game or following evacuation.
- Fixed the "Continue" text in some story events always displaying in English, regardless of selected language.
- Fixed an erroneous translation for less than maximum divers selected for the Away Team in the Russian localization.