• New 8v8 Stadium named Skywall Stadium
  
• New UI scheme. This is not yet finished but the foundation of it is there. There will be more improvements to the UI in the following updates.
  
• Reverted foul detection to how it was before Beta 1.2, and added new mechanic to avoid slide tackling the ball through players. Fouls should be less sensitive and cheesy.
  
• Changed goalkeeper controls. Dives can now be done without holding left ctrl, just hit space bar, then to jump you press left alt. Catching is still done by holding left ctrl. You now can control the height of your dive with the W and S keys. So for example W+A is a dive to the top left, and S+D is a dive to the bottom right.
  
• Buffed goalkeeper dive speed. This is to help shooting vs goalkeeping be more balanced.
  
• Changed goal scale from 1.05 to 1.0. This also should bring more balance to shooting/scoring and goalkeeping.
  
• Changed kick charge mechanics to charge fast at 1st but slow down the more you charge it. Also increased total time it takes to do a full kick charge.
  
• Increased max kick power.
  
• Increased player collision size, also tweaked some settings that should improve the collision of the ball with the player.
  
• Improved headers. They should be more reliable now.
  
• Increased slide tackle and bicycle kick hitbox size.
  
• Fixed throw ins triggering out of bounds when thrown close to the line. It will now calculate when the ball hits the ground.
  
• Increased 1st person max FOV to 140.
  
• Fixed invert look/height/curve options not working.
  
• Added deceleration when a player makes hard turns. This is meant to make dribbling more balanced overall.
  
• Added a small slow down whenever a player takes a touch on the ball. This is also meant to balance dribbling.
  
• Fixed collision bug that made some touches bounce far away from the player after colliding.
  
• Added jump and slide tackle stamina drain of 10%.

To stay up to date on the latest news or give/recieve feedback, join the official Pro Soccer Online discord: https://discord.gg/h5pw5MQrGq

Multiple fixes

Hello fellow travellers!

Welcome back to our monthly blog posts, where we’ll be looking more in-depth into Season: a letter to the future – and peek behind the curtain to see what inspires our team. We’ll use this space to tell you more about our world, our characters and the talented team of individuals working on the game.

In this month’s instalment, we will chat with Narrative Designer Megan Hutchison about the world of Season, its roots, and what we can expect from it when we explore it soon.


Caption: Season: a letter to the future



On Season, the narrative designers do story integration into gameplay mechanics. That is a bit of a wide net that I’ve cast there, but it is easiest to think of narrative designers as the bridge between game designers and writers. We take the words and story that the writer is trying to communicate and figure out how to build it into the world of Season. We do this by creating quests or things in the game to discover along the way.

We are very lucky to have such a small team on Season, and we support each other with the sprints’ tasks. For example, sometimes the writer might want some help figuring out lore that builds off of the landscape, or we might help with integrating accessibility text (subtitles). One of my tasks is ensuring the grammar in the game is Canadian (all the extra u’s and l’s). The narrative designers (there are two of us!) end up doing a lot of different things to support the development of Season.


It can be a bit of both! Games are intermedial products that blend different areas of creation together to build an experience. Narrative games are a byproduct of the media that came before them.

I find that books and movies hold control over the reader. You don’t have much agency as a reader – you can either read or not. There are no choices in where you go or what you choose to learn about; that’s where games differ. In Season, you choose where you go, so you can change the order of what you learn or explore sections to uncover more information. For this reason, a player is often referred to as a “cyborg”; they use the controller as a piece of technology that encodes their intentions for the game character to do. So through the controller, you become a cyborg and have agency.

Dr. Alexander Galloway has a wonderful collection of essays in his book: Gaming Essays on Algorithmic Culture, where he compares video games to movies. Regarding framing the camera, we can see inspiration from filmmaking (and Oli talked about this too in his interview!). The team looked at their favourite movies to decide how the camera would act within the game.

Any of the narrative scenes are designed the same way as you would a movie. You have a script that turns into a storyboard, and then you animate the characters, add lighting, voice acting, and polish!

Video games are unique, but we are still just trying to tell a story and have the viewers be entertained.


Caption: Season: a letter to the future


I take inspiration from my studies and past experiences. I studied filmmaking in undergrad and worked in a theatre for a while on sound design. Then I did a masters in literature. Now I’m working on Season and doing a PhD in game studies.

The class I keep returning to is one I took for my masters, taught by Dr. Sandra Singer on trauma studies. Which I know sounds dark, but I love dark things. We learned about the collective memory of events, which is best described as a question, like “where were you during 9/11?”. This question for people alive during that time triggers a memory of when they learned of the fall of the towers. For me, I was in school and too young to understand what had happened, but my parents could tell me exactly what they were doing on that day. It’s the idea that events tie us all together, we all have different perspectives of an event, and piecing those together will give us a better view of the moment in time they lived within.

As Estelle meets people, I remind myself that we are writing a story that isn’t egocentric. Estelle is there to show you the world and learn; everyone has a story to tell.


I had written a lot of lore that isn’t in the game. For example, I really like thinking about death and burials, so I came up with a history of how people were buried in a place that Estelle visits. But none of that made it into the game. Some may think “aww man that’s a bummer,” but I would disagree with that. The practice of writing that lore made me understand the world better, and pieces of it inspired other storylines. Even though an idea isn’t in the game in its original form, it still makes an impact on the story and the team.

For me, that’s the meaning of collaboration.


Caption: Season: a letter to the future


I find the farmlands really comforting and familiar to my life. If you watch our gameplay trailer, you can see the cows, which always reminds me of my grandfather’s farm. I grew up surrounded by these lovely large dogs (the cows act like giant dogs), and caring for them was a lovely pleasure.

With that, the locations in the game have some unique features, but they are pulled from the experiences and places that our team has visited. Some of the fears and stories of the characters are also very relatable to issues we would see in reality.


Caption: Season: a letter to the future


I am very new to game development, so I was given homework by my coworkers to learn more about level design and narrative design. I must say, getting homework to play games is pretty rad.

Oli had me play Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to understand how quest items can be hidden in a space that makes them not obvious but also work in the scene. He explained it as a radius of a location. Items should be placed by importance, with the least important items placed further away from the middle. For example, when approaching an area, a narrative item far away should introduce the quest, but it needs to be placed where it is framed by a player entering the area. Then the key to the quest is in the middle, encouraging players towards the pivotal point.

There are other games I looked to for guidance as well: Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, to understand how a mystery can be set up. Tell Me Why for emotional storytelling. Outer Wilds for world-building (I managed to permanently die in this game while streaming to the studio…). Finally, Disco Elysium for the gold standard for dialogue.


Caption: Disco Elysium


The Season’s history is based on the ages of our own world. We tried to base the way of life in each of these ages on what happened in our reality.


Find mentors to support you. I am extremely lucky to work at a studio that listened to my interest in narrative design and took a risk on the community manager to teach her about things like how to use the Unreal Engine, and everything else that goes with game development.

My other piece of advice is to keep reading. I have a background in academics of games, and you can learn a lot from reading about game development. There are a couple of writers that I love, so I’ll tell you all about them. Matthew Thomas Payne inspired a lot of my masters research from his books Joystick Soldiers, and Playing War. For a look at Queer Studies in games, Bonnie Ruberg is your person, their book Video Games Have Always Been Queer is a great place to start. If you are more interested in learning about ethical choices in games, then check out Miguel Sicart, and start with Play Matters. Finally, if you want to look at gaming cultures, Mia Consalvo is your researcher. Her most recent book Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames, looks into gamer cultures of what we consider to be a “real game” or respectable to admit to playing.

Finally, leave your ego at the door. No matter your background, you will always have something to learn from discussing ideas with your team. Find that supportive environment and steal all the wisdom that you can.


Caption: Tell Me Why


When I started to work on Season, I made a big move from Brampton to Montreal. I had been living in isolation with my family, surrounded by all I knew. It felt like I was breaking this safety bubble and what I knew to head into the unknown. It was the first move I made to be a real adult and live alone. As I worked on Estelle’s story, I felt comfort in this woman going off to explore the world for herself.


I mentioned my grandfather earlier. As I write, he keeps popping into my head. He grew up in Paraguay on a farm and went by horse to school. In his youth, he was an engineer aboard a ship, travelling around South America. He did many things before settling in Canada on the Ontario / Quebec border and became a farmer. As a child, I would follow him to the barn to feed the animals and then to the workshop. Every time I was in that workshop we would silently work, I would clean up the wood shavings and he would carve me a wooden bowl. I did that with him every time I visited, and he taught me the power of silence and connection.

Sometimes it’s not what you say; instead, being together can make all the difference.

The world of Season is complex, as are the people you meet. I like to think the place we built is one my grandfather would like to explore.

---

Thank you for taking the time to read our update! We’d love to hear your thoughts on our Discord, where you can talk to the developers, share your own inspirations, and learn more about Season.

Don’t forget that we also have a newsletter that will share some different information you won’t get in our blog posts!

Be safe in your journeys, and never forget.

With love,
Scavengers Studio

• Fixed typing audio continuing after dialogue typing had ended
  
• Added first pass on adding custom UI to the new dialogue system
  
• Fixed Cancel key interact for cutscenes.
  
• Changed device to not make a sound after it shows again when Sinew explodes.
  
• Fixed NRE when invite controller button pressed when steam sdk isn't intialised
  
• Fixed player select screen misaligned for 10:16
  
• Added pop sound to sinew boss antenna pop
  
• Fixed scene triggers in escape pod scene not loading end of demo screen.
  
• Fixed issue where cracks didn't always show for sinew
  
• Added dirt and other static shards to sinew after breaking floor. Then setting to floor layer after death.
  
• Added escape pod to escape pod scene.
  
• Fixed NRE happening in PlayerInteractBehaviour
  
• Fixed NRE in EnemyStateController.IsPlayerInFOVRange()
  
• Added flashing to pop orb Boss animations.

Hello everyone!

I've received some feedback and tried to make the tanks more visible and reworked some enemies.
Please let me know if there are enemies that are way to strong or not fun to fight.

Next update I will add more common items to the store and rework the tavern.

I hope you've been enjoying your saunterings in the strange world of Dread Delusion. We're excited to put out a rather large content update, with a focus of deepening the Faction systems and giving players more to explore and see. So let's get started!

---

First up, we've added a sprawling mine complex to the underbelly of Hallowshire, designed by the fantastic Aaron Taecker-Wyss. This not only adds a more intricate dungeon-space that was lacking from Hallowshire, but it provides a new way to gain crafting upgrades for your weapons!



Speaking of which, crafting has been overhauled. You will now need more ores to upgrade weapons, and we've added a shiny new weapon tier; Emberian.

(Please note that, because the Emberian weapons are meant as late-game upgrades, they're pretty hard to obtain at the moment. Hard, but not impossible.)

---

Speaking of resources, across the Oneiric Isles you'll encounter a new resource, encased in an emerald conch of sorts. These 'Godlets', as they're called by the locals, can be used as a currency to further your standing with factions. (Cute little buggers, aren't they?)

---

Next up we've added a new flying island to the skies of Hallowshire. This is ruled by the mystic Wikkan Coven of the Worm and features a bunch of nooks and crannies. Expect more peculiar denizens to pop up here in the future, including a moth-related deity...

---

We've also added a load more lore books to the world, and each one features a bespoke illustration by the amazing comics artist Artyom Trakhanov, whose style is simply sublime. I've been following Artyom's work for a while now, and the chance to include his work in the game is really humbling.

---

And that about wraps it up for this post! There's still a lot in store for the future of Dread Delusion. We've been listening closely to the great feedback our playerbase has been giving the team. Mechanics like music placements, stat-weights, and player interaction are just a few of the things we've been looking into, so stay tuned!

And as always, please post any issues you come across or feedback you may have in the Discussion Forums.

---

Patch Notes

• Added New Location: The Wikkan Isle
  
• Added New Dungeon: Hallowshire Mines
  
• Added New Spell: Spectral Flachette
  
• Added New Weapon Type: Emberian
  
• Added New Ore Type: Emberian Ore
  
• Added "Faction Collectors" - NPCs who will buy Godshells for cash & faction rep

• Boosted spell damage & Spellcast skill damage multiplier
  
• Minor tweaks to stamina's relation to physical damage
  
• Minor tweaks to fall damage calculation

• Added a new type of teleporter: Mirrors! These will serve as a quick way to exit dungeons and other areas as well as a robust way to move around environments.
  
• Changed crafting/upgrade and item coding
  
• Added lore books around the world, complete with illustrations
  
• Thread-based clothing now upgrades 3 Levels instead of 2
  
• Added chests and redistributed certain pieces of loot across the isle
  
• Added Godshells pickups around Hallowshire
  
• Added a big vertical shell to the swamp area of Hallowshire
  
• Tweaks were made to the movement system
  
• Increased what the max sensitivity can be set to
  
• Added a tab in the menu for tracking the player's reputation with different factions
  
• Changed all beds to be either 'restable', 'unsafe' or 'owned'. Using unsafe beds may result in the player being mugged or awoken by an enemy.
  
• Minor UI tweaks

• Fixed calculations regarding stamina and attack damage
  
• Fixed certain materials not displaying accurately
  
• Fixed minor enemy navigation issues

---

Don't have Dread Delusion Yet? Pick it up Now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1574240/Dread_Delusion/

• LovelyHellplace's Twitter
• DreadXP Tiktok
• DreadXP Twitter
• DreadXP Youtube
• DreadXP Instagram
• DreadXP Discord

Welcome to the first "major" post-release update. It's been so great to see people enjoying the game! The feedback has been flowing in, primarily around game balance, so that will be the focus of this update. Let's dive in!

Let's face it--Guided Missiles were pretty OP. I've made some changes to make them slightly less OP. In particular, each of your missiles now has a limited lifetime, if it can't reach an enemy before that time elapses, you're out of luck! When you have a missile ready, you'll see a red missile around your ship, and all enemies in range will be indicated with a red target. Be sure to save the missile until enemies are in range!

Don't you hate it when your first encounters on a run are all Mechanics and Doctors? Me too! So I fixed it! Now, you're more likely to see shops, Scrappers, and Tinkerers early game, with Mechanics and Doctors being more likely in the end-game. This should make runs feel more consistent and avoid situations where the map feels unwinnable.

• Scrapper is now much more likely to give you higher-quality augments than previously
  
• Hyper Shot projectile speed buff has been decreased across the board

There is now a subtle green particle effect around a planet whenever there are still enemies in orbit. When you clear a planet, you get a happy little sound effect and particle explosion. Because who doesn't like a little dopamine?

Many of these changes came from suggestions from players like you! Join the Discord to give any suggestions or feedback you may have about the game!

Hello everyone!

We have just published the latest version of the demo, which brings about many changes.

First of all, we have switched the engine version from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, mainly because the game takes place in one big island and thanks to some new lighting technologies (Lumen) it will be possible to have one single lighting setup for the complete scenario.

This means that there will be real time lighting present wherever you go.
So far we have been using a baked lighting method, which had several problematic aspects, like balancing indoor and outdoor lighting and just simply baking the whole island in one go, not mentioning that making changes required everything to be rebaked from the ground up.
All of this has been resolved, obviously now we have different technicalities to juggle but we have managed to find a good balance so far.

This lighting system has been implemented in the demo as well, so don’t be surprised if everything looks a little bit different, some better some a little worse.

Apart from switching engine versions we have been hard at work on the Graphical User Interface of the game:

Now there is an Objective list, which details the steps you have to take for your goals, this will make much more sense in the final product, but you can see a glimpse of it in the demo as well.

An Inventory, where you can inspect the items that you have picked up and read any type of document you may have found.

A Journal detailing every comment of the character, making it easier to read them in case you missed something.

An Options menu, with adjustable display, audio and mouse settings.

A Controls menu, where you can freely customize your keyboard or controller settings.

Last but not least, now there is also a title screen and main menu, with an intro sequence.

All that is left is to implement the character profile system, which entails saving and loading and the hint system. We also plan to add achievements and have come up with a new way to make localization more feasible.

When all these are done we will implement a tutorial that will take place during the demo sequence.

We plan to include the demo in the complete game and it will connect seamlessly to the main game. Obviously, you will be prompted to choose whether you would like to play this part of the game again or not.

Apart from these, we have been also working on the various puzzles and environments on the island, slowly but surely we are getting closer to completion.
There is still a lot to do, and we would like to give you the best experience.

Thanks and have a nice day!
Adam and Laszlo

Fix for sticking on loading between levels
Fix for Lazer gun not working on boss 1
Made scanlines more visible

You waited a long time. sorry.
The DLC patch is now complete.
If automatic update doesn't work, try installing again.
Feel free to comment on questions and improvements.

thank you