Hi Adventurers!

Great news for you today! Our magical road trip Firebird is HERE!

Are you ready to embark on a rich and folkloric adventure aboard your Firebird? Are you ready to switch back and forth between myth and reality? All your choices will be important to your smooth progress in the Great North, without forgetting resource management!

Check out the trailer and its Audio Described version :




Embark with Mariska and Vassilissa aboard the Firebird, in their road trip in the Great North in search of a lost village, prey to the dangers of these sacred lands.

These two young women are very different and yet! Mariska, a convoy driver in her Firebird truck, travels the snowy roads to survive. Vassilissa is trying to save her village by asking Mariska for help. Their history makes them who they are, with their own beliefs.

Their unexpected friendship will be put to the test during their journey aboard the Firebird.




You can explore the snowy landscapes of the Great North, from the industrial city of Norislk to the most sacred lands hiding legendary creatures.




Travel around the steppes of the Great North with your truck. Pay attention to its condition and the gas, and choose the best route. Will you manage to get your truck to its destination without succumbing to the dangers of this hostile land?




To celebrate this magical event, Firebird has a -20% launch discount! For those, who haven’t joined the road trip yet, it is time to embark!

Also, we plan to stream the game in French tomorrow, August 3 at 5:00 pm (CET) on FibreTigre's channel. Emmanuel, Narrative Designer at Ludogram and FibreTigre, writer of Firebird, will play the game and answer your questions!

We want to say thank you to all of you who are with us on this long trip alongside 💗

To support us, you can spread the word about the game and leave a positive review on Steam and tell us what you enjoyed during your icy road trip ❄

And don't forget to join our Discord server to share your thoughts about the game with us 💙

Axon TD: Uprising is out now in Early Access! Try it out now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2296550/Axon_TD_Uprising__Tower_Defense/

Choose from an arsenal of 32 Towers & Traps and extend the path by adding Tiles directly to the map itself. Expand to islands and create an impenetrable defense as hoards of Axons try to break through your maze!

Conquer the 15 Mission Campaign, top the Leaderboards across 12 Quickplay Levels, take on the Roguelite Survival Mode, and coordinate with other players across 9 Co-op Levels! On top of that, we've got 34 Achievements out the gate.

Check out our trailer below!

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Also, we are part of Tiny Teams 2023! We'll be dropping a post tomorrow with more details.

We'll be releasing a Roadmap towards the end of next week, detailing what you should expect in content releases and update frequency. In the meantime, play our game and let us know what you think by leaving a review!

And if you want a place to discuss it further, join our Discord:

Today's update brings a new feature to Symbiotes and a bunch of asset fixes. It contains:

• Fixes for various typos in tags and asset names.
• Fixed asset thumbnails for Moorgoth floor tiles, which previously didn't match the actual asset.
• A fix for the cases where "{thing}" appeared instead of a readable name when players requested to interact with specific assets.
• Replaced thumbnails for sci-fi ship hull assets where a different angle made them more legible.
• An optional popup mode for Symbiotes. This helps Symbiote creators handle logins for some sites.

Many sites use providers like Google, Facebook, or Twitch to handle logging in to their services. These login systems often pop up a temporary window where the user logs in before being handed back to the original web page. Previously, Symbiotes couldn't handle this, so using some online systems popular in the ttrpg space was impossible.

This is now fixed. Symbiote creators can now add a single entry to their project's manifest to tell TaleSpire how to handle websites trying to open a new window. It can be ignored, opened in the same view, or (the new addition) opened in a modal view over the Symbiote. Creators can find more info in the documentation here: https://symbiote-docs.talespire.com/manifest_doc_v1.html#link-new-tab-behavior



Seeing a steady stream of Symbiotes being added to the repository has been a delight. We are yet again excited to see what Symbiotes arrive now this critical shortcoming is being resolved. As always, big thanks go out to the community, especially those folks who reported this issue and showed us what they needed.

Until next time,

Happy adventuring

p.s. This is a surprisingly hefty update at 2.4GB. We believe this a side effect of build changes we had to make for mac support. Update sizes should be back under control soon.

Hello, Settlers! The starry skies have been a welcome change for the denizens of the void...

Thanks to everyone for giving the game a try so far! It's surreal seeing something I've been working on in private actually be released to the masses. Seems like folks are really liking managing their lil' towns!

...provided they get over the hurdle of actually starting it so far, Hah. You probably already saw, but I released v1.1 to help out with getting new players started. Doesn't SEEM like a perfect solution yet...Feedback is always appreciated!
I don't want to just throw paragraphs of tutorial text at players; that feels pretty tedious to read as a first impression.

Tangentially, we have a Discord server! If you like the game, or are looking for advice on your playthrough, you can check it out here: https://discord.com/invite/kH39T4PaS5

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That way, you can save outfits and swap them out whenever you want! It's been VERY highly requested.

Again, thanks for playing Settlemoon! I hope your time with it has been nice n' cozy so far. Seeing people play my little passion project for the last year and a half is really what makes this whole indie gamedev thing worth it. <3

《纯爱独白：小小》商店页面和官方网站正式公开了！
如果您不希望漏过任何关于游戏的最新情报，欢迎把游戏加入愿望单，参加官方网站的预约活动！


前往官网预约游戏，即可参加100%中奖的超级抽奖，有机会获得“游戏激活码”、“Steam礼品卡”、“实体周边”等丰富奖品！【我要预约】


转发推广微博，抽1部黄油神机“SteamDeck 美版64G”！【去扩散】

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等不及了？欢迎加群找客服娘聊天💕（群号搜不到扫码才行哟）

• Fixed multiplayer not working after first game start
  
• Fixed graphic button in main menu not working
  
• Fixed VSync not saving after game restart
  
• Fixed some spelling mistakes

After tests, we found it good to change some detail to our AI... The scary side was not too marked. So we worked on the details....

As a studio, we have been enthusiastic about AI artwork as it opens doors to creating content that would otherwise take a lot longer, or cost too much for our modest budget. For many years our team members have wanted to create story-based games. So we decided to work on Imaginal Voyages while using AI art to create the backgrounds. By using AI artwork for the backgrounds -- generally one of the most expensive aspects of a Visual Novel -- it would ensure that we could afford to complete the full production.

While the sprites for the first episode were made using AI, we already had an artist working on custom sprites starting from Episode 2 onwards. Episodes 1-3 are already written, and we were close to finishing the CGs for Episode 2. However, on July 3rd, TechCrunch and other news websites shared information that Steam is no longer allowing work from mass-trained AI artists such as Stable Diffusion (DreamStudio) and Dall-E2.

While we did contact Valve on July 3rd for clarification, it has now been nearly a month and we have gotten no response. Some websites have claimed that Valve provided an official response on the matter, but Valve has not responded to our direct inquiry.

Being that our small studio does not have widespread marketing at our disposal, over 90% of our visibility comes from organic traffic on the Steam marketplace. Similar to how Hi-Fi Rush launched unannounced to critical acclaim, Steam's organic traffic comes as a major benefit to studios who do not have a large fanbase or months of marketing for their productions.

Given the circumstances and the quickly changing rules regarding AI art, as a studio we have decided to await more concrete decisions such as an official policy update regarding AI assets. It is likely that other platforms will soon make similar decisions regarding AI art. For this matter, we will explore transitioning to human-made artwork sooner than anticipated (we wanted to release the full season and then work on changing the AI art, but it seems our original plan will not be possible given the evolving landscape).

We apologize for any inconvenience to those who enjoyed the first episode of Imaginal Voyages and wanted to see more. We will leave the episode available for the time being.

Heroes of Arkesia,

Many of you are already aware of some of the key content arriving in the August Update, such as the Akkan Legion Raid, Aeromancer Advanced Class, the Sonavel Guardian Raid, QoL Updates, a revamp to the early game tiers, and more! Along with all these updates, we’ve seen player questions pop up on when the next balance patch will arrive so that players can properly prepare. While all of the specifics will be included in the release notes arriving in a few weeks, we can confirm that the next balance patch will arrive in the August Update.

We’re also excited to announce that the winning emotes (found above) from the Maykoko Fest emote design competition will arrive in August! We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all the artists and community members who entered submissions and voted on the finalists.



We know there are more questions about what players can expect in the August update and the rest of 2023. Our team is working on preparing more communication on that front— so we’ll see you next week with more information! In the meantime, we’ll see you in Arkesia.

Raiders and Beasts!

We've already told how Raiders were created and what concept was used for them, so today it's the Beasts' turn.

Beast Hour wasn't originally planned as the game with unique characters: all Raiders were knights in armor, and the Beast was only the Werewolf. Hence the name of the game is Beast Hour, which means 'Werewolf Hour'.



But when we decided that Raiders needed to be diverse, so we did the same for the others. In fact, Werewolves are one of the most mainstream characters in the mass culture, ahead of them are only zombies, but they didn't fit the concept of our game. By the way, there aren't really that many games that allow you to play as a Werewolf, although a lot of movies/books/series feature these creatures.



The early Werewolf concepts

We approached the creation of the werewolf with great care, we didn't want to make it too human, for example, as in "The Wolf Among Us", so the references were reptiles first, and then - apes with their specific running, when the weight comes on the front arms phalanges.



It was also simple to choose the next character: werewolves, and then vampires. Bram Stoker's "Dracula", Friedrich Murnau's "Nosferatu: Symphony of Terror", Neil Jordan's "Interview with the Vampire", and of course Troika Games' "Vampire the Masquerade". You can probably easily complete this list yourself with books, movies or games that have featured Vampires in many different incarnations.



Again, we weren't satisfied with the mainstream "pale man with fangs" image, so the Vampire in Beast Hour looks more like a bat. We used the movies "Underworld" and "Van Helsing" as references.



Conclusion

Thanks for reading till the end! It's interesting that these creatures can look completely different. Which Beast do you think will appear in the game next? Guess in the comments!

Make sure to check our regular livestreams on YouTube and Twitch channels, since it's a great opportunity for us to talk with you!

Follow Beast Hour on social media, wishlist on Steam and support on Patreon – it does help our small indie team to bring the game to the next level!

Beast Hour needs your help to prepare Italian, Korean and Japanese translations! And if you know German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic or Portuguese – we have a bunch of texts waiting for you to proofread them! You can contact us via email: info@beasthour.com


If you want to discuss any form of cooperation with us, use this email: bizdev@beasthour.com


The Beast will come!