Greetings!

Happy to announce a new patch that includes some new stuff and bug fixes.
A major update is being worked on right now, stay tuned to stay informed and don't miss the next update..


New furnishings have been added to give more options for decorating your cafe.

Added 9 new dishes that will allow you to diversify the menu of your cafe and please your customers with something special.

Sometimes you could find a problem in cooking burgers, now this problem has been fixed.

The number of ingredients could be equal to -1, the problem has been fixed.


This is a very rare problem, but it was occasionally encountered. The waiter would stand still and not give the order, fixed!

Occasionally - cockroaches could appear inside the wall or fittings, problem fixed.


Regards,
Second Reality development team

Number 6 has rolled into our pin collection on Eighty Sixed. Check it out!



Next New Player Challenge is on Saturday, September 2.

The New Player Challenge is a global tournament, open to all players with less than 200 hours in game.

The winner gets a DLC skin of their choice.

Register Here!

IMPORTANT:
Don't forget to read the full description and the explanation about submitting your hours. Failing to do so will disqualify your entry.

Watch it on https://www.twitch.tv/Desselie

Tournament communication will happen on the LLB Stadium discord server.

Greetings dear Farmers,

It has been an amazing year with all of you, we got some stats for this 1st year. This is a sum of all players together on all platforms.



Looking forward for the 2nd years and we are starting by working on some QoL to improve the Equipment (sorting and maybe an upgrade to "reserve" a slot, which would switch if a better Equipment drop after the inventory is full, yes pretty handy) and some Pet Combo listing which would unlock the right combo as soon as a Pet is caught, no more messing around and memorizing all the Pet Combo.

Of course we have a lot more planned

Thank you everyone, have fun on the field ːsteamhappyː

Hot off the back of saving and loading dungeons, comes the ability to explore them from 3D mode! Simply enter 3D mode, and interact with a POI containing a saved dungeon. When you select it from the POI map, you will be transported into a 3D view of your dungeon :)

It's been a while since the last update. We have spent a lot of time to develop the new hero and prepare the groundwork for the next major. We hope you're excited about this new updates.



Alright, let's take a look at what's new in this update.

The new hero come with her new unique weapon, "Mystical Card"
Her passive skill will Increase damage and size of next 4 attacks after casting a magic weapon.(Add 1 attack / 4 levels)
She can be uplocked by completing the new achievement, "Upgrade Enilef's pillar to level 9"



( Mixing Wepon and relic)
This is one of the most requested QOL feature. The item that is required for imbuing now show on the item selection screen.




All weapons in this change can be access in early gameplay and a bit hard to use, We buff them to be more friendly for the new players.

Simple Sword

• Cooldown 1.2 - > 1.1 (Lv.9 : 1 -> 0.9 )

Fur's nado

• Duration 6 -> 7 sec (Lv.9 : 7.5 ->8)
  
• Speed 350 -> 400 (Lv.9 : 400 ->450)

Enilef's Pow

• Increase one more jumping to the attack

If you are enjoying the game, Don't forget to rate us on steam, it really helps us out a lot!
Do not hesitate to contact us If you have any suggestion or feedback.
Discord
Dissustions

Hello! This update is pretty similar to the one that was available in the beta branch, things have happened in my life and I haven't been able to put all the time i would like to the game. Remember I'm literally the only one actually developing the game.

But still, I'm gonna update the game little by little to add the features I had planned on this "big" update, I still hope you enjoy it!

New Hero

The character from the title picture is now implemented! You can unlock him by getting 70 achievements.
He combines the attacks from the previous heroes, instead of having to focus on one element he can use all of them!




New Achievements
I designed a total of 96 achievements now. Steam limits me to a maximum to 100 achievements until i reach an unknown sales quota. When steam allows me to design more achievements i plan to implement many more!

Enemy art work adjustments
I made some enemy artwork more consistent with the rest.

Enemy spawning
Enemy spawnrate (normal enemys, not special enemies) will slow down if you barely kill any of them to prevent a huge pileup outside of the screen. To counterbalance that, if you move too far away from enemies they will teleport nearer to you (outside of the screen).

Work on Folk Emerging has steadily progressed over the summer, and it's almost time for the next milestone...


Before releasing a public demo or sending builds to publishers, it's important to get the game into the hands of trusted players and get feedback. It's where the rubber meets the road, where the game makes contact with reality.

What works and what doesn't? What doesn't makes sense? Which parts are fun & interesting? These are all crucial questions that these private playtests will start to answer.

I would have liked to do this much sooner, but a 4X game juggles many systems, each of which needs to be fun and coherent on its own, while also combining with all the other systems to create an overall experience that is fun and coherent too.

It's tough to playtest a game like this until most of the components are relatively complete and inter-connected. Well, that time is nigh!


Here are some updates on the work done in the last couple of months.


I've been thinking a lot about what the win conditions should be. As Soren Johnson (designer of Civ 4, Old World) points out in his excellent talk "Games and Meaning, or You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop", the entire player experience hinges on what they are told to aim for.

Even if a game is intended to be "about" the unfortunate terrors of war, if a player is simply given an army and rewarded for conquering the world, then the game is actually "about" the thrill of conquest. They may still have a great time playing the game, but if the designers' goal was to have the player come away with a nuanced perspective on the matter, this is unlikely to happen.

For me, Folk Emerging is about the complex relationship between the individual and the collective, and about how humanity functioned before sedentism and centralized power. I don't want it to be about imperialist factions cosplaying as prehistoric tribes.

So, I've been reading a lot of great perspectives on how to give strategy players a range of satisfying ways to play, e.g. rushdown / econ / defense, early / mid / late-game wins, tall vs wide, aggressive vs diplomatic, etc.

For now, I've decided to set a simple goal of "be the first to reach X population", and give the player multiple routes to achieving that. It enables playing with different social structures, cultural norms, and technologies, which can result in a wide variety of human experiences & societies.

I'm curious to see what the playtesters have to say!




If the goal is to grow your population, then it's crucial that the health & mortality of your people work intuitively, and any changes need to be easy to track in the UI. Various events / states can affect HP, so I've tried to make all this easy to parse, both on an individual and collective level.




Humans have been domesticating other species for a very long time, with varied success. Domestication of plants began long before the agricultural revolution—it was just difficult, inefficient, inconsistent. Only after many thousands of years of struggle, innovations, and trial & error did we eventually enable a consistent food surplus, large populations, and sedentary settlements.

I've added this process of gradual domestication to Folk Emerging. You can domesticate certain plants and animals from the start, but with little to show for it. The more experience your bands gain with each species, however, the better they'll get. Certain late-game technologies, combined with this hard-earned experience, enable massive increases in food yields from these domesticated species.

With enough of a food surplus, maybe your nomadic hunter-gatherers can finally afford to stick around for a while... but is their society ready for it?


As a band's population grows larger, resources are spread thin and they have a choice to make:

• do they split up into 2 smaller bands and go their separate ways, to ensure everyone's survival?
  
• or do they stick together and weather the storm together?

Each of these paths brings its own challenges, and requires different social norms to support it.

If they choose to split up, how can they survive with dwindling ranks? Fewer mouths to feed also means fewer hands with which to defend your people. Can they maintain a connection to the family members and friends they've left behind? What is the cost of survival?

If instead they stick together and find a way to generate enough food for everyone, can their collective way of resolving inter-personal conflicts sustain a larger population, or will a more hierarchichal system be required? If an Individual is to be given the power to decide what's right or wrong, who should it be? What is lost in the process?




I've finally implemented a much-needed Production system. For a long time I avoided it, because each turn is 1 year of all the characters' lives, and I thought it would be weird to focus all of a band's efforts on 1 thing for multiple years. However, Civ gets away with cities "producing a Swordsman" for like 400 years so I guess anything goes!

Production is one of the main ways to give the player agency, and it can be framed as choosing what the band collectively puts their primary focus on, not that they aren't doing anything else during that time. For now, a band can "produce" the following (unlocked via the Tech tree):

• specialized areas of their campsite,
  
• improvements/upgrades to these specialized areas
  
• certain collective actions (e.g. scouting expedition, combat training, hunting exercises, etc)
  
• specialized combat units (each of which consists of 5 of your deeply simulated characters with personalities, skills, families, etc)

Rather than have 1 feature per tile, there are now up to 6 potential features per tile, as the features are placed at the 6 points of each hexagon. It also means that each of these feature borders 3 hexagons, so up to 3 different nomadic bands can gather around it.

For example, 3 bands can gather around a Stone Deposit and have simultaneous access to Stone (an important resource in the game). Such a layout brings bands close together, enabling more interactions than just fighting over who gets to occupy a tile.


Certain inter-cell features provide an opportunity to trigger an RPG-style event with various outcomes. For example, if you find a Cave and send a scouting party, they may find special Items, which you can choose to salvage and keep (for their various ongoing effects) or trade with other bands... hopefully the Cave doesn't collapse and fatally injure anyone from your scouting party 😱




I've implemented a basic trading system, via which bands can barter Resources (e.g. Food, Stone, Wood, Pelts) and Items (e.g. Obsidian, Amber, Shells). I'm planning to extend this system in various ways, and to enable some unique diplomatic options for those who pursue that playstyle.


For the playtests, the AI doesn't have to be amazing at combat, but they need to have some basic competence and unpredictability. Currently it's at a decent place with simple rules that work well enough for now.




There's a lot going on under the hood, with many values affecting many others. I want it to be as transparent as possible without being overwhelming, so I've added on-hover tooltips wherever I can, with detailed breakdowns of how everything is calculated. I'd love to enable nested tooltips, but that's a nice-to-have for later.

I've also added notifications that inform you of important changes that happen throughout your turn and in the simulation between turns.

My goal is to enable players to easily understand the consequences of their actions and create their own fun & interesting strategies.




In early trailers/screenshots, the character portraits were 3D and colorful, but that didn't really fit the rest of the aesthetic. They are now stylized as charcoal drawings on slabs of stone, while retaining the complex (and heritable) facial features of the 3D models. Still need to make the eyes less creepy :)



I also added a subtle paper texture to the terrain, which helps the vibe I'm going for: hand-painted illustrations from childhood history textbooks.


Lots of us, myself included, love to take our time with these games and enjoy them over more than one sitting. It's a "simple" and expected feature but with complex simulations it can be a tough nut to crack — thankfully, 'tis now cracked.


I've set up the game's content in a way that makes it very easy for me to tweak/add stuff, and leaves the door open for making the game moddable down the road.


I've implemented multi-threading to process the intense simulation that happens between turns (with great population comes great frame-droppability), which keeps the game running at a steady ~60 FPS, at least on my machine (the playtests will show how it fares elsewhere).


Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be ready to start reaching out to gamer/gamedev friends (and others if they're super interested) to start playtesting! I'm very excited to get that started :)

This will help me sort out the biggest issues and have a build that can be sent to publishers. I'll gradually open up the playtests to a wider audience with the goal of polishing the game for a public demo.

Greetings STEAM denizens,

After years of existence, we're finally made it onto the vaunted STEAM platform and it's a pleasure to be a part of this community. We're going to kick things off here with our weekly update reports- something that we have been doing regularly for sometime now, so without adieu, let- oh, one last thing!

We regularly update our timelines with some of the more "explicitly" NSFW content over at our Discord and Twitter.

Find us at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CursedAtelier

Public Discord: https://discord.com/invite/tG7DKBa

Now then, the report:

With the next patch release inching closer by the day, the team is ramping up their efforts to put the finishing touches on the technical aspects of the patch. While the CG work is largely finished, we however fished up some unexpected coding goofs during the implementation phase- but more on that in a bit.

From the beginning: The Art

Patch work being a major hurdle no longer has freed up our artist to pick up and continue work on the upcoming gladiator world. Of course, it is going to be far more than just a Colosseum for players to have Caly face off against powerful enemies. The world will have it's own story, including a new alien species for Caly to interact with in whatever way players see fit.

So far we have two main maps, with one requiring more attention to the city architectural design since it was built by a new species. The other planned map will offer some puzzle encounters while also catering to those that like sneaking around.

Work continues on Gen's Bad End with draft work finalized and now going through one more round of edits. Bad Ends always have to play a balance between Caly trying to overcome the situation and then Caly being overcome by the pleasure of the situation. Psst! Between us though, there seem to be rumors swirling around that Gen is so smitten with Caly, there might be more than one plan he has for her! A second bad end route, perhaps? Perhaps. Stay tuned for more info!

Now for a bit of cheerless news. Our coder reported coming across some technical issues during patch’s initial testing. An event was found having meshing issues due to desynced ​trigger timings and had to undergo re-scripting, while a handful of plugins had to be re-tuned. Though a minor issue, he remains wary of a possible ripple effect that might have affected the entire patch, and thus has decided to take a deep dive through the programming sequence again.

To put it short, the patch has been delayed a bit in order to polish certain sections to improve the quality and stability of the update. Rest assured, bar any major hiccups, we still remain on schedule for release in August!

And that is all for this one. Thank you for reading and we'll see you in the next one!

Kind Regards,

Cursed-Atelier Team

We localize our game by sending text files to translators but we have text in brackets that should not be changed and they tend to change those accidently. They were hard to track. But now we built a feature to track those so we went through all localization files and corrected those mistakes.

Also Machinegunned unit is nerfed. He just had huge starting damage but is otherwise fine.

Thank you for patience!