We knew Bread HAD to be in the original GladiEATer line up - a food *Icon* of the breakfast, lunch and dinner table.


The line was designed around Bread Loaf as a core idea. Its’ blocky, rectangular shape was iconic we thought. We also wanted it to feel heavy, starchy and slow; so we gave it short-stubby legs to emphasise this weight - akin to how the tiny legs on sausage dogs or munchkin cats make them seem heavier.


Bread Loaf's sound design emphasises this with cow-like moos and hooves. Those deep empty eyes add to the bread's character of being a plain and innocent ideal. We placed a huge mouth where the crust top and fluffy body begin which allowed us to give the bread air sucking abilities. It now rises as bread does when cooking = expanding its fluffy body.







The natural question followed, what is a bread slice? Not all that different from a bread loaf - it’s a thinner version of its big bread loaf brother. Same eyes and mouth.



It only needs two legs to give its quirky vertical slice body movement. We tried giving it four little legs and lying it flat. However, seeing that standing little bread slice balance as it runs is just the type of cute our carby critter needed.



Their abilities involve headbutting their opponent, inspired by their big loaf brother. Shaking off pesky crumbs for a boost in speed and taking a little loaf around nap to heal up. All adding to that charming plainness that bread holds in our hearts.








But not all bread is plain and fluffy. Some have a darker, more intense side – and we've brought that essence in the Toast GladiEATer.



The charred black crust, the sharp edges of toast and the smokiness of burnt bread. We took those smooth curves in bread slice and sharpened them out. We darkened the bread and added sharper eyes.



Previously, we tried out teeth in our Bread Loaf GladiEATer but e found it took away from that cute plain energy we wanted...and we are so glad we did. We brought in that previous design take out and added it into toast where that fierce edge was wanted. That little sad lip mouth in bread slice becomes a large, scary, gaping mouth of teeth in toast's stomach. This crispy toast bites back. It shoots out the smoke of toast and can defend its allies in a smokey fog. Menacing.








When we had designed Avocado Paste, we came back to Toast Slice for Avocado Toast. Seeing how it shaped into this sassy little green critter, we imagined the paste making its home on the toast slice when spread.



For some visual storytelling, we thought the Avocado Paste would work great as a face-hugging creature onto the toast host it’s been spread on.



Its abilities are largely structured around merging the Avocado Paste's and Toast Slice's abilities - while giving the toast slice underneath an appearance to let the host-avocado story be uncovered.








And finally, when we settled that we want EVERY minigame in GladiEATers to give the player a new GladiEATer - our Dough making minigame fell short of that. To fix this, we designed the Dough GladiEATer.



The Dough minigame can branch into the Bread but also Croissant GladiEATers so the dough GladiEATer needed to be relatively faceless so that it could grow into both branches seamlessly. So, it has no face, just a bright wide smile cornered by floury cheeks.



Its abilities involve kneading itself for a power boost, rolling stickily towards its enemy and puffing out some yeast spores that give an ally a nice-power boosting sleep.




With that, we love our topic to rest. We're thrilled to share our passion for Bread and GladiEATers - we can't wait to feast on your messages and ideas for more flavour filled food creatures!

Hello, SacriFire community!

We’re happy to be back with a brand new installment of our devlog!

First of all, thank you so much for your awesome reception of our previous posts, each of which has revealed some further info about the world of our game! Today, we would like to go even deeper, and share some further details about SacriFire’s story and themes.

And don’t worry, our devlog is spoiler-free — so without further ado, let’s dive right in!




The story we want to tell in SacriFire has a lot of background to it — background relating to the long and colorful history of the city of Antioch (you can read more about the city itself here). This is why we say that the events presented in our game are not the beginning, but rather the culmination, of a centuries-long struggle between good and evil (or to be precise, the struggle between the god Sheol and the demon lord Amaymon).

The Church of Sheol ensures that life in Antioch is peaceful, with law and order as fundamental values. Unfortunately, the city will soon face another outbreak of the plague heresy, which brings with it a confrontation with various unsavory demons.

---

What exactly is Heresy? It’s difficult to be sure. Some call Heresy a plague, others think of it as a form of demonic possession. What’s certain is that Heresy is a serious threat that has loomed over Antioch for centuries. The danger is ever-present; sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, but unchanging in the threat it poses to the god Sheol.

The group known as heretics — and their motivations and methods — will become more familiar to you as you play the game. For now, suffice to know that these mysterious rebels are sworn to destroy Sheol, and are willing to go to any lengths to make this plan a reality. In the upcoming demo, you will see the heretics take the first — but not the last — step towards that end.

The terrifying thing about the heretics is how easily they blend in with the rest of the population of Antioch. They may look like normal citizens by day, but at night they don their masks and robes and go out to put their plans in motion. Each heretic has their own demonic power, beyond their heightened strength and speed, so that even one poses a significant threat.

Heretics also have unique weapons. During battles with demons, you will notice some dangerous-looking red sparks of light taking over the location — heresy not only corrupts the soul but also the world around you…

---

As gods and demons clash once more, the battle begins to impact on the life of Ezekiel Ridan, the main character of SacriFire. As a soldier of the Church of Sheol, Eze is naturally involved in the events of its war, and soon is confronted with his real test: the two immortal beings who both attempt to claim his soul.

Together with a companion, such as best friend Zephaniah Milto or fellow bishop-recruit Ava Valeri, Ezekiel will travel to the spirit world Erebus (and a number of other mysterious locations), in order to fulfill his duty as bishop of the Church of Sheol.

---

The inhabitants of the world of SacriFire are carefully crafted, each with their own personality, back story, and motivations. The characters evolve as the story progresses (none more so than Ezekiel himself), and these changes will be reflected in their dialogue and actions.

Of course, telling compelling stories and creating believable characters goes beyond words — there’s also the question of how those words are delivered. We’ve paid a lot of attention to this aspect, and all the characters in the main storyline of SacriFire will be voiced thanks to the incredibly talented team from Sound Cadence Studios!

Let’s not forget music. As you may already know, the soundtrack of the game has been composed by the legendary Motoi Sakuraba (scores for Dark Souls, Tales series and more) and G4F Records. We’re hoping to create a true JRPG vibe! You can listen to the first publicly-released track, called “Awakening”, which is already available on Spotify and which recently surpassed 100k streams!

Aside from the sound, we can’t neglect the visual aspect. Individual portraits, each with multiple expressions, will help bring the characters of SacriFire to life.

---

Time to wrap up today’s devlog, as we don’t want to reveal too much about the main storyline of SacriFire. We cannot wait for you to dive into the story of Ezekiel and his companions, and we’re looking forward to seeing your reactions to the mysteries of demons lurking in the shadows of Antioch.

See you in the next devlog!


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Greetings fellow Wardens!

From now until the end of the year we will be running a playtest for our game Horror Stories: Harvest Hunt!

The playtest will be run via Steam and it will include brand new content of our game!


If you played the demo of Harvest Hunt then you might have experienced what our game is all about. The demo takes part at the beginning of the game and had the onboarding and tutorialization turned on.

The playtest consists of three nights and has most of our onboarding difficulty settings off so you can experience what the game is like in mid-progression.

• New monster ability to fight off (Spine Growth)
  
• More abilities (Village Fortifications & Warden Strengths) will be available to equip and try out
  
• More Tools will be unlocked to play around with
  
• More Whispers (nightly challenges) are unlocked to encounter

To sign up all you have to do is Request Access via the game's Steam page.


We will be running the playtest with a few people at a time and reviewing the feedback before allowing more people to join the playtest so if you request to join but have not been granted access please be patient!


To leave us feedback please use this feedback form which is also provided in the playtest build (Main menu) once granted access.

All feedback is anonymous and we will be using it to improve the gameplay of Harvest Hunt. We are really looking forward to hearing your feedback be it tweaks, new ideas or bugs!


Thank you so much for your interest Wardens, and see you in Luna Nova!

Thank you for everyone for your support on the recent announcement. It has been quite a while since I've said anything after, but here I am announcing that I'm going to re-create the game entirely in the Godot game engine.

Why of this you may ask? Well as of the past week or so, Unity announced their new runtime installation fees which in summary, when passing certain parameters on your game made with Unity, their will be charges per install of the game. As of currently they are updating the runtime fee, instead of removing it entirely, which in return is still quite upsetting.

More information can be found here in this video: Unity's New Pricing is... Awful by Gamefromscratch

And to be honest this doesn't really affect me at all, not having met the criteria, but in the end it is quite outrageous of Unity to announce this, as it affects developers who have used Unity, either big or small out there who have made games much better than mine. So as a result I've also decided to join the movement in migrating to a more trustworthy platform much like Godot.

Don't worry, I'll keep the current version of the game up and running, whilst having the version made in Godot be available. The unfortunate part is that I won't be updating the version created with Unity anymore, but when I eventually have the Godot version up to date, it'll be replacing the current version.

As of that, I can only hope for you, the reader, to understand my decision, but if it does leave a bad impression, I'll try my best to accommodate for all the time I've spent neglecting the games development, towards a better version of the game in the near future.

A little update.

- Darts mode conditions changed, reset results in leaderboard.
- Renovation got some improvements.
- Returned Mihalych's cry in stunts with comments
- Objects on maps are now easier to break
- Some bug fixes.

香肠岛民们好，V16.14.1版本现已推出，本次更新配置了锦标赛投票活动正式头像，并解决了以下问题：

• 修复亚瑟王面部表情错误的问题
  
  
• 修复魔龙和雷狼套装形态切换异常的问题
  
  
• 修复大厅设置画风风格设置为简约，战场还是显示默认风格的问题
  
  
• 修复大厅关闭阴影，进战场内仍然显示阴影的问题

如果您关于香肠派对有改进的建议，欢迎在Steam商店页或社区中理性讨论，您的反馈会在我们进行优化版本时提供帮助，同时祝您游戏愉快！

Hi Ranchers! 🐴🍀 I'm really excited to share with you all the first content update for The Ranch of Rivershine! This update allows you to catch wild horses, build new upgrades such as training arenas, a retirement pasture and a competition board, along with many other fixes and quality of life improvements.

It's the perfect time to dive back into Rivershine or build your ranch for the first time!

It’s time to saddle up and chase wild horse herds! You’ll now be able to see them roaming the trails around Rivershine… Get ready to catch them!


First, the park ranger will send you a message to build wild horse pens on each of the trails. Once built, there’ll be a chance for wild horses to arrive on those trails every day. If wild horses are present, the ranger will send you a message to let you know… And it’s time to set out and find them!


Once you encounter them, the wild horses will be scared and run away from you. To approach them, you’ll have to chase them from horseback and guide them into the round pen. They’ll settle down once they enter the corral, and you’ll be able to take a closer look…


Befriend the wild horses by petting their head, and then inspect them from all sides. This allows you to see the wild horse’s coat, gender, and skill level. You can corral and inspect as many wild horses as you like, but you can only choose one to bring back home, so pick wisely…

Luckily, a new herd will pass by the trails in a few days!


Wild horses have a chance to feature exclusive coat colors and patterns. You'll be able to find a unique type of coat on each trail, so make sure to catch horses everywhere you go! For example, here are the unique splash patterns you'll be able to find in Lupine Meadow...


I’ve also reworked and expanded on the previous pattern types, so you’ll be able to find new variations of appaloosa, tobianos and overos. Here's a quick look at what these new patterns look like!






New training arenas are available to purchase from the trainer’s store! These arenas are designed to improve a specific skill, such as speed, endurance or jump. Each of them can be built and upgraded twice to train your horse even further daily.


To train your horse, simply bring them to the arena and pass through the training checkpoints at the correct gait. Your horse will quickly improve their skills, but the arena can only be used once per day!


Since it’s been a much requested feature to keep more horses, I've added a new pasture on the ranch! The retirement pasture allows you to keep horses you’ve grown attached to even if you’re done training and competing with them, without occupying a stall in your stable. Of course, you can always take them out of retirement and bring them back to your stable if you change your mind!

The retirement pasture can be built and upgraded twice to keep up to 16 horses. While horses are retired, they can’t be interacted with, but they also don’t need to be cared for… So you don’t have to worry about feeding or brushing them!


Finally, I've also added a competition board that can be built on your ranch! This will allow you to register for competitions from your home and easily change between horses to compete with.


For more information, here’s a detailed list of the changes and bug fixes included in this update!

• Added 14 new cream coats colors.
  
• Added 10 new splash coat patterns.
  
• Added 8 new sabino coat patterns.
  
• Added 4 new tobiano coat patterns and improved the older ones.
  
• Added 5 new overo coat patterns and improved the older ones.
  
• Added 6 new appaloosa coat patterns and improved the older ones.
  
• Added 20 new face markings.
  
• Changed how the face markings are inherited so that foals inherit a marking more similar to their parents.
  
• Reduced the chance for horses to have a badger or bald face marking.
  
• Adjusted the bay and roan coat colors.
  
• Fixed the silver gene inheritance.
  
• Changed how the flaxen and silver genes work to be more realistic. Chestnut horses now can’t have silver hair, only the bay and black horses can. Instead, all chestnut horses can now have flaxen hair.
  This won’t impact current silver chestnuts in your save file, and they will stay as is, but no new silver chestnuts will appear in the game. However, as I had to change how the flaxen is applied to horses, horses who previously had the “Flaxen Chestnut” coat will change to a new coat called “Sandy Chestnut ''. While I try my best not to impact current coats, it happens from time to time during Early Access as I update different systems. I hope you’ll still like this new chestnut coat, and you’ll now be able to find more variations of flaxen horses!

• Changed that horses lose a potential point if they spend the night in the pasture. If they’re kept in the stable, their potential doesn’t go down.
  
• Moved the location of Liam’s house.
  
• Updated the map icons for better clarity.
  
• Added map icons for the training arenas and the fertility pasture.
  
• Improved the collision detection to interact with horses.
  
• Reduced the price of the Pine Forest and Crystal Lake trails.
  
• Added cucumbers, pumpkins and pears for sale in Aisha’s store.
  
• Translated all new content to French.

• Fixed various issues with the mane and tail not growing correctly or saving and loading the wrong hair style.
  
• Fixed a bug where the horse coat description wouldn’t update in the auction house.
  
• Fixed a bug where you could collide with foals before they were born.
  
• Fixed a bug where selling a horse in the auction house could then cause multiple horses to share the same stall.
  
• Fixed a bug where young adult horses would have the wrong hairstyle after growing up.
  
• Fixed various typos and updated descriptions to fit the new content.
  
• Changed the auction house horse for sale list to exclude horses that can’t be sold.
  
• Fixed the sand and dirt sound effects in Lupine Meadow.

For the next content update, I’m planning on adding a new villager and opening the saddlery in town! You’ll be able to purchase new saddles, blankets and bridles… I might also add other accessories for your horses to wear!



Thank you for following the development of The Ranch of Rivershine!

Éloïse

My name is Mats Andersson, also known as the resident Combat guy, Lead Combat Designer or just “Ratherdone” around the interwebs. I’d like to tell the story of the Darktide team's new take on classes and all the player choice and build availability that comes with it. This update is the result of a wide collaboration throughout the project as changing the core of what defines a player character has far-reaching implications on many parts of the game.

First off, we’ve always looked at Darktide as a game where you define your own character and play style. Much more so than in our previous tide-games. The idea that we’d be less prescriptive in the way we present who you play always has some friction with the class system. It is just natural that presenting a class, full with loadout restrictions, abilities and talent packages, comes with a heavy lore-package and a specific “you’re choosing to play THIS GUY”. We wanted to change that. We wanted to make the character creation stretch further into build choices and loadout configurations. We wanted you to be able to pick and choose and define your own main character using any and all combinations of gameplay and cosmetic choices available. The whole “forge your own narrative” taken to a very personal level.

Now, we also wanted to just widen the available builds and play styles. So for those of you who aren’t really that heavy into the lore or characterization, there is a heavy focus on just adding more game to explore.

So we made big, complex talent trees with lots of build freedom. We’ve expanded each class and raised the perspective a bit. The Sharpshooter is now just one of the builds available within the Veteran tree. This shift in class definition helps us give you guys some more freedom in picking your build while keeping the design space nice and open for us. We’ve internally talked about the different trees rather as “domains” than “classes”, striving for that broader range of sources. So, a character from the Veteran domain can be anything from a sharpshooter to a squad leader to more commando/spec ops type character and anything in between. It also allows us a nice freedom to add or change stuff in the future as there’s plenty of stuff that fit within these broader categories.



Within the talent trees you can keep things “by the book” and go for some more conservative builds, like recreating the current Preacher class within the Zealot space; or you can be a bit more unorthodox and forge your own character with a mix of picks as you navigate across the talent tree. Want to make a team supporting fanatic that bolsters the team with invigorating prayers while dipping into the mobility and knife-tossing mayhem that the deathcult side of our Zealot tree provides? Go right ahead. It’s your character, it’s your story, it’s your choice.

So that’s the main idea. The tricky thing with ideas is that you also have to realize them and somehow build all of this. We approached this with a couple of different approaches. On the practical side of things we started out with just slapping together a bunch of build-packages for each Class. Quickly staple a bunch of buffs and bonuses together with combinations of new and old Blitz and Combat abilities. Some rapid prototyping, some reanimation of old and forgotten feature-tests, some scavenging throughout the code base later we had a solid library of around 30 builds up and running on internal tests.

There’s also a fairly high-brow academic approach to this whole design-space, mainly consisting of designers trying their best to cosplay some kind of intellectual ludologist while defining gestalts, inter-play cooperation and the whole actions-into-moves mapping. In short, doing some paper design where we guess (real accurately) which power fantasies and gameplay roles we can cover, and how they’ll rotate to allow everyone their moment in the sun while keeping some variation in the gameplay. There have been fairly large parts of this theoretical map that we didn’t cover with the original classes. Mainly the area of team support, which brings a much needed cooperation loop into the moment-to-moment gameplay. There’s also parts of our roster that just lacked coverage for certain playstyles (shooty Ogryn anyone?).

Equipped with this set of builds and a theoretical map of what we’d need to cover we set about playtesting. It’s only after we’ve tried things in-game that we actually started building the trees themselves. This might seem counterintuitive, but we really didn’t want to end up in the “the tree demands there to be X amount of buffs/choices” but rather allow what made sense for the game to direct the format of the trees. The old feat layout, for instance, mandates that we construct six rows of three interchangeable options for everything, which can be restrictive and make cool ideas fall short. With a new ruleset that allows for much more freedom we can instead change the trees to fit the cool stuff we want to add.

Now, here’s where things become tricky from a balancing perspective. We broke down our premade builds into their components and spread them out across the emerging tree-structures. We wanted there to be clear and easily identifiable options here, portrayed by a branching end of the trees. So new players or less tinkering-prone ones can just click their way down and have a nice build to play. However, we also wanted there to be a tinkering space where less obvious combinations of choices create their own build packages. The principle of “the udder and the teats” was born. It’s a very cow-based metaphor and perhaps not the most sensible one but it worked. Higher up in the talent trees, within the “udder”, players are free to tinker and pick their path, narrow or broad. Lower down in the tree we branch out in the key-stone “teats”, which provide a more single-path deep-dive into particular buff sets. We also wanted each tree to be free from restrictive layout rules and provide their own, individual tinkering spaces. So some trees have larger udders while some have longer teats. If we wanted to make another tree with like five teats that would be ok too. These are some grimdark cows we’re modeling after so creative freedom is intact.

The different nodes available within each talent tree are of the following different types:

• Blitz ability: The grenade slot or other type of extra attack.
  
• Combat ability: The ult, bound by cooldown and high impact on game.
  
• Keystone: More iconic talents, varies between the trees but drive playstyle.
  
• Talent: Interactive buffs that tie into core gameplay loops
  
• Aura: Various team buffs spread as Coherency bonus.
  
• Stat node: Simple flat bonus to a core stat (toughness/crit chance/health)

Currently we settled in on a three blitz, three combat ability and three keystone configuration per talent tree, with a varied assortment of talents and stat nodes to provide the core of the tinkering space. The inclusion of stat nodes also allows us to bring a previously hardcoded baseline into player control. Where starting values for health, crit chance, toughness etc is just that, a starting point that is subsequently boosted through picking stat nodes within each talent tree. As for the size of trees and unlocking of points, we’re trying to keep it simple. You’ll earn one talent point per level and players are free to re-spec at any time, landing us on a total budget of 30 points to spend on each talent tree. One core principle we’ve tried to follow is you should be able to reach an end-node around the 20-point mark and then have some change to tinker with.

This whole endeavor does have quite a heavy impact on the game balance and thus warranted a wider take to make everything play nice together. We’ve shifted baseline difficulty scales, re-tuned healthpools for enemies, tuned spawning limits and rebalanced core parts of our damage system as part of our test-driven approach. What’s the point of having suppression bonuses in a talent tree if everything is already immediately suppressed, or worse: dead. Same goes for builds with a heavier emphasis on backstabs and flanking shots, which warranted an overhaul on how we stack our damage multipliers. This work has also included some deep dives into the weapon and blessing space, since we view a full build loadout as the sum total of your weapons, curios and talent choices. Brutal momentum is one example of a blessing that has changed to fit snugly into the whole system; it now discounts any targets killed with a clean weakspot hit - allowing you to loop as many heads off as you manage to line up with the right build to back it up.

With the new talent trees come a range of new features. On the blitz side, to name a few, we’ve got krak grenades, flame grenades, homing magic missiles and pretty rocks the Ogryn will find throughout his adventures that just happen to be very useful if hurled at nasty traitors. On the combat ability side you will find taunting, stealth mechanics, warp shields, stances and shouts to tailor your operatives build from a team support pillar to a murderous whirlwind of dps and anything in between.



We’ll return with more in depth looks at the different talent trees and their configuration in the near future. We have been continuously testing and tweaking as we have moved closer to release, both internally and together with playtesters from the community. The amount of builds that have emerged and minute finetuning of all the components that enable them have been a pleasure to explore and an interesting challenge to balance. One of the key reasons we made this change is to allow fast iterations and change, we hope to continue evolving the classes and the game together with you.

The Darktide Team

We found a small error in the game which caused the player to not make any progress.

Here's the changelog for the latest test build available right now on the test branch (check out the next chapter to try it).

• Save the last equipment of characters and use it the next time they are deployed
  
• Implemented squad management from the main menu
  
• Added a keyboard shortcut to pause/resume the plan of the selected character (P by default)

• Changed the cost of activating perks: they now reduce your mission score instead of costing credits
  
• Tweaked the vision and visibility offsets of the agents
  
• Updated translations

• Fixed crouched characters sometimes standing when interacting with doors or throwing grenades

In the Steam client, right-click on the game from your library and select "Properties".
Select the "BETAS" tab.
Select the "test" branch listed in the dropdown menu under "Select the beta you would like to opt into".



The game then should automatically update to the test version.

To switch back to the public branch, just select "None" in the betas dropdown.