Last week we concluded the Trial of the Ancestors Hideout Competition where we encouraged our community to reflect the theme of Karui Gods in their hideouts. As always, our players have outdone themselves in creativity. With help from our Level Design team, we have selected the winners and are excited to announce them today!

Level Designers: We saw a lot of strong entries in both categories, and we each had favourites that didn't make it into our overall top 3 picks. We saw a lot of creative interpretations of the Karui Deities theme, especially where the gods in question didn't have extensive decoration support.

It's always difficult when decorating hideouts to strike a balance between the visuals you want to achieve and the clutter of collaging them together so we were particularly impressed by the entries that managed to strike a balance and present their concept cleanly.

We considered the hideouts mostly as art pieces, rather than assessing them for practical use, but it was always a delight to see entries that executed on both aesthetics and functionality.

Check out the video with the top five winners from both categories below!

• The Moon Descends by G4nzo

We were blown away by the striking visuals of this hideout. The theme was executed stylishly, and with an eye for visual flair and contrast. Each part of the hideout featured well-lit, readable decoration collages, executed with minimal visual artifacting. The area's creator was surprised to see it used this way.

• Whare Koiwi, the House of Bones by ƙloƙɱacɧine

We loved the strong theming and use of colour in this hideout. The understated walkable space is well balanced with the gorgeously elaborate wall displays. We also noted the unified and consistent shape language, which made for an overall excellent execution on the theme. Hinekora's influence and presence are felt throughout.

• Path of the Karui by moonretealoud

We were impressed by the understated, naturalistic theming of the area that managed to keep to a clear colour scheme without ever feeling over-cluttered. It's readable and clear while maintaining visual interest and distinction throughout.

• Temple to Arohongui by Morinmeth

The dioramas in this hideout are absolutely gorgeous, and exhibit a strong stylization that contrasts with the more mundane walkable parts of the hideout.

• Ngamahu's Heated Home by fordyslawz

We all really enjoyed the strong volcanic theme and firey atmosphere that delivered on the concept without feeling over cluttered. If anything, the name undersold how polished the overall hideout felt.

• Midnight Repose by MikoMiranda
  
• Fire Mommy's Kitchen by OrcFace
  
• Akoya's Proving Ground by ajaarrkkss
  
• Moon Grotto by LuLu242
  
• Tribute to the Night Sky by Myra9

• Kahuturoa’s Cave by Kougno
  
• Storm's Herald by Butifarra
  
• Hinekora's Haven by CelinaKira
  
• Ambition's End by keldemahll
  
• Corrupted Kitava Worshipper's Hideout by Murstiisback
  
• Between Us and Oblivion by Revan_Bane
  
• Maata's Paradise by Arthur_von_Schreyer
  
• Hinekora's Night-Clad Isle by Mawtail
  
• Rivers of Blood by TallBird
  
• Overgrown Pyramid by wolf61206

• "Insatiable" - The Scavenger's Cannibal Compound by keldemahll

This area uses large-scale geometric forms and overall symmetry to create some really interesting macabre imagery. We appreciated that it delivered on the cannibalistic/Kitava theme without being a straightforward gory nightmare.

• Gardens of Time - Four Faces of the Forest by Myra9

A wonderful concept executed stunningly. This hideout delivers some lovely blending between the four seasonal themes, each of which is realised vividly and clearly.

• The Gift by Alyanne19

This hideout presents a pleasant and relaxing environment, with pretty visuals that avoid being too noisy. Integrating the ruins and overgrowth made for some nice vignettes without the results feeling overdone.

• Lost Shrine of Tasalio by Tayanalulu

An enchanting and serene aesthetic, offering a good use of colour and tastefully applied visual effects. We found the cosmic environmental effects a bit distracting but the aquariums and aquatic sections sell the underwater theme really well.

• World of Endless Night by moonretealoud

This area's strong visual style and use of azurite led it to be deemed to be "good rocks" by one of the more geologically minded members of the team. We enjoyed the feeling of walking through a geode. A good use of colour contrast, making for a satisfying overall aesthetic.

• Rite of Spring by Morinmeth
  
• Fogs of the Sorrow Seas by Revan_Bane
  
• Sanctuary of Ramako by Arthur_von_Schreyer
  
• Hinekora's Habitat by jaka1988
  
• Te Mate Ka Whiwhi Katoa by JacciJoe

• Hinekora's Lair by Jix_91
  
• Tasalio's Lost Temple by FlowAxiom
  
• Fall of Kitava by Higava
  
• Heart of Corruption by Хастур
  
• A Cult in Hiding by Cowrex
  
• Moon Temple by Lina5555
  
• Tomb of Hinekora by titon
  
• Hinekora's Temple by XeoTech
  
• Colorful Night by mel_976189
  
• Primeval Gardens by Vigurian

We'd also like to note the Charred Council by Max34. While this hideout does have a strong presence of some other familiar entity rather than a Karui god, we just couldn't get over it!

Congratulations to all the winners, you made the Ancestors proud! We'll be in touch with you very soon to arrange your prizes.

We're very happy with how this competition turned out and due to a huge amount of high-quality submissions we will also reward more runners-up in a few days. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted your hideout!

Updates:
1. Game was ported from Unity to Unreal Engine v5.1
2. Game has way better graphics and hazards are a bit more fair.
3. Game difficulties still exist but no longer modify the levels. The difficulty setting will only change damage done to player and spinning wheels in each level.
4. Game no longer supports full controller support (Update in the future for full controller support).
5. Game no longer supports multiple languages (Update in the future for multiple languages).
6. Game now supports multiple options to change audio and video settings.

FIXED:

• Resolved the issue of the patrol route staying in the room's list after deletion and preventing the game from saving.
  
• Fixed the issue of employees using the locker room without the policy change.
  
• Addressed the issue of the game occasionally crashing if a maintenance officer was assigned to a route with no rooms while they were working.
  
• Resolved the problem of maintenance officers ceasing work if the patrol route to which they were assigned had a room with no items.

CHANGED:

• The trash carry capacity of the janitors has been increased from 15 to 30.
  
• The number of delivery persons spawning now increases based on the available storage shelves and fridges.

Hi folks,

Another small but important update for Woodfel today! I've added a shortcut key for quick inventory transfer, and improved some networking of inventory item moves.

You can now ctrl-click to instant transfer items from your personal inventory to a world inventory and vice-versa. There is a new key define so if ctrl doesn't work for you, you can change it to something else.

This was a long-requested feature which makes inventory management a bit nicer.

Enjoy! :D

- The German translation version was not translating correctly after restarting the game. This problem has now been solved.

- The horse collision has been revised to prevent the horse from getting stuck in certain rocks.

- Fixed the problem of rocks and grasses appearing too quickly and too closely to the ground, and are now displayed more progressively.

- Cloud shadows added to Minerva and Pluto levels.

- Corrected ambient light in some areas of the Minerva level.

Join our Discord to follow development news, suggest ideas, report bugs and be part of the community!
Official Cry of Athena Discord

Cry of Athena is sandbox battle simulator built for VR and PC where you create epic physics based battles, intervene as a giant god with massive god hands, or join in the battle yourself on the battlegrounds!

Join us in the official Next Fest stream where we showcase gameplay and answer questions!

Get ready to step into the eerie and imaginative world of Cody's Nightmare alongside the developers themselves! Join us this Next Fest, where we, the creators, will guide you through the spine-tingling adventure of our pixel art run and gun game.

In Cody's Nightmare, you'll take on the role of young Cody as he battles his deepest fears within the confines of his own dream. From creepy crawlies to sinister clowns and all things that go bump in the night, Cody's journey promises thrills and chills at every turn. But fear not, for Cody won't be alone on this quest. Along the way, he'll receive aid from his trusty friends, each inspired by his toys, comics, and video games.

Into the Dungeon will be released on Friday, October 20th, 2023 at 10:00 am! We are so excited to be releasing our first game to steam. This title has been underway for nearly 8 months and it feels great to be getting it into the hands of players.

We plan to push consistent updates to the game every 2 weeks, and balance changes and card tweaks every week. You can plan to expect these updates on Fridays at 10am every week, barring any major holidays.
We have been working hard to iron out as many of the bugs as we can before this release, but please keep in mind that we are a team of 1 developer/artist/composer and 1 game designer. If you do encounter bugs when playing Into the Dungeon Early Access please reach out to us on our discord and we will do our best to tackle them by our bi-weekly updates.

Great question! As excited as we are about entering Early Access, we want to be in full release no later than February of 2024. That's roughly 16 weeks from now.

We have a busy schedule ahead of us. Here is a list of all the things we will be working on in the next 16 weeks. These items are roughly in the order that we will be working on them, but some items might change or move around so don't treat this too biblically. Some items might have additional "Hope to Have" items that we will add if we have time.

• Enemy Overhaul: Update the enemies in every level to have a more deterministic experience (create repeating patterns in enemies). This also includes introducing more enemy variety and having a major boss at the end of each level.
  -Hope to Have Two boss variants for each level
  
• Music & SFX Overhaul: Create a soundtrack for each section of the game and introduce SFX for every component of the game.
  
• Environment Art Overhaul: Completely update the background art for each level.
  -Hope to Have lighting changes throughout the map.
  
• Loot & Rest Scene Update: update the loot and rest scene with art, sfx, and atmosphere.
  
• Final Boss: The addition of a final boss after the last level to really test your final deck.
  
• (Hope to Have) Mystery Scenes: Add mystery scenes to the map that contain meaningful choices that augment your run.
  
• Ability VFX: Complete the implementation of ability FX. (Such as fire raining down when casting Firestorm)
  
• Unlockable Cards: We will add additional cards for each class, as well as a set of cards that allows for a different combo set unlocked upon beating the game.
  
• Tutorial: A tutorial for players new to the roguelike deckbuilding genre that shows them the ropes so they can hop in and start playing as quick as possible.

That's it from me this week. Once again we are so excited to be releasing our first game and we hope you enjoy it. If you ever want to reach out and talk to me or another dev please feel free to join our discord and introduce yourself. Thank you for reading and we hope you enjoy!

Cheers,
Jamie
Lead Developer
Frog GameStudios

Hello everyone,

This is Martin, the creator of Try to Fall Asleep. I wanted to give you guys a brief update on everything regarding the Kickstarter campaign as well as share some short and long-term plans for the game.

So, let's just jump in and start with Kickstarter.


First off all, I wanted to thank each and everyone one of you who pledged their support to the campaign. Even though we weren’t able to reach the goal, I’m still very grateful for the support that you guys were ready to give for the game. The humbling messages and comments that we received along the way were really motivating too, so thank you for those as well.

Overall, I think we had a pretty good run, but unfortunately it just didn’t pan out the way we hoped it would. I don’t want to spend too much time analyzing and reviewing the campaign, what we could've done better and so on. In short though, looking at the Kickstarter’s statistics, I believe we had a pretty good conversion rate and only one of the 39 supporters canceled their pledge. Basically, the campaign itself was doing its job really well, but we just couldn't get enough traction to our page in order to make it succeed.


On November 8th I plan to host a presentation about the overall journey of the game as well as take a deep dive into our Kickstarter. So if it sounds interesting to you, we invite you to tune in to Latvia’s Game Developer Association YouTube channel, where they will be livestreaming my presentation live. You'll also get a chance to ask me some questions live.

So overall, even though we didn’t reach our goal, I’m still glad that we were able to give it a good shot and try out some really cool ideas. On the bright side, this campaign was able to do much better than the first one (: And of course, this still was a great learning experience and we'll be able to share our knowledge with other indie developers on November 8th.

So, what are our short and long term plans?

First of all, we’d like to make the physical items from our Kickstarter available outside of the campaign. We still need to figure out the best way to do it, as there are some logistics that need to be sorted out in order to make it happen. I’m not ready to give any concrete dates yet, but we do hope to make it happen around the end of this October. So if you really liked our physical items from the campaign, we’ll try to figure out how to make them available as soon as we can, so stay tuned for further updates on that.



As for the game - we plan to launch one more patch tomorrow with some nice fixes, adjustments and overall improvements.

It took a lot of effort to make the Kickstarter happen - the page itself, the LUC1D livestreams, all the physical items and rewards, logistics and marketing etc. We even were releasing patches for the game along with conducting the Kickstarter as well. It all has been putting a lot of stress, strain and pressure on me and my team for the past few months. So, till the end of this year, we would really like to take a bit of a break.

The break will give us some time to rest, reflect on our journey, recuperate and head into the new year refreshed and ready to continue our work on the game. It will also give us some much needed time to thoroughly rethink our strategy and re-evaluate our plans for the last 2 nights.

Of course, the biggest challenge is going to be the game’s development budget.

Without the extra funding that Kickstarter would’ve provided to the game, we’ll need to downscale a few things and find the right compromises, so that we can fit in our budget and still deliver a great closure for the game and its story.

I personally will be getting an extra job somewhere in the project management realm. I'll be able to dedicate some portion of my salary to the game’s budget if necessary. And IF we set up a permanent store for the Kickstarter items, that'll be another potential way to support the budget of the game.

And as to when we could expect to see the full release - unfortunately, I don't have the answers for that at the moment. Once we've had our break and had some time to rethink things, we hope to have a better estimate in the new year.

Even though things didn't work out with the Kickstarter, it's not gonna stop us from finishing the game. We've come so far that it would be just stupid to give up right now... So we won't - we'll find a way to move forward, towards the completion of our game. Some compromises will need to be made, but we'll make sure that we release a damn good game for the full release. We hope to see you around when that happens. Until then, thank you for your support and stay tuned for news from us in the future :))

Sincerely,

Martin

[[url=https://twitter.com/AmberDropGames]TWITTER/X[/url]] ~ [[url=https://www.youtube.com/@AmberDrop]YOUTUBE[/url]] ~ [[url=https://discord.gg/uz5WkNN]DISCORD[/url]] ~ [[url=https://amberdropgames.com]WEBSITE[/url]]

NPCs now has voices and emotions when player interact with them.

Fixed a bug that boots do not show the level up icons correctly.

Fixed some translations of Japanese.

Fixed a bug that item sometimes does not show tip panel when mouse hovering on it.