2023, what a year! Can you believe it's already over? Wanted to let you know of everything happening behind the scenes of Monster Mop Up, but I'll stick to the highlights!



We had big plans and even bigger dreams when starting Monster Mop Up, and it feels warm and fuzzy inside seeing them come to life! Some of the following will be revealed in the coming weeks/months in better detail but I really can’t wait!


Those adorable fluffy rascals got even adorabler (totally a word), with unique looks, poops and abilities (poopabilities?), so each time you try to save them you’ll get a pleasant (evil grin) surprise!



They also increased in number from what we originally planned!


We still haven't revealed an important tool that will help you immensely in keeping the Ragamuffins' presence hidden from humans. (Hint: it's a multitool with 3 different functions that will BLOW you away).

Also we finished our upgrade system. Oh I never told you about that? We got UPGRADES for days!



Some of them can be bought with the coins you get from finishing levels but some can be found only by the most observant custodians for free!


So our level designer might have had too many good ideas that we couldn’t pass up on, and ended up with a couple more levels done than we originally planned!



Expect diverse level layouts with little details and references from movies or other games we love, as easter eggs!

Also if you missed it, this is how a level is created in the game!

We even added a new tutorial level as we wanted you to give you an easier intro and at the same time a viewpoint of the human world through the cute eyes of the monsters.


This is where most of the time is spent on Monster Mop Up!

We wanted to give you a satisfying experience where you can express yourself. This requires a fine balancing to avoid tediousness but at the same time be rewarding enough down to each stroke of the mop!



With the full campaign in mind, overall pacing became very important! Upgrades, decorations and house expansions offer different options on how to tackle obstacles.



There is a lot of playtesting going on, but we got the best feedback from the community when the demo came out, so thank you for making the game better!



Some mighty talented people in our team helped bring everything to life!
The custodian's home - the place where your Ragamuffins will be safe, can be adorned with (currently) 169 unique furniture, toys, paintings, and numerous other objects so you can make it your own!



You can purchase these from the shop using the coins you are rewarded when finishing missions.
We did a total redesign on the Custodian’s home from our demo days with different rooms so you can build themed spaces too!



Of course there are achievements! You should be rewarded and bragging rights for your continued efforts! Proudly show off your prowess!



Secrets? Hmmm… well if I were to verify the existence of any secrets then they wouldn’t be secret anymore. So no. No secrets. Totally nothing to look for.



All the hard work going into Monster Mop Up hasn’t gone unnoticed!

Without your love we would never have made the Dreamhack Beyond Game Awards 2023 (Most Anticipated Game) or be among the Finalists at the TIGA Game Awards (Best Casual Game 2023). Everyone in the team is honored and humbled by the recognition of our efforts!

The gaming community around the globe took notice of our First Demo!
You know them, you love them, here are the most viewed videos for 2023 on our Demo:

Fynnpire (Australia) 105K views
Drae (Canada) 98K views
LegitGamingGr (Greece) 49K views
Oyuncu Aile (Turkey) 36K views
Hugo Délire (France) 19K views

Thank you!

Yeah, I'm talking about you!

From the support and love you gave us to the awesome feedback, which some ended up in the game, we couldn’t have done it without you!

My favorite suggestion was flushing the poop down the toilet, where we looked at each other in the office and went “huh, why didn’t we think of that”.


Feel free to keep in touch on X (Twitter) for weekly updates, or if you want to get updated on the game’s development (once per month) how about{LINK REMOVED} joining our newsletter!

Also also if you haven’t already wishlisted or followed Monster Mop Up, you can do it right now!

From everyone here at Terahard studios, thank you from the bottom of our hearts!

We wish you a cozy and wholesome 2024!

Hello, Hunters!

As we begin to wrap up 2023, we want to take the opportunity to thank you, our dedicated players, for being part of yet another fantastic year for theHunter: Call of the Wild. Thanks to your unwavering support, we’ve been able to reach new milestones, release exciting new premium and free content, and deliver improvements and features for you to enjoy.

2023 was truly a memorable year: we welcomed players to Emerald Coast Australia, our first-ever Australian map. The team has had so much fun seeing you go toe-to-toe with the Eastern Gray Kangaroo, and we can’t wait to hear more stories from your adventures in the land down under.

Hunting aficionados also got their hands on all-new content this year: Hunter Power Pack, Free Trophy Lodge, Ambusher Pack, Seasonal Events, and various Cosmetic Packs all brought something unique to the table.

Speaking of Cosmetic Packs, make sure to grab the free limited-time New Year 2024 Cosmetic Pack – available only between December 29 and January 8!



More recently, we were thrilled to welcome the adorable Labrador Retriever to the family. Fun fact: did you know that the top 5 most popular names for the dog are Jamal, followed by Pablo, Copper, Buddy, and Hunter? And can you guess which animal species has been retrieved the most? It may or may not share the same name as a certain country, that’s all we’re going to say…

With a fantastic 2023 coming to a close, and so much to look forward to in 2024, the team is dedicated to continue delivering engaging and memorable new hunting experiences for our global community of players.

• Create or upgrade to a Full Apex Connect account. Existing Full Apex Connect account owners will automatically receive the pack when launching the game
  
• Make sure you’re connected to the internet and have Hunt Club enabled

The New Year 2024 Cosmetic Pack and the event-themed Hunt Club challenges disappear on January 8, so play theHunter: Call of the Wild before then to make sure you don’t miss out!

As this year comes to a close, I've decided to settle a debt and complete an important development blog that was originally planned for much earlier, focusing on the topic of multidimensional temples in the game. However, like many other developers, our game underwent significant changes due to the unfortunate situation with Unity that shook the gaming industry.

This blog has proven to be one of the most challenging for me so far, as it delves not only into new content and positive development narratives, but also explores personal experiences with the situation. Therefore, this blog might be a bit longer :)

Warped Times is our third game developed in the Unity engine, following 3x64 and the initial attempt — a Christmas mini-game from the old Warped Times series released back in 2014. Despite some shortcomings, I was satisfied with the engine, and the game development had been progressing smoothly. However, I, along with others, was shocked by Unity's decision regarding absurd fees and utterly opaque communication. In the first few days, I, like many other developers, could only observe the situation and contemplate our next steps.

Eventually, I concluded that I didn't want to release a game, which I wanted to continue supporting and expanding long after its release, in an engine from such a questionable company. Therefore, I decided to at least try transferring the game to one of the alternative engines.


(our statement on the situation on Twitter)

Although I tried both of the major alternative engines (Godot and Unreal), the decision was easy. Given my familiarity with writing games using programming languages, Unreal with blueprints was not appealing to me, and Unreal’s main programming language (C++) was too complicated.

Getting acquainted with Godot didn't take long. Converting graphics wasn't a major issue, but there were some significant changes. Due to the division between 2D and 3D, I decided to transform existing scenes, primarily composed of sprites, into full-fledged 3D scenes. In this regard, the result was much more impressive than the existing game in Unity. I must praise Godot for its excellent work with lighting and the impressive volumetric fog, which added depth to both the dystopian rainy city and the colorful forest scenes.



Critical part of deciding whether I was going to continue with Godot was successfully implementing the dimension transition effect. Unfortunately, Godot, due to its smaller user base, didn't offer any existing shaders I could use. Still, because of the simplicity of writing custom shaders in Godot, I decided to give it a try. Godot proved incredibly helpful in this regard, thanks to its straightforward language.

This marked a significant breakthrough that profoundly affected the game's visuals. Until then, I had relied on available effects from stores/the internet, but with this breakthrough, I could create any effect tailored to the game. However, this meant discarding many original designs and effects, adding a considerable amount of extra work. The first experimental scenes looked good in Godot — much better and more natural than anything I had achieved in Unity so far — and everything was on the right track. However, as you can sense, a turning point in the story was just around the corner.


(Godot - my first created shader)

Graphically, the shift was enormous, and working with materials was very convenient. The first complications arose when dealing with the editor and asset browser, which I found less intuitive. While nodes in Godot are a matter of habit, working in the very basic Godot editor was challenging for me, considering that in Unity I had gradually customized my editor for the game's needs over the development period. GDScript was simpler, something I had to get used to after years of C# (in Godot, I hadn't tried C# due to more accessible learning materials for GDScript). On the other hand, Godot itself has many things out of the box that Unity does not, which I highly appreciate — visually, it is evident that it is better designed for game development.


(Warped Times in Unity vs Godot)

Many things are very similar to Unity, or, in their simplicity, Game Maker. Thus, I didn't encounter too many problems, and in this regard, I can only recommend Godot. Learning is more straightforward if you have some knowledge of both mentioned engines. Even though I couldn't (or rather didn't want to) see the extent of the work involved in transferring the entire existing game, I continued trying because the motivation to leave Unity was strong.

However, over time, accumulating factors made the work less enjoyable for me. These included an overly simple and personally unintuitive editor without custom extensions for my game (just a personal experience; many others find it the opposite compared to Unity), cumbersome work with the asset browser, and unfortunately, encountering bugs that even break the editor — a significant issue when reworking a game with a two-year development history, which is already time consuming.

Moreover, I knew that ahead of me lied tasks that would be incredibly complicated to transfer — this includes character movement, but also smaller elements like the camera, dialogue system, or shooting with all accompanying effects, for which I already had finely tuned scripts in Unity.

Then came another challenge — likely a limitation in the code, where I couldn't effectively duplicate the second dimension of the level and let it exist concurrently. This problem could probably be solved either in a different creative way, or by modifying the engine itself. However, given the lack of material on the internet and all the previous problems, I had to come to an inevitable decision. Despite my sincere efforts, I probably wouldn't be able to transfer the game with everything I wished for, and certainly not in a reasonable time.

I'm ashamed to write this sentence, but the first return home to the familiar Unity editor tailored to my game was a tremendous relief for me :) In any case, this decision applies only to Warped Times. I dare say that transferring this game is impossible, especially when I'm the sole programmer. However, for future games, I will strongly lean towards Godot, as the experience wasn't bad at all, and I believe that it will become an even better engine in the meantime.

The return to Unity did not go smoothly. After seeing the visual improvements with Godot, I couldn't revert to the previous version of the game. The existing version was mostly composed of 2D graphics, but after seeing the significant spatial enhancements, I decided to rework the existing scenes. Fortunately, I didn't need to change the graphics too much, rather I added additional details and used more realistic models, which aligns with the direction the game had already been taking. For example, the village or temples were already entirely in 3D.


(older 2D scene vs new 3D scene)

This, again, meant a lot of additional work, but luckily, there were very few completely finished scenes, and from live game events, I know from players’ feedback that some parts that deserve a bit of rework.

As I mentioned, due to Godot and the unavailability of existing shaders, I had no choice but to learn shaders. Now, with the basics grasped, I can understand and modify much more complicated shaders I used in Unity, even without extensive knowledge. They are still somewhat beyond my skills, but through experimentation, I can achieve the desired effect.


(improved transition with custom shader)

Most importantly, this results in an entirely new dimension transition that is now entirely smooth (for which I received praise from a friend without even pointing it out :) ), and technically much simpler, with the ability to tweak it as needed. But it's not just a transition — this opens the door to new effects that I can precisely tailor to the game, and I am extremely happy about that.

What happened is terrible, and I must say that I admire those who managed to switch to another engine to the extent that they can continue developing their game elsewhere. Although I saw a return to Unity as unthinkable, unfortunately, Warped Times relies on it a lot. I want to complete the game without compromising on quality or content, and currently, it's simply not possible to rework the game unless I want to deviate from a reasonable release date (if it’s even possible at all).

However, as it turned out, our game has been strengthened by this whole unfortunate situation. Even though we lost a lot of time by reworking the currently completed content, the new, more immersive-looking scenes already bring me joy. I hope that the next blog will be about the joyful successes of development. Thank you to all the fans for their support and patience during this difficult time. I hope the game will see the light of day within the next two years :) As always, you can follow small updates from development on our social media, and if you'd like to see more personal insights from development, you can now follow me on Mastodon :)

Hey everyone,



big thanks for everyone who played this game!!

I know that its a pretty small game, it was basically to test out things here on steam.

Prepare yourself for the next year, we have already something planned and another small project is under development, but after that we will start with the real big games!

Stay tuned until then and thanks again for everyone who played!

Internal development

• Fixed an issue where player character controls were unresponsive during save/load.
  
• Fixed an issue during save/load where the path was blocked, preventing you from leaving your house.
  
• Fixed an issue during save/load where the potion delivery quest couldn't be obtained.

New:

• Added sandbox mode

Changes:

• Increased fish net capability proportionally to max 10k.
  
• Added more fish attracted by Candy lure
  
• Changed fishnet experience gain (exp is now always given when fish is caught, not only when we put fish into the net)

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to create profiles without choosing game mode.
  
• Fixed a bug that highlighted wrong game mode texts while creating a profile.
  
• Fixed Candy bait not showing attracted fish

• Customers now have separate max spawn counts for Trash and Messes (dirty footprints) separately
  
• Tourists have a slightly higher chance to spawn Messes. There's no time to clean your shoes when you're traveling across The Island!

• Resolved issue where employees sometimes quit from Hiring Table when you left them in certain conditions
  
• Fixed clients using Scythe on crops spawning non-networked seeds

- Two small typos.
- Mac version. (First time on Mac, we might need to change something)
- One bug fixed on case 1. Now a puzzle can be solved in another way.

Although "Endless Immortal Journey" has not been officially released yet, we already have dozens of members in our player community (QQ Group ID: 537185437).

We value the opinions and suggestions of our players and hope to communicate better with everyone. Therefore, we have decided to maintain weekly updates of the "Game Development Log" until the official release.

As this is the first entry, this log will provide a general overview of the game's basic framework and update plans. In subsequent updates, we will provide more detailed reports based on the weekly work.

The basic framework of "Endless Immortal Journey" consists of three main systems:

1. Sect System:
Mainly featuring simulated management gameplay, the sect will generate resources over game time, used for constructing the sect and exchanging various items.
Buildings in the sect system are categorized as core buildings, functional buildings, and resource buildings.
Functions such as forging equipment, refining elixirs, and recruiting disciples are included in functional buildings, which are closely related to the character cultivation system.

2. Character Cultivation System:
A system where players enhance the strength of their teams through various means.
Main dimensions of character cultivation include advancing realms, equipping gear, combining and upgrading skills, choosing paths, and practicing martial arts.
By combining equipment, paths, and martial arts, even characters of the same profession may have vastly different final forms.
Powerful effects of 1+1>2 can be achieved by further combining skills among different characters.

3. Combat System:
While exploring the continent, players will engage in numerous battles with various enemies.
Defeating these enemies yields rich spoils used to directly enhance character realms or to manufacture items in sect buildings.
As players travel across the continent, they will also collect increasing reputation, one of the necessary conditions for upgrading the sect.
Time-limited special events and battles will be triggered at specific points during the in-game year, month, or special occasions.
We plan to release a trial version in February of next year (before the Spring Festival), which will include the following content:

Guidance, tasks, levels, and plot flow content for the first two chapters of the game.
1.Maximum realm for player characters extended to Foundation Establishment realm.
2.Core sect buildings and resource buildings all unlocked, with external functions available: recruiting 3.disciples, and equipment forging.
4.Disciple recruitment feature: In addition to the main character, at least 8 collectible characters.
5.Equipment forging feature: At least 70 types of craftable regular equipment and some unique equipment with rare drops.
6.Main character can freely combine skills from other professions.

That concludes all the content for this log. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year, and we'll see you next year!