Hi! It might not be a historical game per se, but it still very much has the Charles Games DNA it it: Playing Kafka is a narrative adventure based on the work of life of the famous absurdist writer. It comes out May 21 here, on Steam, 100% free. The fully-voiced game (in English, German and Czech) was developed with Kafka experts.

We poured our hearts (and evenings reading The Castle, The Trial and Letter to His Father) into the game. If you like what you see, wishlist, spread the word and help us

Playing Kafka follows in the footsteps of Svoboda 1945 and Attentat 1942. A narrative adventure that adapts three books, but is still rooted in real-life: Kafka’s biography as well as his apt social criticism.

Check it out:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2911850/Playing_Kafka/

We are really proud, so I hope you’ll also allow me to share the latest trailer, showcasing all the three chapters, based on three Kafka’s books: The Trial, The Castle and Letter to his Father.


We can’t wait to hear what you think on May 21st! So see you at the castle in three weeks.

Ondřej
Charles Games

My Face Your Music has updated to version 0.017. With this comes:
- Added instruments Telephone, Seashore & Helicopter, completing the MIDI meme instruments
- Custom video wall entries can now be set to <NONE>
- Extra video can now be stopped from the menu
- Slider for the size of webcam and extra video windows has more in-between values.
- Various quality of life GUI improvements
- Various bugfixes

If you haven't got MFYM yet, starting now is a 10% special discount, so come join the chaos!

CHALLENGE 85

Challenge 85 is here and your next Ultimate Piece up for grabs ːUltimatePieceː

ːgoldenbitː

Enjoy!!!

UL benchmarks use a component called SystemInfo to identify the hardware in your system. This patch updates SystemInfo to version 5.72.

• Updated CPUID module to attempt to solve an issue that could cause the scan to hang on some AMD-based systems.

UL benchmarks use a component called SystemInfo to identify the hardware in your system. This patch updates SystemInfo to version 5.72.

• Updated CPUID module to attempt to solve an issue that could cause the scan to hang on some AMD-based systems.

Hello Heroes!

Last week, we released Dwarves of Runenberg, the first DLC of The Last Spell! If you missed the news, this new DLC introduces three new weapons, a new race, a brand new map and new items called "Medals". You can find more information here:

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1105670/view/7454095233531526552

Following the release, we've kept a close eye on all the feedback shared by players, either on Steam forums, Reddit or Discord (join us over there, everyone is awesome!). We've noted multiple things and we will work on them accordingly to better balance the game but it will take some time, since in France we have multiple public holidays in May which affect the pace of the production.


Earlier this week, we released an update (Patch 1.1.1.4) which was planned before the release of the DLC. It fixed multiples issues and brought a few features to the game.

We knew it wouldn't address your issues & feedback but rest assured: we absolutely plan to make further updates! The next one is planned to be released on the week of May 13. This additional time will help us to better analyze your feedback and properly test our changes before giving you access to it.

• Balancing on the Final Night of Runenberg
  
• Gauntlet balancing
  
• Improving the Runestones' visibility on Runenberg
  
• Correctly display the Boss Meter progress on Runenberg

Thank you for reading this blogpost! Keep sharing your feedback, your ideas and your issues: we'll do our best to correct & fix them 🔥

Join us on Discord, Twitter & Instagram to discuss with the team and other players!

the latest Beta test of our upcoming quality of life update 0.6.0 is out now!

Please tell us what you think on Discord or in our Open Beta discussion forum on Steam.

Thank you for your support and have fun testing our new features!

---

• The new state “Acquainted” is already achieved with 50% faction standing
  
• The “Acquainted” state already unlocks some trade and gift offers
  
• The overall amount of trade and gift offers has been increased

In building construction mode, a help grid will now also inform about space available around the current building position. This is very helpful to immediately recognize if there is enough room to build a road along or around the building. Beside that, it helps in general to estimate available space for other planned buildings nearby.
In building construction mode, hovering over an existing road or very close to it will snap the entrance direction of the planned building to the road. This means it is still possible to place buildings sideways to roads, but also to snap them to the road directly without the need to rotate the building.
In road construction mode, new planned roads will snap automatically to 90 and 180 degree angles if the current mouse position is close to those axes. The new planned road segment will snap to existing road segments, previous planned road segments and to existing buildings/construction sites.

• Road snapping can be enabled and disabled with a new button in the road construction menu
  
• Road snapping can be suppressed by holding CTRL (customizable)

• For each building with a continuous workflow, an efficiency value is shown
  
  • Hovering over a building will show the efficiency value in the building tooltip
    
  • For a selected building, the efficiency value is displayed, too. The tooltip of the value will show the efficiency graph for the last hour. This is very helpful to understand whether the building is operating continuously or not, and at which efficiency level.
• Efficiency values are displayed for the following buildings:
  
  • 9 different gathering buildings (Woodcutter, Quarry, Copper hut, etc.)
    
  • 16 different production buildings (Sawmill, Weaponsmith, etc.)
    
  • Both farm buildings, reflecting successful harvesting
    
  • Forester, reflecting successful planting of trees
    
  • Tavern, reflecting successful meal ingredient usage
    
  • Guard Tower / Garrison, reflecting territory expansion
    
  • Explorer, reflecting unknown territory exploration
• The efficiency value reflects actual positive results, not if the units are continuously busy. The value of 100% is a best case value, it can be lower for many reasons, depending on the building type. Here are some examples:
  
  • Longer walk distances (for gathering buildings, farms, territory building, explorer, etc.)
    
  • Missing input commodities, missing food supply (for mining) or full output piles
    
  • Weaker ingredients which consume more production time (copper instead of iron)
    
  • Rotting plants (for farms: more seeding, less harvesting)

• Equipment items in training buildings which are currently not needed for the ordered and scheduled units of that building, will be released and redirected to other locations if they are needed there. This ensures that equipment can be exchanged between e.g. multiple guild houses or multiple military academies to handle the training/recruitment orders.
  
• Input commodities in buildings which are currently not needed because their recipe has been disabled, will be released and redirected to other locations if they are needed there.

• Demolishing a building grants 50% (rounded down) of wood/stone construction materials that were used to construct the building
  
• Cloth and rope are refunded 100%
  
• A tooltip shows the amount of commodities refunded
  
• A simple demolish visualization has been added
  
• The demolish refund can help to escape deadlock situations (no more softwood beams, no more stone deposits, no more nutrition food for quarries)

• For customized maps you can select between one of several new lighting setups. At the very end of the “Map Setup” section, you will find a new dropdown for “Atmosphere”
  
• By pressing a hotkey (default: CTRL+L) it’s possible to change the current map lighting setup at any time. The last active lighting setup will be part of the savegame.
  
• The 4 available lighting setups are:
  
  • Sunrise
    
  • Cloudy Daytime (Default)
    
  • Golden Hour
    
  • Sunset
• New directional atmospheric fog
  
  • The fog color reacts when facing the sun
    
  • Can be deactivated in the settings

• When a hunter is selected, nearby animals get highlighted
  
• Rations and nutrition meals now still look different after being served at mining buildings

• The landing party “Beginner” now contains some trade carriers
  
• Added enemy level “Extremely many” which adds another 50% of enemies
  
• Added landing party “Extended for co-op”
  
• This landing party has been created for co-op to allow a faster game start. It has both more units and more commodities. Adding more enemies keeps the overall challenge similar.

• Improved reflection on the cliff textures

• Audio mixing
  
• Saved games can be deleted from the load and save menus
  
• Loading the game to the main menu with many saved games is now faster.
  
• Switched trade UI layout for better readability so that the player is on left side and the NPC side is on right side
  
• Improvements in the UI layout
  
• Improvements of the localized texts
  
• Improved rendering performance through optimized LOD levels for characters
  
• Optimized VRAM usage with optimized texture compression setup
  
• “Join Co-op game” button got a tooltip
  
• Reworked visuals for the thieves
  
• Improved rendering of distance fog
  
• Performance improvements on maps with a lot of Pagonians

• Fixed: Sometimes the building state “Construction paused” was not removed even though the building got finished
  
• Fixed: Sometimes a guard tower did not get any reinforcements
  
• Fixed: When a soldier was living in a residence or cottage, its selection window did not reflect this
  
• Fixed: A Pagonian bitten by a werewolf would still show “Ready for new orders” when selected
  
• Fixed: A bitten Pagonian did not have an icon
  
• Fixed: Building preview got stuck at its current location if cursor hovers any UI while holding right mouse button

• Fixed: Sometimes fish was swimming into the ground when close to the shore
  
• Forester now carries different looking hardwood and softwood saplings
  
• Fixed: State "not enough to do for all staff members at the moment" stayed active when building was turned off
  
• The color of porcini and raspberries baskets was too similar, so the white blanket was removed from the porcini basket
  
• Fixed: Black rabbits suddenly turned red when dead.

• Fixed: When changing the language, not all text was updated to the new language
  
• Fixed several crashes
  
• Fixed: Placed pings in a co-op session persisted in the world after last client left the session

• Build system optimization
  
• Recipes/ingredients now visible
  
• All structures should be buildable
  
• All foundations placeable
  
• Optimized resource node respawn

The Sker Ritual Post-Launch Roadmap is here! We've got a packed several months of updates and content coming your way. We hope you'll look forward to two FREE content updates that will feature: a new map, a new special weapon, new perks, a new Hardcore Easter Egg and Easter Egg music! The only paid element of our roadmap is the cosmetic dlc!

We are committed to continually improving all areas of the game including: optimisation, bug fixes, balancing and networking. PS4 and XO releases will happen, however the date is TBC at the moment. Every effort will be made to hit the content times and many more milestones, but anything can happen in game dev so dates and content are subject to change.

Above all, we want to thank you once again for supporting Sker Ritual! You've supported us throughout our Early Access journey, over the course of our 1.0 launch and we hope you'll continue to support us during our post-launch.

We now have a thriving community of over 15K members on the Sker Ritual Discord! If you'd like to be a part of it, join us and have your say!

What are you most looking forward to? Let us know in the comments!

Wales Interactive

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1492070/Sker_Ritual/

Website
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
Steam
Youtube
Twitch
Reddit

Added seeding input functionality for controller + Steam Deck