Finally, we are fixing a fatal flaw in Bloodcrave—a lack of goth girls! Please give a warm welcome to Rebecca, a bartender who will steal your heart, tips, and maybe something more!

You can also sign up for our Kickstarter which launches soon!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bloodcrave/bloodcrave-vampire-themed-visual-novel

Hello invaders! Today I released an update with some QOL fixes. Here's what I did:

1. Removed the debug label and added logic so it shouldn't pop up again.
   
2. Added logic to automatically pick up loot when you're in the safe zone so that Loot won't get stuck behind work benches any more.
   
3. Fixed the collision on the walls of the house so that you can't walk on top of the walls any more.
   
4. Modified the prompt for harvest nodes to have it's actual name rather than the system's name for it.
   
5. Fenced in the playable area so you can no longer wander off the map.
   
6. Fixed the sounds for stone harvest nodes so they play on every hit instead of skipping the first few.
   
7. Back end up date to the dialogue system. Please test to make sure it still works on your systems!

GoatDragonStudio here, bringing you a top-secret announcement.
Our visual novel, Spy 1 Lovecraftian, is going undercover at the Steam June Festival.



That's right, agents; we'll be infiltrating the Steam Next Fest with a live-streamed playthrough of our latest demo. Join us on this covert operation as we showcase the thrilling adventures of Billy Hayward and his telepath partner, Alice Tenderwood.

But be warned, this mission is not for the faint of heart - we're taking on a cult and their dark rituals head-on. So, gear up, keep your wits about you, and tune in for a night of espionage and otherworldly thrills. Remember, wishlisting and following are crucial for your mission preparation. Ask any questions, but be cautious - loose lips sink ships. Let's make this operation a success, agents.

🤩
Wishlist Sisters: The Last Day of Summer now and follow our socials to remind her that there's only 2 more days to go!

Hello everyone, it's been a while but I'm back with three big pieces of news!


Wing Haven is a game about populating wildlife sanctuaries with rare birds! It's a spiritual successor to Chillquarium, but I'm really excited about the variety that comes from having new biomes to build in and fill with native plant species. If you are interested, you can head over to the Steam page and add it to your wishlist, it does a lot for the Steam algorithm if you do!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2790850/Wing_Haven/

For the time being, Wing Haven is still in the early stages of development, and I'm super excited for where it will end up. For now that means that I don't have a target release date in mind -- it will be ready once it's ready. And don't worry, this doesn't mean I'm abandoning Chillquarium any time soon! I plan to continue development for both games in tandem moving forward. Which brings me to announcement number 2....


The main content of this update is an extra pack of fish to play with, but I've also added a few quality of life improvements that have been heavily requested.

• Introducing Spring Pals, a new pack of freshwater fish to discover!
  
• Added an extra freshwater and saltwater tank, so you now have more room for all your fish!
  
• Added the ability to rename your tanks, finally!

And last but not least...

From now until June 9th, you can get Chillquarium for 33% off! That's the biggest discount the game has ever had, so now is the perfect time for those of you who've been holding onto the game in your wishlist to save some money!

Happy Fishing!
-Ben

Hej Víkingar!

Welcome to our first Production Department update! Take a look behind the scenes with our Production department as they share insight into the evolution of the game.

From in-depth mechanic showcases revealing key gameplay to an exclusive chat with the dev team on the future plans of Skye: The Misty Isle!

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We revealed a flythrough of the breathtaking landscapes of Morsvikbotn, Norway, and explored the vibrant towns nestled within its majestic embrace! Our starting map in Skye: The Misty Isle features the fictional town of Ravndal as its bustling hub, where adventure awaits around every corner.

For our final day, we revealed a flythrough of Norway's breathtaking, hyper-realistic landscapes, and explored the vibrant towns nestled within its majestic embrace! Our starting location in Skye: The Misty Isle features the fictional town of Ravndal, a charming settlement nestled amidst the rugged terrain of Mørsvikbotn. Perched on the world's edge, it boasts unparalleled views of the vast Nordfolda fjord.

Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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Kicking off the week with our first of three mechanic showcases, we demonstrate in-game footage of our dev testing area, displaying mechanics such as foraging, forestry, mining ores, farming, collectables, and fishing!

Foraging
Explore diverse biomes and map-specific locations to uncover essential resources crucial for crafting and sustenance in the wild.

Forestry
Venture into dense forests, harvesting wood for crafting while facing challenges like confrontations with wolves. Utilise tools like knives to enhance resource-gathering efficiency.

Mining
Delve into underground mines to unearth a wealth of ores, including coal, copper, and iron. Refine your findings at blacksmiths or trade them for profit amidst threats like bandits.

Farming
Cultivate crops in customisable plots, engage in trading at bustling markets, and harvest your yield for sustenance or cooking, influencing the landscape of survival.

Collectables
Discover over 200 unique items scattered throughout the world, crafting them into essential components and advanced gear to shape the narrative of your journey.

Fishing
Cast your line in serene wilderness spots or bustling piers, reel in a variety of fish, and savour the fruits of your labour with a hearty meal, enhancing your survival experience.

Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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Our second mechanics showcase covered our primitive to advanced crafting system using workbenches, trading with our 14 specialised vendors, cooking gathered ingredients, building from our modular build parts, and customising your builds with decorations and melee and ranged combat.

Crafting
Hone your crafting skills, starting with primitive items and expanding your abilities with various workbenches. Forge higher-tier components to thrive in the wilderness and overcome challenges.

Workbenches
Explore a variety of 20 different workstations scattered across the land.

Traders
Interact with 14 specialised vendors to acquire or craft 211 essential items crucial for your journey's success.

Cooking
Gather ingredients through foraging, hunting, and farming endeavours. Utilise fire or cooking workbenches to prepare nourishing meals, sustaining yourself amidst the wilderness's rigours.

Building
Unleash your creativity with modular build parts crafted from wood or stone. Construct a permanent home or shelter, establishing your presence in the vast and ever-changing world.

Decorations
Customise your surroundings with an array of workbenches, usable items such as beds, and decorative elements, including shelves, fur rugs, and tables. Make your space truly your own.

Combat
Craft melee and ranged weapons to defend yourself against threats ranging from bandits to wild animals. Engage in thrilling battles, securing your survival and dominance in the challenging landscape.

Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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Our third and final mechanic showcase showed traversal through vaulting and climbing, horse-riding and sailing. We also revealed our day-to-night cycles and dynamic weather, such as fog, rain and snow.

Traversal
Navigate the terrain with agility using vaulting, climbing, and nimble dodge and roll techniques. Embrace excitement with exhilarating zipline rides across the wilderness.

Riding
Embark on epic journeys by hiring horses from stables, utilising their speed and strength for travel across the expansive world. Harness their power in combat when necessary, ensuring your dominance.

Time and Weather
Witness the ever-changing dynamics of day and night, accompanied by dynamic weather phenomena such as fog, rain, and snow. Utilise the real-world night sky for navigation beneath the stars.

Sailing
Explore vast lakes and oceans, freely swimming or commanding large longships to conquer the seas. Let the call of the waves guide your journey across the waters, unlocking new horizons and adventures.

Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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We revealed a behind the scenes look at Unreal Engine’s PCG technology that is powering our procedural towns and forests. From settlements and NPCs to decorations and foliage, enjoy in-engine images revealing the inner workings of the game’s environments.

Mesh Scatter
We've begun using new Procedural Scattering on static meshes. Here, you can see how clustered static meshes adapt to concave surfaces, creating organic plant growth. This method allows for natural-looking procedural content with customisable parameters, giving us greater creative control over the final product.

Towns and NPCs
Procedural technology helps us bring structures, roads, and environmental elements to life, creating immersive locations for players to explore. Our NPC and Enemy placement, largely driven by data tables, dictates spawn points and emergent behaviours to make the world feel truly alive.

Forests and Foliage
We use a blend of Unreal Engine 5’s technologies to shape our environmental design. From the strategic placement and lush growth of foliage, guided by procedural rules and datasets, to the use of Nanite technology, we've amplified density and realism in our environments like never before.

Fences and Decorations
We've also started exploring the use of Procedural Content Generation tools for our fences, decorating our world with grass, foliage, and rocks that spawn along the edges of splines, creating a natural and overgrown aesthetic.

Environmental Effects
We also use a more traditional approach to procedural content, randomisation for natural environmental effects. Utilising 'weighted' points, depicted by the grey boxes, along with randomised scaling and rotation, helps us break up the monotony of flat surfaces. This method enables us to scatter ground elements like rocks, stones, leaves, and debris, bypassing the constraints of traditional grass layers in landscape design.

Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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We also introduced our third developmental recap. Join our Marketing Director and Creative Director as they discuss the exciting things we are working on, and what’s next for Skye as we look to move into phase 0.3, Muspelheim!

Be sure to watch our other videos covering our work so far on Helheim, 0.1, and Svartalfheim, 0.2!
Click the links to read more!

Instagram | Facebook

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Our Production Department provided an update on what they have been working on recently, from rolling out over 500 updates since April to diving deep into the intricacies of a full map overall and MetaHuman integration.

Expand or click the links to read more!

[expand type=details]
What We’re Working On

Over the past few months, we have been busier than ever. Since April, we’ve rolled out over 500 updates to our game’s internal branch! It’s been a real team effort, with everyone helping out with fixes, changes and improvements.

We’ve been hard at work overhauling our artificial intelligence systems, implementing our MetaHumans, redesigning the user interface and maps, and, of course, handling all the bugs and technical issues that follow.

Our Favourite Project

Our most interesting focus was integrating MetaHumans. It's been a pretty big task and needed hard work from everyone on the team, but seeing these characters come to life with their quirky expressions and subtle, true-to-life, movements has been so rewarding.

As we continue to explore the possibilities in Unreal Engine 5, we're really excited about the potential to enhance the game, and each step forward brings us closer to our goals of hyper-realism and immersion.

Our Biggest Challenge

One of our biggest challenges has been redesigning the user interface. There’s such a delicate balance of minimalism, functionality and artistic theme, and it has been a tough process for all of us, across every department.

We’re so happy with the progress we’ve made, despite the steep learning curve! We’re excited for players to see what we’ve made and to get their insights into other improvements we can make as we continue.

What We’ve Learnt

Optimisation has also been a major hurdle for us, mainly with our maps. We recently scaled down our 8k heightmaps to tackle the performance issues caused by a landscape made of over 64 million polygons! We dropped the resolution to 2k, which gave us huge framerate improvements but, unfortunately, resulted in a landscape of jagged edges and navigation issues.

So, after all that work, we had to scale the resolution back up to 4k, giving us a landscape with only 16 million polygons - a 4x reduction from the original! This gave us the stable framerate we needed while allowing us a clean slate to completely redesign both maps with higher-quality textures, and better environmental design. We've been fighting a constant, uphill battle to balance visual fidelity and stable performance throughout development but, finally, we seem to be winning.

Latest Technology

The constant challenge of working with cutting-edge technology has been an interesting process. We began work in Unreal Engine 5 before its public release and, while it’s been a really exciting time, it also means we’re working with an ever-adapting production process to keep up with an evolving engine, and unforeseen bugs, issues and errors are just part of that process.

However, for all of the complexities and occasional setbacks, our experience of Unreal Engine 5 has been so incredibly rewarding, and has allowed us to explore new creative possibilities and push the boundaries of what's achievable for our small team.

The Community

Since February 2023, we've been gathering insights from our dedicated group of Æsir testers, on everything from mechanics and gameplay to world-building and aesthetics. As a small team, player feedback has been so helpful and we’re so excited to expand our community as we continue to grow.

We’ve already started to open up dialogue with our wider community, especially over on our discord server. This has been so useful in helping us prioritise different aspects of development to meet players’ expectations.

Looking into the Future

We're so excited for the future of our team, and the ambitions and plans we have for the game are a long journey that we can’t wait to tackle with our community.

We know that development is a long process and we understand how frustrating it can be for players to wait for updates or development phases. But, even after three years, this is just the beginning!
[/expand]
Instagram | Facebook

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Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our journey towards bringing Skye: The Misty Isle to life!


Skål,

The Production Department ⚙️

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Website Discord {LINK REMOVED} Socials

Minor update to fix some issues caused in the last major update.

• Fixed Mortar unit not glowing blue in info mode
  
• Fixed Tank Alignment to terrain again
  
• Fixed Mine Units having a rendering bug on their range making it impossible to see where the unit can place mines
  
• Fixed issue with certain sounds not looping

• Extended Bridge 3 map by 2 tiles
  
• Adjusted player camera in Bridge 3

Hi Raifu Wars Fans!

We are excited to make some big announcements today; mainly that Raifu Wars will soon be available for free to everyone!


That's right! Starting in July we plan to make the base Raifu Wars game completely free. That means anyone will be able to play online and locally, make and publish maps, and choose from any of the 8 base characters!


We thank you so much for supporting us! All player profiles made before the free switch will receive special cosmetics as well as all DLC characters (including future ones) for free.


The mobile version will also become free. Paid customers will receive the same benefits stated above (special cosmetics and all DLC characters free). After the switch to free, new mobile customers will buy a DLC pass to get new characters.


This move is not motivated by profit but rather making the game available to as many people as possible. Our goal has always been to bring people across the globe together to play online, and removing the paywall allows us to invite more people to try the game. Please consider this a gift to the community for all your support. We are sincerely thankful. 🙏


We are also announcing the final update roadmap of Raifu Wars. This is a bittersweet ending to our journey, but we are dedicated to going out with a bang! Here's what you can expect coming soon:

• Modable textures: all game graphics will be loaded as PNGs
  
• Skin Colors
  
• Bug fixes and optimizations

• New character!
  
• Matchmaking
  
• Multiplayer join codes
  
• Camera rotation
  
• Support for more languages

We will remain committed to fixing bugs and maintaining online services. New content such as characters, story mode, and new gamemodes may happen depending on future commercial success.


Wrapping up Raifu Wars development frees us to work on new titles!

We're excited to announce our next game will be forked from Raifu Wars. This means we can develop the next game faster and improvements we make along the way can be brought back into Raifu Wars! Stay tuned for more details.


Our cloud account service, Yotis Online, meant to bridge the gap between Steam and mobile is not going anywhere! In fact, we are planning a massive revamp and overhaul of the service. Stay tuned for more!


Our final announcement is introducing, Schneewolf Labs LLC, the legal entity that will publish all Yotis Studios titles going forward. This is only a formality and does not reflect any change in leadership or direction.

Schneewolf will be providing Raifu Wars with more servers to handle the anticipated increase in online games.

Thank you all again for your support! We look forward to bringing Raifu Wars to more people!

Dear Players!

I have great news! I have created a publisher page that you can subscribe to in order to stay updated with the latest news about my games. On this page, you will be able to learn about:

• New releases and upcoming games
  
• Updates and improvements to my current projects
  
• Exclusive discounts and special offers

Don't miss out on any important news — subscribe now and stay connected with me!

Link

Thank you for your support!

Dear Players!

I have great news! I have created a publisher page that you can subscribe to in order to stay updated with the latest news about my games. On this page, you will be able to learn about:

• New releases and upcoming games
  
• Updates and improvements to my current projects
  
• Exclusive discounts and special offers

Don't miss out on any important news — subscribe now and stay connected with me!

Link

Thank you for your support!