Hello everyone!

We're happy to announce that the Spirit Valley demo is now playable on Steam! We can't wait for you guys to try out the early parts of the game and hear what you think about it. Feedback is much appreciated and the easiest way to leave feedback is though our Discord server. You can find us on Discord from this link: https://discord.com/invite/F62b7ZbDVp


In other news, the beta test has been going great and we will be ready to release Spirit Valley as Early Access in later October!

So join us on Discord to give us some feedback and if you enjoy the demo, add it to your wishlist to get notified when we launch the game. And as always, thanks for following and supporting us!

-Otterside Games team

Added more complete controller shortcut support

The issue where the Ares ship disappeared from the map has been fixed.
Map jump time has been set to 2 seconds.
Speed stone will now provide 25% speed instead of 50%.
Quick repair time has been increased from 10 seconds to 20 seconds.
Auto repair effectiveness has been reduced by 50%.
Range ability increased from 0.1 to 0.2.
Defense ability reduced from 100 to 50.
Defensive health reduced from 1000 to 500.
Critical damage increased from 2% to 4%.
Auto repair ability reduced from 0.002% to 0.001%.
Cannon range has been increased by 1 unit.
A spy shortcut has been added to the mini-map.
Player profiles will now be visible in the leaderboard.
Rank icons have been updated.
Healing cannonball attack power reduced from 20 to 5.
Healing cannonball can now only be used on allies.
Healing cannonball will no longer give elite points.
Admirals will only notify players in their current map.
A save system for abilities has been added.
In the seasonal quest, the number of quick repairs needed has been reduced from 5000 to 2500.
A joystick option or manual drag option has been added in the mobile settings.
Several textual errors have been fixed.
Multiple purchases for cannons, masts, and sails have been added to the market.
If a player is AFK and killed twice, they will be disconnected from the game.
On mobile, the area displaying cannon icons will now show the remaining ammunition.
Elite classes have been strengthened. Now, instead of 1 cannon per level, they will receive 3, along with an extra 100 rocket damage per level.
A special ship has been added for medals and achievements.
New maps 7 and 8 have been added.
You can now travel to a specific location by typing it on the map.

Sex, nickname and chat colour, free location, avatar settings and much more!

The following changes have been made to the game:

▪ The skill card enchanting rait has been activated

We wish you a pleasant game!

It's time to sharpen your skills!

Right now and until the maintenance starts on Monday, good magic will increase the chance of successfully enchanting skill cards by 20% of the available one!

Good luck!

Hello everyone!

I'm happy to announce that...the 1.0 demo is now a reality!

This version contains the new battle system, its own original OST (composed by Mikel Dale), improved graphics and dialogues, and other details like autosaving. I've put a lot of effort into making it as polished as possible.

I'm so glad that I can finally share this definitive version of what The Silent Kingdom will be. The old demo was outdated a long time ago, but I couldn't replace it because the battle system wasn't ready until now, and that was killing me inside a little bit hahaha.

If you play it, I'd love to hear your impressions!



IMPORTANT: Since 1.0 uses a different translation plugin, players who downloaded the alpha demo back in the day will get an Uncaught TypeError message when they open the game now.

To solve it, go to the folder where the game is installed. Then go into www>save, and delete all the files inside the save folder. That should solve the issue!

Hi everybody, exciting times! Silence of the Siren launches in Early Access on Monday!

For us this marks an important point of a ~4 year development journey and you can imagine how excited we are to finally see our game released into the wild! :)
For all the HoMM fans on the team, this has been a bit of a dream project and we hope you'll enjoy the game, just like we have had a great time working on it and allowing ourselves to get creative with the weird sci-fi settings and related game mechanics.
The development wasn't without its challenges, like running pre-production during lockdown, but that makes us even more proud that we've reached this important milestone.

A quick recap:
Three playable factions, one of them, the Fossorians, also come with a story campaign. Then there are 9 custom skirmish maps, lots of buildings, skills, abilities and equipment!
From our testing it looks like the overall playtime is already way over 30 hours (or even more, if you like to explore every nook and cranny like some of us do). :)

Some interesting and helpful features:

• Day-night cycle affecting not only graphics, but also some units
  
• Building mechanics on the map
  
• A lot of useful shortcuts in the UI, like highlighting interactive objects, enemy movement range and more
  
• Orbital layer, dangerous zones, teleports, shortcuts and side quests to spice up the maps

More about some of the UI features and graphical features.



From the last few rounds of testing the game looks very stable, but we of course anticipate some rare issues to pop up after release, so we'll pay proper attention to fixing these first.
Then, what you're all looking for, the updates: we have been able to update the game regularly, so this will continue and you'll see the remaining branches of the story campaign arrive, accompanied by the two remaining factions and the main features for the full game, like the map editor and scripting system.
We aim to stay in EA for roughly a year to complete all the content and features on our list:



First, let us take this opportunity to thank everybody who joined us in the different testing stages over last year. We can tell how much better the game is and how stable it has become thanks to all the feedback and bug reports.
We're looking forward to listening to and working with you during the Early Access stage to make the game even better as it approaches its full release.

Feel free to join our Discord server!

Also, for any content creators out there, we'd love to see you make videos/stream the game. Feel free to reach out, we are happy to provide keys to reasonably-sized channels aimed at similar games and genres!

Now let us compile one last build of the game with latest fixes and fingers crossed everything goes smoothly on Monday! :)

The headline feature here is a patch to address the problem some people saw with blank Further Stories events in legacy saves.

There are also a bunch of typos and story logic oddity fixes, and a tiny additional feature that will become apparent after completing a couple of Further Stories.

to repeat: this is on the beta branch! Properties | Betas ->dropdown | Beta if you want to give it a spin.

Dear Retailers!

A month has gone by, and it is time for an update. Both as in actually releasing an update to our alpha, as well as our little blog to tell you what is going on. So let's get to it.



In last update we planned to start working on expansions and decorations. That is still our plan, however the feedback from the community indicated that some small things needed to be changed. Since starting a new long implementation period means these changes would not be active for a while, we chose to do a Quality of Life month which means a month of focusing on smaller implementations and upgrades instead.


What many have been asking for for a while was the ability to change opening hours, which i can understand. There is nothing more frustrating then having to close with a store full of customers. So that is now a possibility.

You can also close the store for a whole day. Right now it doesn't make sense, but in the future when you can properly run multiple stores, you would most likely want that possibility as well.





Then i decided to give the Manager's computer an overhaul, and i hope the micromanagers out there will like the new options.



The first one to mention is the sales statistics. Now you can compare your different categories with each other, on different levels. Select a day interval, and choose your categories, and you can now compare them directly with each other day by day.




You can also analyse the traffic in your store. See which customers who arrives at which time of which day, and plan your opening hours and assortment accordingly.




The screen showing all article details are now accessible from the computer as well. You can also now see the actual sales history of the article, meaning you now have all the time in the world to analyze each article in the tiniest of detail, allowing you to maximize the sales of your store to the fullest.


Too many customers got lost already in the first days because of how the the cash register was handled. So changes have been made to address this.
Customers now overall wait a longer time in the queue, and the article processing speed has been increased significantly, meaning you can process more customers, allowing you to earn more money.

Customers also start heading for the registers an hour before the store closes, meaning not losing out on all these people who actually would like to buy something just because the store closes.
These numbers most likely still need tweaking, so feedback on this is still very welcome.



It will be a while before the HQ really gets into play and get some massive update, as it is more important to round off the actual store part of the game first. However there was a bug where the HQ floor used the same material as the floor in the corner of your store. One of these small curiosities that shows bugs can come in all shapes and sizes.
So when fixing this bug, i also allowed for the possibility of painting the floors at your HQ as well.




Given how the expansion part will work, it is necessary to have a world grid to align walls and such on. This has been added so it also shows when you place your inventory, you can also adjust the grid size which you can then snap things to, making it much easier to align things in nice, perfect lines.




Regarding articles we are as always pushing hard to add new stuff to the game. The article process can be a bit complex, which is why we sometimes have articles ready that doesn't make it to a game in a specific update.

When adding articles, first we need to decide on a collection of items, and how many it should consist of. The hard part of this is to hit the sweet spot.
No category should be more or less important than another in the game. So we try to aim for an equal number of articles in each.

Then we have to decide how many unique meshes and textures it has to consist of. For each new unique mesh / texture, the work time on this specific article increases massively. So it is about figuring a good variety/speed ratio.
Supermarket items are in this regard a bit tricky in general, as it is a lot of texture work and less of modelling. It is hard to design a proper looking label. People takes educations in this stuff to do this professionally, and we kind of have to "assembly line" the process, as we need MANY of them. Also to create the individual article in a group, it means designing a new label with new texts images etc..
Compared to this when we start making clothes, we can model one t-shirt, and give it different colours and voila, a new article line in a short time.

When modelling and texturing has been done, then we have to get them ready to add them to the game. We need to optimise textures and create the actual materials. Materials are the surfaces you see in the actual game. If you look at a surface, it is not only a colour. It also have a property for how smooth it is, the level of metallicity, the bumps that simulate high's and low's, and many other things




These are usually defined by textures, but can also be tweaked with different kind of maths.

After setting up materials, we need to prepare their behavior. It it a hanging item, and from where do they hang. Is it a shelf item that is stacking, and how much do they stack. Should they have random positions and rotations to give them a natural placed look, and so on.

When this has been adjusted, we can finally parameterize them, which means adding price range, quality type, supplier, customer need offset etc. and add them to their respective lists so they show up properly in the game.
So each and every article need to go through all these steps to be able to work properly in the game


In this update, you will have new types of juices, beer can and soda cans. We also started the production of cleaning items, which will be the major additions over the next updates.

Here is an images of some of the things that will be added :)






With this update is released, we will now start on these new big features, i will explain a bit about what you can expect from them.


Currently you can rent and buy property open new stores.
With this implementation, you get certain advantages when buying property (There should be some kind of bonus to spend this amount of money).
One of them is that if you buy property adjacent to an existing store, you can merge them together, allowing for an even bigger store.
So with this as well as the possibility to increase the numbers of floors vertically your stores can end up being MASSIVE.


With these new huge properties, just having a huge building on there might be a bit boring. So the plan is to give you a whole new level of possibilities.

First of all you will be allowed to define the shape of your store, meaning you can place outer walls as you see fit,
In this outer structure you will then be able to place (multiple) entrances and exits, windows and various decorations as you see fit, allowing you to make each building rather unique.

Then you also be able to add other elements to the outer area of the store. Some of these items will boosi your store. For instance maybe a parking lot that increases overall traffic? A bus stop? A playground? A franchised restaurant/cafe? A gas station? Any other ideas? You can also place signs, billboards and various decorations here as well to spice up the looks and attractiveness.


Inside the store you will be able to place various elements, and even create your own designs. You will have access to various shapes you can combine, change and place as you seem fit. That means custom walls, walls with different doors, pillars, overhang elements, etc. etc. Allowing for total control and customisation of your store.
I also plan to make a designer for this to you can experiment, save and share your constructions with each other.
I also plan to add other different decorations as well. Plants, benches, chairs and what not, should also be possible.


I have allocated around 3 months of time for this, so how much of the above that will be part of this sprint, and how much that will be saved for later on i don't know, but my plan is to allow for all of this at some point.
I also plan to allow for a poster system like in KoR1. However i know that this feature in itself is quite heavy to make, so it will not be a part of this decorations update.




We also hosted our monthly contest, and this month the focus was on creating the best looking bakery. We had a record high of participants and submissions, making it hard to determine the winners, also considering that people are starting to use the display designer in many new and creative ways. It is used for making walls, lamps, tables and chairs, which even i had not imagined.

And personally i always like to see people push the boundaries of the game to their fullest.

But on to the winners.


The winner of this months contest is "GodGutten" with "William's Bakery"

A nice clean looking bakery, with various types of displays to showcase the bakery. The spacing between the elements is perfect. It does not feel too crowded, nor too compact. It also features various drinks sections to compliment the store, as you would expect in real life as well.

It is a simple store but well executed, which is hard when you try and keep it simplistic.

The keen eye will also notice the back wall is actually the backside of huge displays, so a creative way to limit the size of your store.

Here are some images of an award winning store:







On second place we have "Sparks" with Sparks Midnight Bakery.

A more spaceous bakery, that is sure ti give some energy to those going midnight shopping. It features long good looking rows of various bakery items, and with the evening sunlight shining directly on the bread, makes it look REALLY delicious.

Here the display designer has really been pushed to the limits.
Again the shape of the store is made of displays, and it also features café elements, where tables, chairs and nice decorative elements, that fits well into the energizing midnight vibe, also are made of custom displays. Each aisle of bakery is also fitted with a special lamp as well.

Here are some images:







On third place we have "HeyHannes" Baguetting Better.

A more classic looking type of morning service bakery. Here we have the large counter where customers come up to the counter and gets served by the clerks, where they have to ask for one of the delicious types of bread.

So it is a smaller store, featuring one long line of articles, as well as an adjacent café section where the customers can go and eat in peace.

This store also has spent time on creating a good looking storage area, which adds to the overall score.

Here are some images:









For our next contest we will take a look back, and make a challenge in the original King of Retail instead. So to try something new, we would like people to create the coolest gaming store that they can. Importing things to consider is making a coherent theme, store layout and article presentation. Using the poster system for ultimate customisation, will also be noticed.

So you can



and join in on the chance to win a Steam gift card.




Our community is also helping translate the game into many different languages, which i am very very appreciateive of. This is a constant ongoing word, as new translations arrive or change with each update. So if you would like to give a hand with translating King of Retail 2, you can do that on

Localizor

This is how the translation is going so farr:






That was all i had to say for now.

Feedback, ideas, bug reports and all these things are as always very welcome.
Now I will return to my cave and continue on making the best game possible for you to enjoy.

So until next time, i wish you a happy sale.
Cheers
Daniel