The veil between worlds has finally parted, and the time has come. Worshippers of Cthulhu has emerged from the shadows, entering Early Access. The cosmic winds beckon, and now it falls upon you, the chosen, to lead the Cult of Cthulhu into madness and glory. Your path is shrouded in mystery, your actions will ripple through the realms, and the Great Old One awaits your devotion.

A New Trailer has been revealed - a dark vision of what is to come. Peer into the unfathomable void, where eldritch forces stir and unspeakable horrors slumber. Your fate will be forged through rituals of madness, decisions that tear at your sanity, and the shadowy beings that answer your call. Watch, if you dare, and steel yourself for the trials that await in the abyss.



But take heed, this is only the beginning. The dark voyage ahead is vast, and we have inscribed the Roadmap - a forbidden tome that reveals what awaits in future chapters. Yet, the winds of fate are fickle, and we seek your guidance, faithful ones. What hidden horrors do you wish to summon? What powers must be unlocked to bring the Cult to greater dominion?



Join us in the depths of Discord, where your whispers can shape the fate of this dark journey. Together, we shall craft this eldritch nightmare.

And if the darkness has already stirred your soul, we humbly implore you to leave a review. Your words are like ancient incantations, spreading our influence across the realms, drawing more followers into the ever-growing abyss of Worshippers of Cthulhu.

Join us in shaping this dark world. The Great Old One stirs, and your voice could be the one that awakens Him.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2807150/Worshippers_of_Cthulhu/

Preparations for Halloween event

Ave, citizens of Rome.
Only a few days have passed since the launch of Citadelum, and we can already proudly say that Rome is expanding its glory and dominion in all the territories of the empire. Thank you all for playing and sharing your experiences to make our little indie reach “plvs vltra”.

In addition to the historical campaign of 10 levels and the Sandbox Mode, which offers freedom in choosing the various parameters of the game, Citadelum has a powerful editor to create maps, missions and campaigns. We have gone through all the creations of the community, and in this devlog we offer you our favorite creations.

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Remember that you can click on the links and subscribe directly. The next time you start Citadelum you will have them available.

A small map set on an island in the Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum), and with limited resources. Did you know that we initially thought this would be a good prologue for the game? In Stranded, space management and bridge building become the protagonists.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3345159642

The possibility of exploring a Nordic biome, covered by ice and snow, where the possibilities of cultivation are greatly reduced. Our citizens must trade with other nearby settlements to obtain basic resources; a new experience closer to survival games.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346244179


It's the craziest map we've seen in Citadelum, and a proposal for those players who want to take a break after the historical scenarios. What would happen if a Roman colony was moved to an alien planet and forced to mine its surface resources? It's time to check it out... and yes, it includes combat against aliens.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346236127

Klaatu Barada... ahem! A map for fantasy fans. Experience the construction of a settlement in the swamps and face the army of the undead. Will the Roman legions be able to wipe out the skeletons that populate this cursed area?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346318201

So far we have highlighted some of the first maps created by the community, but we would like to make more content like this. Leave us your best creations, historical or fictional, on Steam Workshop and don't forget to play the maps of the rest of the community.

Valete

Hey everyone! I'm Plankie, one of the game programmers on hoi4, and one of my favourite parts of developing a game is to work on the game AI. So when I was asked, almost a year ago, whether I wanted to take charge of a small AI feature, I was delighted! The goal of this feature was to make the AI better at concentrating their hardest and meanest divisions instead of spreading them out along an entire front line. This is something we've wanted to do for a long time and with the Germany-focused Götterdämmerung expansion, we had the perfect opportunity. We call this feature AI Force Concentration, or AIFC for short (an acronym which has caused many football-related jokes in the team).

Well, first of all, the AI has frankly not been very good at handling their armoured divisions. Sure, they produce tanks and assign them to fronts, but they are seldom concentrated enough to actually pose a threat for the defender.
Second, the AI always pushed along the entire front with equal effort. There's nothing strictly wrong with that, but most military operations have a strategic goal like capturing a city or a supply hub rather than just taking ground, so making a concentrated offensive effort towards a specific goal seems more realistic and human-like.
Third, we want to make the combat gameplay more dynamic and interesting for you as a player. If the enemy concentrates more and better divisions in a certain sector, it requires you to make choices. Should you meet the anticipated offensive head on, will you lure them into a trap, or use the opportunity to attack somewhere else?


The days before Operation Barbarossa. The AIFC divisions are visible in the right picture as the turquoise army, preparing to quickly take a supply hub in Volyn when the war kicks off.

For the most important fronts, the AI considers whether it wants to concentrate its forces. If it has enough units available to both hold the line and still allocate units for offensive duty, then it will create an AIFC army. This army will receive the "best" divisions along the frontline, taking into account factors like attack and breakthrough stats, how experienced they are, how fast they can move, and so on.

The AI then evaluates possible targets close to the front line, for example supply hubs, ports, large cities and so on, and it finds a path from the front line to the chosen target. This path is determined according to the path-of-least-resistance principle, which essentially means that it tries to avoid river crossings, bad terrain, fortifications and so on, while also following railway lines in an attempt to avoid ending up in a situation where it can't supply the troops.


The paths evaluated by Germany before Barbarossa.

The AIFC armies follow those paths-of-least-resistance and will continuously update their orders to make sure that the front lines match up with the intended path. Of course, since placing too many units too close together might cause some problems with your Amazon deliveries (a.k.a. your supply situation), they will spread out somewhat along the neighboring provinces.

But as they say, "a plan never survives contact with the enemy". This can be true for the AI as well. Because of this, it keeps track of how well an AIFC offensive is going. If the offensive is going well, by all means let's continue pushing. But if it stagnates and fails to make progress towards the target, then the AI sooner or later decides that the plan indeed didn't survive the enemy contact, and it tries to find another target for its next offensive. Similarly, if the offensive succeeds and the target is taken, the AI will start looking for new opportunities to concentrate their forces and break through, taking into account the newly conquered areas as a potential start of the offensive.

In order to make it feel like the AIFC behavior is not static, the degree to which it is used is (mainly) tied to the doctrines an AI has unlocked. This means there will be a difference between for example fighting an early war Soviet Union compared to a late war Germany. Doctrines which narratively and stats-wise promote a higher force concentration will make the AI prefer using AIFC to a higher degree (fully scriptable of course, so all our wonderful mod creators can play around with it).


On the receiving end of an AIFC offensive.

Thomas here now to add some more info about a selection of other things we have been working on. Aside from the AIFC, we have - as we tend to do - tried to touch up things here and there during the development of Götterdämmerung. So let’s take a quick look at some of the other smaller features and changes we have done:

The tech tree has as mentioned in the Special Projects Developer Diary received a few new techs relating to Special Projects. But those are not the only changes we have made to it. We have also added a few new techs to make research and gameplay slightly more diverse, and give you a few more options.

First of all we have added a few new Transport Plane Techs and related tech and equipment icons. The main benefit of researching these is that your transport planes gain more range, allowing you to paradrop or supply your troops at a greater distance.


One cannot have too many Junkers, right?

The other, slightly bigger change we have made is to Forts. Previously everyone could build level 10 forts everywhere from the get go. Now the max fort level depends on the terrain the fort is in, and the techs you have researched - as well as other modifiers you can get from e.g. focuses. This means the engineering tab has received 5 new techs for forts - one general, and two each for Land Forts and Coastal Forts.

Initial maximum fort levels, without techs or other country specific modifiers are set to 6 for all Coastal Forts, and Land forts are as follows:
Plains: 5
Hills: 5
Urban: 5
Forest: 4
Mountain: 4
Desert: 4
Jungle: 3
Marsh: 3
(Note that values might change before release. Yes I know that I’ve said this already, but just to make sure the message gets across :) )


The new fortification techs,


Here we have upped our fortification capabilities a bit, just need to construct the actual forts

We have also slightly changed how the Command Power Cap works. Now your High Command will actually increase the Command Power Cap, so that with a good set of military commanders, you will have more Command Power at your disposal. This should make it less punishing to build up your high command, rewarding you for having a competent staff.


By adding von Rundstedt to our staff, we increase the Max Command Power by 20

As Mentioned in other dev diaries, there are now Dams in the game. They can be targeted by Raids which makes them a bit of a liability, but not by strategic bombing so they are relatively safe. What do they do? Their main effect is that they boost the state they are in, making it easier and better to invest in industry there. You can’t build new dams except through specific focuses.

Another thing you can see on the map, and that several of you have already noted in previous diaries and streams are what we call Landmarks. First of all, these look super cool on the map, and make countries more unique. But additionally they have small country level effects. A bit like National Spirits, but as buildings on the map. The cool thing with these bonuses is that they only apply to the country that originally owns the Landmark, so by capturing for example the Statue of Liberty, you can deny the USA their bonuses, but you won’t get them yourself.


A landmark in the UK

In order to make the difference between State and Province effects a bit easier to see at a glance we have made some changes to the State and Province UI. The main focus of these changes were to ensure that Province Effects are in the lower part of the window, and state effects are in the upper section.
A special area for all state effects and a summary of all state related effects from buildings has been added at the bottom of the “State section”.

Some of the more unique Province level buildings, such as Dams, Landmarks, and Experimental Facilities, are displayed in the “Terrain section”, while the rest are displayed beneath it as before.


The upper section, marked in yellow in this image, contains things that are relevant for the entire state, so e.g. state related modifiers have been moved up there. Down in the bottom section, we have collected all the info that relates to the province, such as terrain, weather, victory points etc. Not a drastic change in any way, but hopefully it should be a bit easier to understand what relates to what.

We have also done some minor quality-of-life updates to the Area Defense settings. First of all, no specific settings are active by default when you open it up (unlike the old behavior where all settings were activated by default). Instead, if no special setting is specified, the divisions will spread out as evenly as possible in the selected area. We changed this since a very common pattern when using Area Defense was to immediately unselect all the options one wasn't interested in, which led to a lot of unnecessary clicks.


The new Area Defense settings for guarding borders and special project facilities (red arrows), and the updated supply setting (orange arrow).

The supply setting has received some small changes: Instead of trying to cover the supply hubs and ALL the railways, it will now cover supply hubs and railway junctions. It has also received a new icon depicting a supply crate instead of the previous railway icon. We have also added two new settings to Area Defense: Guarding borders, and guarding special project facilities.


The new Area Defense setting for guarding borders

All horses aren’t bays, or browns for that matter. This is something one of our artists, who happens to really like horsies, was very aware of and wanted to do something about. So after having convinced one of the programmers that this was a brilliant idea, they set out to make a few new textures and ensured that the horsies in the game now have more varied and realistic colours.


I assume these would be Hanoverians…

That was a selection of the things we have been working on aside from the major features for Götterdämmerung. Of course, we have been up to more things. There is always some balancing, tweaking, and bug fixing work going on. And fixes to code and to the AI in general. We have made some changes to how we script things for example, that we hope to describe more in the upcoming modding diary (together with some other cool stuff). But for now, we hope that you have enjoyed this diary.

Make sure to check out the Expansion Pass Here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3152810/Hearts_of_Iron_IV_Expansion_Pass_1

Dear Giants,

thank you for playing the demo and sending us your invaluable feedback across all available channels. We were reading absolutely everything, analysed your comments and continued our testing runs.

We hear you!

While we received a lot of positive feedback about the core mechanics, the onboarding, accessibility in connection with the complexity (also in terms of menu structures and user interface) have been criticized a lot - and rightfully so.

Fundamental options, features and functions are not intuitive enough yet or are not explained to the degree that is needed for a deep business simulation. Sometimes as a developer you are so deeply involved that you are 'blinkered' and lose touch with the general players' needs, not seeing how difficult it can be to access all the gameplay layers, if you are not an 'insider'.

Which is exactly why we decided to work on all those elements and thus have decided with a heavy heart to postpone the release of Industry Giant 4.0 to November 15th.
The additional development time we will use to enhance the tutorial functions and general usability. Furthermore, we will adjust balancing, tweak the performance and include the first 'Quality of Life' improvements in terms of menu structures and user experience.

We apologize for the delay, but hope you understand our decision and are looking forward to more of your feedback and suggestions, especially towards and in the Early Access phase in order to make Industry Giant 4.0 a true giant.

Kindest regards from your IG4.0 Team

We formed an unholy alliance with an all-star line-up of musicians, to release HYMNS of the UNHOLY - a metal reimagining of Cult of the Lamb tracks!

We created a six-track metal album, featuring members past and present from Killswitch Engage, Trivium, Animals as Leaders, Malevolence, Polyphia, While She Sleeps, Pick Up Goliath and Monuments.

HYMNS of the UNHOLY will be out in full on October 28th.

You can listen to CULT right now, our single, while you wait! Pre-save the entire album here, on your preferred listening platform.



https://store.steampowered.com/app/3258330/Cult_of_the_Lamb_Hymns_of_the_Unholy/

🎧 Music by:
River Boy
Sam George (Pick Up Goliath)
Howard Jones (Light The Torch, Sion, ex-Killswitch Engage)
Matthew K. Heafy (Trivium)
Scott LePage (Polyphia)
Clay Gober (Polyphia)
Mike Malyan (ex-Monuments)
Javier Reyes (Animals As Leaders)
Josh Baines (Malevolence)
Sean Long (While She Sleeps)

Pre-orders are open on the Devolver Digital store for an exclusive splatter vinyl, & Hymns of the Unholy t-shirts!

Devolver Digital Global Store: https://merch.devolverdigital.co/

US & Canada Store: https://merch.devolverdigital.com/






We're so excited to finally be able to share this project with you all!

We’re huge fans of metal music, and we know there’s a lot of metalheads in the Cult of the Lamb community too. There’s a natural link between the game’s themes and heavy metal music and, given the recent release of our Unholy Alliance DLC and the Goat character, we thought - why not get some G.O.A.T.s from the world of metal, to transform River Boy’s iconic melodies into heavy metal slammers?

We also want to extend a huge thank you to the incredible artists featured on this release - we couldn't be more grateful for their support, and the backing of their management to work on this project with us.

We hope you love these tracks, as much as we do!

Hey everyone,

It's been so wonderful seeing folks experience a first taste of the world of Critter Café, via our demo during Steam Next Fest. We've received some amazing feedback from you, and the entire team appreciate your support and excitement, ahead of launch on November 26 for Steam and Nintendo Switch!



To make sure more people have a chance to experience the game, we've decided to keep the demo live and available on Steam, right the way up until launch day!

If you're yet to play, and want the chance to run and renovate your own cute café, whilst rescuing and building bonds with even cuter Critters, now is your time. Or, if you've been playing the demo and just wanted a little longer to explore, customise and get to know your new friends, now you can!



If you'd like to know more details of what to expect in the demo before jumping in, you can check out our guide here.

As well as the lovely repsonses from our cosy community, we've been overjoyed to see some glowing responses from the games media world. A piece from GamesRadar says "Critter Cafe is my new obsession", and "Sumo Digital is cooking up an absolutely adorable game", whilst an article from GameSpew states: "It’s the type of wholesome game that never feels like busywork, that combines simulation with adventure, and I can’t wait to see more."

Finally, we highly recommend checking out streams, VODs, and video round-ups of folks playing the Critter Café demo, including this video from Payton'sCorner, who seemed to have a blast playing.

We can't wait to see more people play the Critter Café demo, rescuing more friends, brewing up more lattes, slicing more cakes, and discovering more mysteries, as we prepare for the full launch on November 26. Join us on Discord to chat about the game, and follow our TikTok, Instagram, and X channels to stay up to date!

Hey everyone,

Julius from Remedy Entertainment here. Join the FBC: Firebreak development team as they give you, the community, a first look at what the game is about and what their inspirations for FBC: Firebreak have been.


FBC: Firebreak is a 3-player cooperative first-person shooter set within the enigmatic Federal Bureau of Control (FBC). As the Bureau’s headquarters faces a deadly and prolonged siege by otherworldly forces, only Firebreak—its most adaptable response unit—has the skills and courage to restore order.

FBC: Firebreak is scheduled to release in 2025. Wishlist now!

IT’S TIME TO CLEAN HOUSE

Commanders!

We want to inform you of an upcoming maintenance period that will impact the accessibility of most World of Tank services, including the game.

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EU: From October 22, 2024, at 09:00 CEST through October 22, 2024, at 10:30 CEST (UTC+2)

NA: From October 22, 2024, at 00:00 PT through October 22, 2024, at 01:30 PT (UTC-7)

ASIA: From October 22, 2024, at 15:00 UTC+8 through October 22, 2024, at 16:30 UTC+8

Duration: Approximately 1.5 hours

Following the maintenance period, we will require several additional hours to restore the full functionality of all services. We kindly ask for your patience and understanding while the work is being carried out. Your game account and progress will not be impacted.

We are excited to announce a major update aimed at streamlining your gaming experience: the implementation of a linked account system across all regions. If you have multiple regional accounts registered to the same email address, these will now be managed under a single, unified system. This change is purely technical and will not affect your progress, items, or any other account assets.

This change will impact only players with multiple accounts in different regions registered to the same email address or those who use the same social network account to access multiple accounts in different regions. This update will let you consolidate them into one.
For further information and updates read the full article.

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We appreciate your patience. Thank you for your continued support of World of Tanks.

Roll Out!

Go Home Annie is participating in The Indie Horror Showcase on October 24th with a brand-new trailer! John Wolfe will be hosting the event, so we’re expecting top-tier entertainment. Along with Go Home Annie, there will be trailers for The Thing: Remastered, Clock Tower: Rewind, and loads of other upcoming indie horror gems.


I’d like to share a bit of our character creation process.

We start with a general idea of the character’s life and what shaped them into the person they are now, in terms of both visuals and personality. We then give tons of notes to our concept artists (in Annie’s case, Antonia Klarić), who turn our words into beautiful concept art.


Mood board



Exploring concepts



Annie’s final concept art. And a good reference if anyone wants to cosplay as Annie this Halloween🙂


Next, we create a 3D model of the character in iClone Character Creator, using a pre-existing base and adapting it based on our concept art. We either create the character’s clothes from scratch or buy them on 3D model stores and adapt them to our needs.

This allows us to give lifelike movements to our characters.


Work in progress vs. final 3D model of Annie.



Demonstrating facial animations on a character. Note the skin around the eyes moving in conjunction with the eyes.


Finally, we manually create facial expressions and lip movements for the character and animate their face based on the voice actor’s performance.

By the way, we listened to over 1,000 auditions to find the perfect actors for all our characters. We’ll share more about each of our voice actors closer to release.


Some of the characters you’ll meet in Go Home Annie. We’re keeping most of them under wraps for you to discover for yourself while playing the game.



We wanted to create something special to show off at conferences and fairs (and have a cool prop for the office). Last year, we had a whole basement from the game recreated (chainsaw included). This year, we wanted to do something more specific to Go Home Annie, so we bought a mannequin, ripped off its arms, and painted them red. We then went searching for the perfect bucket to create SCP-R-354—the Red Bucket.




Bringing SCP-R-354 to life.


We can’t wait for you to see what the aftermath of the bucket scene looks like in-game and what happens next.

That’s it for this devlog. Now it’s back to the trenches for us to fix all the bugs and bring you a stable experience for release!

Mladen Bošnjak
Creative Director at Misfit Village