Jan 28

Celebrate with Us! Tower of Time, "The CRPG Book" and the EH Complete Bundle!

Dark Envoy - x_files

Hey Dark Envoy Fans!

We're excited to share some fantastic news with our Polish community, especially those who love classic RPGs (like our previous title, Tower of Time!). It seems the folks at Bitmap Books have excellent taste!

The Polish edition of "The CRPG Book" - a massive guide to the best role-playing games - was just released, and guess what? Tower of Time is featured inside! We're incredibly honored to see our previous title included alongside some of the genre's most legendary games.

This book is a true monster – in the best way possible! Spread across 684 pages, "The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games (Expanded Edition)" reviews over 450 games from 1975 to 2019, covering all the role-playing classics we know and love.

But it's not just a collection of pretty pictures! "The CRPG Book" also includes insightful articles on the RPG genre. Plus, it was written entirely by RPG fanatics – AAA developers, indies, journalists, modders and industry personalities, such as Chris Avellone, Ian Frazier, Scorpia, Ferhegón, Richard Cobbett, Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green, Durante, George Weidman and Tim Cain, to name but a few.

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/35911/Event_Horizon_Complete_Set/

To celebrate this recognition, we're putting the Event Horizon Complete Set bundle on sale for the next 72 hours!

For a limited time, you can grab both Tower of Time and Dark Envoy at a special discounted price. It's the perfect opportunity for Dark Envoy fans to experience the world of Artara and the unique combat system of Tower of Time!

The Event Horizon Complete Set bundle is a "complete the set" bundle! Buying this type of bundle means paying for, and receiving, just the items in the bundle that you don't already have in your Steam library. If you haven't experienced the tactical depth of Tower of Time yet, but already own Dark Envoy, now's your chance!

If you're looking to delve deeper into the world of RPGs, or just want to see Tower of Time get the recognition it deserves, be sure to check out the book! You can grab a copy of the book in Polish here.

We hope you enjoy this awesome celebration of RPGs!

Cheers,
The Event Horizon Team

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/44641/Dark_Envoy_Supporter_Edition/

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Also check:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/617480/view/4453592738017838063?l=english
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/617480/view/4453592738017838069?l=english

Jan 28

1.7 Update + Lunar New Year content is now LIVE!🏮🔴

Spirit City: Lofi Sessions - Mooncube Games

📢Hello Spiritographers!

We’re happy to share that our first update of the year is officially live! 🔴

We wanted to be sure to highlight the Lunar New Year with some content that we think everybody across the world will love. We're also looking at improving the general look and feel of the app by adding some polish to the interface that we hope you'll appreciate!

See below for the full patch notes and more exciting news below! ✨

NEW CONTENT:

Added a few new room decor items to celebrate the Lunar New Year. You will find hanging lanterns, a snake plushie, some tasty steamed dumplings and a new wallpaper.
Added a few new clothing items for Lunar New Year, including two new styles of tops, one style of pants and shoes, as well as new skirt colors.
Added three new hairstyles

ADJUSTMENTS:

Updated the style for tooltips when elements are hovered in the game interface.
Updated the style of the default font.
New animations are available across the interface when opening and closing some menus.
The Winter Wonderland playlist has been moved down in the list so that it's not the default playlist. Sorry folks, holidays are now officially over!

BUG FIXES:

Fixed an issue with the sushi wallpaper rendering incorrectly on the wall
Fixed an issue where one of the sidetable accessory at the desk area wasn't always updating properly when switching room presets.

End of Year Survey

We received over 12000 responses to our end of year survey! Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill it out, there is tons of valuable feedback to go through! This will help us plan our roadmap for 2025, and we hope to be able to share more details soon.

We can share the results of perhaps the most important question, which Spirit is your favorite?

The full rankings are available in our Discord channel if you're curious!

What's next?

We're hard at work on our first major DLC, the Cozy Kitchen Expansion Pack
Watch the teaser trailer below if you haven't already!

Remember this: Our DLCs will never include new productivity feature or QOL updates, those would always be added as free updates. Instead, we want our DLCs to be adding to the existing fantasy of Spirit City with new locations, new spirits, and more to discover!

Please consider Wishlisting!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3210380/Spirit_City_Lofi_Sessions__Cozy_Kitchen_DLC/

Stay tuned as we will be revealing more info about this expansion pack soon as well as future updates.

Mac Support

We've heard all the requests for native Mac support! We have been working on getting the game running on Mac but have had a few delays. Things are looking good now though! We still aren't ready to announce a specific date, but it's coming!

As always, thank you for your incredible support—it truly means the world to us. We are looking forward to bringing more features, content, and QoL to Spirit City: Lofi Sessions in 2025!

📢 Follow us for updates, sneak peeks, and more:
Discord: https://discord.gg/spiritcitylofi
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/SpiritCityLofi
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/spiritcitylofi.bsky.social
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@spiritcitylofi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spiritcitylofi/
Merch: https://mooncubegames-shop.fourthwall.com/
Buy us a Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/spiritcitylofi

Jan 28

Full release now available!

Exogate Initiative - Xeno Bits Dev

Greetings Gaters!

This is it, the full release version of the game is finally here!

The biggest update yet

For those who missed the preview here’s a short list of what you can expect:

3 new factions which whom you can now fight, trade or form alliances
4 new victory conditions
New difficulty settings
5 new equipments
Lots of QOL improvements and balancing
Steam achievements

We were also able to add one more thing at the last minute, and it was the most requested feature by the players:
You’ll now have access to a new tech that allows more gaters to cross the gate at any time. Meaning you can form teams of 4 or 5 gaters!

The more the merrier

Please note that saves from the current public version (0.9.1) or earlier will not be compatible with the v1.0. You can switch to a “Beta branch” for the version you were using from Steam game settings if you want to continue your current save.

A look back at early access

Now if we look back at what we announced at the beginning of the early access, it took us a little bit longer than expected, but we managed to add everything we planned to in this full release version of Exogate Initiative!

Our initial roadmap (you can check the corresponding news here)

Mission events editor
Environmental mission events
More rooms, equipment and upgrades
Recruitable alien gaters
New invaders and improved defense gameplay
Alien factions and 4X gameplay
Diplomat gater class
Improved gaters, teams and missions management

We are extremely proud of what was accomplished by such a small team. It started as a solo project a long time ago, and in the end 24 talented people contributed one way or another to make this game, but on average only 2 were working on it full time!

We’d like to address a special thanks to the community that helped us shape the game all along the early access, your feedback was always precious and led to some major changes that ultimately made the game far better.

New supporter pack

If you think we did a good job, and want to show your support, there is now a Supporter Pack DLC available, it will grant you some special visual skins for the gate room and the builder bots.

Who does not want fancy banners in the gate room?

But one of the best ways to help us right now is to share the word if you enjoyed the game, and leave a review!

We will obviously continue to support and address any issue that we may have missed, so do not hesitate to give us feedback.

We truly hope that you will have a blast with the game!

Maxime MILLET
Creative Director, Xeno Bits

Changelog 1.0.0

[CF] = From community feedback

New

New game settings:

Toggle and setup the different victory conditions
Define the number of factions present on the map
Setup the game difficulty between 3 levels: Peaceful, Challenging, Extreme

New factions:

Three new factions to compete with

Borderless Conscience: Charity of a tortoise-like race, expanding their territory in the guise of offering aid
Felis Reapers: Predatory, cat-like religious zealots, who expand to eliminate the competition
Zodiac Cohort: The commercial military-industrial complex of a worm-like race, who sells products to an ever-expanding market to make big profits

Trading: you can trade materials and influence with other factions

Treaties:

Non aggression treaties: Sign a treaty to prevent any hostile action with another faction for a fixed period of time
Alliance: Form an alliance with one or more faction to prevent hostile action, share your enemies, improve trading conditions

Diplomatic gift:

Retrieve a special artifact from each faction during diplomatic missions on their homeworld, each with bonuses randomly generated at game start.

New campaign objectives to explore factions’ territory and meet factions’ leader

You can now build and upgrade stronghold outposts on claimed worlds to provide automated defenses.

[CF] You can now unlock new techs that will allow more gaters to cross the exogate at the same time, up to 5 by missions!

New victory conditions:

Knowledge victory: Win by being the first faction to study the target number of native alien cultures
Scientific victory: Win by being the first faction to research and build an ultimate generator, unlocking unlimited power!
Material victory: Win by being the first faction to collect and store the target quantity of the target material
Influence victory: Win by being the first faction to generate the target amount of influence per day

New panel to track victory conditions progress

[CF] Starmap filters: filters starmap by exploration status or destination rewards

[CF] You can now choose to let the team handle sector defense and invasion by themselves.

New tech - Micro gates:

Miniaturized exogate technology, which unlocks advanced applications
New equipment: Ultimate generator : Provides infinite energy to power room objects and connect more destinations to the star map, by opening a wormhole inside a distant star
New equipment: Auto miner : Retrieves raw ore from an assigned mining destination, via a micro-exogate (requires an engineer to operate, and prevents mining missions being sent to that destination)

[CF] New indicator in gaters list to know if a gater is ready to go on mission or not

[CF] New panel to view gater and team mission status when you click on a team event in the top left list.

[CF] Behavior modes:

You can now force gaters to specific behaviors if needed:

Well-being: Gaters will focus on improving their well-being by resting, having fun or socializing with others, ignoring work or training activities
Working: Gaters will focus on their work, ignoring training and recreational activities
Training: Gaters will focus on their training, ignoring work and recreational activities

[CF] New tutorials:

Training
Loneliness
Affinities between gaters
Period budget summary
Leveling
Base defenses
Faction leader contact

Achievements: 44 Steam achievements to unlock

[CF] You can now rename planets

[CF] You can search planets on starmap

[CF] Room efficiency:

Rooms not surrounded by walls or doors will be less efficient and gaters fatigue will increase faster while they are in those rooms.

New unlockable med bay upgrades:

Faster ambulance bots
Physical and psychological treatment improvements
Improved ICU
Faster diagnostic pods

New training upgrades:

Each training equipment can be upgraded 2 times to greatly improve the experience earned

Gaters class specific tasks management:
You can finetune a gater job by toggling some class related tasks in their details panel.

[CF] Doors will now auto rotate on placement

[CF] New 2 and 4 people tables in mess hall
[CF] New advanced food distributor that improve mental health

[CF] You can now see the queue of tech to be researched in tech tree

New visual variations for bookshelves

Changes

Increased Xp gained by training equipments
Increased mental health healed by recreation equipments
New notifications for factions related events
New notification when diplomatic level with a faction change
[CF] Invaders and factions are now part of the standard settings when starting a new free play game
[CF] Improve player comprehension when artifact destination can't be explored by a specific team.
Max influence was reduced from 5000 to 1000
Social attribute impact mental health gained during social interactions.
Gaters body and mind strength attributes will make gaters sleep less often.
[CF] Improved messages when a gater is not able to drop something.
[CF] Room equipment selection panel was reworked to be more readable, include sell option and the room efficiency level.
[CF] Refund ratio is now displayed on tooltips when selling something
[CF] Improved gaters attributes descriptions
[CF] New notification when an assignment was completed (e.g. science runs out on a planet)
[CF] Improved faction leader contact button visibility on factions list screen
[CF] Canopy bed access was changed on set on the same size, moreover it increase mental health, price was increased
[CF] Nap pod impact on mental health was removed, price was increased
You must now confirm when declaring war to a faction
New notification when full artifact bonus is unlocked
[CF] Improved gater equipment tooltips to help understand their usage.
New logs when gaters meet or their affinity level change
[CF] The medic treating a gater in med bed is now displayed on the gater status.
Faction badge and color will not be visible on starmap until faction is met
[CF] Improved messages displayed when a gater is not able to go on mission to help player understand the reason
[CF] Added steps to reach next influence point generated by territory size
Trending and flopping patent topics have bigger impact (+ and -50% revenues instead of 30%)
Improved initial bedrock placement
Reworked campaign objectives order
Increased diplomats salary
Chance for gater to have bad relationships were increased
Clicking on button to view a gater will now close the gater list
Liberation missions balancing.
Reworked room equipment assignment picker to allow to pick gaters already assigned to a similar room equipment
You can now click on dropped item on the floor to see what they are
Improve aliens AI during invasion and defense team fights, they may now decide not to target a shielded gater.
Soldiers will now display their needs when they have no weapon available during invasion.
There will be no notification for new patent theory if you already have many theories available.
Increased initial money from 200 000 to 500 000
Campaign rewards were reduced
Slightly increased patents revenues
Slightly increase asteril price

Fixes

Need status were not properly displayed on load
[CF] Capped the maximum amount of money that can be owned to avoid a bug
[CF] Power label was white instead of gray when power was back on
[CF] During mission dialogs, gater's mind and body stat number were flipped
Female soldiers in light armor were not properly placed during missions dialogs
[CF] Missions stats are now properly updated on starmap when modifying a team.
[CF] It was possible to create a culture study mission without the tech unlocked.
Fixed a bug where collecting alien corpse objective was not always validated in time
[CF] Fixed an issue where gaters would sometimes stop to do anything because they were unable to collect an item somewhere.
[CF] Fixed issues with multi ambulance bots and cremation units behaviors.
[CF] Fixed issue where it would no longer be possible to place room equipment after being interrupted by a team.
[CF] Fixed a bug where gater would be in the wrong animation on game load.
The button to display gater with needs on the top of the screen was not properly setup by default.
Player were not always notified when there was no available storage for materials.
[CF] Nuclids will now interrupt their tasks when they need to regenerate
[CF] Bliques can now properly be healed during events on mission
[CF] Fixed issues where teams were locked offworld after a sector was invaded

Jan 28

Development Update #3: Episode 1's Progress and Early Access

Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter - AgentRaze

Hey everyone, Lina here with another update! 🎴🎆

This one’s gonna be a little different from the previous few, we thought it’d be good to take a more macro view of the project’s progress this time and cover some questions we’ve been getting!

First though, we want to talk a little bit about the Demo Update coming next month.

As mentioned before, a substantial update to the Kumitantei Demo Version is coming very soon, and we’re excited to announce it’s coming February 17th! In it you’ll find the addition of Tsubaki as a Battle Demo opponent (as seen last month), as well as graphical and performance updates and the highly requested introduction of the Scanner in exploration!

We’ll be showing previews of the new Demo content on our Bluesky and YouTube Community pages over the coming weeks, so be sure to follow those!

Right now we estimate that Episode 1’s production is about 30% complete, which is right on pace for us to release it in Q3 2025 as planned! Let’s check out the specifics of our progress:

Our focus currently is completing and polishing Episode 1’s script after finalizing the scenario for it last month. For everyone wondering, doing the Demo Update for February has been to keep us making consistent progress across departments for general things not specific to the plot while we wait for the completed script, it hasn’t been a distraction from working on Episode 1 at all.

As for Episode 1’s release plan, as stated above our planned window is still Q3 of 2025, and with Episode 1 the game will be released into Early Access on Steam. We’re using the Early Access model for our Episodic release phase to ensure clarity of the game not yet being complete, and to encourage players to share their feedback with us while we gradually update and add in the narrative’s six Episodes. During this time, we intend on having the game’s price initially discounted on Steam and increasing with each Episode addition, then exiting Early Access when the game is complete.

You may have noticed from our previous few Backer Updates that we’ve been silent regarding the promised Nintendo Switch port of Kumitantei, and as you might have guessed, we were ourselves waiting for more information about the Nintendo Switch’s successor. With the news now of Nintendo Switch 2’s full backwards compatibility with its predecessor, we’re very excited to be supporting both generations of the system. We intend on releasing the full game on Nintendo Switch (and by extension Nintendo Switch 2) once we’ve left Early Access and officially launch, still intended for Late 2027.

Now that was a whole lot of densely packed information, so we’re gonna end this month’s update with something more mellow... the very first preview OST track of Episode 1 titled “Liminal Morning” and courtesy of Hundotte. It’s a relaxing coffee shop bossa nova-inspired alternative version of Liminal Apathy, which will of course be heard during each in-game morning! Enjoy!

We know this Backer Update was way more of an info dump than a showcase like our previous ones were, but we thought it was important to give you guys a better look behind the curtain and clear up all the concerns regarding releases and rewards. Plus with the holidays and focusing on writing right now there’s not really a ton of flashy spoiler-free stuff to share, so it just kinda worked out to do this now.

You guys have given us so much support, and so we want to be as transparent as possible!

Discord: https://discord.gg/mangofactory

Website: https://www.mangofactory.win/kumitantei

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MangoFactoryEN

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MangoFactoryEN

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mangofactory.win

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/mangofactory