Hope you're doing well.

Rotschwert, a horizontal spinoff of Nullschwert, is Coming Soon to Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3443430/Rotschwert

Red Blade in hand, the Blue Rabbit begins her hazy crusade. It is a horizontal bullet-hell slashing game which is neither a prequel nor sequel to Nullschwert - a sidequel? - that lets you take control over one of the same long-eared beings that you encounter in Null. Or maybe they're different? Not confusing at all...

Either way, it is more of its own, shorter thing. Visiting Rotschwert first may give you an advantage in Nullschwert, or it may raise even more questions. Trust your instincts, and I hope you enjoy your visit.


Still in development. Unfortunately, progress during the entire trainwreck that was 2024 has been very slow, with one incident in particular sapping a lot of my energy. Slowly recovering, there are still a few roadblocks that prevent me from working any faster (though Rotschwert's co-development has been very helpful at breaking through some of them)

The release date has been changed to show "Coming Soon". Putting up a very tight release date was a rookie mistake in the first place, hugely overestimating my solo capabilities and not taking some important aspects like mental health into account. There will no longer be any kind of approximation until the game is at least 99% ready.

I apologize to everyone who were hyped for 2024 release, and while a new game is not enough to make up for it, hopefully it will make the wait more bearable.

See you all in 2025, then.
Cheers,

- ːxaruː

Hello Everyone,
We would like to start by apologizing for the mixing of English and Japanese in our previous builds. We understand the importance of a seamless language experience, and we have been working diligently to address this issue. Version 0.3.1.0 has had a large number of localization updates.

However, we acknowledge that there are still areas that need improvement, specifically the ship names and star system names, which remain in English. We are actively working to resolve these issues in future updates.
We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we strive to make your experience better. Thank you!


皆さん、こんにちは！

以前のバージョンで英語と日本語が混在していたことについて、まずお詫び申し上げます。シームレスな言語体験の重要性を理解しており、この問題を解決するために一生懸命取り組んできました。バージョン 0.3.1.0 には、多数のローカリゼーション更新が行われています。

しかし、まだ改善が必要な部分があることを認識しており、特に船の名前や星系の名前が英語のままであることについてご承知ください。これらの問題を今後のアップデートで解決するために積極的に取り組んでいます。

皆さんのご理解と引き続きのご支援を感謝申し上げます。皆さんの体験をより良くするために努力してまいります。ありがとうございました！

First off—thank you! Our recent playtest was a massive success, with almost 4,000 players diving into the game, giving feedback, and helping shape its future. Seeing so many of you play and discuss the game reinforced something important: Shadows of Chroma Tower has the potential to be something truly special.

Since Discord has a character limit on messages, we’re linking our Playtest Results page for those interested in checking out our analysis. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be fixing bugs, addressing balance issues, and implementing missing features based on your feedback.

Today, we want to share a MAJOR DECISION about the game’s direction. We know this won’t appeal to everyone, and it’s not a decision we’ve made lightly. With that in mind, keep discussions respectful, even if this change isn’t aligned with your personal taste. We are always open to feedback as long as it’s respectful.

After careful analysis of the playtest data, community feedback, and our long-term goals, we’ve made the difficult (but necessary) decision to remove PvP from dungeons. Shadows of Chroma Tower will now be a fully PvE-focused game. But we’re developing competitive features to maintain intensity and excitement.

The short answer? Sustainability. We want SoCT to be an enjoyable game to play 5 years from now as much as it will be on release. We don't want to plan it in such a way that, if we end up with 100 daily users eventually, it becomes a barren shell of what it was in its launch week.

The long answer? PvP creates and catalyzes several major issues for a small studio with an even smaller budget such as ours:

• A PvPvE game needs a consistently large player base to work. If lobbies aren’t full, PvP encounters feel rare, unfair, or frustrating.
  
• Without tens of thousands of daily players, PvP won’t feel rewarding, and players will leave due to long wait times or empty matches.
  
• In games like this, if we fail to hit that "critical mass" of players, we don’t just disappoint one group of players—we disappoint all of them as we've seen happen to other games in the past:
  
  • PvPers get bored due to rare fights.
    
  • PvE players feel forced into PvP situations they didn’t want.
    
  • Social/exploration-focused players struggle to find trade or co-op partners.
• We have analyzed alternatives to our current approach to reduce population segmentation, and I do not have enough characters in this Discord Announcement to go through it. Suffice to say we'd need MILLIONS of dollars to penetrate the market and guarantee we'd reach AND MAINTAIN critical mass population.
  
• I have read your suggestion threads and there's no silver bullet to this issue that is accessible to us as a studio and doesn't infringe our vision for the game. Your suggestions were not ignored and are very much appreciated.
  
  
  2️⃣ The Cost & Technical Burden of PvP
• PvP increases the cost of dedicated servers, anti-cheat, and backend: all of which are already expensive and difficult to maintain for a smaller studio.
  
• Balance costs: With our very limited team size and budget, PvP draws a lot of our game design and programming efforts to ensuring balance among all classes and viable builds.
  
• Development slows down: Every new skill, enemy, or system needs double the balancing and implementation effort.
  
  
  3️⃣ The Gameplay Limitations under PvPvE
• Level design is rigid to prevent unfair PvP fights, spawn rushing and other frustrating scenarios (and even while aware of these issues, solving them is difficult and requires many iterations to get right).
  
• PvE encounters have to be "toned down" to account for spontaneous PvP encounters.
  
• Creativity becomes limited by cost, since everything must be implemented for both PvP and PvE and designed with two very distinct crowds and gameplay styles in mind.
  
• The overarching game design becomes limited and we can't lean into a design that 100% satisfies either crowd. Adding a 5th difficulty, for instance, becomes unfeasible due to population segmentation, adding a new equipment rarity/tier becomes unfeasible due to gear/stat gaps, even more 'innocent' things such as character customization becomes limited (or at the very least more costly) because we need to make sure character classes are very easily distinguishable from one another in PvP encounters.
  
  
  🔄 What This Means for Gameplay
• Dungeons will now be purely PvE, with a focus on challenging, hand-crafted enemy encounters.
  
• Matchmaking remains co-op, with teams of up to 3 players tackling the dungeon together.
  
• More design freedom, allowing for bigger, more unique enemy types, class abilities, PvE mechanics, and maps that wouldn’t have been possible before.
  
• Faster Content Output, since our team will have a lot less to worry about when designing content and it will be MUCH easier to iterate over developed content.
  
• Clearer Class Roles, meaning we get a chance to fulfill our vision of sticking to more traditional RPG party roles - tank, support, DPS. And don't worry, all classes will be viable for solo gameplay.
  
  
  ✅ How We’re Keeping the Competitive Thrill Alive
  We know many of you love competition, so we’re shifting that focus towards asynchronous and parallel competitive systems, including:
  
• 🏆 Leaderboards – Seasonal Leaderboards like the ones you saw during the January Playtest.
  
• 🗺️ Factions & Territories (F&T) – A global war where players conquer and defend territories while the Archmage’s forces fight back. Players may affiliate with one of the two factions and each conquered territory within the tower confers perks and bonuses to players of that faction. We have teased this feature in the past, but if you've missed the teaser, this is not too distinct from Helldivers 2's overarching metagame.
  
• 🎮 Parallel-Play PvP - Together with the asynchronous PvP activities (leaderboards and F&T), we will introduce seasonal Parallel-Play PvP activities where there is no direct PvP encounter, but teams compete within the same match to win, being able to disrupt each other's gameplay in various ways. If you have ever played Hero Line Wars or Rabbits vs Sheep in the old Warcraft 3 days, you might have an idea of what we're aiming for.
  
• ⚔️ Post-Launch PvP Roadmap – Our future as a studio is hanging on the commercial performance of SoCT. If we achieve an initial success great enough to keep us afloat for another few months, we will dedicate a chunk of our efforts to making PvP gamemodes such as an Arena mode, or, if the success is great enough to mitigate all of the problems previously mentioned, even bring back opt-in PvP to dungeons.
  
  
  💬 Let Us Know Your Thoughts
  This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we know it might be unexpected for some of you. However, we strongly believe this is the best path forward for Shadows of Chroma Tower to thrive long-term.
  
  We’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to use any of the discussion channels to express your feelings (in a respectful way), and help us shape this game together.
  
  Thank you for being part of this journey!
  
  
  
  
  

Today, I am happy to announce the release of the second update to the demo.

Here is a list of changes:

Added:

• New mini-game when talking to multiple people in town. Keeping them engaged convinces them to come to the shop. A new tutorial section enables this after a few days
  
• Peak times so it gets busier in town in the afternoon
  
• New cash registers so you can create more diverse shop designs

Improvements:

• Changed some more dialogue to be better
  
• Fixed occasionally jittering NPCs
  
• Fixed accidental/random opening of windows

Here is a gif of the new mini-game in action


I hope you enjoy creating and running your bookshops with these updates.

Happy decorating
Bit66

The demo includes the first city of the full game: Barcelona. You will experience 5 different levels + 1 special level!



Let us know what you think!

If you played yesterday on Beta:https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2096030/view/499438606930150670?l=english

Please switch version to default now.

If you encounter any crashes - let us know! They should not occur, however, if they do - write to us immediately.


In addition, in this version, we have added an additional tab on how to support us:



Over the past few weeks, the in-game car repair and Fatal Error fix have halted our work on bugs and adding new content to the game.

However, we can now say:
We are already working on the next update which fixes the bugs you have recently reported and introduces new content - stay tuned!

Love You💗
SPS Team

The latest playtest ran fairly smoothly, with players jumping in, exploring, and engaging in great discussions. Newcomers took some time to adjust, but once they got the hang of things, many seemed to really enjoy Stars Reach.



Player Character now default starts with all tools, plus grav mesh, grapple and fortress shield are auto-equipped into the character slots.

RADIAL MENU (CONSUMABLES): Players requested item names to be displayed for easier identification.
INVENTORY SCREEN: A small info box was suggested to provide:

• Current planet name, possibly added to the zone info.
  
• Number of homesteads used and their locations.
  
• Corpse location, if applicable.

• SPACE CREATURES & TERRAIN: A terrain check is needed to prevent creatures from phasing into solid ground.
  
• BALLHOGS IN SPACE: Currently, these enemies can target players through asteroids and melt the rock, leading to unexpected deaths.
  
• TOOL MAKER BUG: After returning from space to a planet, the tool maker stops functioning. The only current workaround is to log out and back in. This issue is flagged as a high-priority fix.

No playtest is complete without players pushing the boundaries of the game world. This time, one player attempted to reshape the starting portal area on Pyromycis by digging a trench around the spawn point. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but the large cave system beneath the platform added an unexpected twist, turning it into a potential hazard for new arrivals.
Other players quickly took notice, sparking some creative problem-solving. Some tried diplomacy, while others used in-game mechanics to counter the effort. While the attempt to trap new players was ultimately ineffective, it provided valuable insights into player behavior, emergent gameplay, and potential exploits. Situations like this help highlight areas that may need refinement, such as spawn protection, while also showcasing the sandbox potential of Stars Reach.

This playtest provided valuable insights, and player feedback is shaping the future of Stars Reach. Upcoming adjustments will focus on space combat, griefing prevention, and improving quality-of-life features.

Now is the perfect time to get involved and help shape the game. Support Stars Reach by following our upcoming Kickstarter campaign. Get exclusive early backer rewards and be part of a passionate community shaping an MMORPG from the ground up.

Follow Stars Reach on Kickstarter now and be the first to know when the campaign goes live!

-Made fullscreen mode to also help with 21:9 ultrawide ratio

This update focuses on balancing, controller support, and other quality of life improvements, Here are the patch notes:

Gameplay:

• Directional damage indicators now show from where you got hit.
  
• Melee will now lock onto the nearest target.
  
• Ai Enemies can no longer shoot as far giving you time to get away.
  
• Police helicopters should follow you now if you are wanted.

Controller:

• A new lock on aim assist feature has been added when you ADS(Left trigger).
  
• Controls have been slightly reworked to feel better. Be sure to check the controls HUD to see what changed.
  
• Using the gamepad in menus and UI should be more stable now.
  
• Look sensitivity has been improved for gamepad users.
  
• Sprinting is now a button hold not a toggle on gamepad.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where returning to the chrono station would not trigger when you walk through the portal.
  
• Fixed an issue where grenades would explode on spawn hitting the player.
  
• Fixed an issue with rocks in specific parts of the level not spawning.
  
• Fixed an issue where medium settings were incorrectly applied as low settings. Be sure to apply your settings again if you were using anything under high settings.

UI:

• Made the cursor slightly larger and it should now scale properly with different screen resolutions.

Performance:

• Fixed an issue with stuttering from the level streaming loading in objects on hard drives and lower end devices when flying at top speed.

Thank you to everyone who has left feedback so far, hearing your suggestions and bug reports helps make the game better for everyone. if you left a review regarding controller issues please consider updating your review with this new update.

Hello! Here is the first beta version of the huge migration of PixelOver to the next major version of Godot, going from Godot 3.5.1 to Godot 4.4.

As previously announced, this update is more than just a migration. It introduces 2 major new features: the ability to add shaders to individual objects and blending mode.

Please note that pre-release versions may be unstable.







(For itch.io users, you can get a Steam key on the download page)




If you encounter any bugs or have feature suggestions, feel free to share them in the community forum. Thank you!