Play * Fixed bug that can not play with some catch charts * Supported to quit mp playing by double-pressing pause button * Fixed wrong parse result of SM charts Editor * Supported shortcut for plugins * Fixed scroll multiplier not working issue Other * Fixed bug that can not import files on some Android devices
The Steam Spring Sale is on! Both “Cat Museum” and “Life Gallery” are on special discount—if you haven’t tried them yet, now’s the perfect time to grab them!
Development Update #1 - Behind the Scenes at City 1 Studios
Development and Building a Team
City 1 Studios includes 4 members of the Half-Life Alyx NoVR Development team, but we needed a bigger team to put together the game we wanted to create. Inspired by our love for the Half-Life series and many other classic first person shooter franchises, we put together our new studio to take on this large task of creating a brand new IP, world and game.
Check out our newest teaser trailer below!
We spoke with TheGamer and PCGamesN to talk about this process, what it was like moving away from the Source engine and more, check out the links to both articles below.
We are very excited, the team is highly motivated and we are learning a lot as we enter full development of a retail game versus modding a game. It has been a learning experience and we appreciate the feedback along the way as we ensure we have an amazing team at City 1 Studios ready to bring you the best Half-Like indie game you will ever play!
Our Real World Inspiration for Buddy - AI and Programming
Say hello to Tillie! She is our real world golden retriever inspiration for Buddy in game, Cindy's trusty dog that will be with her every step of the way. Buddy is also one of the few fully biological dogs left on Earth, making Buddy easy prey for bounty hunters around Hazard City.
The most important part of having Buddy in game is ensuring they will be able to feel like a real dog and not create any friction or issues with the player. Everything should work smoothly, Buddy will wander when idle and find things for you, you can command buddy to grab items that are out of Cindy's reach, which will be used in various ways like puzzles and other unique scenarios. Buddy will engage in battle with Cindy, helping distract enemies while Cindy focuses on taking enemies down one by one.
Something is our programming lead and has been focused on the custom FPS engine and AI. He has been working hard to ensure Buddy can do everything we want them to and ensure they feel like a real dog at all times, both in and out of combat. We are using Unreal Engine 5 but are using a lot of custom work and we are fully focused on using more traditional and alternative techniques to ensure the game performs on a wide variety of systems from low to high end. Our target specs right now are a Steam Deck, and no ray tracing will be required.
Our Talented Team of Artists
We wanted to thank our other amazing artists Artvader_AF, Yehor Perepelytsia and VenomWalter_art. We have an amazing team of artists from all over the world making Hazard City and its inhabitants real!
We love the amazing art Artvader_AF created for us of Cindy and Buddy and wanted to show off the alternate version that some in the community grew fond of in a gritty hand drawn style! They are working on more art for the game, this time an action scene.
Artvader_AF has created a ton of amazing art of some of the first person shooter greats! Check out their account here for even more amazing art: ArtVader_AF on X/Twitter
VenomWalter_art has been amazing to work with to help realize the concept of Cindy and her dog Buddy, action poses, style and more. They specialize in art that honours the work of the amazing Yoji Shinkawa of the Metal Gear Solid series. They continue to work on new art and concepts and will be creating our final game art when the game releases.
VenomWalter_art has created a ton of amazing art of some iconic characters in that Metal Gear Solid art style! Check out their account here for even more amazing art: VenomWalter on X/Twitter
Cindy is being voiced by the amazingly talented Sarah Nightingale! They have done amazing voice work in the industry and we are so proud to have them on our team.
We have a fantastic team of animators and 3D Modellers including Jawa, CptCrates and Wi'am. They are creating life from nothing as they create 3D models of various kinds, rig them and animate them into the world of Hazard City. This includes weapons, enemies, player arms and hands, Buddy and much more!
Jawa has been working hard on animating our weapons and is our animation lead. Jawa is also our lead first person animator, focusing on weapons, hands, arms and other animations you control as the player. Our first set of weapons are directly inspired by Half-Life 2, with our unrevealed set of weapons leaning into the sci-fi/cyberpunk setting.
Wi'am has been animating our Cynthetic Zombies, inhabitants of Hazard City who have taken too many Cyber-Chems, drugs and more. The main antagonist in the game, Chemical, manufactures and distributes Cyber-Chems in all parts of Hazard City.
The Chemical Troopers seen above, were created by CptCrates, they modelled it, rigged it and animated it, bringing our main enemy force to life. Clearly inspired by the trans-human Combine forces of the Half-Life series, they are an army being led by Chemical himself, the drug lord and crime boss that controls most of Hazard City and supplies everyone with Cyber-Chems.
Our biggest inspiration when building Hazard City and the world of Chemical-Burn is the Half-Life series, for the city itself like the arrival train station and more are very much taken from Half-Life 2 (as seen in the bottom screenshot above) but given a futuristic and cyberpunk twist. We use, purchase and license a lot of assets from Fab, Cosmos, Sketchfab and other great services to get great assets quickly; some of which are only used as placeholders for now as well. We are also working with various support studios and independent developers and artists to make Hazard City reach our vision.
We are working with the amazing Scurvy Studios for environmental design, level design and much more! They are a small indie team just like us. Providing support to our team.
We are also working with Anil Isbilir who has provided a lot of assets and work. Anil is a fantastic artist and developer who has worked with Hangar 13 Games on Mafia Definitive Edition for example.
Not only are we building a world that looks amazing, but also making sure the levels are properly designed to lead the player into proper combat and exploration loops. Max Pears, a level designer who's credits include Cyberpunk 2077 and Phantom Liberty, has been an amazing source of knowledge. With Max working on another franchise that has been an inspiration for us, it was a perfect match up for the type of open wide levels we want to create, similar to Cyberpunk 2077's bespoke mission areas. Max Pears will be assisting us as a consultant on our level design, providing feedback and more.
Please check out his website for all the amazing courses and tools for level designers: http://Max Pears' Website
Music and Audio
Our amazing audio and music team is led by SatouVA. and SweetAngelOdeth, who are creating original tracks for the game. This track called "Metropolitan" is very work in progress, its high tempo and rhythm is the perfect musical soundtrack to the first boss Cindy and Buddy will encounter in the game.
Check out some more of SatouVA.'s work on their YouTube Channel and subscribe: SatouVA.'s YouTube Channel
Thank You!
We cannot thank you all enough over the last couple weeks since we first revealed Chemical-Burn! We have hit over 2000 wishlists and cannot express enough gratitude for the support and feedback. We have made some stumbles along the way but we never would have learned about some serious things without your help and it has been well worth revealing the game even in its very early state of development. We revealed the game as a New Year's Resolution the team had going into 2025 and we are excited to continue this journey with you all as we lead into release next year!
If you want to help shape the game and talk to the developers of City 1 Studios, please join our Discord server!
186 of 195 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining nine bugs, seven require further testing and two require more work.
Music and sound design are being worked on.
First and foremost, Lab 77 has reached 100 wishlists on Steam! This is a major milestone for me as an indie game dev, especially given how difficult the games industry is at the moment. A massive thank you to any and all who have whishlisted Lab 77!
Secondly, music. I was sent the final master of the game music from Rossano Cariello who has done the in game music and sound design for Lab 77. Initially, I asked him to help me make 77 individual sound tracks. As in one for each level. Thankfully, I was convinced that this was a terrible idea and we have since then been working on one menu track, one tutorial track and seven variable in-game tracks that will be implemented using Wwise. These seven tracks will fit the seven sets of 11 levels in the game. While we have not gotten to the Wwise implementation just yet, the final version of the music is very close and you can hear a snippet here.
Implementing Wwise is the next big task to be done. It is not a thing I have any prior experience with, but I am looking forward to working on it. In addition to the in-game music the intention is to use Wwise for the sound effects as well. These sound effects are in the demo, which does not use Wwise. Instead the demo used my own concoction of madness that worked just well enough for the demo but I would rather have a proper underlying system that does not rely on my rushed implementation.
Working with Rossano I was able to get a start on the Wwise implementation. Initially we focused on the basics, making sure the connection between Wwise and Unity was correct and that it would play any sound at all. Once this was established we focused on the task of making sure the music tracks would switch at the correct times, which turned out to be a bit of a faff as we made some mistakes which complicated matters. After attempting to use the pre-made AkSwitch components, which did not work, I wrote a simple method in my game manager which now handles the entire switching as the manager is in DontDestroyOnLoad, which keeps the manager constantly loaded throughout the game. We also had some trouble after this with only one stem per track playing, but after some consultations we realised that we had set the number of instances to one, which we had done as the AkSwitch seemed to be layering multiple tracks. However, in the end we were able to make a start and leave the game in a stable state where we will pick it up next time.
In addition to the new music I have done more playtesting and data gathering. I mentioned last Dev Diary I intended to start working on more quality assurance through playtesting, and in this effort I also decided to re-start my data gathering which has been dormant for a while. I decided the best way to uphold the difficulty level that I am aiming for is to have the placement data, as difficulty in the game is determined by a limited number of placements, gathered by me as I am the only person with sufficient gameplay experience in Lab 77.
What this means in practical terms is that I have to play 66 levels at least five times (that is a total of 330 levels) to make sure I find the lowest amount of placements for each level. Thankfully, I did this job for the 11 levels in the demo before I released that, so they are set in stone. Still 66 levels need to be worked through, and the start did not go very well as I managed to lose two data sets through my own incompetence. So that was fun. That being said, I aim to pick this up again going forward, as it is something I must do to complete the game, it just needs time and patience.
I also did some "accidental" QA and playtesting work through my attempts at data gathering. At this point the QA work is very much focused on minor details such as moving floor blocks one unit to the side, up or down which is rather repetitive work but still very necessary to do. In doing this I also found that I have either got an issue with my GitHub repo or I made some git mistakes a long while ago in what branches I merged and how I resolved merge conflicts as level design bugs that I thought I had fixed resurfaced. All these things have thankfully been easy enough to fix. Though the trouble is that I have no idea which of the previous bugs now remain unfixed. I know I will find them as I do more playtesting, but it is certainly going to be a project until the release happens.
Lastly, I also started work on a proper trailer for Lab 77. I did share the first draft on Patreon and Discord, and got some feedback on it which is very appreciated. I know that I have to make some refinements to it, but I made a decent start for someone with no video editing experience to speak of. I do think this is an area I should improve in, as game trailers are very important for marketing. However, it is difficult to make things the way I want them to be at the moment, and that will probably show in the final trailer.
That is all for this week, more to come in two weeks.
The demo is a small prologue, it takes about 30 minutes to complete. It introduces the player to the setting, atmosphere and some mechanics. Already in the demo you will be able to find collectibles, listen to recordings, explore the location and get into our universe The Black Ice. And professional voices will help you in this.
We are waiting for feedback on the demo. Feedback and suggestions are accepted here.
🌍 Travelers, it's time to showcase another strategic masterpiece in the Composition Strategy Event! 🏆 Today, we present a Dauntless Comps guide from our member Ninjawrath. 📖 In this guide, we will: 🛡️ Explore the key strategies for maximizing damage while ensuring survivability. ⚔️ Detail the best hero arrangement and synergy to optimize your battle performance. 🎯 Provide essential timing insights to execute skills effectively against the Temporal Vortex boss. 💡 Read on to master the Dauntless team strategy and conquer the Temporal Vortex with precision! ⚡🛡️ #dragonheir #dragonheirsilentgods #downloadnow 🔥 Download Dragonheir NOW: {LINK REMOVED}https://bit.ly/dragonheirsilentgod
The second game starring Izzy has been revealed on Steam. Izzy's Arcade is a spin-off of Intrepid Izzy, where the plucky heroine returns to explore a video game arcade filled with strange, funny, quirky and experimental little games. The arcade games found in the original will be back in an updated form, and of course there will be brand new ones to discover as well.
This game is still in the early stages of development, so there are still many details left to work out. But you can already find Izzy's Arcade on Steam to get a glimpse of the work in progress, and of course, to add it to your wishlist!
Also, you are cordially invited to join our new Discord server to chat with us about current and upcoming games! Are you excited to see Izzy return? What features would you like to see? Let us know!
