Jul 29
Juno 06 - Illun
Hello everyone. the update for August is now up on Substack.
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Hello everyone. the update for August is now up on Substack.
We are super excited to announce our 2nd game, Vartio's release date!
Experience the world of Kaamos from another perspective in this psychological horror game, where you patrol a dark forest when the world turned dark. 
A short psychological horror experience from the creators of Kaamos.
Vartio (Finnish for “Patrol”) drops you into the boots of a medieval guardsman assigned to a solitary night watch. Your duty: patrol the shadowy forests surrounding a remote watchtower and report back to your commander. But something is wrong out there. And it’s getting closer.
Step out into the cold woods under the cover of night. As a lone sentry on the empire’s edge, your torch is dim, and your instincts are all you can trust.
Rely on your ears more than your eyes. Every rustle in the brush, every creak of a branch may spell danger. Are those footsteps? Or just the wind?
The deeper into the forest you go, the more uncertain reality becomes. Blood trails. Whispers. Was that a raider—or something worse?
A compact, focused psychological horror experience (~20 minutes).
Immersive 3D pixel art with a dark retro aesthetic.
Rich atmospheric sound design crafted to heighten tension.
Standalone story set in the same unsettling world as Kaamos.
This update adds a lot! New systems, reworked systems, way better performance, and even a new weapon to produce.
🌟 Prestige! Restart your progress, but with new, very powerful prestige upgrades. We have a lot more coming, but these will change how you play the game.
😱 Fear! A new system to engage with, that will increase the sell prices of all weapons as you boost fear higher.
🪙 Golden Weapons! An idle game staple. Each weapon produced has a small chance to be golden. When clicked, it’ll boost the sell price for that weapon. This can be stacked with the boost from the Fear system
🧪 Research Rework! Research now gives you the choice of 2 options to pick from. This will make research more interesting, and allow for prioritizing different builds.
🚙 Jeeps! The next weapon to make.
⚒️ All Materials Production Unlocked! Automate your entire supply chain.
🎛️ Performance Improvements! Lots of improvements here, the game should run a lot better.
Also, we’re running 2 contests for this demo update in our discord!
A randomly drawn sweepstakes where the winner gets to name an upgrade in the game. Post a screenshot of your end-screen from the demo to enter
A speed-run contest, where whoever posts the fastest time to beat the demo gets an achievement named after them. Instructions and rules can be found here on the submission form.
More details on both in our discord, join here: https://discord.gg/unp9BR69cA
This month introduces a slew of improvements, QoL updates, and a new performance branch (IL2CPP) for further testing.
Fixed issues with resources that were spawning under water.
Fixed item category on Mangrove Logs.
Fixed Radiant Flux crafted weapons not showing their updated visuals.
Fixed Cooked Tough Meat recipe output.
Fixed an issue that allowed some ranged NPC abilities to be parried and riposted by players.
Fixed characters not being clickable on character selection.
Fixed tooltip typo in high resolution sun shadows option.
Fixed macro edit dialog text not wrapping.
Fixed visual issue with the Log UI when opening/closing the window with the hunting log selected.
Fixed an issue with macOS performance when "None" was selected for the framerate limiter.
Fixed lights disabling in the Shaper hallway.
Fixed an issue that was causing overhead chat bubble text to be faded.
Fixed a spelling error on level 50 dropped tar flasks.
Adjusted LOD on a number of weapons.
Adjusted LOD on all Ember Ring vegetation.
Doubled the AFK boot timer for active subscribers.
Increased the number of bears that spawn for Hallick's Tower quest.
Rotated seasonal wares on Marta.
Updated the entrance to Freehold to be more solo-friendly.
NPCs:
Reduced the damage over time component on Ashen Boar's Impale ability.
Reduced rate that NPCs can use the Patch ability.
Redmane Stalkers should no longer attack boars.
Bulletin Board Tasks:
Allow Flooded Ruins Crocodiles and Rats to be counted for the Redshore tasks.
Reduced Elk count for Grimstone Canyon task. Included general animal killing as part of the task.
Camera:
Allow left mouse to rotate the camera without rotating the player in over-the-shoulder camera mode.
Adjusted upper camera orbit to be equidistant from the center and lower orbits so that a fixed zoom maintains the same distance for the character in 3rd person camera mode.
UI:
We have spruced up our loading screens by including various renders of our custom creatures & props that correspond to the region you are currently loading.
Added title to the offensive UI-space nameplate.
Added "Use Alternate Difficulty Colors" toggle to the interface options to replace the Yellow/Orange/Red difficulty colors with Gold/Red-Orange/Purple.
Added a "Type" dropdown to the Auction House which allows you to filter by different types (weapon types, armor types, jewelry, etc).
Added "Type" to the sort menu in the Auction House which sorts by the above types.
Auctions that have bids can no longer be cancelled.
Improved the error wording when your client cannot contact Steam.
Ability UI elements now properly use Alchemy execution and targeting parameters when Alchemy is toggled on.
Changed "Sale Price" to "Sell Price" on item tooltips at the merchant.
Max craft count increased from 99 to 999.
Overhead Combat Text:
Now scales with distance to the camera. This should make it easier to see for ranged attacks.
Now properly renders with dynamic resolution modes.
Ibaxus:
Improved notification of mobs calling allies from great distances.
Increased delay for certain mobs calling allies from great distances.
Increased variability in Stalker respawns.
Enforced stricter reset distances for some mobs.
Adjusted a number of nav links around the lake to reduce mobs from climbing the rocks.
Archibald no longer accepts money from your bank.
Shards no longer ask for confirmation during Need/Greed loot rolls.
With the recent slew of activity in Ibaxus the path from the Ember Ring to the valley has become well travelled.
Renamed a few reagents to reserve the "Potent" adjective for the highest level reagent item category:
Potent Venom -> Strong Venom
Potent Ichor -> Concentrated Ichor
Potent Salve -> Soothing Salve
Potent Tincture -> Concentrated Tincture
MacOS builds are no longer universal binaries and will only work on Apple Silicon.
Reduced the default max shadow casting lights option to 2 (performance optimization).
This patch includes a Unity Engine update to the latest subversion. This brings some small performance improvements and bug fixes. In addition, all vegetation and custom shaders have been updated which should also yield some minor performance gains.
This month we are adding new culling tech to overland scenes. Most zones are composed of 4 large terrains in a 2x2 configuration. Each individual terrain has a performance setting that was previously set to a fixed number. With this patch we are now dynamically adjusting this value based on your distance to each individual terrain - which should provide a small break to your GPU.
In addition, we have enabled stochastic texture sampling in terrain shaders for all outdoor zones. This rendering technique should reduce the frequency of repeated texture patterns.
The last few patches have ballooned our application load times to an unacceptable level. On application start we are pre-loading a lot of data which can cause the client to show as "not responding". To mitigate this issue we have deferred some loading until the first loading screen is shown. This means that your first "zone in" after application startup may take slightly longer than it did previously, but subsequent zone loads will be quicker.
During a deep dive into performance of the game we identified an an issue with how our UI windows interact with Unity's backend UGUI system.
Previously, all hidden windows have an alpha value of 0 and are not raycasted against, which means that they cannot be seen or interacted with. When a window is shown, we transition the alpha from 0->1 for a fade in, and enable racyasting for interactions. As it turns out, even though a UI element is not being rendered or raycasted against we were still paying a performance overhead in UGUI to keep them registered and available.
This patch changes how we handle hidden windows within our UI system. Once hidden, a window's game object is now completely disabled which removes them from the UIGUI system entirely. The downside to this, is that there is a slight performance hit for disabling and enabling objects (which is why we did not do it previously). However, this performance hit only lasts a single frame on open/close rather than us paying for having it registered with UGUI on every frame.
We have done a fair bit of internal testing and everything appears to work as usual. In theory this change should not even be noticed - outside of the performance improvement. On average I was saving upwards of 4ms per frame which isn't a giant leap forward, but it just may be enough to make a difference for you.
To further improve performance, we have built an alternate client using Unity's IL2CPP build process, which converts the game into a native binary. In theory, this should provide significant performance gains. In practice, however, the results can vary considerably depending on several factors - most notably vegetation and point light shadows.
Earlier this month we deployed a QA build using this tech but did not get enough feedback for us to make a call on if we should move forward with this tech as the primary build. We would ask that you try playing with the alternate IL2CPP build this month and report any issues you might encounter. If something game breaking comes up you can always swap back to the default branch.
To swap to this branch right click on Embers Adrift in your Steam library and select "Properties":
Next select "Betas" in the left hand column and you should see a menu on the right named "Beta Participation". In this dropdown you should see an entry called "live_il2cpp - experimental IL2CPP builds" - select this and you are good to go!
To swap back to non-IL2CPP builds simply change this dropdown to "None". And just to reiterate - our goal is to make the default IL2CPP so any and all feedback you can provide on these builds would be extremely helpful.
Note that this is a LIVE build -meaning that this branch connects to the LIVE server.
After thirty days in the gauntlet of Kickstarter campaigning, we are pleased to announce that Necrofugitive has officially been funded! Thank you to each and every one of you who has contributed to the campaign.
Now that we have concluded our campaign, we are very excited to announce a few things. Please read along for more information.
We are very excited to share this regional map of Necrofugitive's Kingdom of Avencia. In the full version of Necrofugitive, we intend to make each of these regional areas accessible to players for their escapes. For now, we'd like to direct your attention to the Southwest corner of the continent— the Duchy of Castor.
Necrofugitive's opening act will take place in a place called Fortress Havenhold, located on a remote plateau within the Duchy of Castor. Learn more about this region in the excerpt below.
Forged in the fires of war and steadfast adherence to the Avencian Code of Arms, the Duchy of Castor sits in the southernmost region of Avencia. Tasked with generations of stalwart defense against threats from beyond her borders, the children of Castor know what it means to fortify, protect, and hold the line. Theirs is a harsh, obedient doctrine, where one's potential is not defined by the station of his birth, but his ability to obey orders and unflinchingly devote his entire being to the preservation of the Avencian way of life. With noble birth, high walls, well-trained hounds, and the zealous devotion of his troops, their duke's claim to the throne is most certainly irrefutable...
We will share more about the Duchy of Castor in a future update. Please stay tuned.
For those who are late to the party, Kickstarter rolled out a feature called Late Pledges that we are very excited to have learned about. With Late Pledges, the studio will be able to continue to accept pledges for the game even after the campaign is finished! This also includes contributing toward stretch goals, so keep the momentum going and we might just see something awesome happen.
We will only be accepting late pledges for select tiers while supplies last and for a limited time, so don't hesitate to pull the trigger!
Click Here to Visit the Kickstarter Page
As detailed in the campaign, we've got a handful of backer exclusive skins available for Necrofugitive. Below you can see not just the human form, but also the monster form of these exclusives. Be sure to take a look.
These skins are each included at different tier levels, with the full set of them included in all tiers priced at $75 and above. We hope you'll enjoy spreading your colors all across Avencia.
In addition to the content coming as part of the Necrofugitive campaign, our team is also creating a special game mode where players will need to fight to survive against waves of oncoming enemies. We will have more to share about this game mode in a future update.
We are so thankful that Necrofugitive has been a game that can help bring players together all around the world. Included in the $50,000 level of funding is also localization for Simplified Chinese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese! As we have noted in the past, players from these three countries represent a sizable portion of the Necrofugitive Wishlists on Steam, so we are making sure to bring the game to these regions as quickly as possible.
That's all for this update! If you have any questions about the game or the campaign, please be sure to leave them in the comments! We'll be checking back in with another update as the campaign continues. Thank you all once again for your continued support.
Greetings, Rivals!
We're thrilled to announce the upcoming patch drops on July 31st, 2025, at 9:00:00 AM (UTC)
This update will be deployed seamlessly, with no server downtime required! Simply log in after the update and jump right back into the action.
Here's what's coming in this patch
1. Magik - Phoenix Demon Bundle
2. Black Panther - Phoenix Panther Bundle
Available from: August 1st, 2025, at 02 :00 :00 (UTC)
The Marvel Rivals IGNITE Mid-Season Finals are about to light up the universe! Watch the live finals and accumulate the required viewing time to claim exclusive rewards. Including the Star-Lord Ignite Series Costume and more!
Drops goes live: August 6th, 2025, at 02:00:00 (UTC)
1. Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, Accessory Points gained in Competitive matches were displayed incorrectly on the results screen.
2. Fixed a bug where adjusting cursor sensitivity with a controller could cause individual hero keybinds to stop working.
3. Addressed an exploit where costume-exclusive emotes could be used on other costumes by binding them to a key.
1. Hela's Hel-acious Hiccups: We've fixed a bug where Hela's Ultimate Ability could fizzle out and end immediately if unleashed while being launched up in poor network conditions. Now, even the trickiest lag can't banish the Queen of Hel's wrath.
2. Hulk's Leaping Lament: Resolved an issue where Hulk's Incredible Leap could go haywire on stairs if the camera is tilted almost straight down, causing Hulk to jump in unexpected directions. Hulk's leaps are now as unstoppable as his rage, no more stairway to confusion!
The Marvel Rivals universe is ever-evolving, and we have plenty more surprises and updates on the horizon. Stay tuned to our official announcements for more!
A short psychological horror experience from the creators of Kaamos.
Vartio (Finnish for “Patrol”) drops you into the boots of a medieval guardsman assigned to a solitary night watch. Your duty: patrol the shadowy forests surrounding a remote watchtower and report back to your commander. But something is wrong out there. And it’s getting closer.
Step out into the cold woods under cover of night. As a lone sentry on the empire’s edge, your torch is dim, and your instincts are all you can trust.
Rely on your ears more than your eyes. Every rustle in the brush, every creak of a branch may spell danger. Are those footsteps? Or just the wind?
The deeper into the forest you go, the more uncertain reality becomes. Blood trails. Whispers. Was that a raider—or something worse?
