Oct 19

Of Lies and Rain - CastelloInc

Hi everyone,

We're thrilled to annouce that the final version of "Of Lies and Rain" will be released

Novemeber 4th 9AM PT on Steam, Meta and PSVR2

In the beginning we thought that it would take more time to fix all the bugs and that the we would have had more problems with early access. It turns out early access was already pretty polished with virtually no blocking bugs and just a few thing to correct before the final release.

Some of you who played the game in early access and gave us feedback told us that the game could have been released in full already as "Of Lies and Rain" is in pretty good shape already.

They criticized us for not releasing in full the 10th of September because this way we were gonna hurt sales. First of all as a dev it's amazing to see players concearned that you are not gonna sell enough copies! This makes us feel part of a community more than a customer-developer relationship it seems like we're all on the same side, to grow the VR in it's whole.

So while we agree that the early access might have hurt sales we are still convinced it was the right thing to do, we got the chance to have some more player feedback so we took a couple of months to add features and polish the game even more.

---The next section might have some SPOILERS---

Things we added and fixed frtom early access realease:

Beath volume and inhalers balance
Footsteps (depending on the surface you're on)
Sprinting
better iron sight
Projectile traces
Fixed some hand interactions with objects
Fixed a bug that would disable a cableway
Datawolds redesign, just the mandatory ones.
Fixed a bug that would disable a cableway
Fixed Adrian Office screen texture Typo.
Fixed a bug that made the cableway not working after loading a game.
Fixed some more invisible walls.
Fixed a bug that made audio disappear in some spots.
Lower reflection on some material to lower aliasing problems
Laser interaction menu visibility
Hand on the opposite side when grabbin bin
Russian translation improvements
added ambient volume option
added thumbstick sensitivity option (fix drift on old controllers)
added haptics intensity option
fix first trigger action ignored
fix floating hand bug
fix shotgun half-discharged magazines
fix enhanced input buttons (use started/completed events)
fix coupled trigger/height calibration options
fix nest 1st elevator going back
fix dataworld anchor better unlock
fix machinegun secondary grab collisions
fix scorpion grenade throwback
fix elevators with preactivation pops on activation (labirynth/adecore)
fix Flower not starting after the labyrinth
added screen percentage option +/-50% (skipping 100 that causes reprojection)
added spectator window mode option (windowed/fullscreen)
fix TAA ghosting/jittering (suggest to increase sharpness a bit for best visuals)
fix Vulkan rendering (disabled SM6, also for DX12)
enhanced SteamVR haptics curves
Fixed the infinite die buga
Accessibility menu option monoscopic

What you asked but we coudn't do:

There a few things that many players wanted us to add and we didn't, the reason is money and time, as always, trust me if we had a decent budget we would have made a better game. This is the best we could do whit what we had, 5 people and no money.

Npcs:

It takes a lot of money and time to make NPCs, we choose to have a dead world and no one around also for that reason, we agree with you that some encounters throughout the game would have been great but that is something our small studio just coudn't afford.

More cinematics:

Same reason here, not enough money and frankly we're not super experts in cinematics, we should have hired some people to do it but again, no time, and no money this time.

Better trailer:

We did ask some external to take care of the trialer but it was like 10-15k. simply too much for us. the trailer we managed to make may not be the best and according to many of you it doesn't really show how good the game is, but it's again the best we could do.

Better graphics:

Regarding to graphics this a personal matter as who is writing here is the tcchnical artist, ceo and community manager and I took care of the graphics aspect of the game. There are some places in the game that will feel a bit lower quality in terms of 3d Models and Textures, again it takes a lot of time to make everything look great, and I didn't have enough to do all that, I apologize if some part of the game are not supersharp but I hope that won't ruin the experince too much.

Less text and instead a voice over for all the memories:

Too much money and time here as well, we would have needed some more voice actors and very long recordings for a voice over of all the memories, There is also a tecnical problem here, if you had to hear them while roaming through the game they could have overlapped with some in game dialogues and would have had to truncate one or another. If you had to stay still with the memory opened you might just as well read it, but yeah not ideal, we know.

That said I wanna thank everyone who bought the early access, this saved the company for the moment, we gotta say that the numbers for the moment are really low, definitely not enough to keep the company going, we don't have funding, we don't have a publisher so this is it, if something doesn't change in the future we're screwed.

Reviews are amazing though, we still have a 93% positive review and it's still early access. Most of our players really enjoyed our game and some even suggested us for VR GOTY.

This is beyond words and if we're gonna close the studio after full release this time will stay with us for the rest of our lives, we love making games and we've done it for the last 5 years, all together as friends and with an amazing community of players that really gave us infinite hours of playtesting asking nothing in return.

We coudn't have asked for anything better!

But it's not the time to give up just yet, there's still couple of weeks to go to full release, we want to release one more update.

After full release anything can change.

Keeping our finger crossed.

Best,

Castello Inc Team.

Oct 19

The Playtest Just Got Real: NEW ITEMS and Bosses Are Here!

ODDCORE - 【Botaro】

📜 Patch Notes – Item System Overhaul & Boss Update

🧩 Revamped Item System

Tons of new items with varying usefulness, now tiered by rarity — better loot is harder to find.
Items and shrines can now appear at the end of or within missing variants.

⚔️ Combat & Balance

Enemy Rebalance: Fewer enemies per round, but each packs more HP.
Weapon Upgrades Reworked: Choose your upgrade path via 3 new vending machines in the shop.
- 🔴 Red Cards – Power buffs
- 🟢 Green Cards – Sustainability buffs
- 🔵 Blue Cards – Utility buffs

🧠 Weapons

Boomerang: Now pierces enemies. Hold to extend flight, release to recall.
Nailgun: Buffed.
Sniper: Nerfed.

👑 Bosses & Progression

5 New Bosses appear at set variant milestones | boss variants: 13/25/37/49/61
Face off against the final boss—can you beat it?

🏆 Leaderboards

Added new board for “Fastest to Win” (defeat the Variant 61 boss).

🧹 QoL & Fixes

Tons of bug fixes and polish for smoother gameplay.

Oct 19

Devlog: Progress

Ruinlander - wineviper

It is hinted to me that I am not very verbose when describing the development process. Now I will try to describe the current state of the game in a little more detail.

In the game, you can move around the entire map. All locations are ready and connected by walkways. Some locations are initially closed, but can be explored or opened for the duration of the quest.
All cities, villages, faction bases, and points of interest are mapped and interactive. BUT the loot lists for the points of interest are not ready yet and need to be adjusted and balanced. Quests, faction settings, and relationships between them are not ready yet.
All images of opponents are updated and ready, but not tied to random encounters. And that's what I'm working on right now.
The battle backgrounds have also been updated and are 80% ready.
Implemented the mechanics of trading resources that create and consume cities, villages, and faction bases.
Implemented a bulletin board with tasks. There are 3 tasks available to find and deliver a wide variety of items. The tasks are updated every day. Those who played the demo could find many household items in the abandoned village that were not used in crafting. It was for them that this mechanic was added.

I finally found the visual style of the opponents that I like. A few examples:

As a result, once I finish working on random encounters, loot lists for points of interest, and faction quests, the project will be playable at least in sandbox mode. I don't want to guess again, but I think early access is really close. Work on the game continues and will be completed!