I've been working on improving the demo and making some changes based on your feedback, especially regarding the mechanics and the game sometimes feeling too cruel.

This demo update hopefully brings more balancing to the table, without losing its core focus on darkness and confusion.

What's new and/or improved:

• Safer respawns - enemies now ignore you for a few seconds after respawn, giving you time to move and haul cape out of there.

• Clearer tutorial - still in the form of a poem, but notes and cautions are simpler and more direct. No other changes to the cave - it introduces you to the spells one at a time, and allows you to charge the sigil at the exit to lower the boulder and leave the cave. The purpose of the game is to find all sigils and escape the world, not the tutorial cave.

  Note: default tutorial shows default key bindings. You can map them to any other keys/inputs you like through the settings menu.

• Directional indicator - an indicator appears on your screen to signify which direction an imminent danger is coming from. Will probably trip you out but so does everything else in the game.

• Rebalanced enemies - lucent and descry enemies are now slower, with an unspecified wait time before attacking. Flying enemies have a slightly lower chance of aggression. Critters have become jumping critters. Might give you a spook as well but idk.

• Soul strikes - soul strikes now can immediately kill you if they strike you. Directional indicator does not detect. Insta kill btw.

• Light Spirit - a light spirit that is in the form of something that flies. All it does is fly and roam around. Acts as a little helpful guide for you to see without having to use lucent, but that's if you can follow it.

• Refined Spells - made lucent brighter, a bit quieter, and made descry have a slightly longer duration. Ward is basically instant. Has an indicator for its durability and regen.

  Note: descry reveals sigils in your vicinity. It will not reveal something you are not close to. Lucent is used to charge the sigils.

  Final note: you charge sigils, then you escape.

What might be added in the future:

• Random chance of buffs from sigils - thinking of adding buffs to charged sigils. Their duration wouldn't be for very long, nor would they be THAT useful, but still buff something.

  If you have any suggestions, go ahead and send them my way! And for fun, might even add a debuff from the sigils. Hardercore mode confirmed?

• More mobs - no just kidding. That's enough, I think. Probably.

Other than all that, the vision still remains the same! Darkness, blindness, loss, and confusion - but now with extra zhuzz and a slightly fairer system.

Every death and every sigil still matters, though. So don't give up! That's what it wants you to do :)

JxCB

Hello everyone! This is Graeme, from the one-man indie publisher 2 Left Thumbs.

I first came across Wasteland Bites this summer. Combining the high-intensity gameplay of a cooking sim, with monster management survival horror immediately struck a chord with me! After hounding CosmicDev a little bit to expand the concept, we're thrilled to show off the newest iteration of the game in time for the Steam Scream Fest IV!

CosmicDev has spent the last few months pushing the concept further, and reworking the demo. Each individual shift is now a little smaller, more varied and more intense - while also adding the larger progression system of attempting to cross the wasteland.

You'll need to earn enough money to buy gas, upgrade your van, and otherwise manage your food truck to survive the horrors abroad. Hopefully the fully redone tutorial will help ease you into the process.

The demo is already public! Please give it a try, and leave us a review. We're looking forward to hearing your feedback and working towards the most polished experience we can. Cheers!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3820720/Wasteland_Bites_Demo/

- Improved bot retreating behavior
- Added bot difficulties (still in-progress)
- Added different map sizes
- Tweaked skin color of blue team units to be more distinct from green units
- Fixed a bug where players could open up the menu while the defeat / victory screens were already up
- Fixed a bug where the building placement UI would reveal hidden units in the fog of war
- Fixed a bug where units repairing an in-progress town hall would not automatically go mine gold after the hall was finished
- Fixed a bug where bots wouldn't reinforce their armies correctly
- Fixed a bug where the game would crash when bots had maxed out population

One thing that comes up a lot in any sort of software engineering is the concept of automation: how can we take repetitive, error-prone tasks and automate them? This is where you get things like automated testing and automated build systems. It's also part of why the LLM nonsense known as "AI" has taken over billionaires' brains: the idea of replacing their "entitled workers" with slop is just too enticing, apparently. 

There's also the idea that in a lot of projects, especially programming and game development, that the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. (Sometimes it's 80 out of 100, sometimes it's an additional 80%, but either way it's a lot.) So combining these two ideas: what if we could get away with just doing that first 80% of the work? Or to put it another way, can we get away with half-assing automation? 

I would argue, yes. Especially in "solo" development, there are so many things to do, and only so much time to use, so you have to at least try and use your time wisely. I'm going to go through two examples of what I call semi-automation, one I did for Iron Village and one that I'm working on for project OY.

Some of the platform-specific work that isn't mentioned here: different sizes of images are required for the logo depending on the store.

To start, Iron Village. As you may know, Iron Village is available for a few different platforms: Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Android. (Technically Android is built on top of Linux, but it's different enough to require its own build. On the flip side, the Steam Deck just runs Linux, and can handle a lot of Windows programs as well, so that gets covered pretty easily.) Each of these platforms works differently, so the actual executable program needs to be built differently for each one. That's 4 different builds so far. 

Next though, there's three different stores: Steam, Itch, and Google Play. The fun thing is that each one gets built differently: the Steam version has its SDK plopped in so that you get achievements and cloud saves. Same deal for Google Play, it gets its own SDK that works slightly differently, although I haven't been able to get cloud saves to work. (I might need to tinker with the plug-in that allows Hoodie to use the Android SDK to get more debugging info, but it's been low priority.) The Itch version doesn't need any of that, so it builds without the extra stuff. Not every store supports every platform, but that gets us up to 8 different builds: Steam Windows, Steam MacOS, Steam Linux, Itch Windows, Itch MacOS, Itch Linux, Itch Android, Google Play Android. 

But wait! There's also a demo. Similar build system there, but there's a flag that gets set and some assets from the later levels are stripped out. So multiply the earlier number by 2 and you get... 16 different builds. There's no way to do that one at a time and keep your sanity, especially when you have to repeat the process for every update.

An expertly drawn diagram showing all of the build variants, as well as the scripts described below.

So ok, this has got to be automated, what are the easiest wins we can get? I was having issues running Godot from the command line, for some reason, but the export section allows you to "Build All", so that's what I did. It's a little annoying because there MacOS build on a Windows machine seems to be broken, but everything else works. This means the computer wastes time on making builds it doesn't need, but it saves us from having to click and wait 12 separate times, so it's still a win.

Before that, I do also have to manually update the output location for each version (that's how I have my output folders structured). That could be automated in the future, but it's a little trickier because you have to read through and modify an existing file, so that work gets indefinitely postponed. Making the folders is automated though, it's a pretty simple batch script.

The Lunar Chippy Games MacOS "Build Server"

So we have the folders set up, everything is built and in place, and... Oh right, MacOS. If Lunar Chippy Games were a larger company, we might have a separate build server (potentially on the "cloud"), probably running Linux (although MacOS could be an option if the MacOS build is also broken on Linux), and everything would be in one place. However, that requires more setup work, as well as money, so our semi-automation system will skip all of that. Instead, I open up my MacBook (shout out to Toast for letting us keep those when they laid off half the company at the start of the pandemic), pull all the commits, build x4, and paste the results in Google Drive. Is this efficient? No. But it's a harder thing to automate, and it's only 4 builds, so it's not worth the effort to automate it. 

Once everything's made it onto my desktop, and I've pasted those 4 builds into their folders the earlier script created, we're ready for the next step: uploading them to the stores. Steam comes first, since it's the biggest platform; 6 of the builds are heading there. It is possible to just upload builds through the online dashboard website, but there are limits to what it can handle, and they heavily encourage you to use their Steamworks SDK as well. It's also setup so that you make a config file describing which files are which, and then run commands that look at those config files and do the uploading - basically forcing you to automate things anyway. The only extra step I needed to add was a script copying the builds from my releases folder to the folder where the SDK reads from. Then it's just copying and pasting one command (well, a few commands chained together into one), wait a couple minutes, and done! 

Itch is still manual uploads for each build. It also has a separate command line interface available, and honestly it's probably worth investigating. That's just my own fault for being lazy. (In some ways you could just call semi-automation "justifiable laziness", haha.) Google Play is just two builds, and if there is a command line interface, it's not at all obvious. 

Overall then, this turns a painful highly error-prone process into a slightly painful less error-prone one, with relatively little effort. There's still some low hanging fruit (zipping up and sending itch uploads, mainly), but anything else connecting those steps is going to take quite a bit more effort. It also means you understand the process better, and can more easily pick up on issues: if something goes wrong, just look at the last task you ran, rather than digging through a full confusing pipeline to find the one issue. Especially in the context of "solo" game development, I think that it's the sweet spot.

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Intermission: I'm partway through writing this dev diary, and it looks like it's gone on way longer than I thought it would, oops. I did promise to talk about an example from Project OY, so instead of going back up and deleting that promise, I'm going to follow through and make it way too long.

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Probably the most revealing teaser for Project OY yet. Very much a work in progress of course.

Now, project OY. Despite the use of the Z dimension in this game, I'm still making and using pixel art. To animate something in pixel art, a common method is a spritesheet: basically draw every individual frame, line them up in one image, and then in the game engine specify which section is which frame. Just like with the Iron Village builds though, we've got some multiplication coming in. For people/characters in the game, they can be drawn in six different directions: the diagonals, straight forwards, and straight back. Right now, since I'm just getting the very basic gameplay framed out, there's only two animations with four frames each. That's still 48 different sprites that need to be sliced out of the sprite sheet and organized into separate animations.

The spritesheet in question, a 6x8 grid of people in various states

I did try a plugin someone else made for importing images directly from Aseprite (the program I use for making pixel art), but it didn't quite meet my requirements and had a few bugs. After sinking a lot of time into trying to modify it, I realized my best option would be to pull back and make something myself. Sure it won't be as powerful as the existing tools, but it doesn't need to be. Instead of automatically reading from Aseprite file, I can export the spritesheet (one extra manual step), and write a much simpler plug-in up to slice up and organize it.

That's in progress right now, if people are interested I could probably generalize the logic and release the plugin. Either way though, it's a fun little sidequest to work on.

Here's another one!

• Fixed unpickable tokens in 2 rooms

• Fixed a room editor issue that caused a crash

• Fixed unpickable goblet in Dracula 2

• Fixed some translation errors

• Saves in Space 3 and Dracula 3 might be deleted after this update. We are super sorry if that happend to you! :(

Thanks again, and happy escaping! 🗝️

Pine team

Next UPDATE IS LIVE! 😊

🔹 The cursor no longer appears on the screen at strange moments (e.g. after starting the game) 🖱️
🔹 NPCs no longer appear in the air - from now on, they walk calmly on the ground 🦋
🔹 Chainsaw added to two shops - No more problems with the Japanese House 🪚
🔹 Colliders in vehicles improved - it used to happen that another vehicle would drive through us. Never again! 🚗💨
🔹 Hammer added next to the barn 🔨
🔹 Interface improvements 🖥️🧩

⚠️❗️ Remember - House Builder 2 is in Early Access. Gameplay errors can happen! Therefore, we look forward to your feedback. Most bugs are being fixed thanks to your reports.We kindly ask for your understanding. In addition, new solutions are also being introduced thanks to you – that's why we read every single one of your ideas! ❗️⚠️

If you would like to ❤️ support us ❤️, please share your opinion about the game with other players! Just go to the shop:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2827960/House_Builder_2/
Scroll down a little, and you should find the option. Your positive feedback gives us strength!

Have Fun! 🤗
Team House Builder 2

• Removed Experimental mode, it was causing more troubles than it solved.
  
• Added animated NPCs in Bank and Clothing locations.
  
• Balanced Workaholic and Hoarder Roles.
  
• Mayor Edgar now makes feeding Crows free, but the crows get angry if you don't feed them.
  
• Attribute costs for all works has been decreased.
  
• End-Score for Work Level has been decreased.
  
• End-Score for Educations has been decreased.
  
• End-Score for Role Quests has been decreased.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause crashes if multiple games were played in a row.
  
• Stopped burglars from stealing your Cardboard Bed and Plastic Chair.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Adventurer could have two quests that blocked him from completing either one.
  
• Some Role states were not loading correctly, this has been fixed.
  
• Fixed "For a Biblical Flood" achievement so it completes properly.
  
• Fixed an inventory bug where you couldn't clean dirty potatoes if your inventory was full.
  
• Fixed an inventory bug where you couldn't remove an item if your inventory was full.
  
• Fixed a bug where buying two fishing poles and then selling one would not allow you to fish using the remaining one.
  
• Emojis and popping in players no longer block clicks.
  
• Rent no longer constantly increases, this was a feature we added last year and everybody forgot it was there...

//bug fixes
- Godly Vessel Bosshunter achievement: Killing the Godly Vessel boss wasn't dropping the achievement.
- Castle Conquest: Killing the Queen would cause a crash.

Hi everyone!
It’s been a while since the last update, and I’ve been working hard improving Hunkfrat to make the core gameplay feel tighter and more satisfying.
Here’s what’s new since the last version:

---

The weapon system has been completely restructured to support multiple weapons.
Previously, the player could only use a single gun, which obviously isn’t ideal for an FPS.
Now, the system dynamically handles different weapon types, animations, and unique shooting/reloading logic.

This update lays the foundation for more variety and scalability in future builds.

---

To make the game more content-rich, I’ve added three new weapons to the game:

• Assault Rifle – reliable, balanced, and perfect for mid-range combat.

• Shotgun – powerful, close-range weapon for clearing tight spaces.

• Knife – a quick melee option for finishing off enemies up close.

Each weapon will support the planned upgrade and attachment system, which I'll be expanding further in the upcoming updates.

---

A lot of internal code has been simplified and optimized for better performance and stability.
This cleanup makes future development much easier and reduces potential bugs down the line.

---

In the next phases, I’ll be focusing on:

• Expanding the Weapon Upgrade System,

• Reformatting the Quest System to fit a linear First Person Shooter better.

• Building the rest of the campaign levels and story

• And getting closer to the final release of Hunkfrat.

If you’d like to learn more about:

• How the new weapon system looks like,

• Various informations about the game,

• And when it’s planned to release...

---

Thanks for reading and supporting the project. it really means a lot to me 😇.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to add Hunkfrat to your Steam wishlist and join our Discord community for future updates and sneak peeks.

Stay tuned, more is on the way!

Hey Spankrs!

tl;dr

• We sent out the first Milestone 20 Steam key giveaway

• We're nearly at Milestone 2 already

• The games Soundtrack is being released on Spotify and Steam for free (dates and links below)

---

You did it! You hit the first milestone a week ago at 50 reviews, and we sent out the 20 keys to the lucky winners! Not only that, but we're basically at the second milestone already! Be ready for a post with a survey soon to let you guys design a fancy new SpankStick set.

Here's a reminder of our milestone ladder!

50 Reviews:

At 50 reviews we will do a key giveaway! Spread the love of secrets, the love of SPANKING!

At 100 Reviews we will have a poll for a new SPANK STICK set! A custom design, chosen by YOU!

At 150 reviews, we will create MORE custom content for you! This time, you guys can decide! More Spank Stick pieces? A new song? More backgrounds to choose from for the HQ? It's up to YOU!

If we reach 200 reviews, we will post a free Content Update! New levels, new lore, new.... SEEEEECREEEETSSSS!

---

We've heard you, you love GlitchSPANKR's music! So we're releasing it ALL!

So there are two albums. Volume 1 has the most popular songs, and all the songs with vocals. Volume 2 has all the ambient tracks and instrumentals. Spunk and I have favorites in both, but that doesn't matter because they are both FREE! You'll be able to listen on Spotify or download the OSTs on Steam directly.

We also have some of them on YouTube already, but we didn't post them all because there's like 50 of them.

YouTube Songs: Cool Music on YT

The official release is October 31st at 10:00 AM, EST. It looks like you can even pre-save the albums on Spotify here:
Vol. 1: Vol. 1 Presave
Vol. 2: Vol. 2 Presave

There might even be some special songs added to the Steam OST! We'd add it to Spotify, but we can't actually add more songs after the initial upload.

---

If you just want to hang out, or maybe follow along with that new secret ARG that was recently added, we'd love for you to join the Discord!

TheClassifiedX (developers): TCX Discord
Black Lantern Collective (publishers): BLC Discord

Aside from that, thanks to everyone who's submitted bug reports or feedback. I believe I've fixed everything I've seen, and polished up any ideas that were feasible. But don't hesitate to post, I want to do my best to make the game even better!

Also, please share the game with your friends, the more people who play, the better the odds we can make a sequel or DLC! We might even be able to port to consoles soon!


Thanks again everyone,
Mahelyk (Kyle Frost)