Hi everyone, ⋆˙⟡

We’ve been hard at work polishing ASCEND and learning so much along the way. We’re a small, no-budget indie team who built this game out of love, and we’re honestly so proud of how far it’s come. Thank you so much for the patience, feedback, and support that helped us able to focus on our priorities for bugfixing.

This update fixes a lot of the issues you’ve been reporting - especially around controller navigation, puzzle stability, and performance. Annnnnnd, we've added a few Halloween surprises to discover too 👀.

Oh, and one more thing… Ascend has been nominated for Best Indie Game Made in The North 2025! 🏆WAHHHHH! ⋆⭒˚.⋆

You can support us by voting here 👉Vote for Ascend
Every vote means the world to us! And we’re truly here to stay. 💫

• Pumpkins have appeared throughout the Fire Level!

  • Collect them as you play. Every 5 pumpkins triggers a surprise.

  • Gather 20 pumpkins and press P to unlock something very special.

• A Halloween-themed Tarot Card is hidden somewhere in the level. Can you find it?

• The Starweaver was lingering on screen when interacting with the Gaia statue.

• Pass on the twilight crystal tutorials.

• Gotten rid of the VFX when you pick up the flowers.

• Text on tutorials should be bigger.

• Flowers have had a pass to show up correctly when picked up.

• Made the pressure plates go down when you step on the reset or push the blocks on the puzzle ones.

• Added noise in for the reset button on the Aries puzzle.

• Pass on Aries puzzle for sound and controller.

• Dialogue pass.

• Messaging on the Taurus quest is better.

• Re-arranged the area to now include pickables.
  Re-arranged the area to now show where you put the Yaks.

• Dialogue pass.

• It says "that’s not right" when you add the telescope lens to the telescope. Adjusted. 💅🏼

• Reminder to switch to daytime if you haven’t done so yet in the Leo puzzle or delete the riddle.

• Added audio messaging of the sun beam powering down when you exit daytime, while the sun beam is active.

• 'Sparking' particle effect was not appearing when in daytime, and sunbeam glass has been added.

• Pass on the Leo puzzle from an audio perspective.

• Terrain pass on the platforming area for the moon fragment.

• The crab claw moved, and platforming is now needed to find it.

• The camera added when the crab claw let's go of the moon ball.

• Moons have been adjusted when you pick them up.

• Dialogue pass.

• Cleaned up of the waterfalls that disappear after activating the 3rd Scorpio pressure pad.

• Switched the switches around for raising and lowering the water.

• Riddles are now up to date on the Scorpio puzzles and provide better support on what you're meant to be doing.

• The panic attack scene has been looked at. Adjusted the comic scene and 3D scene.

• Dialogue pass.

• Add in breaking building bits to the entrance.

• Dialogue pass.

• There were multiple areas where Aurora could go beneath the snow during the climbing gorge.

• There was no dialogue on the first lines as Aurora approaches the Aquarius puzzle.

• The player was able to get underneath the split path area.

• Waterfall VFX near the 1st pressure plate pad is too high.

• Lighting Pass on the split path area.

• Added riddle prompts to UIWidgets so they appear/show during cinematics correctly.

• There are occasions where the player can sometimes not skip a cutscene. Fixed. 💅🏼

• Pass on the panic attack scene.

• The interact button stays when talking to Gaia.

• If the player picks up the Moon Ball from the grove first, it doesn't update the mission. Fixed. 💅🏼

• Added all scrolls to the game.

• Added in all books related to the Starsigns.

• The main menu widget didn't stretch on the screen.

• Music didn't play on the splash screen.

We’re still a small team doing our best with what we have, no external funding, just doing what we love, persistence (as much as we can handle!), and the belief that ASCEND can keep growing into something truly special. We’re aiming to add more content before the end of the year.

Come hang out, share your ideas, and show off your discoveries in our Discord:

We’re honoured that Ascend has been nominated for Best Indie Game Made in The North 2025!

🗳️ Vote here: Vote for Ascend
🗓️ Voting closes: 10th November 2025
🏅 Winner announced: GaMaYo WX – 13th November 2025

Thank you for believing in us and for being part of this journey!!

Thanks, Nareice

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A small but important update is out, aimed at improving stability and fixing bugs.

• Fixed a bug where part of the hand was not visible

• Added colliders for some objects on the base

• Map updated for accurate placement of substations

• Updated instructions when purchasing items in the shop

• Fixed a bug where walking sounds played even when standing still

• Changed the hint requiring you to start the generator

• Mines reworked — now they are visible from a distance

• Added purchase sounds and printer sounds

• Spider damage reduced by 60%

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Work is still ongoing to fix the bug where some models are missing textures.

If you find a bug or have suggestions, please let us know!
Thank you for your support 💬

Bao Boi now supports controllers for both gameplay and full menu navigation.

You can play start to finish using your gamepad — or keep using keyboard and mouse if you prefer.

Thank you for playing Bao Boi!

Timestamp: 07-26-14 // Location: Maintenance // Speaker: Unknown

"They've overrun the ship... Can't hold out much longer... I found some things the others could use... GET OFF OF THE SHIP!" // Transmission ends.

Maintenance schedule initiated, incoming parameter improvements imminent. Thank you all for your continued support of Moros Protocol! The devs have been hard at work squashing bugs and making improvements to the game, and now it's time to get excited for MORE. We're revealing our roadmap for additional content coming to the game right now, starting in November with run modifiers and more to come in December 2025 and into 2026. We're grateful to all of you for playing and hope you enjoy the new content coming.

But that's not all for today! As a little treat and a thank you we've added a whole host of community items to Steam for you to enjoy including backgrounds, profile images and profile image borders. You can find all of them in the points shop on Steam now ➡️ https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop/app/1605250

Stay up to date with Moros Protocol by following us on X and joining our Discord Community for the latest updates and to connect with your fellow Orpheans.

See you in the stars 🌠

- Pixel Reign 🚀

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1605250/Moros_Protocol/

We're shocked and grateful and humbled by the community response to Elemental: Reforged. In the first week since Beta 1 hit Early Access, we’ve hit wishlist numbers and sales approximately 6X higher than our most optimistic projections. The game is already in the top 1000 overall wishlists.

When we started working on this a few years ago, we were just really doing this for ourselves. A kind of therapy :). So this has all been overwhelming in a good way.

Your support means I get to steal er borrow er assign more engineers and artists to the effort.

So let’s talk about the exciting world of bug fixing.

With Beta 1 now in players' hands, this week has been all about stability and polish. Our primary focus areas have been:

We've been systematically hunting down and eliminating memory leaks and various bugs that emerged during early testing. One particularly interesting challenge we've encountered is dealing with race conditions that never manifested on older hardware. Modern systems are so much faster than the machines we originally developed for that timing-dependent issues which were effectively "hidden" by slower processors are now surfacing. It's a fascinating reminder that performance improvements can sometimes reveal bugs that were always there—just waiting for the hardware to catch up.

Before Beta 1, we made great strides in transitioning the game away from hard-coded strings to proper string tables. This week, we've continued that work with a critical focus: variable ordering for different languages.

Here's the challenge: In English, you might see:

"You have hit the bandit for 5 damage and taken 3 in return."

But in other languages, the natural word order might require those numbers (5 and 3) to appear in completely different positions within the sentence. We need a robust system that allows translators to reorder variables while maintaining grammatical correctness in each language. Getting this right is critical for the game's long-term success and ensuring players around the world have an authentic, high-quality experience.

One of our major ongoing initiatives is modernizing the game's input systems. Currently, too many actions require mouse clicks on specific buttons and UI elements. We're committed to ensuring that players can:

- Navigate and control everything via keyboard
- Use game controllers for full gameplay
- Avoid being forced into mouse-driven interactions

This is a substantial undertaking and will be an ongoing challenge, but it's essential for accessibility and player comfort. We want Elemental Reforged to be playable the way *you* want to play it.

The original Elemental was the first game we made to support the detailed breakdowns of stats in tooltips. Internally we call them “Chicks” (named after Tom Chick, a well respected journalist, writer and thought leader). We’re expanding on this now that we have more resolution to work on.

We also plan to add tooltiips within tooltips as well as some sort of Shafer button (both concepts popularized and/or invented by Jon Shafer, the designer of Civilization V and Galactic Civilizations III). The Shafer button is pretty common in games now where the Turn button leads the player to whatever still needs your attention. Our plan is to eventually get that in here but with the addition that you can hold down say the SHIFT key and force it to the next turn. Note if you look at the screenshot we have a bug. Can you spot it?

Thanks to the overwhelming interest in the game, we've been able to bring additional artists onto the project! This means we can accelerate visual improvements and polish.

We want to hear from you: What are the top 3 things you'd like to see visually improved in Elemental Reforged? Please share your thoughts in the comments below. Your feedback directly influences our priorities.

We also have added around 200+ new quests and Goodie huts and a begun bringing back lots of author Dave Stern’s writing back into the game which was lost due to having to reduce the number of quests for War of Magic (and Fallen Enchantress had even fewer quests than WOM). We also restored some of the units that were removed before War of Magic shipped (and never appeared in Fallen Enchantress) so you’ll be seeing those.

We also began adding in the quests from Sorcerer King which were written by author Chris Bucholz, and amazing writer.

We haven’t really started on the AI overhaul yet, but we did a few things to make them a bit tougher.

The Champions are back on the map! As you gain fame, you can recruit them. You still will get champions offering to join you but it’s far less frequent. Instead, most champions will be the ones you find on the map and win them over to join you.

The game already runs pretty well. After all, it was originally made when computers were very slow. But there is always room for cleaning up code. Hopefully it’s noticeable. However, loading the game will, for now, take longer as adding hundreds of new quests and more units and more points of interest means loading up the XML will take longer. We’re working on that.

 

One thing that we have seen is that the original intention of Early Access has been ruined, imo, by studios using it as a late development demo or marketing effort rather than the original idea which was to bring players on the journey of development, warts and all. Which is a real shame. Thankfully, most people do realize that these are early betas and intended a such. With finite development resources, the point is to work with the fans to determine where those resources go and that’s where Early Access goes.

Nevertheless, we also need to recognize the reality that many, if not most, gamers have a limited tolerance for bugs and instability. Therefore, we are going to create a Preview Branch (“Even buggier”) branch that shows off a lot of new features and improvements that might be even buggier than the main branch. These builds still go through QA so they’re not untested. But they will have things in them that we are trying out that might prove to have been dumb ideas and they will have more bugs than the main version.

For example, if we’re adding 200+ quests, we have obviously not tested them all yet. They should work, but a treasure might not show up or an icon might be missing. But through it, we’ll find out what kinds of quests players tend to like more and would like more of.

I was asked what the long-term plan is for this game. My answer is that the plan is to keep actively working on this game for as long as there’s a reasonable number of people playing it, which I suspect will be many years.

I’d like to keep early access short. Get the bugs out. Clean things up. Polish. Balance. Make the AI better. Etc. I don’t know how long that will take, the game is pretty buggy. But once that’s done, you put it out there and then we keep doing updates for the next several years. That’s the plan!

The Halloween season is here, and so is madness! Face a surreal, nightmare-fueled Dungeon where the only way out is up. Each floor brings stranger sights, deadlier foes, and rewards for those brave enough to climb higher.

Will you reach the top before the night consumes you? Dare to take on the Halloween Rampage and see what horrors—and treasures—await above the clouds!

Jane’s been asked to shoot a TV program called “Cooking Strike” to show off her incredible cooking skills, and she needs to complete five levels in a row to make sure she’s ready!

While you complete the levels to get ready for the show, the TV crew will bring some more professional equipment.

If you fail a level, your progress will be reset and you’ll have to start from the beginning!
You can try as many times as you want. The TV show’s paying for the food, so you won’t be using yours up.

When you finish the fifth level you’ll receive a big reward that includes booster parts, Coins, Rubies, and blog points!



If you don’t complete all the levels before the event ends, don’t worry. You aren’t losing anything, and there’ll always be another TV program!

Hi all!!

A while back I optimized the game to be of a smaller download size, which meant that it needed a little bit more RAM space (about 6GB or so), but since then, I realized that many people can't play the game if they had an 8GB RAM setup. So I've decided to go back to have a bigger download size, and hopefully this can help.

I will also be continuing to find ways to potentially optimize for both GPU and CPU (the recent potato mode being one example) but this is a solution that I have for the moment.

0.1.14

New

- blind box secret item

- alchemy books

Fix

- fixed lumi bio page cursed layout after max friendship

- fixed lamp position

Polish

- swapped ida and daisy plush positions

- bookshelf ui

Today marks a historic milestone for Land of the Valiant.
The foundation of Evolving Intelligence is complete — a system that allows NPCs to think, learn, and grow with every player interaction.

Each question, each conversation, and each choice made by the players helps shape the knowledge and behavior of the world itself.
No two interactions are ever the same — every villager, craftsman, and guardian may now see the world through their own evolving perspective.

This is not a scripted world anymore.
It’s a living, breathing realm — one that learns from you.

🧩 This system is now live and being tested by our closed testers.
🔥 It marks the beginning of the AI age within Land of the Valiant.

• Fixed issue where offline gains were computed incorrectly

• Still in progress: 'city' map, that will replace the current business grid. Coming soon!