Hey Little Chefs,

A little bit of optimization, small updates, and a little expansion on the tutorial in this update.

• Updated boing bones, characters had more than they needed

• Updated Setting/Pause menu - time stop seemed to be causeing some problems. Time still stops everywhere that is necessary but it shouldn't spike the game now. (you may see some things still moving like Alan hopping, smoke coming out of the cooking stations - but be assured that time is actually not moving if you are in this menu)

• Added a force to use TAB button (or controller version) to open the menu

• Added Miso soup to tutorial to help teach about the preparation stations and how prep ingredients work

• Updated to tutorial! - added a force to use TAB button (or controller version) to open the menu. Added Miso soup to tutorial

• Tighter hit boxes on the wood

• Tighter hit boxes on little buddies so you can pick up items from them without (or at least with limited) picking up of other nearby items

• Trash indicator added to Tool Tip

• Updated dash so that you can do it a bit more frequently

• Moved some Tool Tips to fit better on Steam Deck

• Changes how the Regular's story is diplayed in the book - arrows to cycle to the different lines so that the text could be bigger

• Fixed the freezer allowing you to put in multiple food mush mixes in to make meals

• Small indicator now when there is something in the Freezer

• Cloud saving update

We are so very sorry to our players in China. We set up the game to detect the language on the players computer, and this apparently broke everything for our folks in China. We are incredible sorry about this issue and we hope you give us another chance.

If any of these don't seem fixed to you, or you are experiencing other issues, please keep letting us know!

As always, we appreciate you!
Axie & Leaf

This season's Fight Pass features a new skin for Queen Cobra - "Vindictive Capitalist"! You'll also find a new universal stance "Clockwork Plaything" and a universal victory pose "Promised Reward"!

Hello everyone,

I’m Raswan Orizka, the Art Director, and I'm with Yan, the Lead Artist from GameChanger Studio. In today’s DevLog, we will highlight our visual development process for 1998: The Toll Keeper Story: discussing a fictional world that is also very close to our real-life counterpart.

In our previous games, we were more focused on visual elements with dark fantasy themes, where we took elements like creatures and magic from outside our reality. In this project, we've done a visual approach to take people closer to the daily lives of the real world, taking their anxieties, nostalgia, and symbolism to make it feel like an almost forgotten memory.

Initially, our visual idea for the story and gameplay was much simpler. We aimed for a more cartoonish, easy-to-digest art style with just a hint of eeriness that complemented a gameplay-focused experience. We drew strong inspiration from games like My Child Lebensborn, which has a uniquely simple yet dark visual style. To make the art style reflect the game's time period, we were careful with our colors and textures. We incorporated a halftone dot pattern, a sepia color overlay reminiscent of old, faded magazines, and a subtle yellow tint that resembles aged photographs and films.

After a bit of consideration, we felt some part of the early art style was too cartoonish for the game's themes, so we did a visual overhaul to reflect the tone and themes of the game better. We went through numerous iterations of character and cutscene art styles, reworking many assets and even redesigning some characters entirely, like making the style a bit realistic.

Some visual experiments we did involved making illustrations that are metaphors and satires, as a criticism of the world’s social and political condition. We turned them into a medium for the people of Janapa to express their aspirations. These visuals also help to visualize various scenarios that are happening, like conflicts between characters and the place they’re living in. We’re also using scrapbooks filled with diaries, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos to express valuable memories of the characters, especially the main character Dewi, who is putting her story inside her diary book.

We’re also highlighting the element of hatchings in all of our designs to give the impression of a rough and dishevelled vibe. This helps contrast visually the story of the struggling and anxious common people in the middle of an economic crisis and the tension between Janapan citizens and their government.

Some of the challenges we aimed for were to make the game as true to its time period as possible for both the characters and cutscenes, ensuring everything is authentic. We conducted research and cross-checking, paying close attention to historical details and adding nostalgic objects that would resonate with people who lived through that time period. For the cutscenes, there was an extra layer of difficulty in conveying a dark and tense atmosphere. We tried to show that each character’s emotions and gestures shine through by playing with camera angles and mainly the lighting intensity to make the event in the cutscene more dramatic.

Another highlight of the visual overhaul is that Dewi's hairstyle is directly inspired from the 'dead mom' anime meme, which really is our biggest foreshadowing that things are not going to end well for her.

Regarding relatability: At first, her design was extremely plain to make her more relatable to the everyday struggles of a pregnant woman without the means to support her baby, always tired and too busy to care for herself. We made her look somewhat disheveled. Eventually, we changed this to make her more polished and conventionally pretty when she’s pregnant.

And that’s how we visualized the final art style for 1998: The Toll Keeper Story. There are some parts of the process we really enjoyed when we developed the visuals.

Yan’s favourite part was getting the idea of the game from our Game Director, Riris Marpaung, and translating that into visuals on paper for the first few concept arts of the game. It was an interesting and new experience to explore various art styles and concepts from the ground up. Other than that, she really enjoyed drawing some promotional arts and being free to explore characters like Heru and Sinta through illustration!

As for Raswan, He really did enjoy making concepts for some parts of the end-of-day cutscenes and the final ending cutscene, where the heavy emotional feelings of the story need to be conveyed visually. For example, sketching the expression & gesture of Heru and Dewi having a debate with the background of cracked glass to convey the beginning of a shattering family because of differing priorities between a husband and a wife, and also the fragile struggle to build a family.

That wraps up our journey into visualizing the world of 1998: The Toll Keeper Story. We poured a lot of thought and heart into every line, texture, and shadow to bring this "forgotten memory" to life. Thank you so much for reading this devlog.

Hey Survivor!

A new hotfix has been released to fix issues occurring in certain regions and countries.

Please make sure to update your game before playing.

Build ID: 20619305

If the game doesn’t update automatically, try verifying the integrity of your game files.

This hotfix updates the previous Pre-release version to the live version.

There’s now no difference between the Pre-release and Live (None) builds, so please play on the Live (None) version.

Every Steam review from you means a lot to our dev team.

With your support, we’ll keep working to make MIMESIS more stable and fun!

• Fixed an issue that allowed players to skip the 元くん challenge in びぜん. The challenge is now also available in the challenge history for players who were previously able to skip it.

• Fixed missing hints for two objectives in the だいせん町 quest.

Bug Fix

• Halloween node had blackscreen bug on the second battle.

Thank you to Tecnic for finding the bug and reporting it on the Akumi Wars Discord.
Join the Akumi Wars Discord to stay up to date on our projects!

-Akumi Wars Team

Previous Event Post:
"If you missed last years Halloween event, now's your chance to grab the powerful seasonal rewards again. They'll be up a limited time only.

The Halloween node can be found in the first Zone! It's the same rewards from 2024 but I'll try to add more skins before the end of the year. Maybe holding a voting poll or something. I'm in the middle of moving so things are a bit chaotic at the moment. Akumi Mobile is also set to release before the end of the year so stay tuned for that!"

Good evening Commanders, we just released Dev. Build 10. Thanks to everyone for the help in testing and trying out the new features on the preview branch.

As some of you may already know, this build not only introduces many new features but also marks an important milestone for our planned Multiplayer release.

- Mortar Turret. Long-range weapon that splits into multiple rockets when close to the target.

- Stable-pivot rotator. Rotator module with a rotating core that enables new designs

- Biominers. When a Bioforge is completed, a swarm of biominers will damage nearby structures and asteroids to generate resources. (WIP)

- 3-to-2 Extender. Converts a three-cube-wide platform into a two-cube-wide section.

- Reduced Crew cost across all armors by 50%.

- Engines now also provide a percentage of their power to all directions.

- Debuted the Training Shipyard map for the new training experience.

- Softened nebula and dust cloud colors and refreshed dust and radiation cloud visualizers to improve battlefield readability.

- Introduced a Training game mode with very easy difficulty, and custom settings to ease new commanders into the controls.

- Increased ray weapons internal hit buffer to reduce cases of ion weapons not shooting through allied shields.

- Removed proximity warp disruptor fields from large asteroids.

- Fighters and corvettes now execute flyby attacks more reliably, including against derelicts, thanks to adjusted disengage behaviour.

- Wreck resources are retained after loading a save.

- When the "Wrecks Contain Research" setting is enabled, salvageable wrecks can contain the research required to construct that module or ship.

- New Starting Resources: "Insane" (starts with 4000 resources).

- Objectives that award resources now have a "Collect Reward" button instead of auto-collecting.

- Research is slightly faster at higher Game Speed settings.

- Concussion Missiles moved to Tier 2.

- Enemy Waves unlock upgrades faster, increasing difficulty especially at higher settings.

- Defense Shields recharge speed reduced by 30%.

- Challenges and wave modes tuned to match intended income and progression.

- Healer drones return to Repair Bay when it is powered off.

- Ray weapons no longer cause friendly fire.

- Hyperspace: more accurate blockage checks.

- Pirate frigates equipped with Hull Rockets.

- Light ships attack behaviour tweaked for a higher hit chance.

- Added Portuguese, German, and French languages.

- Auto-Save option added with a customizable interval.

- The overlay toggle now controls sensor and cloud range bubbles directly.

- Save and load flows provide clearer confirmation and error messaging, and returning to the main menu no longer resumes gameplay.

- Names and keybind display options cycle through four distinct states.

- Added secondary cargo bar in selection and deck panels.

- Wave counters now update after unit deaths.

- Auto-hide side panels (left/right) with hover-to-reveal; toggle available in UI settings.

- Added Idle Camera: subtle camera idle movement after a few seconds of inactivity.

- Info panel spacing and objective button layout improved; long texts now truncate correctly.

- Radiation status effect added with a new VFX.

- Nebulae and Dust Clouds are now shown on the Tactical Interface as spheres, to better highlight their size and position.

- Added new unit responses for dust and radiation clouds, rally interactions, cargo deliveries, trade messages, and support calls.

- Music volume remains stable when leaving scenes, eliminating brief spikes.

- Visibility system optimizations reduce CPU usage on idle units.

- Effects processing moved to a secondary background thread.

- Deferred Call Scheduler introduced to spread heavy tasks across ticks.

- Call-for-help has a smaller impact on combat performance by distributing calls over time.

- Reduced memory footprint across weapon, SFX, and VFX systems.

- Derelict explosions now use batched particles for steadier visuals.

- Fixed rare save/load issues that could corrupt data or break compatibility with older saves.

- Fixed an issue that made it harder than intended to click on rotator commands.

- Fixed an issue that caused some asteroids to not be selectable.

- Fixed incorrect display of Fusion and Power module buff lines.

- Reduced audio spam by fixing excessive audio clips emitted by some projectiles.

- Proximity Fields no longer prevent warp from inside; destination orientation is always horizontal.

- Control groups stability improvements; fixed cases where units were sometimes lost from control groups.

- Enemy units may stop their attack behaviour while searching for a new target.

- The new Inline-Rotator module may initialize with a wrong initial rotation.

- Biominers are still work in progress, there may be some visual issues.

- When playing on "Locus", the Rally point may have an incorrect rotation.

Since the start of the custom skin system, we had been using 1k textures for our creatures. Due to some troubleshooting during that process as we continued to update, I started making some of the skins in 2k in order for them to function as intended in-game. Since then, some are in 1k, some are in 2k. Now I’ve been tasked with giving everyone a 2k upgrade. During this resolution upgrade, I'm also combing through these skins and giving a few of them a subtle cleanup. Below are some examples. Hopefully the older skins will look on par with the more recent ones.

I gave the team two months of reprieve from having to write in any of these and you can see why Fred is the GoodNoodle™ of the team. This officially makes my entry director’s commentary and I don’t have to write a saga.

We’re going to start strong with bugs. I’ve been partaking in bug hunts this month that make me want to put my head in a bag of holding and scream until I’m dead or I wake up God. It has not been fun and it’s not even visually interesting so there’s no heehaws to be found unless you count the allosaurus (again). Are you starting to notice a pattern? If an animal ever deserved to be resurrected just to go extinct again, it would be allosaurus. Why does its foot shake? Why does it slightly glow? The Gods remain ignorant or indifferent to our pleas.

The UI is nearing completion with only a few screens and pop-ups remaining. After that, there may be a few additional tweaks to allow a bit more of a personal customization for the display but the theme is largely there with a secret or two already buried in it. After that comes all the additional information like hints and tutorials.

As testing builds have gone on this month, a lot of animal colorization options have been temporarily reset before being drastically reduced. The reduced color options are so that we can expand dinosaur patterns to have varying palettes. This will allow us an overall greater freedom for color choice that stays within an intended artistic vision without letting players run around as giant rainbow monsters.

(There is an option intended for player servers to allow all palette colors \[or possibly a color wheel] so you can visually do whatever you want. If I can’t see it, it can’t hurt me.)

Pteranodon flight stats were drastically changed this month as well with all the aerial stamina requirements lowered across the board. Pteranodon carries its momentum exceptionally longer in flight than it did previously as well. There’s one more turn functionality for its flight to keep it nimble, but otherwise flight is done and it's time to give it some terrestrial enhancements. Don’t forget, when we’re done with it this animal is going to have a violent ground game.

The animation team has leaned fully into the camarasaurus. This sentence is just to pad the paragraph since I’ll let the attached media for the sauropod speak for itself. Bryan is putting the finishing touches on the quetzalcoatlus rig, which now has dimorphism in the crest for females and an additional edit to the juvenile. After that, he’s on to oviraptor locomotion so it can be plugged up alongside baryonyx, kentrosaurus, and austroraptor. The animation team will remain with our sauropod until its complete, barring an occasional switch over to any austroraptor cleanup that may be needed during its testing.

That being said, austroraptor, kentrosaurus, and baryonyx have had their basic functionality, locomotion, and lifecycles put in. I know some of the images are already floating around the community, but I’ll get some more out there in Phase Three this week. The three of these animals have needlessly cute juvenile morphs that may make a player stay their hand for a moment before trying to kill them, so use this to your advantage when the time comes.

Since last month the sound team has burned through the austroraptor, with only a few juvenile calls left before its time for kentrosaurus. The kentrosaurus’s core vocalizations have been done, so this is just like the austroraptor from last month where they can smoothly move from one dinosaur to the next that has a core vocal palette prepared. In the interim, Will is tackling some foley audio for the large animals before we can change the way footstep audio is handled (Nothing too crazy here. Just having footstep audio dynamically change based on weight).

A myriad of other balance/bug changes have found their way in. In no particular order, just going to throw out some mentionables:

Tyrannosaurus changes went well with only one particular spot in the early juvenile life stage that was allowing tyrannosaurus to hit a little harder than intended. There’s a little more to shore up on making his crush initiate a spar, but he can no longer just pin and kill things in its own weight class (and paleo calls work).

Maiasaura thirst decay has been reduced. This animal will be receiving a bit more attention for CC on its attacks and how easily it can stagger/knockdown an enemy when defending itself, including a small grace amount on the standing shove. Maia also has a small hidden passive most everyone doesn’t know about that will also be getting a minor boost in performance to make sure this is truly known as the good mother lizard.

Omniraptor’s latch decay has been reduced to more effectively hang on larger creatures for longer.

Beipiaosaurus and herrerasaurus oxygen decay has been greatly reduced.

More of the larger animals have received growth curve updates so they have more overlap with animals of smaller sizes instead of linearly outpacing them almost immediately. As stated in the last blog, the times for growth have been slightly shortened as well and put on the end of these animal’s lives so that they spend more time in the elder phase.

Jace has been hard at work on Gateway, expanding the outposts with the new buildings I spoke about last month. Gabriel has been supplying him with shells of locations you’ve seen in the GUTS locales, including some that will be too large for the outposts you’ve seen. You can also expect a new sanctuary near the highlands soon.

I leave you with media, good tithings, and an update to the HordeTesting branch. See you on the servers and Happy Halloween ya filthy animals.