Quick and a little messy this week, but still packed with good stuff.
🚦Refund Radar/ Dev Danger Watch
Not quite ready to slap a color on it (heyo, Dev Danger Watch™), but I’m giving serious side-eye to Sea Scraps—a Raft-lookin’ demo that popped up in the current Next Fest. Can’t put my finger on it yet, but it’s ringing all the wrong bells.
Let me know if you played it and felt the same weird itch.
(Obviously, if the red flags turn out to be more about inexperience than bad faith, I’ll report back in its favor!)
🔮 Upcoming Game News
- Prologue: Go Wayback! finally has a public demo that’s easily accessible without having to join their Discord. Check it out and lemme know what you think.
- CAIRN is one of three demos I’m actually excited to mess with this weekend. I don’t have the upper body strength (or skillset) to climb a real mountain, so I’m glad this one went hard on realism and detail.
- If you’ve got your eye on Hiraeth—that space sci-fi survival game—there’s a playtest up now, and a bunch of changes on the horizon. Worth a look if you want to see where it’s headed.
- Blind Descent is alive again! During their (very prolonged) silence, they picked up a publisher/investor and apparently got a ton of work done. There’s a new trailer, too. I’m honestly hyped to get my hands on the next playtest and see how it stacks up against what I (very hazily) remember from the one I played… two years ago?
#️⃣ Hashtag Backend Changes
Most of the work this week went into the Steam Curator —over a dozen new titles added and several updates pushed live. The website got some love too: a calendar’s now in the menu, and there’s a fresh batch of articles, including a breakdown of what showed up during Summer Games Week.
Feeling lucky? The newest Kickstarter Compass is up too. Check the post feed and take your chances.
💥 Quick Shots
- Forever Skies posted the results of their Q&A.
- Patch notes for the (future) 2.0 Storms Brewing patch for 7D2D. Or perhaps you prefer a video?
- HumanitZ...these are some adorable backpack attachments, damn you.
- Patch notes for the experimental branch update for Project Zomboid.
- SCUM is shifting to 1.0 on the 17th, I talked about it in the newsletter, I’m not excited.
- Excellent job adding popular community requests, Survive the Night.
- Occupy Mars published a devlog detailing progress on adding Multiplayer Mode.
🕸️ Around the Web
- Anno 117: Pax Romana drops in November
- ‘The Last Dive’ Follows a Diver’s 20-Year-Long Friendship with a Giant Manta Ray (I want to see it!)
- GOG takes on the Steam Workshop with the official launch of one-click modding
- 5 Natural Deodorants That Actually Work (I love Native)
- YouTube has loosened its content moderation policies (Annnd fuck you)
- GameStop CEO Says The Company’s Future Isn’t In Games (So…CardStop? PokemonStore?)
If this week’s survival game chaos sparked joy, pay it forward. Drop it in a Discord. Paste it under a dev trailer. Scribble it on a napkin and hand it to a stranger—whatever works. More eyes = word spreads faster.
See ya next time!
Wayback, ehh its ok some interesting thoughts with mechanics, but its still more about the engine vs the game. and i’m more interested in the plans for the engine. however the engine yes has random gen world size but still looks like unity built in render pipeline, some aspects of the world are a bit off, so seeing how it progresses and if it will be a unity/ue option or if its just an engine only they will use.
Hiraeth just reminds me of osiris new dawn last time i saw it it needed more time to cook.
Blind decent still has promise will see if it does actually make it out to early access.
GOG i like that they will have some curated modlist plug and plays. plus they keep some really old games alive.
I think we’ll get another Blind Descent playtest soon – I’m interested in seeing how the cash infusion and uninterrupted development time affected progress and changes.