Good morning, Mr. Investigator. I see you’re craving more creepy stories that might have inspired The Developer to create the mysterious and eerie place known as Green Creek. But remember, the more you know, the more your mind is open to suggestion. If one is not careful, these tales just may lead to a breakdown of sanity. I warn you to proceed with caution.

The haunting of castles, buildings and huge manors has always been a topic of fascination for mankind. You can find creepy villas, possessed houses and mansions full of specters, ghosts and the undead in many legends and tales of horror throughout the ages. Ah, of course, brave investigator, coming from the land of man, you are familiar with moving pictures and it’s these records, converted from well-known chronicles, which have served to influence the Developer in his creations.

You may be familiar with the historical account of Poltergeist, from 1982. The concept for the overall atmosphere of Green Creek was based upon this story. You want to go deeper, you say? Indeed. You should try 13 Ghosts from 1960 or perhaps The Hunting of 1963, which has come from the creepy written chronicles of Shirley Jackson. The Amityville Horror may peak your interest, as it is quite a recent tale, or something newer like Ju-On: The Grudge. And lastly, Crimson Peak, a tale woven in an elaborate design, fares like a love letter to classic haunted mansion stories.

These moving pictures and written records can help you to understand the ways of our great Developer. The old books don’t lie – he actually used a few of man’s works while manifesting his wicked creations. But that’s only for the better isn’t it? It makes it easier to achieve a connection with his dark ways. And you need to do it if you want to understand what’s going on in Green Creek.

If you want to know more about the beings that inspired The Great One, please add Apparition to your wishlist and stay up to date with all information.

Mr. Ciastku

Why, hello there! I see you’ve just come back from the job, partner. Clean yourself up ASAP, cause we got a nice promotional video to watch.

What video, you ask? Have you already forgotten how we shot this sweet commercial to release it on TOR to draw the attention of possible new clients? Oh, and I gotta say it’s really good. You did really well on the recording – you sound confident. A bit bold, but very professional.

Here, sit down, relax and let’s watch it together. That’s a fine piece of gory art if you ask me.

Oh, when you post it, don’t forget to ask our viewers to add Body of Evidence to the wishlist! It’ll help them stay up to date with our company’s news.

Empyrean

Welcome again, Mr. Brave and Bold. I can sense you’ve already visited Green Creek once before. You want to know more about the ways of The Developer, yes? I must warn you that the more knowledge you aquire, the greater the danger of spiraling into madness, as the human mind may not be able to grasp the horrors as they unfold.

I see your determination, Mr. Investigator. Good.

Have you ever heard about The Slenderman? That’s one of the mythical apparitions that served as an inspiration for Mr. Ciastku’s realm-bending creative process. It is said that there exists a very tall and slim being without a face who manifests in various places and stalks the weak. You can spot him in many historical photographs lurking in the background with his ominous blank face. Waiting. Traumatizing people. Especially children.

If you notice someone similar in presence or behaviour, just don’t look at him. Slenderman despises anyone who stares at his featureless face and he begins to haunt that person. And as you can imagine – direct contact means death.

If you wanna know more about the beings that have inspired The Great One, please add Apparition to your wishlist and stay up to date with all information.

Mr. Ciastku

Well, well, our small business has been up and running for a quite some time already, huh? As a manager, my friend, I'd like to gather and catalog some info about our past jobs. Oh, don't worry – it's for internal use only, so everything's fine. No worries about a leak in our company, right?

So, it appears that we mainly get three types of jobs. The first involves finding all the bodies or body parts and hiding them away effectively. There are some really unprofessional cleaners in the business, and I know it feels like a bit of a pain in the ass to clean after other cleaners, but hey, it still means more work for us, right?

The second kind of job needs to be done stealthily because there are other people in the "workspace", as I like to call it, who don't necessarily need to see us in action. It's a bit like a gory cat and mouse game if you think about it, am I right?

There are also some "small fry" who come to us with easier, but lower paid jobs. But hey – it's still money! And we’ll need more of it if we want to keep our business running. Money will allow us to buy some new equipment that I’m sure will prove itself necessary when tackling our bigger orders.

Oh, did I say three? I actually meant four. We just got another job, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. To be honest, I really don't know what to think about it. It's wicked weird, so I'll brief you when we arrive at our "workspace".

Until then – remember to follow Body of Evidence and add the game to your wishlist.

Empyrean

Oh, brave investigator! Do you remember my story about the mythical creator, the divine power, who made the Golden Creek as terryfing as it is? He is the one, in the books of old, called The Great One or Mr Ciastku. Aah, you do remember. There's one ancient writing I didn't mention in my tale for it is shrouded in secrecy. However, you have proven yourself worthy of hearing this story. Your mind is open and you have a heart full of determination so you are presented with the wisdom granted to very few.

You see, perceptive one, this is not the only creation of The Great One. Two previous attempts had been made to turn his dark visions into reality, though both of them were turned back into dust when they hadn't met his gloomy expectations. The first world he founded was confined to a large house with a weird, grotesque and child-likeinterior. They were like those moving pictures the little ones love to follow on the television boxes and such. The person he put in there for testing purposes was given the ability to craft materials and weapons. He also had the soul of a brave warrior and confronted the demons in battle. 

He didn't like it, as he had found it too greatly disconnected from our reality and his wish was to merge the creation with this world - as it was from the beginning of time.

Therefore, the second attempt of creation was much more realistic, dark and haunting. The new test subject was stripped of his abillity to craft maaterials, but The Great One allowed him to carry the Ouija board around the house. The Developer decided to make it the home for a particularly haunting ghost of a deceased woman who was able to kill "at first sight", quite similarily to Slender Man.

Be careful mister investigator. I can feel your courage and fortitude, but you need to stay cautious. For more precious information please follow Apparition on Steam and add it to your wishlist!

Mr Ciastku

Every major competition needs a handsome logo. Or a crest as we prefere to call it. We went through a few design iterations, before we got a satisfying result. But we have to admit, we’re pretty proud of our final logo!

The lord if insects, who creates a swarm that attacks the opponents

A friendly creature that heals his owner’s wounds

An unearthly creature that creates exploding seals on the enemy’s territory

A dangerous creature from hell throwing fireballs at the opponent

A mysterious creature setting fire to the ground under the feet of enemies

Deusald Studio

We love comics, and we wanted all the conversations in the game to look like drawn straight from the visual novels. Comic books have by now developed a substantial “standard language” how to convey some ideas.

Bubbles of all shapes and sizes

For example, there are clearly defined ways how to differentiate between someone speaking and whispering, or just speaking with a weak voice and the narrator bubbles often have a distinct background.

We also knew that we will have some… “special guests” speaking. This is the game where you can speak with The Devil himself, and his comic bubble should not look like a mere mortal. For this, we looked at how Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman uses various comic bubble types to represent various special characters (like “the endless”). E.g. the Dream has a special bubble that is filled with black, has a strong white outline and is wobbly. You automatically imagine that it’s not a normal voice speaking these words.

So, we wanted it all in our game. To achieve this, we developed a simple system of defining comic bubble types. We have many comic bubble types, and each type may have different shape, outline, colors and font. Each NPC can have his/her special bubble type, also a particular phrase (like shout) may use a particular comic bubble type.

Here’s how hero shouting may look like:

The simplest, early comic bubble type looked like this when designed in Blender:

As you can see, a bubble type has actually three bubble shapes: one to the left, one to the right, and one going to the top. We use a particular direction in game depending on various things. In the “walking view” the direction (usually) depends on the direction between a speaker and a listener. In the “first-person view” (when we fight) the direction depends on the position of speaker’s mouth on the screen.

Oh yeah, each NPC has a specifically configured “mouth” position.

Inside the bubble, we have a special area where the text must fit. We first put the text inside, wrap it, and then we adjust bubble scaling to make the best fit around the text.

The screenshot above shows a comic bubble for “choice”, used when a player needs to make a choice in the conversation. The three bubbles never overlap each other, this way choices are displayed correctly. This is how it looks like in game:

When a person speaks, we use a different bubble shape:

Will it blend?

We use Blender’s Bezier curves to define comic bubble shape. And we make some comic bubbles animated, using Blender’s “shape key” animation, exported to Castle Game Engine animation format.

During the game, we wanted to show “hints” to the player, indicating that a player can press something to interact with something (enter a house, speak to someone). We realized that this can be nicely shown as a comic bubble indicating that a hero is thinking: “Hmm, I can enter this house…”. Comics have already established a standard how to show a “thinking bubble” of a person, so we can use this.

Here’s how the “thinking” bubble looks like in Blender:

And here’s how it looks in game:

We have plans to extend the system, and use it more intensively. E.g. we have not yet used the feature „various NPCs and various phrases may have various bubble types” as intensively as we want to. We will!

If you like our “bubble science”, please add The Unholy Society to your wishlist to stay up to day with all further announcements.

Cat-astrophe Games

The last DOG.log episode about our new turn-based strategy, Exorder. Michał from Solid 9 studio shares some fun details about the process of designing the campaign.

Fat Dog Games

The Betizu is a breed of wild cattle, indigenous to northern Spain and French Basque Country. It's name is derived from the Basque, behi izua, which translates to "elusive cow". The Beitzu also occupies a very important place in the mythology and is found among the stories of mystical animals that guard the caves in which the treasures of Mari are hidden.

The Betizu is short, slim and covered in unruly hair ranging from beige to reddish-brown. Its color slightly changes depending on the season. It has very expressive eyes, surrounded by aureole, highly developed mane and curved horns. The upper line of the neck is straight in females and swayed in males.There are also variations in color near the end of the feeet, the nose and the ocular aureole.. The hindquarters show a bony prominence with an upper tailhead continued by a long tail.

Although the Betizu is a kind of draught cattle and possesses very fine aerodynamic qualities, due to the limited population at the moment, it is not recommended to undertake any wingsuit catching activities.

For more information on cows please add Cow Catcher to your wishlist.

dev4play

For the glory of the Cerulean Queen, a new patch has been prepared. It includes a new map – Skirmish07 „Last Living Souls”:

Other changes:
–  We refined the layouts of Skirmish02 „Lakelands”, Skirmish04 „Rhinestone Forest” and Skirmish05 „Starshine Temple” maps.
–  We removed 2 vs 2 map Skirmish03 „Damon’s Stronghold” from matchmaking. It’s only available in custom games.
– We added a warning that the game is being played in offline mode.
– The turns in matchmaking battles have now a 2 minute time limit. Think fast about your next move!
– Steam username is set as a nickname used during battles. You can change it in the settings menu.
– We added a new matchmaking map filter. Two players will never be matched on 4 player maps.
– Bug fixes (mostly achievement related).
– Minor visual improvements.

Enjoy your battles with Exorder!

Solid9 Studio