CULTIC News

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][p][/p][h3]CULTIC - Chapter Two will launch on September 18th![/h3][p][/p][p]The long-awaited second chapter of CULTIC is nearly complete! You can wishlist CULTIC: Chapter Two now and be geared up and ready to fight as soon as it's available:[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/p][p]Awakening in the cold, dark morgue beneath the besieged police station, you find yourself in the middle of a cult-controlled New Grandewel, with corpses littering the streets, flames billowing from the windows of torched buildings, and cultists infesting every inch of the city you once protected. Fight your way through all-new maps in this full expansion campaign, boasting larger, more detailed maps, new weapons and enemies, and more secrets and surprises to discover![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]FULL-LENGTH CAMPAIGN[/h3][p]Chapter Two may have started out with the goal of matching Chapter One's length, but it sure didn't end that way! Chapter Two contains 12 total maps, all being even larger and more detailed than Chapter One, with lots of spooky setpieces to explore, new fearsome bosses to defeat, and of course, droves of cultists to gun down. You can expect more of CULTIC's intense, gritty, open-ended combat, enhanced with new mechanics and refinements![/p][p][/p][h3]EXPANDED ARSENAL[/h3][p]All of the weapons from Chapter One will return, alongside the Revolver and SASG from Interlude, which can be freely alternated with the Lever Action Rifle and Sawed-Off. Additionally, new "temporary weapons", such as the mounted machinegun and bazooka, can be found and used to dish out serious damage, adding to the roster of ways you can weaponize the environment.[/p][p][/p][h3]REVAMPED DODGE[/h3][p]The Dodge/Dash mechanic has been reworked and better integrated with CULTIC's core combat loop. The Dodge is now faster and more potent, and Dodging into an enemy triggers a Shoulder Tackle that can knock enemies back and interrupt their attacks, allowing you to get in close and fight much more aggressively. Some enemies and bosses have new tricks up their sleeves as well, though![/p][p][/p][h3]IMPROVED SHIELDS[/h3][p]The Tower Shield has gotten some tweaks as well to better incorporate it into the game and make it more useful! The Shield is much easier to traverse the maps with, and has a full 3D world mesh, making it much simpler to drop/pick up, and makes for a much larger target for kicking/tackling it into an enemy's face! If you need your other hand back, you can now plant shields in the ground to provide temporary cover as well.[/p][p][/p][h3]NEW SURVIVAL MAPS[/h3][p]Chapter Two will include 3 new maps for Survival as well, featuring some of Chapter Two's best arenas, redesigned for wave after wave of carnage! Put your skills to the test and compete for a top spot on the Leaderboard![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]CULTIC 2.0 UPDATE[/h3][p]Accompanying the launch of Chapter Two will be CULTIC's big "2.0" update! This update includes a ton of bug fixes, the gameplay improvements from Chapter Two, loads of optimizations, the improved lighting system, and the Chapter One polish pass, and will be free for all owners of CULTIC, whether they have picked up Chapter Two or not![/p][p][/p][p]It has been one hell of a journey getting Chapter Two this far. I want to sincerely thank CULTIC's community and fans for their support and patience as it came together. I'll see you all at the finish line![/p]

Hello all!

I know I said a couple of times that I wouldn't have more dev updates but this isn't spoilery Chapter Two stuff so uhh it doesn't count!

There's nearly 4 years worth of development time between the very first maps of Chapter One, and the final maps of Chapter Two. Given that CULTIC is my first released game and the first time I was ever doing game dev full-time, I ran into a bit of an issue - switching from game dev as a hobby to a full-time gig meant that I was learning and improving much faster than before, and over time, there starts to be a bit of a contrast between the work you're completing now, and the work you completed years ago. This contrast was already getting pretty evident comparing Interlude to Chapter One (in my opinion), but it's even more pronounced when you compare Chapter Two to Chapter One.

On top of just improving as an artist/modeler/etc. over time, I've got a few years worth of new models and props that weren't available during Chapter One's development, and quite a few textures have been reworked or rebuilt that could be subbed out. Plus, CULTIC's palette has expanded and the lighting system has gotten updated to be able to handle more realtime lights. With all that, I decided to try and tackle making a quick polish pass over Chapter One ahead of Chapter Two's launch, to bring the visual quality of the two Chapters closer together, instead of having such a stark contrast.

I don't have a ton of time to dedicate to this, so it's mostly just swapping out textures, cleaning up some geo, adding in new props wherever they fit, cleaning up some problematic encounter designs, and adjusting lighting to better utilize the improved systems. No huge overhauls or dramatic changes to map flow, enemy placements, or secrets, but it has sure been nice to be able to go back and give these early maps some love!

Below you can check out a quick video with some before/after shots of some recognizable spots from E1M1, and below that, a few screenshots!

As always, thanks everyone for your continued support and patience as we inch ever closer to Chapter Two's completion!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]















[h3]EDIT:[/h3]

There's been a fair few responses expressing concern about the changes on display here, so I wanted to add a little blurb to try and soothe those fears!

If you've played through Chapter One, you've already been playing the game with probably 50% of the graphical updates on display here, and if you've completed Interlude, up that to like 75%! On top of that, every screenshot of Chapter Two that has been shown off includes all of these changes as well. While the difference certainly seems striking when comparing the absolute oldest of CULTIC's assets with the absolute newest, the core artstyle is still pretty much the same.

The primary difference between the current public build of Chapter One's artstyle and Chapter Two's is a couple of yellow swatches in the palette that were desperately needed, and Ambient Occlusion being added in, which contributes a lot of the darker, moodier look. Ambient Occlusion can be disabled in the options for those that prefer it off - I've included an alternate version of one of the above shots, but with AO disabled. While there's still updated texture work and such, the overall contrast of the scene is going to be much closer to what you're used to now.



Another question I've been asked quite a few times is whether these changes can be disabled, and the answer to that question is mostly "no", aside from turning off Ambient Occlusion. It's really not the kind of thing that you can just turn on and off. The totality of the updates to the art since the beginning of development goes far beyond just texture swapping, and includes changes such as:

• Optimized meshes with greatly reduced polycounts that significantly improve performance
  
• Expansions to the color palette to reduce banding and increase visible detail and clarity
  
• Reworks to existing textures to better utilize the palette changes to reduce detail loss
  
• Improved "light portaling" to allow for far more realtime lights at a MUCH lower performance cost
  
• Consolidation of clustered, smaller lights into singular, larger sources
  
• Increases in prop density as new props are built and made available
  
• Updated textures that require different scaling and UV placement
  
• Updates to enemy renders to reduce aliasing and "render noise"
  

... and on and on. These changes have been made gradually over the course of development, and due to the scale of them, having an "on and off" toggle would basically involve having two entirely separate sets of maps, each with their own lighting setups, occlusion data, navmeshes, and so on, which isn't at all feasible. On top of that, there's really no general consensus among the playerbase as to what is and isn't "acceptable", as you've got a significant chunk of players who disable the color palette altogether, and then on the opposite end, those who crunch the render scale way down for the crustiest possible experience. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that art is subjective, and every time CULTIC's artstyle has evolved, it's been met with glowing praise from some and harsh criticism from others - but if I rolled over every time someone pushed back on artstyle changes, CULTIC would still be sitting at it's original 512x288 resolution with 32 colors!

I ask for the community's trust that Chapter Two of CULTIC is not destroying the vibe or experience that Chapter One offered. If you enjoyed Interlude, and you've been enjoying the screenshots from all of the previews of Ch.2's maps, this is more of the same, and effectively just a measure to bring more consistency across the board to the visuals, as well as some significant optimizations.

I don't have much time!

At great personal risk, I managed to sneak some new Chapter Two tracks out of the CULTIC Gulag. The dev can't hide this stuff from us forever!

... Shoot, I think the tape may have gotten damaged in my escape...

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello everyone!

For those of you that follow CULTIC's development on various platforms (Twitter, BlueSky, Discord etc.) you've probably noticed that things have been pretty quiet.

Chapter Two is getting very close to being content complete - as in, I'm currently working on the final boss! While there's still quite a bit to be done before we can launch or even nail down a launch date, it is incredibly thrilling to be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel!

Unfortunately, working on late/end-game content like this means that there's not much I can show off without spoiling stuff, hence the downturn in updates being posted.

What I'll say for now is that Chapter Two is turning out awesome. Being able to work together with Nick on map designs has sped up map development so much, and enabled us to be so much more creative and ambitious with the map designs. Expect bigger and more intricate maps than Chapter One, with far more unique assets and variety in locations! There's also 12 maps now, up from the planned 10.

The bosses in particular have been a treat to work on and I expect will be a step up from the boss fights in Chapter One as well.

I've sunk about 12 hours in the last couple weeks into the final boss music, really going nuts on it. I can't share it now but I think CULTIC fans will really enjoy the track.

The key art for Chapter Two is also finished! We got the talented Bebeto Daroz onboard for this - I can't show it off yet... but man I am excited to unveil it when the time comes!



While I work on the final boss, Nick is currently working on the layout for the penultimate map. Can't really show it off in detail without spoiling stuff but I can show a visually messy overdraw render of it! I'm excited to go back through and set up all of the encounters and such for this climactic level - it's the cult's last stand and they won't go down easy!



Last but not least - mountains! What kind of shenanigans are going on up there?



I know this isn't much to chew on, but rest assured that development is barreling full-speed ahead, and hopefully I can share some concrete news on launch plans soon!

Once again, thanks to everyone in the community for their continued support of CULTIC and for being just an awesome community. Until next time!

It was inevitable. It was by far the biggest community request after Chapter One released:

The Train Map.

The Train Station is by far the most complicated map ever made for CULTIC, that will have players fighting through sprawling cargo yards and dusty depots, connected by segments where the player will have to fight through a moving train! It's also physically the largest by far, spanning nearly a kilometer total, although a chunk of that is train travel stuff.

Getting all of this working with the Quicksave system I think took a couple years off my life.

Anyway, very excited for everyone to get to play this map, but for now, here's a little taste of some work-in-progress music from the map, and some fresh screenshots!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]