CULTIC News

It's been a month since I pushed the big green button to release CULTIC to the world - and what a month it has been!

Thank you all for 2000 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews and a truckload of kind words! Who ever thought I'd be making an accolades trailer?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

What a crazy last week and change it has been!

First things first: An absolutely massive shoutout to the community for helping CULTIC reach Overwhelmingly Positive in just two days! I was absolutely floored to see the reviews pour in, and the incredibly kind words and support coming in from the community. CULTIC is currently sitting at 99% positive scores - something I never thought I'd see. So thank you all for that!

Additionally, I want to thank those that were so patient and cooperative with providing crash/player logs to me to help diagnose and crush some nasty bugs that were affecting a small amount of users.

Now that Chapter One is out, the big question is - what's next for CULTIC?

[h3]A Break[/h3]
Full disclosure - the first thing on my list is to rest and take a step away from CULTIC for a little bit. The weeks leading up to launch were incredibly stressful, and launch doubly so! As exciting as the launch was, and as thrilled as I am with how positively it was received, I am fully burnt out at the moment, and need a bit of a break to get back on my feet. I'm planning to catch up on my backlog of games I missed during development, and also catch up on some housework I've been putting off!

I hope to be back at it after Halloween! Speaking of...

[h3]Steam Scream Fest[/h3]
CULTIC is a bit of a spooky game, so I am participating in Steam Scream Fest! You might see CULTIC pop up here and there during the event.

[h3]Localization[/h3]
The next big task I plan to jump on is localization. I'm getting things ready to get translations for CULTIC underway. While I greatly appreciate all of the generous offers from the community to help translate CULTIC, I have already secured those services. There are some significant changes to the UI that need to happen to support additional languages, so I'm going to get working on that and hope to have updates on it soon.

[h3]GOG Release[/h3]
I had been intending to hold off on a GOG Release until much closer to Chapter Two's launch, because I really don't want to manage updates/patches on two separate platforms. As a one-man team, it's much easier to just maintain a single platform. However, interest from the community in a GOG version has been pretty significant, so I'm looking into options for maybe making that happen sooner.

[h3]Chapter Two[/h3]
I don't have any concrete info to share on Chapter Two at this time. I'm a bit tapped out on creativity at the moment to be honest, so I'm going to take some time to focus on some tasks that are more code-oriented (such as localization) before diving in to Chapter Two.

In closing, thanks again for everyone who has supported CULTIC, and more importantly, supported me through this game dev journey! Until next time!

Hello everyone!

v102 of CULTIC is finally out on the main branch. This build included some pretty major changes that needed to be tested a bit more extensively than my smaller patches. Full details below!

This is a fairly lofty patch, so as always, if there are any issues or feedback, drop me a thread in the forums!

[h2]System Changes[/h2]

• Unity version updated to address a crash happening with the particle engine
  
• XML culture invariance introduced to help prevent issues with save files
  

[h2]E1M6 Balancing[/h2]
E1M6's encounter was a major pain point to the community, While this encounter is intended to be difficult, I do understand that replaying the entire mission was tedious, and not the kind of challenge I wanted for the players. Due to this, the following changes have been made:

• Checkpoint introduced between third wave of cultists and the boss entrance
  
• An additional supply cache is made available when the boss appears
  
• The boss now has an additional attack
  
• Smaller amount of cultists in wave 1
  
• Cultist spawns after the boss' arrival are now limited to low-rank cultists
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Various audio sources properly hooked up to audio mixer
  
• Textures with unintended shininess were toned down
  
• A fence in E1M9 that was solid can now be shot through
  
• Burning enemies now properly drop loot pickups
  
• Confirm action (left mouse) now properly opens the main menu on the title screen
  
• Player can no longer grow a third arm while throwing hatchets and using the lighter
  
• Intro cutscene music should now properly adhere to music volume preferences
  
• Fixed a bug where player controls would get reset to defaults if they opened the controls menu from the main menu and then cancelled out of it without making changes
  

[h2]Other Changes[/h2]

• Progress menu reworked into a Scene Select menu. Allows any map that has been previously completed to be replayed, with choice of two loadouts
  
• Brightness in E1M1/M2 caves was lowered
  
• Small pistol ammo drops now give 10 rounds (down from 20). A deeper audit into ammo availability is planned to look into ammo surpluses and deficits
  
• Debug console key is now bindable
  
• A sequence break in E1M3 was made inaccessible as it was a bit too easy to access casually
  

Hello all!

A new experimental build of CULTIC has dropped on the beta branch, which -should- address the issue users were having with busted save files, where items just wouldn't spawn into the map properly.

Basically, the issue boiled down to a number parsing issue. Some systems use commas instead of decimals to represent float values, so the positions of items and enemies in save files was being loaded in incorrectly, resulting in wildly incorrect position and rotation values.

This was a major oversight on my part, and explains why it was impossible to replicate on my system.

Regardless, it should be fixed in this build.

[h3]IMPORTANT:[/h3]

If you have a Map Start save file for the affected session, you may be able to load this map and play normally. HOWEVER - unfortunately, due to the nature of this issue, if you have created a quicksave or manual save in the map, that save file is most likely still going to have items missing. Items that fall egregiously outside of map bounds are destroyed, so if you have loaded a save (which would break item positions), and then saved again (after the items had gone out of bounds and been destroyed), that save file would still reflect the items having been destroyed.

I will be working some more bug fixes into this patch and releasing on the main branch later today, after I've had a chance to test more thoroughly.

Hello!

I just pushed a VERY EXPERIMENTAL build out to the "beta" branch. Unity made it sound like there's a chance the crashes could be related to the version of the engine I was using, so I've built a separate branch out using the latest LTS release to see if it happens to fix the issue.

Now, my version of Unity was from back when I started on CULTIC, so the engine update might have broken stuff as well. I didn't see anything too major, but I haven't done a full playthrough on this branch yet, so it's mainly just intended to see if it addresses the crashes. Check it out when you have the time, and let me know if it helps at all!

To access this branch:

1. Locate CULTIC in your Library
   
2. Right-click on the game in your list, and select Properties
   
3. Go to the Betas tab
   
4. Select "beta" from the dropdown list
   

If you are NOT experiencing crashes, I'd still appreciate the help sniffing for issues in this new branch, but otherwise, I'd recommend staying on the default branch.

Changes:

• Updated Unity engine version