DOLOS: Your Best Future News

You may have already seen it on our socials: within the next month, we will be attending three events, two of which will be in person!



[h2]Indie X 2025[/h2]
A Portuguese independent video game festival that will take place on Twitch and Steam. It brings together a selection of 50 finalist games for the Indie X Award competition. DOLOS is nominated in the most innovative games category! The event will take place in two stages:

• Monday, October 20 at 4 p.m. (CET) we will be live on the RTP Arena Twitch channel. We will be joining an Indie X streamer who will be discovering the demo of DOLOS: Your Best Future! The live stream will be entirely in English and will last about an hour.
  
• From October 23 to 26, you can visit a dedicated Steam page featuring all the nominated games.
  

[h2]Stunfest 2025[/h2]
The famous French independent video game festival is back! It will take place from October 24 to 26, in Rennes, France. There is an admission fee for the event.

The festival will have a dedicated Steam page featuring all the games at the event. We would like to thank the 3 Hit Combo association for placing their trust in us once again. For this edition, our publisher Abiding Bridge will be exhibiting the game on our behalf as we are forced to save up for a much more expensive festival...

[h2]AdventureX 2025[/h2]
A narrative video game festival in London! It will take place on the weekend of November 22-23, in the LSBU building, and once again, there is an admission fee.

We are honored to be part of this selection of 30 games, and we will of course be there to show you a new version of the demo and hopefully meet lots of great people! If you can't make it, there will be a Steam page featuring all the selected games.

[h2]Upcoming news[/h2]

If you've been following us for a while, you know that we always take advantage of events like this to release some new features for the game. So stick around, the next few weeks are going to be exciting!

See you soon!
The Playing Paradigms team

Hello everyone, I hope you had a relaxing summer!

[h2]Back to School 2025[/h2]

To start the new school year, DOLOS is being part of the Back To School Games Celebration, which showcases educational and brain-teasing games, as well as games about school itself! That's where DOLOS comes in :)

The event is taking place on Steam from August 25 to September 1. All kinds of games await you, so don't hesitate to check it out! We thank Mooncube Games for their invitation, as well as the game Spirit City Lofi and Lofi Girl for co-hosting this 2025 edition!



[h2]Health is important[/h2]

We'd like to take this opportunity to give you some news. One of the development team members experienced health issues over the summer. Nothing serious, but it needs to be taken care of. This has caused delays in development, which has forced us to change our short-term plans, particularly for the Back To School festival.

Since we didn't want to come empty-handed, we still prepared a little something for you.
But let's just say we're coming with a smaller patch than expected!

[h2]A 4th small patch for 2nd demo[/h2]

• Visual changes to the main menu
  
• DOLOS Phase 1: minor visual improvements to the list of applicants.
  
  
  
  
  • Bolder fonts.
    
  • New selection button.
    
  • Diploma information replaced by the applicant's social background.
    
  • Counters for complementary files (dropped and total) per applicant.
    
• DOLOS Phase 2: overhaul of how the professional trainings are generated.
  
  
  
  
  • Any pro wish can be fulfilled by an existing pro recommendation in the deck.
    
  • Greater chances for pro wishes & reco to be duplicated.
    
  • If a priority applicant (those from Exodolos) have both pro reco & wish, they will be identical (except rare cases).
    
  • If a non-priority applicant (not from Exodolos) have both pro reco & wish, they will be different (except rare cases).
    
  • Many minor bugs fixed.
    

Visit our Steam page to play our demo and add DOLOS to your wishlist if you enjoy the game, it helps us greatly.

See you next time for a bigger patch!

DOLOS: Your Best Future is exhibited for AG French Direct 2025, an annual event celebrating French video games organized by ActuGaming. We're thrilled to be back since our first appearance in 2023.

To discover:

• May 28 at 6pm (CEST) on Youtube: a live showcase of trailers, interviews and mashups on the ActuGaming channel. VOD will be available later.
  
• From May 28 to June 2 on Steam: a Steam page featuring some fifty games, including 25 exclusive demos!

What better way to mark the occasion than with a major patch to the second DOLOS: Your Best Future demo!



[h2]Card game: new look and difficulty[/h2]

Among the fixes and modifications:

• New look for the 2 central gauges: the bonus gauge and the external gauge.
  
• The segments of the 2 gauges are called bonus points (BP) and external points (EP).
  
• Assign an applicant gives 5 possible results:
  
  
  • perfect (+2 BP)
    
  • good (+1 BP)
    
  • mediocre (+1 BP and +1 EP)
    
  • bad (+1 EP)
    
  • worse (+2 EP)
    
• Time bonuses and maluses become a gauge completion reward.
  
• Picking applicants becomes a gauge completion reward.
  
• Receiving external applicants becomes a gauge completion reward.
  
• Gauge level is displayed all the time.
  
• All gauge completion rewards are displayed all the time.
  
• The good assignment combo becomes the perfect assignment streak. It yields +1 BP.
  Even a good assignment ends the streak.
  
• The number of all remaining places is displayed at the top of the universities.
  
• Many visual improvements in colors, feedbacks and animations.
  

In general, it should be harder for your turn to last longer.
You start with less time, times bonuses are rarer, less “exponential”.
The goal is the players faces the turn ends more often, and so the external applicants.



[h2]In-between turns: a strategic break[/h2]

Between the turns you can breathe a little bit!
But that's not all: you can think about what to do next.

• The in-between turns displays the total number of places remaining.
  
• The in-between turns displays more clearly the turn modifiers, i.e. unique perk for the next turn.
  
• Modifiers are currently scripted. There's the Preparation modifier only for the first turn and 3 other modifiers for the Sold-Out Turn. Other modifiers are of course planned.
  
• The deck view is only available during in the in-between turns.
  
• The deck view displays the draw order of the applicants in the deck. In other words, you can see which applicants you're going to draw first.
  
• The deck view also displays all the applicants' wishes and all the DOLOS recommendations.
  
• All the time spent in the in-between turns doesn't cost EXP.
  

[h2]Two difficulty modes[/h2]

Finally, the demo's notorious problem of starting the adventure on level 3 gave us the idea of creating two difficulty modes, one specifically for the first playthrough of the game.

Discovery mode will simulate the difficulty of the first level on the DOLOS application.
Specifically

• in PHASE 1, you'll only have to deal with 4 different complementary files,
  
• in PHASE 2, there are +30% more university places,
  
• in PHASE 2, a game turn starts at 60 seconds.
  

Note: the difficulty is still high, as you'll still be confronted with more dilemmas via the EXODOLOS application (which won't be the case in the “real” Level 1).

Normal mode is aligned with level 3 difficulty.
So

• in PHASE 1, you'll deal with 9 different complementary files, including the 3 “new” ones on level 3, which are more heavily represented than the others.
  
• in PHASE 2, there are +15% university places,
  
• in PHASE 2, a game turn starts at 30 seconds.
  

This is the first version of these difficulty modes, changes are to be expected.
A third difficulty mode is planned for the final game.

[h2]Discord and playtest[/h2]

We'd like to end this big post by reminding you of the existence of our Discord!
This is the place to join it if you'd like to chat with us, give us your feedback, preview announcements and take part in exclusive playtests!



Speaking of playtesting, a big public session has been postponed for quite some time now.
This is linked to all the balancing work on the card game, which we felt was more important.

Nevertheless, a playtest session is still planned. Once all the additions to the card game have been integrated (we're almost there), we'll keep you posted all over our networks.

[h3]Thank you all for following us and giving us your feedback, it gives us a lot of strength in everyday life!

See you soon!

The Playing Paradigms team

Hello DOLOS operators! A series of fixes have just been added to the demo of DOLOS: Your Best Future!

Among the bug fixes:

• EXP can now be spent to block the pro training during the sold out turn,
  
• no more bugs on the last applicants drawn in PHASE 2,
  
• the “Hit the nail on the head” challenge from PHASE 1 works normally,
  
• no more “black training” bug, a bug that appeared when PHASE 2 offered at least 10 university trainings.
  

Visual improvements have also been added:

• in PHASE 2, the deck gauges (bonus and external cards) animate at each progression,
  
• in PHASE 2, each applicant's recommendations and wishes appear directly on the trainings through animated and dynamic icons,
  
• DOLOS challenge animation no longer shakes like before.
  

The next demo patch will bring 3 important strategic features to PHASE 2, one of which many of you have been asking for!

The DOLOS PHASE 2 playtest will start right after the release of the next patch.

See you for the 3rd patch!

Since last Thursday we've fixed a series of bugs in the narrative progression of the 2nd DEMO of DOLOS: Your Best Future!

Among the bugs fixed:

• the destinies of Samantha, Nabil and Sophie update in EXODOLOS when they are selected or oriented,
  
• the loss of money caused by retro-control in the final ranking only applies if you have helped Samantha, Nabil or Sophie,
  
• the ending cutscene varies correctly according to Nabil's destiny,
  
• the list of priority applicants on EXODOLOS updates correctly during DOLOS' phase 2,
  
• EXODOLOS continues to display correctly after the final ranking of DOLOS' operators,
  
• messages from Marie regarding your choices on the destinies of Samantha, Nabil and Sophie are not missing anymore,
  
• returning to the main menu from the pause menu works.
  

See you next week for a patch dedicated only to DOLOS' phase 2!