Cauldron News

Playing the cauldron demo!

[h3]Try Cauldron's Idle Mode![/h3]
Want the full idler experience? In honor of Steam's Idler Fest, Idle Mode is now unlocked and available from the start! Begin a new run by selecting an empty slot and choosing Idle. The game will auto-play minigames and battles, so you can spend your time doing something else (like playing other idle games on Steam!).

Uncover Cauldron's mysteries to unlock other game modes!

[h3]New styles[/h3]
These past few months, we've been hard at work updating Cauldron's artwork to bring players a unique and exciting experience. If you haven't played in a while, expect to find a new map, new character portraits, new visual effects, and a whole bunch of QoL improvements! And there's still more to come before full release in a few months!

Come explore a brand new map!

Who doesn't love a tiny waterfall?

[h3]Feedback[/h3]
As always, feel free to reach out with any comments, questions, or feedback, either here on Steam or over in the Cauldron Discord. There's still some time to give us your suggestions and help improve Cauldron before release! We'd love to hear from you!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/2619650/Cauldron/

A Little History:
I began developing Cauldron in 2021 as a hobby project, and now four years later, here we are! What started as a couple strung-together minigames has evolved into the upgrade-fest that is Cauldron! I could pretend that I had a master plan laid out for this game from the start, and that every new unlockable gameplay feature was part of some grand design, but the reality of this game’s development was a lot more chaotic, with a lot of trial and error, testing, and bugs (and an incredible amount of helpful feedback from the community!).

The progress of the world and environment art.

Developing Development:
As Cauldron evolved, so did my vision of the game’s final form, and with that, a realization that I’d never be able to do everything on my own. This past year, I formed SleepyDad Games, and have brought on a dedicated musician (Andy Brown) and pixel artist (Jared Zankowski) to work on the game.

How combat has changed over time.

Happening Now:
If you’ve been following the game, you probably noticed a lot of changes recently! Since the start of the new year, we’ve been updating a lot of the game’s artwork, including Jared’s incredible hand-drawn map and updated character portraits. I’ve also added a whole bunch of post-processing effects to bring the game to life (though I’m currently battling with the slowdown they cause on some graphics cards!).

Early and current dialogues!

SleepyDad has also entered a partnership with Caketown Interactive, whose expertise in marketing and publishing games has already been an incredible help (they’re the ones who suggested I start these dev diaries!).



What’s Left Before Full Release:
Short answer: a whole lot!
More than anything, Cauldron can use a bit of polish, and I’m pushing hard to make sure the game looks and plays its best before release in May. There’s still more map to draw, more character sprites to update, and more features to add (full mouse support almost here!). We’re also looking into localization, and as of now, we’re at least planning to add Simplified Chinese translations to the game.

The next few months will be busy, and I’ll do my best to keep these posts coming for those of you who want to follow the game’s development.

As always, feel free to reach out with any comments, questions, or feedback, either here on Steam or over in the Cauldron Discord.



Thanks again!
Pete

Hey everyone! Cauldron has a HUGE new update live on Steam! Save files from previous versions won’t work anymore, but some of the profile-level progress should carry over. I suggest clearing your old game saves, since they’ll probably crash the game.

There have been a TON of updates, so I’ll list some of the big things:
- A new minigame! Go collect some ice! (I’ll need the most feedback on this one!)
- More map! The entire map is now filled out!
- 14 new items!
- New skits!
- New sub-mini games, found by beating new bosses located on the map!
- The FIGHTING PITS! A new addition for late-game, for those who want a real challenge in battle.
- New enemies!
- Big updates to the Cart game enemy scaling, and a bunch of performance improvements for those later levels. There’s an upgrade that lets you increase enemy levels for increased crystal drops.
- Updated each profile to have 10 save slots instead of 6. This will cause some weirdness if you had previous game files in profiles 2 and 3, but you should probably just delete those anyways.
- More ways to increase the speed of auto-collect! Check out the auto-collect bulletin board for all the fun math.
- Endings! (Sort of). Each game mode has a unique ending! (The TRUE final ending is still locked for now!)
- Still no music… but it should be ready in the next month or 2!