Quoting: GuestDownloads don’t work anymore on itch.io it seems. Oh well. The game seems interesting but it’s hard to get an idea of the gameplay from the trailer.

Itch keeps reverting the page back to "draft" status after random intervals, once or twice per day, and we then have to go back and set it to "published" again. Which is getting pretty annoying by now. We'll try contact them about it, but at least for most of the time the downloads should be available.

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We're hoping to find a nice balance where the game should be playable and enjoyable for the average gamer, while also having some extra interesting stuff, alternative ways to get through levels etc, for those who have some related skills in real life. And of course making the modding tools to allow people to make some nice levels that might also feature some of the real-life vulnerabilities and techniques those people are aware of. (Or, to deal with privacy issues of new laws, or whatever strange stuff might be going on in the modder's home country, and present them to the gamer audience in a more relatable and understandable way)

...we'll have to see how well that works out, of course. :D

As for the avatar, that's a couple of months old white-tailed eagle kid doing some wings practice. Few years ago a friend of mine sent me a link to a live web cam in an eagle's nest somewhere in the middle of a forest in Latvia. Being stuck to my desk way more than I like (and also currently living in London where nature is not quite as abundant as where I come from), just the background noise of the forest, wind and trees was really nice for coding. And pretty quickly I found those eagles to be a lot more interesting creatures than what I would have expected, with some surprisingly intelligent behaviors and personalities. So since then I've had a cam open in background or second monitor all the time while working on the game, just the right balance of relaxing background sounds and occasional distractions to break me away from the work a bit. Highly recommended!

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Quoting: Modanung

Quoting: TheSHEEEPThat's so meta!

Maybe, but in my opinion absolutely relevant given the game's theme:

Unique gameplay mechanics allow you to manipulate the world and people around you with the data they unwittingly leave behind.

Life is no game, Mr Sheep. :|
I sent a message to the creators informing them about the fact that Unity - and games made with it - are spyware, providing Urho3D [External Link] as a viable alternative. I have yet to receive an answer. The same goes for itch.io to whom I sent a similar email.

Sounds like we have quite a different definition of spyware. It it helps, as we are using the paid Unity license, we have the option to disable their anonymous hardware statistic collection, which we have done.

The game will still request access from your firewall, though, which is because our built-in modding & level editing tool uses networking APIs (on your localhost only, not even LAN) to connect game build with the editor. The final version will have a menu option you need to toggle to enable this feature, but for the demo we've removed all of the options menu as it's pretty rough still and not quite ready for public use.

As far as Urho3D goes, that looks like a promising engine project and could certainly be worth considering for future projects (depending on how far they get in their development, as of now it doesn't meet our requirements) but at this stage of development we are not looking to switch the game engine.

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I noticed that as well. Seems to trigger during Unity's splash screens, which funny enough are be the least-busy moment in the game as there really is nothing happening. Anyway, the shell warning popups at least to me to have become a bit more aggressive in general lately. Hadn't seen them, for ages but in the last few months most of the heavier apps I need to run trigger one when they are starting. By now I'd rather just get rid of the warning, I'm sure I'll recognize a frozen app myself when it really happens, don't need a popup for it.

At least for me the popups are displayed on top of the app as expected, having one hidden behind other windows sounds even more annoying.

If this is still an issue when we are closer to full release, I might just ditch Unity's splash screen system and display them myself on top of the main menu screen. That would be the heavier option, but I guess it might keep Gnome-Shell happy.

(And thanks for the article, of course! Much appreciated!)

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Hah, we certainly won't abandon Linux, I've used Ubuntu as my main OS since 2005 and do most of my gaming on it. So making sure our own project runs o it is high priority to us.

...which brings me to the main point, some good news. The Linux build is now available at itch.io, sorry about the delay but we ran into some small but annoying rendering issues on Linux at the very last minute so I had to sort that out first. Seems to be fine now, tested on Ubuntu 18.04, with the proprietary nVidia drivers from the repositories.

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Quoting: CyrilHi there!

Do you know if the game could get a GOG release (or any kind of DRM-Free release) in the future?

Sorry to ask that guys but it might be important. Thanks!

We'll definitely do DRM-free, although what stores will be a question we'll have to answer closer to release. As far as we're concerned, both GOG and Humble Store are something we'd like to do. Not massive supporters of DRM here :D

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