Announcements and Articles: The Gatehouse Quarter => Announcements! The Town Crier! => Topic started by: Jubal on July 17, 2025, 11:07:40 PM
Title: Updates from the Forge 58: Summer 2025
Post by: Jubal on July 17, 2025, 11:07:40 PM
(http://i.imgur.com/Yjd0qkK.png)
Issue 58: Summer 2025
EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS
In utterly shocking predictable news, here's another very late issue of Updates from the Forge, Exilian's quarterly newsletter of creative geekery! As our usual author was away conferencing in early July things have kept getting pushed back, but here we finally are and there's a lot to discover in this issue.
There's not a lot of site news to report for this quarter of the year - while the spring contains a good deal of site events like our birthday and winter competition results, summer can be a quieter time as Exilian folk wander off on their travels and explore the wide world beyond these forum boards. We do have some news planned for next issue on site tech, so stay tuned and keep an eye out for some new updates and redesigns coming soon there!
There may not be many whole-site news announcements but that doesn't mean that the furnaces are stopped or the forge-fires quenched. In this issue we have a big crop of eleven updates from different projects, including creatively building horror labyrinths and dwarven halls, exploring mysterious realms from Forao to Fallout, and also, uh, rockpools and basketball. There's a lot going on, so find out more by reading onwards...
CONTENTS:
Editorial & Community News (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7093.0#editorial)
Game Development (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7093.0#gamedev)
Enter the Minerva Labyrinth
What are Fairytales Made Of?
It's Clutchtime!
Explore The Imperium of Forao
Innkeep Dev Logs Return
Arts & Writing (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7093.0#artwrite)
New Exilian member Antiquity brings us Minerva Labyrinth, a dungeon crawler that faces a newly formed group of magical girl style transforming warriors against a twisted, demonic force only known as the Hate. The future earth our protagonists inhabit is kinder than our own, but the question of whether Hate can truly be defeated still ultimately hangs in the balance...
(https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTMwNjM4OS8xOTY4OTg5Ny5wbmc=/original/HPsUn%2F.png) Do these rooms have an end? Do they even have a geometry? Or do they only have Hate?
Minerva's Labyrinth is made in Godot, and takes some inspiration from games including Wizardry, The Bard's Tale, and Experience. With ten different character classes and adjustable stats and equipment there's a lot of potential for building a fully customised party, but you can also jump in with a pre-built balanced group to start the game with. Enemies provide a range of different tactical challenges, including powerful overlords for each of the game's sixteen labyrinthine dungeons.
There's a demo now available on Steam, and you can check out the game's forum thread as well below:
Take a look on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3520970/Minerva_Labyrinth/)
Discuss the game on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=162487)
(https://img.itch.zone/aW1hZ2UvMTQ5MjM5MS84NzAxMDE3LnBuZw==/794x1000/QPnFfM.png) Wait, there are people out there who don't dream of cake?
What are Fairytales Made Of?
Another new game from a new member, EntangledPear are a game dev couple who bring us The Stuff that Fairytales are Made Of, which takes the 19th century story collections of Slovak folklorist Pavol Dobsinsky and forges them into a new retro JRPG format. The game opens in darkness: the kingdom has been plunged into eternal night, and rumour has it that witches are to blame. Pavol himself becomes the protagonist of the story - a scholar rather than a born warrior, with mechanics allowing him to learn the weaknesses of enemies and progress in the story by learning about the fairy-story land he inhabits.
TStFaMO was made in Game Maker, and features puzzles, potion crafting, and dialogue progression as well as core JRPG combat mechanics. It's available completely free on itch, so please do give it a try and give our folklorists some feedback on their fairytale!
Get the game on Itch (https://entangledpear.itch.io/fairy-tales)
Check out the Exilian thread (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=162881)
It's Clutchtime!
(https://bigosaur.com/blog/images/bball-pick.png) This early modern soldier isn't chicken. He just has a chicken.
Another old friend of the site, Bigosaur has created a new deck-building roguelike where you must lead a basketball team to victory with cards based on all the classic tricks and plays of the game. To win, you must turn your stamina energy into scoring by playing and setting up card combinations, and make best use of getting the crowd involved with a crowd noise score that can provide bonuses to home teams. With additional mechanics like card stacking for fouls and blocks, the principles of Clutchtime may be simple but there are many tricks of the trade to learn.
The game can be played as a free demo: the full game will release on July 24. There's over 100 cards in the full game, with multiple game modes including the knockout Tournament and the slightly more forgiving Season mode which allows you to take a loss or two and still make it to the play-offs. You can give it a go and find out much more at the links below:
Get the demo on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2995450/Clutchtime_Basketball_Deckbuilder/)
Discuss Clutchtime on the forum (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=163988)
(https://i.imgur.com/M0F94RD.png) What may be found on the Bleakhorn Coast?
Explore The Imperium of Forao
We have tabletop gaming updates as well as the indie games of course - and some development notes for Son of the King's homebrew TTRPG setting, the Imperium of Forao. Used for running Pathfinder and D&D games in, the Imperium is a land in the north of its world, wide and running from part-frozen oceans in its uppermost reaches down to arid desert on its southern border. Within the realm, besides the Emperor whose word is law, many species, government systems, townships, lands and gods jostle around with varying levels of prominence and importance. Rather than a one-size-fits-all system, the Empire has an array of local semi-elected governors and one or two old hereditary lordships, all with some oversight but the eyes of the Emperor cannot be everywhere at once.
SOTK has provided some general notes on the world and its deities, rulership, species, and, history, and a second post with a travellers' guide to the Bleakhorn Coast region. It's a good example of making a setting which fits classic D&D/Pathfinder rules and tropes well but manages to make a more flexible, plausible-feeling diversity of a world underneath that. If you're interested or want some inspiration for your own gaming settings, do take a look!
Discover Forao on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=163584)
Innkeep Dev Logs Return
As well as new game projects, we've got updates from old friends as well - Innkeep, BeerDrinkingBurke's game, has rebooted its set of dev logs as part of a major new push on development since the game found a publisher and formed its own company, Boot Disk Games, in 2024. In this log BeerDrinkingBurke introduces us to the team that's recently formed behind Innkeep, including bonus programming support, music and songwriting, graphics and narrative design brought into the project from a range of angles.
He also discusses the importance of tangible items in the game. Innkeep is in some ways a management simulator, though there's a lot more going on and a lot of story being told beneath that surface. Having a grounded setting helps mesh those perspectives together: by ensuring the world feels like it has depth and real, existent things you can interact with, the story can be told within what feels not just like an abstract simulation but a day-to-day set of authentic-feeling activities for your roguish innkeeper.
For more info on all that and more, besides the video above, do take a look at the forum thread or of course Innkeep's website, where you can sign up to the game's email list, steam wishlist, or Discord!
Discuss the game on the forum (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=163355)
Innkeep's Website (https://innkeepgame.com/)
ARTS AND WRITING
SOTK's Short Stories
Quote
"You heard about them Wishing Stones?"
"Wishing stones? What's a stone want with wishing?"
Son of the King's short stories thread has recently been updated with a little short vignette-tale of characters discussing wishing stones in a tavern. It's a good example of how short story writing can be really useful for getting the feel of a setting, the sense of what sort of people exist in a world, how they talk, and therefore what people should expect. Even from the two-line clip above, we get an immediate sense of the register of voice the characters are using, and the sense of how information moves: we know that this is a world with ordinary people in, one where people pass on news by word of mouth and rumour. We also know it's a world in which magic is not something that everyone understands immediately and intrinsically, where this idea of a wishing stone is unfamiliar enough to be novel. Thinking about how bits of text like this can convey a lot more than their immediate meaning is a great way to work out how to write better, and this is a nice example of that.
It's also not the only bit of SOTK's writing to appear recently, as he's also writing an AAR thread of a Pathfinder game he's playing in, entitled Thurazur's Field Notes. The identity of our principal point-of-view character is left somewhat obscure in these early notes - after all, why introduce yourself in your own note-taking? We've got numerous other characters appearing already though, with a primary team of - besides Thurazur - a cleric with a love of the finer things in life called Sister Cynthia, an orc named Grugnog, a druid named Elderberry, and Clive, who is a gnome but possibly more importantly is a Clive.
You can find both these pieces of writing and more in our Stories and AARs subforum - do take a look!
SOTK's Latest Short Stories (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=163614)
Thurazur's Field Notes (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=163899)
A Tale of an Unconquered Sun
More of BagaturKhan's tails of his vast World of Infinitas universe have been added recently, with the end of the story Sol Invictus: these final chapters see the protagonists working out the nature of the ancient threats that may be on the horizone. Focused on small, personal conversations and the juxtaposition of the everyday world of mushrooms and potatoes with the encroaching possibility of galactic war and alien horror, there's an interesting tension between the very grounded world around some of the characters and the immense scale of history and threat they need to contemplate facing.
BagaturKhan's setting is one that exists on a truly epic scale, spanning millions of years of galactic history, but retains a lot of small details in the writing that nonetheless make it very human. You can find a wide array of his stories on his Exilian forum (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=257.0), and he often drops by for discussions and questions. Do take a look!
Read Sol Invictus on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=160712)
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A Poem About A Sea Snail
The latest poetic work from Jubal is a small one about a small creature - one you might not realise is a ferocious predator in its own little world. The dog whelk is a kind of sea snail, but unlike some of its leaf-chewing cousins whelks can secrete liquid that softens other seashells, allowing them to bore holed into mussels and barnacles and eat them from the inside out. This rather gruesome feeding method makes them among other things one of the threats faced by characters in Jubal's TTRPG Rockpool, but a lighter hearted poetic take on some of the grimness of nature is quite possible too.
Jubal often writes poems and has a number of other animal and nature related rhymes and themes, including poems about obscure creatures like the Desman and the Gaur. You can find all those and more on his Exilian thread which brings together all his poetry since 2008. As well as the natural world Jubal often writes fantasy and fan ballads, besides other poetry about a whole range of aspects of this world and what it's like to navigate it.
(https://i.imgur.com/xopYYyX.png) Some days you just need to kick back and chill with a friendly two-headed cow though.
In our gaming forum we've got a range of ongoing threads on different games and game world, including the Witcher, the Elder Scrolls, and, prompting some recent chat, Fallout, where Jubal has recently played through & been posting about Fallout 2, the widely acclaimed second game in the series and the last to be made by Black Isle Studios before the series moved to Bethesda's first-person RPG approach.
The discussion has been focused on how the villains of the different games hold up compared to one another, and the differences between the early games and their sense of creating a more internally consistent devloping world, and the later games which focus more on using the post-apocalypse to hold a mirror up to the world of the players and developers. There's lots of different ways that apocalypses can be used in fiction, and Fallout as one of the key game series that defines that sort of setting actually spans multiple of them.
If you'd like to join in with some post-apocalyptic gaming chat, why not come along and share your thoughts?
Fallout Discussions on Exilian (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=154578)
Experiments in Khazad Architecture
(https://i.imgur.com/jIf35HF.png)
Jubal's recent gaming experiences include a bunch of time playing Return to Moria, the survival-crafting game of maximum dwarfishness. The game has a campaign mode plot as your progress through the various areas of the mountain realm to try and make it safe for your kindred once more, but it also has a lot of scope for free building of different dwarven constructions. From this aspect of the game comes Jubal's Experiments in Khazad Architecture, where he has promised to catalogue various interesting or unusual ideas for building that can be done in the game.
There's a lot of possibilities when building underground that one might not immediately consider. How much does one try to build free-standing in the middle of caverns, versus trying to build things nestled into existing gaps and cracks in the rock? Do buildings need to be built off the floor in the first place, or is building off the ceiling also an equally reasonable option? Hopefully we'll be able to find out all this and more as Jubal's experimentation continues...
The Architectural Logs of Durin's Folk (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?msg=162517)
There's lots of ways to stay in touch with what we're doing on Exilian: of course checking the forum will always be a good way to know what's going on, but there's other options too. We email out these newsletters - please do get in touch if you want to get emails and aren't doing - and we have an RSS feed, where you can get the latest site announcements and updates directly to the RSS reader of your choice.
We also maintain three social media accounts with sporadic updates: our most active is Mastodon, where we make fairly regular posts, and we also have accounts on BlueSky and Facebook which post every few weeks. That gives you lots of potential ways to make sure you don't miss out on what we're doing and on how to support all the lovely creative folk on the site. Do join us in whichever spaces you wish!
Exilian on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/exilianofficial.bsky.social)
Exilian on Mastodon (https://indiepocalypse.social/@Exilian)
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Exilian on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ExilianOfficial/)
And those are summer's updates! As ever we'll be back in autumn with more and we look forward to seeing you and your wonderful creations again then. Until next time, dear friends - may your forges ever glow bright.