Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Whim Independent Studios - Development Log #70

Hey all, it's been a little while since the last development log, and I wanted to talk about some updates going on with whimindie for this year. This update is going to be a bit more text heavy than demonstration so thank you for reading this.

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Addressing the 2023 New Year's Day Cyberattack

As some of you may have seen and heard, I fell victim to a cyberattack on New Year's Day. After doing some travelling during the holidays and not getting much sleep (and not thinking clearly), I received a message from someone who I thought was trying to get their game up to a point to where they could pitch it to our studio. Little did I know that I was going to be the target of a cookie stealer Discord scam which used my personal login information on my computer to troll my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, attack several other accounts (including Amazon and Reddit), and have them take control of our itch.io developer account. 

For three weeks, they turned our itch.io account into "Wyntale" and uploaded versions of our games that contained malware and other viruses, using the same method that compromised me. After working with the itch.io Support Team, we were able to restore our account on Thursday, January 26th, and we rebuilt all of our pages and content and put our games back online on Saturday, January 28th.

We have taken measures to protect our studio accounts so that we can collaborate on updating our game pages in a way where 2FA-methods can remain enabled and we will no longer be accepting new game pitches/demos in a way we have done before nor will we allow play my game downloads on our Discord or through DMs. 

If you're reading this and have visited or downloaded anything from "Wyntale Independent Studios" or "wyntale.itch.io" during the period of January 1-26, 2023 I recommend to please clear all of your cookies on all of your internet browsers, delete any installed programs that look suspicious, and run your antivirus programs and rkill to stop anything weird that may be running in the background. 

We have also upped the requirements of new people joining our Discord that they must have a verified account with a phone number and unable to interact for 10 minutes so that we can evaluate those who come in and out of the channel. Furthermore, legacy members who have been sitting unverified on the server and haven't agreed to the rules of the Discord will be removed from the Discord on February 1st, 2023. 

Thank you for your continued support and this is a situation that we will make sure will not happen again.

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Updates to Selatria

This is finally the year that we're working to complete Selatria. We're bringing a lot of hands on deck from our other projects to be able to finish cutscenes, dungeons, battle adjustments, and generally tie things together for the final game. We also made a handful of adjustments to the core game to make it Steam Deck compatible. 

This Spring, we're going to be pushing out one final update to Selatria: Advent of the Dakk'rian Empire to update it with all of the features that we've developed for the final game and to finally give it some much needed compatibility with the Steam Deck. A shoutout to Shadoe and Jon for making all of the conversions required to get it playable. We still need to figure out a handful of bugs, so please wait a little bit longer if you own the game and have been trying to play it on go with the Steam Deck. 

With Selatria: Full Version we will have a simultaneous launch for PC and Steam Deck so you can play on the go/docked or at your computer. We're aiming for the second half of the year for the full version and hopefully we have more details and updated assets to share soon. 

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Upcoming Conventions!

This upcoming weekend, we will be making an appearance at Anime Gaming Expo in Fresno showing and selling Steam codes for Spellbearers! 



We also have plans to show Spellbearers and Selatria at our return to LVLUPEXPO in Las Vegas in mid-February, So Cal Retro Gaming Expo in early May, and at a special shared booth at San Diego Comic-Con in July! 




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Be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, and join our DiscordSee you soon at Anime Gaming Expo in Fresno and LVLUPEXPO in Las Vegas! It's good to be back.




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