Xbox Game Pass is losing a charming indie game later this month
Xbox Game Pass always sees games come and go, and this month it sees titles like MLB The Show 21 and indie game Pathway leaving the service. Sorry baseball fans, your chance to knock one out of the park in specifically the year 2021 is running out soon, as from April 16 MLB The S
Xbox Game Pass always sees games come and go, and this month it sees titles like MLB The Show 21 and indie game Pathway leaving the service.
Sorry baseball fans, your chance to knock one out of the park in specifically the year 2021 is running out soon, as from April 16 MLB The Show 21 will no longer be available to play on Game Pass. Which includes both the Xbox One and the Xbox Series X|S versions of the game. This probably has something to do with the fact that MLB The Show 22 is out tomorrow, April 5, and will be available day one on Game Pass. So we're not that sorry, as you can still get all your wooden bat needs soon enough anyway.
What we are sorry about is that the beautiful Pathway is also being removed from Game Pass PC, also April 16. A couple of years ago, Pathway was available as a free download on the Epic Games Store, in line with an update at the time. It's a turn-based tactics game set in 1936 in which you try to prevent Nazis from hidden treasure in Northern African temples, which is in general a good thing to do.
Changelog for 1.4.1
We’re pretty excited to announce that Pathway now supports community language mods through the Steam Workshop! Talented members of the community are now able to create translations for the game and publish them directly through Steam. In fact, there's already a completed Italian translation available right now, translated by some of our amazing community members. Check it out here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2678343514
We really hope this will enable even more players the chance to experience Pathway. Keep in mind, these are community translations and any problems/issues with them should be posted directly to their workshop pages so they can be addressed by the team that created them. We can't fix them!
If you are interested in starting a community translation project, you can find instructions inside the game's installation folder inside a folder labeled i18n. The readme will give you a starting point on setting up your language, and how to use excel to manage your translations.
We'd also highly recommend you join our discord server as there's quite a few people there that may be able to help out in case you run into any problems.
Besides this addition, the build also includes a handful of smaller fixes and addresses a crash bug we've seen mentioned quite a few times in the forums recently.
Changelog Version 1.4.0
Controller support has now been officially added to Pathway! Last week 
Currently we have (official) support for Playstation, XBox and Switch controllers, but other controllers will probably work as well. After selecting your option click apply at the bottom and you should be good to go!
Full Changelog 1.3.0
Just a little over two years ago the first version of Pathway came out, and it's been a wild journey since then! We've pushed out over 50 updates since the initial release, and thanks to everyone in our amazing community we now have a game that is far better than what we started out with. Your feedback has been a tremendous help in shaping the game. So thank you everyone for your amazing support throughout the last 2 years!
We wanted to take this moment to highlight two community efforts that we think everyone should know about and a little something from us ...
We think it's amazing what Petru has done! If you want a new/fresh experience check out the instructions on how to install the mod over on nexusmods: 
Darth Vader has been spearheading a community effort to translate the game to Italian. They've just recently reached a huge milestone of translating the entire game. Darth Vader has created a post in the forums and anyone interested in testing this out should head over there for instructions: 
We've just pressed the release button for the Hardcore Mode Update! This is a sizable update that brings an exciting new way to play the game, a bunch of QoL changes and many bug fixes!
In case you haven't seen our last devlog, here's a recap of what the Hardcore Mode is:
When you create a new profile you'll see the option to make this profile a Hardcore Profile. Note that you can't change a hardcore profile to a normal profile later.
Hardcore Mode follows different rules than standard Pathway: All adventures play in a sequence one after the other. Almost everything carries over to the next adventure and you have to survive with only the things you find during your travels. So that means you won't be able to change your team between adventures and if your characters die, they are gone on this profile! Due to these additional constraints, we recommend to try the game on a default profile first.
Some additional differences in Hardcore Mode:
As of today the next version of Pathway is available on the Preview Branch. This build includes the new Hardcore Mode!
Before we dig into the new version, we have a favour to ask of you. Pathway's OST has been nominated for best OST over at 
(photo by EDITORIAL247.COM)
We've also been busy preparing a nice little update for Pathway. We're currently doing some internal testing and are hoping to release the update early next year. Besides the usual bugfixes and quality of life improvements we have the following things coming up:
The update will also introduce a bunch of new weapons and items. They fall into line with the existing categories but will provide more variety at the pointy end of the game!
A big thank you from all of us at Robotality for an incredible year. We're really happy that many of you have been enjoying our little game! Stay tuned and see you in the New Year!
Hey everyone! Simon here, Art Director at Robotality.
What a ride the last few months were. We released over a dozen of updates, including one big update called “Adventurers Wanted” that reworked the core gameplay using your feedback you gave us. We feel honored to have such a nice and supportive community. Thank you!
As you have seen now the Steam Autumn Sale is live and as with every year, you can now also vote for the games you love to nominate for a Steam Awards.
Let’s see if we can get a game with pixel art into the “Outstanding Visual Style” category together 😉
What makes the art style of Pathway so special?
The visual art style of Pathway was a pipe dream of mine I had long before we even started working on the game. During the development of our first game, Halfway we had our first experiments going with the ideas to combine classical pixel art with dynamic lights and shadows, but due to time constraints we never followed through.
After we finished Halfway we started to look into what to do next, and while we worked on the game design for Pathway, we also picked up the old idea again: Can we actually do proper shadows and dynamic light within a pixel art game that are also as close as possible pixel perfect.
No one before us had fully done this so it was an interesting challenge to take up. There are some other games that uses dynamic lighting and normal maps combined with pixel art, but no one did a full dynamic light and shadow setup until now!
After a few months of prototyping we actually had a proof of concept for this:
As you can see, it looked more like Halfway and our concept for Pathway was not even close to the finished product we have now. But... we now knew that it could be done! Little did we know back then, that it would take us another 4 years to complete and for Pathway to become the game it is now.
Here are some more very old prototype screenshots of the Pathway tech:
Even though the game does not look like it in the end, we are using a very limited color palette for the whole game. All assets are made out of a set of 32 colors for the environment and another 32 colors for the character. Here you can see the rough sketches I did to test my 32 colors for the environment back in early 2016:
Next up is a short behind-the-scenes video of how we create our levels and visuals in our custom editor. To achieve the look, we actually use voxels and 3D meshes to generate the scenes and instead of pixels - you see colorized polygons for each pixel on the screen.
https://youtu.be/sHYhSnl7cZo
If you think the result is worth an award nomination on Steam feel free to click on the widget above.
Thank you again for the support, it’s been a cool ride together. We are looking forward to sharing more news with you folks soon about what we have in store with Pathway.
PS: If you want to have a more detailed look at what we did to achieve the look we have. Let us know in the comments and we will see what we can do. 😉
