New DEMO, Lovecraftian Days Festival feature, charity and plans

Lovecraftian Days Festival Demo

We're excited to announce that the Lovecraftian Days Festival is LIVE and Pool of Madness is one of the featured titles!

To celebrate, we've prepared a DEMO that will be available till the end of the event - so make sure to try it out and share the unholy gospel with your friends, enemies and that annoying AI artist at the office.

Get it from our Steam page:

Pool of Madness

Features include:

• new art

• overhauled UI

• procedural rituals

• automats with temporary and permanent upgrades

• many bugfixes

Here's more or less what to expect:

Give the limited demo a spin and let us know what you think on our discord and Steam forums!

Please note that this is an early build that does not represent the final quality of the game - many things will be improved and added as we go along - details in the Pre-demo playtests section below.

While the demo is still a bit rough around the edges, it should give you a good feel of where we're heading with the core gameplay.

Expect more clarity, better game feel, more powerups, locations, tables and general insanity. And, of course, more bloody ways to annihilate fish - the foundation of any self-respecting pool simulation.

Charity fundraiser

Together with the demo, we've launched a fundraiser in cooperation with Voices of Children and Fulqrum Publishing aimed to support the Childhood Center - Ukraine’s first dedicated space for long-term psychological rehabilitation of children and parents affected by war.

The Childhood Center “will serve kids who've lived through shelling, occupation, or deportation; teenagers dealing with anxiety, depression, or PTSD; children with disabilities - anyone who needs time, a safe space, and professional support to start healing.”

Every donation brings the Childhood Center closer to opening its doors. As Bit Golem, we’ve been supporting humanitarian organisations such as Voices of Children since 2022. If you’d like to join us in these efforts, click here.

Pre-demo playtests and next dev steps

We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the short playtest before the demo! We've received a lot of useful feedback that will help us improve many aspects of the game.

With only a few days between the playtests and the demo, we haven’t implemented many major changes yet and focused on bugfixes and smaller updates, like UI enhancements. However, we’ve gathered your feedback into a nice fat document and will be working through it in the coming weeks, including:

• the clarity of rules and feedback from the game

• responsiveness and game feel

• UI and art (changelog already includes better vomit particles)

• various mechanics

• and adding much more insanity, which is also one of the main points raised in your comments and our discord (you're speaking our language)

Thanks again, give the demo a try! We'd love to hear your thoughts!

Hubert, Maciej & Jarek

TL;DR

• limited demo just launched - try it out during Lovecraftian Days!

• Fulqrum, Voices of Children and Bit Golem have launched a charity cooperation

• general list of post-playtest improvements we’re working on

• follow us on X, Bluesky and jump into our discord to say hi and tell us what we should be doing!

And remember: The ritual must continue!