May has come and gone and we have remained very busy. With new dev logs showing off behind the scenes to different games to new OST releases to surprising announcements there is so much to talk about.

Here are the games in this dev log!

Kumitantei
The Immortal John Triptych
Montabi
Echo Weaver
Future Vibe Check
Airframe Ultra
Rain World

Kumitantei | Expanding Free Time

First off, before I dive into the meat of the dev log, I want to say thank you for the support on the launch of Kumitantei and for all of you who left us a review! Also, I want to thank the bug reporters among you for helping us improve the game. We couldn’t’ve done this without your support.

Monthly Dev Log

We want to keep everyone up to date on Episode 2 and beyond on development regarding Kumitantei. We really don’t want to remain silent and want to make sure we’re feeding y’all little tidbits of Kumitantei goodness. So, every month, I’ll write these dev logs to share behind the scenes development, highlight different community fan art, community events, and more!

If you want to keep up to date on Kumitantei news, be sure to follow the game on Steam and join our Discord!

Expanding Free Time

We’d always wanted there to be more to do during Free Time and for there to be more ways to bond with your favorite characters, so that’s something we’re focusing on with the development of Episode 2! There will be two new major features added to this part of the game.

One thing we’ve heard a lot of requests for is the ability to play Card Battle Debate outside of the Clinical Trial, both to try out new Skill Card strategies and see the unique animations for the characters who haven’t gotten to battle yet. We’re adding a new interaction to Free Time that will fulfil both of these! You’ll be able to spar with your favorites during Free Time and wager your tokens on who will win, high stakes with high rewards!

We’ve also decided to bring the “Battle Demo” from the Kumitantei Demo Version over to the main game as a new Training Mode, with expansions to allow using every Skill Card and deck composition against any character you want! We hope these additions will make the Card Battle system more accessible and encourage trying out different strategies before the next Clinical Trial rolls around.

The Prize Corner will also be getting an expansion, including a major rebalancing to the Kitty Catcher and a brand new Prize Shop. It’ll now let you exchange tokens for uncommon gifts, upgrades for the Clinical Trial, and even unique Skill Cards! We’re excited to share more information about these gameplay improvements in the future, but for now, we’ll leave you with two never-before-seen Card Battle cut-in animations for Kaguya and Nisuke!

June Character Birthdays

Did you know each character in Kumitantei has an official birthday? Here are the birthdays in June!

June 11th – Tsubaki Inoue

Community Corner

And now time for my favorite part of the dev log! Sharing art and other content created by the community!

megum1blackqu1l on Discord

Dummytit on Discord

Tsubakiinoue on Discord

@agurinrin93 on Twitter

There are a ton more and I wish I could share all the art that the community has shared.

Please feel free to join the Kumitantei Discord to see more art made by the community, ask any burning questions you may have in the #kt-questions channel or just hang out with us and the community.

The Immortal John Triptych | Game Reveal

We’ve partnered up with Joe Richardson to bring you The Immortal John Triptych.

The Immortal John Triptych brings Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate together under one complete package! This isn’t just a merging of the three games, this is never-before-seen bonus features, deleted scenes, and a QoL facelift! WOW! Expect Immortal John Triptych to come to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X + Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch 1 + 2 later this year.

If you’re a PC player, don’t worry, you’ll be able to purchase The Immortal John Triptych as a DLC on Steam, including ALL the little bits and bops. We are also giving a free Quality of Life update to all three games to make sure each title is in tip top shape!

Check out The Immortal John Triptych here!

https://linktr.ee/ImmortalJohnTriptych

Montabi | Demo Update coming soon

Mankibo is preparing for June where Montabi is participating in Southeast Asian Games Showcase with a major announcement and Steam Next Fest with a demo update. This would be a good time to come join the Montabi Discord, just to make sure you’re up to date on all the Montabi news!.

They wrote a dev log talking about this and going into deeper details on what they are working on and some of the changes planned.

Hi Trainers,

The May community playtest is now closed! Thank you to everyone who spent time with Montabi throughout the playtest. This has been really crucial as we prepare for a lot of exciting stuffs in the near future. We truly appreciate all the feedback and we’ll continue addressing them as best as we can!

June is packed with exciting events and announcements! For Montabi, there are two major events to watch out for this month:

June 6 – Southeast Asian Games Showcase: BIG announcement is coming!
June 15 – Steam Next Fest: New demo update!

What’s New?

We’ve been focusing on addressing your feedback, including various QoL improvements and balancing changes:

New content
- Charm: Herd Call, Primal Flux
- Status effect: Impervious
- Supply: Coating
Balancing
- Skills adjustments, rebalance, or redesigns, including:
  - Chottle, Yipao, and Cabpod starter decks redesign
  - Flamble armor playstyle redesign
  - Exchroma redesign
  - And many more!
- Stickers: Rebalance, rarity, and price adjustments
- Montabi Mastery Reward: Progression adjustments
- Events: Tinker Shop Clearance, Training Station, Relaxing Spa, No Pain No Gain
- Cafe: “Study” levels up twice instead of once
QoL improvements
- Attach sticker UX: Show which sticker you’re going to attach to a card
- Timer in team detail: Show how long you’ve been playing
- Settings and accessibility improvements
- And more!
Credits update
Localization
Store page refresh
- New capsule art: Adding more cards and zoom for genre clarity and readability, while also keeping the vibes alive
- Meet the Montabi: Introducing all the starters you’ll meet in the game!
- New GIFs: Also more cards! And showing how each Montabi has its own deck

What’s Next?

More balancing and bug fixes💪
More QoL improvements💪
✨HUGE✨ announcement on June 6
Steam Next Fest demo update

Fanart

Wonderful art of Tonkey, Wishly, and Hydo by Sharlyf from Montabi Discord!

Don’t miss important announcements and events, especially this June! Join the Montabi Discord for reminders and fun discussions with the community. Let’s get hyped together for these adorable mons!

Thank you for building Montabi with us! See you soon… REAL SOON!👀

The team is sharing different behind the scenes sketches and information on different Montabi in the Montabi Discord! Be sure to join the Discord as I’m sure they will share more there!

Echo Weaver | Thinky Direct

Echo Weaver joined Thinky Direct, a puzzle game showcase for games that make you– well, you get it.

If you missed the direct, don’t fret, here is the Echo Weaver trailer!

We wanted to focus a little more on the mystery underneath Provenance with this trailer. You can see new biomes too, if you pay close attention to some of the shots! The game keeps getting closer and closer to gold. What do you think?

There will be a new demo coming during the Steam Next Fest in a couple weeks!

Wishlist Echo Weaver on Steam and prepare for the new demo coming soon.

Future Vibe Check |Turning Music Into an Automation Objective

Unwise has been deep in the coding mines and music theory notes of Future Vibe Check. I was very lucky to pull him aside for a bit to talk about what he has been working on.

Hey Vibers,

We’ve been hard at work trying to answer one of the toughest game design questions in Future Vibe Check since starting: How do you make music, something subjective, work inside an automation game, something built around objective outputs?

Automation games are built around quantitative pressure. Items per minute. Belt throughput. Jammed outputs. Power usage. Layout efficiency. Players look at a system, find the bottleneck, rebuild it, and make the number go up.

Music is not like that. A great song can be dense, simple, strange, aggressive, soft, repetitive, or chaotic. If we just tell players “make good music,” there is nothing concrete to optimize. If we force players to copy exact songs or solve a specific puzzle, we lose the feeling of creative freedom that is core to what makes making music fun. How do we make the music feel like your own but the factory you make feel like it is optimized for it?

The Vibe Check system is our answer.

It turns music into a performance objective without turning creativity into homework.

The Draft: Pick The Vibe Before You Build It

Before a song section begins, players can draft the musical direction they want to aim for. That draft can shape the section’s key, scale, mode, tempo, chord progression, and contract objective.

This matters because we do not want the game to say, “Here is the correct song. Recreate it.”

Instead, we want the game to say, “Here is the kind of musical problem you are solving. Now build your own answer.”

A draft might push you toward a verse with rising melodic motion, a chorus with call-and-response hooks, a strong bass-focused section, a rock intro, a jazz groove, or a branching network shape that creates a larger musical phrase. The player still decides how to route signals, which nodes to use, how dense the arrangement becomes, and how the performance actually sounds.

The draft is the creative brief. Your factory is the composition.

The Vibe Check: A Score You Can Optimize Around

Once you have built the section, you can start a Vibe Check. Finally the name of the game is tied to a real mechanic 🙂 ! When you choose to start a Vibe Check, the game scores a live pass of what music you are making with your factory.

That distinction is important. The system is not judging a static menu choice. It is listening to what your factory actually performs in time.

At runtime, the music contract system evaluates notes as they happen, measure by measure, against the current musical context: tempo, key, mode, scale, chord progression, section, and timing. Some requirements care about every measure. Some accumulate across the full contract. Some reset with the chord progression. Network requirements can also score the physical shape of the audio network itself.

What Can A Vibe Check Measure?

This is where the system gets interesting. A Vibe Check is not one generic “song quality” meter. It is a modular contract made from multiple music requirements. We have built a way to quantify the “structure” of music in a way to make objectives flexible and procedural.

Examples include:

Rhythm Check: Require kicks, snares, hi-hats, or other instrument categories on specific sixteenth-note steps. A contract can allow loose timing, demand exact timing, or punish extra notes.

Density Check: Ask for a sparse phrase, a dense phrase, a minimum number of notes, notes per beat, or enough unique step coverage to keep the pattern moving.

Instrumentation Check: Require bass, drums, keys, leads, or multiple instrument categories. The system can ask for “bass every measure” or “use at least three instrument types across the progression to make a certain genre.”

Tonality Check: Check key, mode, scale, crafted tonal settings, or specific chord progression behavior.

Tempo Check: Score against BPM ranges or traditional tempo markings.

Composer Check: This is where the procedural music brain becomes scoreable. Requirements can look for roles like Bass, Melody, Harmony, Lead, or Rhythm. They can check melodic contours, harmonic focus, voicing styles, tension tolerance, resolution urgency, voice leading, anticipation, octave range, density, and dynamics.

Network Check: Since Future Vibe Check is built on spatial music routing, the system can also score the physical composition network. It can require a certain number of audio networks, downstream nodes, signal path length, branch points, terminal sound nodes, unique path lengths, or exact edge spacing. A requirement can even say: build a long route, but avoid one-cell jumps.

That means a music contract can ask for something like:

Build a chorus with call-and-response contour, chord or color-tone focus, and a branching audio network with multiple terminal sound nodes.

That is not just “play more notes.” That is a musical and logistical design challenge.

Why This Fits The Genre

The goal is not to make music less subjective. The goal is to make musical intention measurable.

In an automation game, a good objective should create a readable problem. If a belt is starved, you add supply. If an output is jammed, you fix routing. If your Vibe Check score is low, you can inspect why.

Not enough bass notes? Route more signals through bass-focused nodes.

Rhythm missing the backbeat? Move the node spacing so notes land on the right sixteenth steps.

Density too low? Add another source, split a signal, or increase note generation.

Network score failing? Extend the route, add branches, or clean up one-cell jumps.

Tonality missing? Craft stronger key, scale, and mode control into the signal.

That is the loop we want: listen, diagnose, rebuild, improve.

The music becomes something you can feel and optimize.

The Bigger Design Goal

Future Vibe Check is trying to bridge two player motivations that usually fight each other.

The first is the expression: “I want to make something that sounds like me.”

The second is mastery: “I want the system to give me a hard target, then let me solve it better.”

The draft gives players creative direction. The Vibe Check gives players objective feedback. Together, they let us bring music into the automation/base-building genre without flattening it into a simple puzzle.

You are not just making a factory that produces items.

You are building a machine that performs.

And when you pass the Vibe Check, it should feel like your layout choices and your ear clicked into place.

The biggest challenge we have now is onboarding players to this system, improving the UI/UX, tuning the requirements, balancing the scoring, and ensuring the mechanics around it are simplified for this to come to life. I’m excited for players to pass some Vibe Checks in the game soon as we polish this system and its place in the game.

Peace and Love,

Unwise

If you have time wishlist Future Vibe Check on Steam and join the Future Vibe Check Discord!

Airframe Ultra | A Small Update from the Developers

It has been a couple months since the last beta, but you better believe we have the most dedicated developers in all of Megacity West! I checked in with Josh, the developer on Airframe Ultra, talking about what they have been focusing on the last months.

We hope you’re as excited as we are for some upcoming changes to the tutorial (Josh), input (Miles), and customization (Joar).

We know that the tutorial takes a bit longer than most folks sitting down to play with friends for the first time would like. That’s why we’re refocusing the tutorial into two separate paths depending on what you’re looking for. We’re keeping the original tutorial in place and planning to keep it focused on the nitty gritty details of movement, combat, and racing so that players will continue to have a sandbox to hone their skills in. We’ve also built a menu where players hopping in to play with their friends for the first time can more quickly get up to speed. Our hope here is that players will have the option to get an in-depth guide on movement or a quick rundown on the basics before hopping directly into a race.

We’re also investing some more time in input management, so the next time you play, it should feel nice and crispy on a wider range of devices. Rebinding will also have broader functionality and be more reliable, so keep an eye out for those changes!

Last, we’ve been overhauling character customization and building a progression system to give your unlocked cosmetics a bit more oomph. After much hard work, we’re almost ready to show you our totally reworked systems for unlocking character customizations and applying those changes to your own racers. We’re waiting a bit longer to show you these changes, but we know you’ll love it. Soon!

I’ll make sure to bother the crew next month, so be sure to keep an eye out for that.

Community Corner

Fl.oof on Discord

Bananaslugcatwawa on Discord

rosept10 on Discord

Make sure to wishlist Airframe Ultra on Steam and join the community in the Airframe Ultra Discord.

Rain World | In the Classroom

Rain World was used by the University of Chicago’s “Serious Play: Video Games and Global Politics” to study climate change and video games.

There are many ecosystems in the world on land and in the oceans where even the smallest change will disrupt the fragile balance that has remained there for thousands of years.

If you would like to read more about this, then check out the blog here!

https://www.akuparagames.com/2026/05/27/rain-world-in-the-classroom/

We also brought some of the unused tracks in Rain World into 3 OST on Steam, GOG, and Epic.

These were already out on James’ Bandcamp but we want to bring them to other platforms so more people can listen to them.

Here are the OSTs!

Alphas, Gems, and Junk

Ambients and Instrumentals

Songs and Rhythms

Community Corner

@moonwhirl.bsky.social on Bluesky

@MikeWowski6437 on Youtube

If you want to hear more news on these titles, then join our Akupara Discord, or follow us on Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram!