BitCake Studio and Mad Mushroom announced that the cooperative roguelike shooter Atomic Picnic will launch on Steam Early Access on November 7.

In the $20 title, players will dive into the chaos and thrill of a co-op bullet-heaven roguelike shooter and an anime-inspired visual style for an unforgettable picnic in the wasteland. BitCake Studio is a rare game studio based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (I visited the city as part of our brief Brazil global gaming tour recently).

Players team up with up to three fellow “Loners” and embark on scavenger hunts known as “Picnics.” Each adventure pits you against relentless waves of monsters, objectives, and hulking bosses to ensure that no two Picnics are ever alike.

Run, gun, explore, collect, upgrade, and decimate – every Picnic offers a unique experience, filled with diverse upgrade paths and special events that challenge both solo adventurers and groups.

A final public playtest for Atomic Picnic is now available on Steam and will run until October 17. Hop in, run some Picnics with friends, and give feedback in the Atomic Picnic Discord as the devs at BitCake fine-tune, balance, and polish the game in time for Early Access.

In early access, the developers at BitCake Studio are introducing a wave of features for Loners to cut their Picnic teeth on. There are four hungry Loners: Ash, Hani, Bonnie, and JD. Each Loner boasts unique stats and abilities, allowing for varying playstyles. Try each out and find which suits you. You can permanently upgrade character stats via Mementos, which are acquired through Discoveries as Loners complete Picnics.

Loners will scour maps for valuable resources that unlock 18 different Mementos: character and gear upgrades for future runs. Completing specific challenges within Picnics will reveal Discoveries, which in turn grant new Mementos, characters, and weapons.

The game has three maps. In Train Plateau, you set up your Picnic in an abandoned trainyard, ripe for resource scavenging. If you’re lucky, you might find something worth cold cash! You can also come back to the Plateau in night mode, facing off against a different set of even tougher enemies.

In Twilight Dam, you figure out what cataclysmic event ravaged this dam. Picnic here to explore this mysteriously wrecked rift, in day or night mode. And in City of Sand, there are two dimensions, one city. Explore and Picnic in a glorious city caught within the sands of time…or what’s left of it.

In-run upgrades known as Curios represent the dramatic changes a Loner’s build will go through as they progress a Picnic. Standard Curios unleash your Loner’s full potential as its stats and abilities dynamically adapt to every acquired Curios.

Austin, Texas-based Mad Mushroom is a game publishing company positioned as a next-generation influencer-owned entity within the vast umbrella of OTK Network. Mad Mushroom wants to empower indie developers, engage gamers, and shape the future of interactive entertainment.

BitCake Studios is a game development studio from Brazil, creating games that bring people together since 2013. Hailing from Rio de Janeiro, BitCake is a completely remote studio with coworkers from different cities around the country and the world.

Accountants typically dread month-end and quarter-end closings. That’s because finalizing financial records for a specific period is generally a manual, error-prone and time-consuming endeavor. 

In 2020, Parker Gilbert (pictured above; middle) was so fed up with the tedium of managing finance and accounting at an early-stage startup that he decided to co-found Numeric, an accounting software that automates certain parts of the book-closing process. And the introduction of genAI several years later significantly enhanced Numeric’s capabilities, so much so that it’s now used by the accounting departments of companies like Brex, OpenAI, Plaid and Wealthfront. 

Over the last year, Numeric’s revenue has increased four-fold to the single-digit millions, and investors are suddenly flocking to back the company. Now, just five months after it raised a $10 million seed round from a slew of well-known investors, the company has raised a $28 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from new investors IVP and Socii. Previous backers Founders Fund, Long Journey, 8VC, Friends & Family Capital, and Fifth Down also invested in this round.

Numeric lets accounting teams shave days off their monthly book-closing process, Gilbert told TechCrunch. The company’s product achieves this by aggregating and reconciling data from various accounting systems and Excel spreadsheets. It then overlays that data with an AI agent, which looks for how each line item changed from the previous month. If the agent spots outliers or unexpected variations, it explains why the account has increased or decreased, saving accountants a lot of time they would otherwise spend documenting variance in accounts — a process known as flux analysis.

Gilbert, the CEO of the startup, explained with an example: If the AI agent notices that Numeric’s legal expenses were much higher in October than in September, it would write an explanation along the lines of, “Your legal expenses went up this month because you paid Wilson Sonsini $X amount more for your funding.”

The possibility of AI hallucinations in the flux analysis commentary is one of the first concerns to come to mind, but Gilbert stressed that’s typically not a problem — he said Numeric always provides links so accountants can check the AI agent’s work at any time.

While the actual tie-out and calculations are not done by generative AI at the moment, Gilbert expects Numeric’s model to soon be capable of doing that accurately. “In terms of synthesizing large quantities of data, LLMs are incredibly good at this today, and I think are going to only increasingly get better,” he added.

Croom Beatty, a partner at Menlo Ventures, said he has spent a lot of time looking for a company that is disrupting accounting software, and Numeric was one of the first startups in the category to pique his interest. 

“Numeric’s moat is a lot deeper than a lot of areas we were looking at,” he said. “It marries complex workflow with complex data in a market that has not been well served by tech companies.”

Beatty expects the company will be able to add other products in the future, such as financial planning and analysis capabilities — a market that Anaplan now dominates.

Numeric competes with two accounting software companies: Publicly-traded Blackline, and FloQast, an 11-year-old startup that was valued at $1.6 billion when it raised its Series E this April.

As for why there aren’t other, new AI-powered entrants in the accounting software market, Beatty said what Numeric is doing is very complex and not easily replicable.

Claustrophobia and barely contained panic were my two overriding emotions as I experienced Apple’s first-ever immersive narrative short film on its Vision Pro mixed reality headset.

The aptly titled Submerged, which arrives on Vision Pro headsets around the world today, tells the harrowing 17-minute tale of a World War II submarine tasked with tracking ships in enemy waters.