Act 4 News
INTRO Hello everyone, it's been a long time since our last post. We're still working on the game and the overhauls we mentioned previously (you can find the previous post here: View game page ). TLDR : We are behind schedule but making progress and wanted to share how things are
INTRO
Hello everyone, it's been a long time since our last post.
We're still working on the game and the overhauls we mentioned previously (you can find the previous post here: View game page).
TLDR: We are behind schedule but making progress and wanted to share how things are shaping up.
GOD BLESSINGS
In terms of gameplay content we're adding in a TON of new god blessings and item abilities.
With Act 2 and 3 we kept adding new gods and blessings, which diluted pools and synergies. What was working with Act 1 just didn't scale well. Rerolls and alterations became a cheap solution for deeper, more fundamental issues.
Now the entire God system has been rebuilt from the ground up. Slots have been removed and instead god blessings focus on inherent synergies rather than slot separation. Here's what we aimed to solve, and how it turned out:
Buildmaking and Synergies: We've added both within-god and cross-god mechanics with which you can either make a tall build or combine the common mechanics of the gods in many different ways. For example, Mort can harvest and store souls, while Leigong's blessings release powerful bursts of static electricity - and both can be empowered with status rituals from any god.
Minimizing bad RNG: The cross-god buildmaking, the removal of slots and the fact that you can now choose your god after combat should severely reduce the need for rerolls and alterations. Alongside this we've implemented bad RNG protection.
Customize your Playstyle: Some people have expressed the concern that the addition of inputs would make the game too active, whilst others would like more action expression in our game. For others still it may be based on a run-by-run mood. Skill upgrades allow you to dynamically adjust this and take the skill towards any playstyle or synergy direction you prefer.
SKILL UPGRADES
Now every active skill has it's own upgrade tree, that can be built in many different ways.
For example, all active skills can be made inactive or have their playstyle reinforced:
Or just made easier to cast, like removing their targeting:
Synergies
You can also push skills towards more mechanical or synergetic combos and abuses instead.
Or just make them bombastic:
VFX
We've been adding a lot more new spells and VFX to the game for all this, and have pushed their visuals to feel as powerful as possible.
Because of this, we've also decided to overhaul some of the old VFX that we felt were lacking:
CHARACTERS
Animations
To support the new active skills we've had to make a ton of new animations for each character - 32 direction animations for:
- Target Channel
- Target Channel Walk Forward
- Target Channel Walk Backward (no movement stopping, even while channeling)
16 directions for:
- Dash Attack (you can now attack while dashing)
And just more new regular animations for:
- Target Cast 1
- Target Cast 2 (gotta have variety)
- No Target Cast 1
- No Target Cast 2
- No Target Channel
- No Target Channel Walk Forward
- No Target Channel Walk Backward
- Post-Dash Attack Slide
Which basically ~12xs the animation budget per character (sort of).
Preview of Nixi Target Channel:
Why did we do this much animation? Well I wish we had done it earlier. We tried a couple of ways to make these active skills work without having to draw all the directions but it just didn't play well. So effectively these tests just ended up wasting time. Sometimes cost-cutting measures end up costing us more. So, we sat down and drew all the required frames.
New Characters
Alongside these major overhauls to the core characters, we do have 2 new characters in the making - the Necromancer and Shaman, but we're still not sure if they'll make it to Act 4 or shortly after it. But anyway lets just say this is in the works and nearly done:
ENEMIES
And then there is obviously the default laborious work involved with Act 4 itself - new monsters, bosses, terrain, etc.
ENVIRONMENT
We spent a lot of time setting up a system for the environment with which we can create many procedural levels, that still feel hand-crafted and polished, and have features such as height, holes, tile variety, wall matching combinations, etc.
The code turned out to be a lot more complex than we anticipated because of this spec and took many months. It involved solving collision, pathing, wall sorting, complex wall combinations, optimization issues and all sorts of other matters.
We are still focused on creating the endless assets needed - tiles, walls, props, etc. and progress has been slower than we would like. We will show more when we can get it to a more presentably polished state.
DELAY
Because of the overscope of the aforementioned features, the experimental nature of the design, the iteration required and life delays we have not been able to hit our estimated deadlines on a lot of features.
This has gradually led to the timeline getting longer and longer, so unfortunately the release of Act 4 will be delayed. We'd rather not estimate once again how long this delay will take, given our terrible skill in this. But it will most likely spill into early 2027.
EXPANDING THE TEAM
Some people have asked us why we don't expand to tackle this problem.
We tried working with freelancers previously to speed up our timeline, but it ended up costing us a lot of time in trying to bring people up to speed on the code architecture, design, visuals, etc.
Ultimately we were fortunate enough to find the right people and we did recently expand to 5 team members in-house (3 artists, 2 programmers), and are now aligned and working cohesively. We believe this size is right for us and have little intent to expand further at this time.
