Hi, everyone! It has been a fun and productive year for us so far! Despite the immense progress we have made, we have unfortunate news to share regarding the launch. On the flip side, we have exciting news as well: Mladen, a narrative designer and game writer has joined our team to breathe life into the characters and world! We want to show you all that we have been working on and discuss the delay in more detail to make sure we are as transparent as possible with you all.
Meet Mladen! 🖋️
Mladen Duric | Narrative Design & Writing | LinkedIn
Mladen is a professional narrative designer and game writer from Serbia! He has worked in the industry for over 5 years and contributed to titles like Warlander. He has joined our team to help us design the world, story, characters, and locations. He will breathe life into these by writing the dialogues for the game, as well as the text for interactable items that you can discover while exploring the levels. He will also collaborate with Peter and Enchae on visual storytelling to make sure each location reveals more about the lore of the world.
Dev Update
⌨️ Programming | Percy
I (Percy) have been implementing miscellaneous features like proper graphics settings, remapping controls, improved controller support, and difficulty settings! Our Beta Testers have also kept me busy with bug reports. I have been fixing tons and tons of bugs! On a more fun note: I just added the harpoon turret! Now all turrets and enemies are in!
🕹️ Level Design | Peter
Peter has been hard at work building levels. This includes painting tilemaps, designing battles, crafting puzzles, hiding secrets, setting up cutscenes, and of course playing through the levels over and over again to make sure it all works just right! He works closely with Mladen to make sure the levels align with the narrative, and with Enchae to make sure we get all of the art needed for each level. After we get bug reports and feedback from the Beta Testers, he iterates on the levels to fix bugs and make improvements. It's a very long and tough process. While we don't want to show any level spoilers, we're happy to note that we are more than halfway done with the levels!
🎨 Art | Enchae
Enchae has been working on art for key locations like this... Hmmm! What could this be?
And environmental props for the different biomes, like this flaming tree!
And this building! I wonder where one might discover such fine architecture...
🎵 Audio | Mordi
Mordi will not leave any stone unturned! He has updated all of the turret and enemy sounds, making sure to replace any shared sounds with personalized ones. Now, events like building a turret provide unique audio feedback depending on which turret it is. Check out the sounds!
He has also been implementing dynamic music that seamlessly transitions from one section to another by adding and removing layers of music. Give the Fort Stonewall preview a listen!
🎵 Fort Stonewall (preview) 🎵
📝 Writing | Mladen
Over the past couple of weeks, Mladen has helped us expand upon the history and lore of the world, elaborate on characters and locations, and refine the overall storyline. He just finished writing the dialogues for one of the chapters, and we have to say: it has been exciting to see those designs and ideas translate to in-game experiences. We can't wait for you all to experience the story of Dwerve!
Launch
Unfortunately Dwerve won't be ready by summer. Since AAA games market aggressively during the holiday season, we cannot launch over fall or winter either. Press and influencers are crucial to indie game success. During the holiday season, press and influences cover all of the AAA titles that are released over the holidays. We don't want to risk Dwerve not getting enough coverage at launch, because we want Dwerve to do well so we can continue to make awesome games for you all. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to delay the launch until early 2022.
While the game itself will likely be done over summer, other important tasks like the Switch port, localizations, and QA will require more time. We want to assure you all that we are, to the best of our abilities, working hard to make sure that Dwerve is the best possible game it can be. After 3.5 years of development, we have grown even more passionate and excited to make Dwerve a reality. This unfortunate but necessary delay will give us more time to make sure we can realize our complete vision for Dwerve.