Hello folks! Its been almost a full month now since the last Dev Diary -- I was so caught up in work I didn’t manage to step aside and get you all updated, sorry about that! I’m here now to give a full run down on where things are currently at.
Before I begin, a quick heads up to let you all know that Vault is currently on Sale for 25% off to celebrate the Steam Summer Sale!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1135810/Vault_of_the_Void/
For those new here, I'm currently in the middle of doing a full rewrite of the game code to support future content expansions, and most importantly, exporting to Mobile and Switch in the future. Today I'm giving another update on how things are progressing on that front :)
Alright let's dive in!
Animations
Sanjeev the Animation Wizard has been hard at work just crushing out all the Monster Animations for the game, and converting them over. As of right now, all Monsters have been re-animated with both the condensed and expanded frame style, ready to be imported into the game! Export and re-import of all these is slated for later this week. A huge task and another exciting milestone.
Instability
Shu has wrapped up the Instability screen and got it working very smoothly. The screen now also has been setup with pagination for smaller screens, (ignore my Max Instability here, we’ve been testing the unlocks there as well!)
Event Rooms
Shu has now moved over to getting the Events queued up and working. To start with, work has begun on the black screen, full image style events (Matron of Memories, Shrine, Ravens Gift etc).
So far, completed are :
- Matron of Memories
- Ravens Gift
- Shrine
- Dark Idol
- Treasure Room
- Aftertifact Treasure Room
We have a meeting today to sweep over these and finalize the art/particles and get them squared away 100%. They also support 2 page styles for smaller screens (Mobile and Switch!) due to a lot of the text being quite long. Really happy with progress here, and we should be moving onto the rest of the rooms next!
Battle Screen
This is one I’ve been putting off for some time, due to how ominous the task was. But I kicked myself into gear and have been progressing very nicely so far. The Battle screen is where you spend about 80% of your time, and I’m very particular about getting things right. This is not only an opportunity to fully optimise the system, but also to ensure that gameplay on Mobile and small screens is smooth and enjoyable, and doesn’t feel like a hacky port.
I started with the State Machine and rewrote that to be more robust and stable than the previous. I also defined a few more states to clarify things like “Start of Turn” and “Start of Players Turn” etc to help clearly define when things happen, at least in the code! I then started with “At the start of your turn” stuff, known internally as “Player Upkeep”. There were a huge amount of artifacts, abilities and effects to move over here, and that is now all setup correctly and working. Once I was able to progress through a turn, it was time to add the Enemies!
Migrating the Enemy code was a long job of copy and pasting and moving scripts over, but it also gave me a chance to audit their State Machine, and clear up a lot of stuff. Previously things like Bleed, Future Strike, Shii checks etc were all looped into the one state, so I was able to split that out for easier processing and triggering. As of right now, I have fully migrated over the Enemies, they now spawn, respawn, select their actions as they should, perform their actions as they should, and die like they (hopefully) should. Once I import over all the new animations, these should 100% be sorted!
So now -- it's onto probably the biggest component to a card game... the cards! I’ve got these all setup in deck viewer and external to battle, however it's now time to migrate over cards which are intractable and playable! I’ll be getting started with that later this week, and will have more to share in the next Dev Blog!
Pricing
I wanted to take some time here to talk about pricing on other platforms. Although this post's goal is to update everyone on the Steam version, I did want to mention this briefly here. Firstly, I’ll admit I’m very new to this space so originally when I announced other platforms, I went with my gut. However, I’ve had some time now to talk with some other developers who have been super generous with their time, and learnt a bit more about the mobile market. So here is where I need to backtrack a little on what I said, and I’m really sorry about this. Originally I was going to have Vault priced on mobile as Free, with paid unlocks for the 3 later classes (Hidden would be unlocked automatically).
After learning a bit more about the mobile market, and the nature of “Free” games, I decided it’s really not the space where I want Vault to play in. I want to offer a fair priced product, with one off purchase unlocks, rather than try to compete with loot crates and predatory purchase models. For this reason, I’ve decided to move Vault of the Void to a single price upfront purchase on Mobile, which will have all content unlocked. At the end of the day, the price for the end user will be the same, but I really do apologize to anyone who was waiting hoping for a free upfront version of the game.
With that said, I do want to look into the possibility of a Steam Demo with this new version as well, allowing players a chance to try Vault of the Void on Steam obligation free. I’ll be looking more into that in the coming months!
Okay -- that's all from me here! I thank you all so much for your patience. It's so painful to not be able to provide you all with new content for so long, but I promise lots of awesome new stuff to come as soon as this is done. Both Shu and I are optimistic about getting a PC Beta out on Steam in the next 4-6 weeks or so, which will run on an opt-in branch whilst we finalize controller implementation and small screen displays. From there, I’ll provide details on other Betas!
Thank you everyone for all your support! I’ll be back in 2 weeks with more good news!
All for now.
- Josh