Oh wow, we are going to reveal almost 3 years of work very soon publicly. Again wow. We don't know how many people will raise an eyebrow after this demo, but we are doing everything we can to pleasantly surprise the ones who will play the demo.
We decided to start a devlog to share the feature and content updates that we will make regularly from now on. The demo will be limited with the first island in the game but the content and the features will get frequent updates (maybe once a week or once a month, we don't know yet).
Demo and Trailer Preparations
We had a playable game until recently but everything was working on top of a prototype codebase. Things were working fine but making changes was a nightmare. We decided to rewrite almost every core system from scratch. Our rendering pipeline, world generation algorithm and object hierarchy have been rewritten.
We couldn't make changes in the main branch of the game for a while but today the main portion of the work is finished and our developers are working double time to merge all these different development branches for UI, lighting, VFX, shaders, content and animation updates.
This is probably the 5th time we are going trough a dramatic change for the UI of the game. But this one will stay for a long while hopefully. Here is how it looks:
The other major work on the parallel was for the trailer. I don't want to spoil a lot but I can share a few images showing the new look and lighting of the game. Unfortunately this new look won't be available in the demo next week as there is some work left on the day/night cycle of the game. We are aiming for June to implement this new lighting and the day/night cycle fully:
World Generation
The world generation was the first system we started developing when we began development almost 3 years ago. This is probably the most important part of the game where everything else is connected to.
There were some design requirements like placements of Points of Interest and dividing the biomes into smaller sub-biome areas. It was a lot of work to implement these new ideas with the legacy system. Therefore we started to work on a more optimized and elastic system. After one month of work we are at the same spot we were one month ago :) But it works faster and allows us to implement our design ideas in the future.
Some tests with trees for opening and closing chunks:
Voronoi cells for a sub-biome structure:
There is still some work left in this area but we will have a unique exploration aspect in Good Heavens! after all is done.
Status Effects and other Developments
In recent months we improved the hit effects when taking and receiving damage. This type of development has a huge effect on the overall feel of the game. The last step of these improvements was showing applied status effects on monsters.
We also edited the behaviors of all monsters because impairments such as Stun, Stagger and Berserk should interrupt the current state of the monsters. It all works very well now:
I can't share everything we have been working over the past weeks but we have some new spellcasting VFX and NPC animations that I would like to finish this first post with.
Concept for Ice Ray Staff (Play the Demo to see the implemented version)
A Vampire from the Love Culture having a good time:
Please play our demo next week and give us feedback.
You can jump in to our discussions on Steam or join our Discord to stay in contact with the team.
