Hello everyone!
We haven't been very active on Steam, and we apologize for that.
In order to have a continuous thread of DEV BLOG updates, we have decided to repost the articles originally posted on Kickstarter.
The other articles will follow shortly, and we hope you will enjoy reading them!
-- this article was originally posted: 12/11/2022
Hello everyone!
It’s already December, the end of the year is coming and today in this new blog post we wanted to do a global summary about what we have done so far, what is left and what is coming in 2023!
As a reminder, we had 4 biomes planned, a fifth has been unlocked with the KS stretchgoals. 19 monsters are planned, 3 mini-bosses and 6 bosses. When we are talking about progression there are many things to consider and I’ll try to list all of them:
- Conception (Game Design)
- Technical stuff (mostly Programing)
- The artistic realization
- Integration (including assets in the project, tweaking, etc)
- validation (when everyone is happy of what we have)
About the Game Design almost everything is done.
Some minor things are still left to do, some stuff is uncertain and we are making tests to validate it as soon as we can.
Two Bosses still need to be completed by Game Design, these will be worked on once we finalize the other bosses currently in production.
The Game Design will change over time should we face any adversity. However, we are currently on track with some of the principal parts of the game already complete.
The technical work
Let's get down to the technical side of things, those of you who love to know the current state of the game. For sake of simplicity we will avoid talking about complex things (like bugs, low-level code, components, shaders).
So here is already done:
- All the monsters in the game (AI code and behaviors).
- 2 Bosses, AI and behaviors (as mentioned above).
- Game mechanics for the biome 1, 2 and 3.
- The interactive world map.
- New karma system.
- The progression of the character (experience, unlock skills).
- The main skills of the character.
- Some optional skills.
The artistic work
Before we start rendering we need to wait for the design and code to be finished so we can work on how we want the monsters and leveling to look and interact inside the game.
Then once rendering is completely finished, we can move on to think about music and sound design.
Now let’s talk a bit about the audio and sound of the game. Right now we are considering the status of sound to be at 0%.
Sarys and MisterMV have completed a lot of tests and have a lot of things in mind however, until the biome is 100% complete it’s hard to validate the music.
This is because we want to be sure the biome matches the mood and rhythm perfectly.
We know this may sound terrifying but do not worry, once the game is nearly done, this work will be fast to finish as the tests and research we have already done will be a big part of the job.
Regarding the visual side of the game, we have around half of the monsters done (at least the first version, sometimes we change rendering months after the first version because we want to improve it).
The main character is done, its attacks.
The biome 1 and 2 are close to being finished.
The arts of the biome 3 has only barely been started.
Once we finish the visual of a biome, we then move on to “level-art” (cf previous blog post) and most of the time, this work requires us to go back in the assets production and create new things for this biome. This is why it is time consuming.
Integration
Everything that has been finished on the art side is directly integrated and tested to fix it if required.
So we have half of the monsters integrated and playable in the first version (there are some monsters or animations we are not happy with, we will change it later).
Hard to imagine how all of this looks right?
We could have shown you the world-map but it is a big spoil we do not want to make.
But! We have a simplified version of this world-map. (keep reading until the end).
Beta version: when ?
This is probably the most asked question and it’s still hard to talk about a precise date.
Instead, as we were progressing quickly these last weeks, we got an idea.
A game needs “playtesting” along the production, way before a beta version.
So why not playtest the game with our community, instead of random people who do not care about the game?
And so, people who backed us with a tier higher than “The Beast” will be selected as playtesters!
We will randomly pick some backers for each session we need to make, and will do our best to offer at least one chance to each of you.
With your help, we will find what is bad, and what needs to be reworked to improve the game, playtest after playtest.
Of course if you do not want to participate, because you want to avoid being spoiled or you don’t want to play the game “without arts, a ton of possible bugs and incomplete”, you can refuse, it’s fine.
In the same way, if you accept to enter the playtest sessions, you accept being spoiled and play a game with bugs, missing arts/description and stuff (mostly blockout without story or stuff like that, see previous blog post).
What is the goal of doing this? Saving time!
Level-Art is time consuming and imagine if we do the level-art over 20 levels, and we discover it’s not easily playable, we would have to change the level design of those 20 maps. So we would have to redo the level-art again resulting in the final release date maybe being pushed back.
This is why playtesting is the best way to find out what is wrong as soon as possible.
The official Beta access (on Steam for example) will be available once we have enough final content in the game. At this time we do not know when.
Rewards upgrade for The Collector and The Renowned backers
As we are now moving on in the production of the game, we thought it would be cool to add some special backer content into the game.
So we are offering the following upgrade:
- backers with The Collector tier, you can now claim a grave in the game with your name on it.
- backers with The Renowned tier, you will now get the chance to design with us a personalized statue with your name on it, that will be added to the game at release (we will reach out to you to organize a call with us to tell us what you’d like as a statuette)
We hope you will like this upgrade and we will keep thinking about new ways to thank our community.
Last word before the end of this post
We thought that some of you would like to know more about the world of the game, so we made a simplified world map “almost no spoil”.
It will give you some ideas about what we want the world to look like, without spoiling too much.
If you want to see it, click on this link ! (we did not include the image in case some of you prefer to wait).
And that’s it for today!
Next time, we will talk about our “Monster creation process” and we will show you some in game stuff ! 🎉