Greetings Kinfolk,
We hope you had a great summer, whether you kicked back on vacation, soaked up the sun, or just took some time off to catch up on your game backlogs. While things tend to slow down around the summer, the Blight: Survival dev team has continued to work hard behind the scenes.
Over the past couple of months, we’ve been deep in development across all areas, from combat, AI, animations, environments, audio, early systems, you name it. Right now, a big focus is refining the core gameplay loop: making sure it’s fun, engaging, and gives players clear goals. Once we’ve nailed that down, we’ll start laying in to the deeper systems like progression and long-term structure. It’s a critical stage, and it’s shaping up nicely.
Let’s take a look at some highlights!
Our Senior 3D Artist, Leo, has been cooking up a fresh base body for some of the enemies that you may encounter. It’s packed with detail, decay, and just the right amount of “oh, that’s gross but I kind of want to pop them.”
Throughout the development process, we often use concept art and paintovers of existing 3D models to guide a lot of our designs, making sure each piece feels like it belongs in the world both visually and thematically. After some initial work was done on this base model, our Concept Artist, Ana, did a quick paintover to further explore how we could make this enemy fit even more into the world of Blight: Survival. Some folks might think that concept art only happens before production, but we use it all the way through development as designs evolve.
The design for this particular model continues to evolve, and we can’t wait to show you where it lands in the future!
The Blight is spreading, literally. We’ve been experimenting with its look and feel, trying out different colours and styles to see what best captures that sense of creeping infection. This version is still very early, but it’s starting to show signs of life, or anti-life?
Our goal is for the Blight to interact with terrain, wrap around and consume things, and make the world feel threatening. What you’re seeing now is just the beginning.
Combat keeps evolving with each new internal build. It’s still a work in progress (we know you’re eager for a fresh look!), but we’re continuously tuning the feel, flow, and animations to make sure it all clicks. We’re not quite ready to show an updated slice just yet, but who knows, you might just get a taste before years end. ;)
In the meantime, we can give you a peek at something fun: one of our devs whipped up a combat arena to test enemy encounters, dubbed the World Blight Boxing Championship. It even comes with a crowd of weirdly invested Rattlers as spectators.
Eagle-eyed readers might notice the creepy foe lurking in the left corner of that shot: the Nightstalker. While the version you’re seeing here is still a placeholder model, it’s already giving both playtesters and devs nightmares. If you join our Playtest Squad, maybe you could lose sleep too.
Ana has been actively working on the Nightstalker’s design and has been playing around with different looks for it. If its already a feared enemy in its placeholder state, just wait until you see where it’s headed..
From the start, exploration has been at the heart of what we're building, and throughout development, we’ve been crafting multiple test worlds at once, some focused on gameplay mechanics, others on visual polish.
The more “polished” spaces are part of our ongoing visual benchmarking efforts, making sure we’re hitting the level of quality we want for the final game.
The gameplay-focused ones are intentionally more stripped back, often greyboxes without textures or fine detail. This let us quickly test the core loop, systems, iterate on enemy encounters, refine traversal and more. Over time, these greybox foundations are replaced with the higher detail, fully realized environment elements, lighting and effects you’ll see in the final game.
As development progresses, pieces from our more polished spaces are incorporated into the playable dev build, allowing us to refine the overall experience while continuing to push both gameplay and visuals forward. These remain crucial to rapid iteration, while also laying the foundation for the multiple regions you will eventually explore.
One of the most exciting types of areas we’ve been working on are something we recently revealed in one of our recent Steam posts: Dungeons. Tight, atmospheric spaces that crank up the tension. Our 3D Artist, Briac, has been building handcrafted dungeon environments with a focus on lighting, narrow exploration paths, and tight encounters. They’re still early, but even now, they’re shaping up to be a standout part of the dev build.
Since we’re developing the game for multiple platforms, including consoles, we’ve been testing different controller layouts to make sure the moment-to-moment interactions feel right. This early testing helps us fine-tune everything as we go. There’s still a lot of polish ahead, but it’s already feeling solid and intuitive. Here’s a look at our current default layout.
Our Technical Art Director, Hugo, has been setting up the first batch of destructibles, adding interactions tied to combat and physics. It’s still early, but it's already looking like a great time. There’s definitely a “see pot, must break pot” energy going on here. Somewhere, Link would be proud.
Many of our breakable objects were created by our 3D Artist, Alexandre, only for Hugo to destroy them. Collaborative destruction is a beautiful thing in game development.
We’ve also been experimenting with breakable weapons. Don’t panic, when a weapon breaks, it’s not gone for good. You’ll still be able to swing it, and everything can be repaired to get back into shape. It’s definitely better than being empty-handed.. but of course, you’d rather have a trusty, non-broken weapon.
If you’re a Lord of the Rings fan, think Isildur using what remained of Elendil’s broken sword to take down Sauron, sometimes that's all you need to make it out alive.
This is still early stuff, so it’s a bit rough around the edges. We’re testing and iterating on breakpoints, and eventually, weapons will show varying levels of wear, damage and deformation before they break.
We’ve been doing a fair bit of of mocap lately to bring combat and movement to life… but not every take goes quite the way we planned. Let’s just say our devs are putting their bodies on the line for Blight.
Here’s Ulrik, one of our Creative Directors, giving it his all during a calibration test, looking like he snapped his ankle in the process. Don’t worry, he’s fine!
This is just a slice of what we’ve been working on recently, but we love to bring you into the process and show you what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s still a lot of work ahead of us, but development is moving at a great pace, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to see the pieces coming together.
As always, thank you for your patience, support, and excitement. We’ll have more to share as our work on Blight: Survival continues, and we’ll continue bringing you along for the ride.
In the meantime, wishlist the game on Steam, and join our Discord to chat, get involved, and keep up with everything happening in the world of Blight: Survival!
-The Blight: Survival Team