Ahoy, Void Hunters!! We bid yer welcome onboard of our latest update the Cursed Fleet. We’re excited to share some pirate concept art and character insights, reworked ascensions, and more!
As we progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Development Process: The Cursed Captain
In our Devlog #9, we shared sketches and discussed the principles that guide our character design. This time, we're thrilled to reveal some of the actual work that goes into creating our newest Void Hunter: The Cursed Captain!
Cursed Captain - Visuals
When the team decided on what the new character would be, Alex went ahead and created these awesome concepts below:
Our aptly named 3D Artist, Colombo then transformed the concept into the playable character we get to enjoy, but this also came with its challenges. To create the menu animation, which shows the character using a rope to drop down to the scene, Colombo used a script/plugin called SpringMagic which simplifies doing this kind of real life physics simulation.
Unfortunately this simulation doesn’t create keyframes, making it impossible to export the file and use it in the game engine. So, to circumvent this, there is a lot of manual testing, tweaking and thinkery involved to make it work.
For the Captain, it was even more challenging because he is holding the rope, so Colombo couldn’t let the simulation make the rope move, rotate, or twist freely; otherwise, the character’s hands and feet would follow and distort the entire character:
So, even after simulating the rope, there were a lot of adjustments to be made by hand which ultimately resulted in the cool animation we see today:
Cursed Captain - Ascension
When we design these characters, we also try to keep our player base’s desires in mind while trying to create something that both feels good, is fun to play and has its own quirks for you to test out and explore, but of course, this always comes without its own challenges.
While we were thinking of the captain’s ascension, we wanted to make something that felt epic and impactful so the Ghost Ship sailing across the map blasting monsters was the first idea we had, but due to limitations such as the top-down view, visual pollution and constant player movement, we had to go through different iterations before getting to the version we have in the game now.
Our first idea as you can also see in our Devlog #9, was to make the ship circle the player from just out of the screen and shoot in a straight line, but it didn’t feel quite… right. We took a lot of time discussing how much screen time the boat was getting and how we did not want the boat to look like it was directly “linked” or “connected” to the player, as you can see in the video below:
The main challenge here was trying to make the movement of the boat “feel” natural, while having it visible “sometimes” but not ALL the time (as it gets in the way).
We had to come up with a movement logic where the boat was always nearby, but if you saw it, it looked like it was sailing naturally, which means no hard turns, no weird stops… but if it sailed naturally all the time, it would be very hard to see the boat, as it would make very large turns and sail away most of the time. The solution was to make the ship kind of loop around, trying to get close to the player all the time, so it is always turning to try to get to a certain distance from you, but when it is off screen, it speeds up based on how far away it is from you, so you don't see the boat turning around at 500mph to come back to you if you happen to intercept it somewhere in the map. Since the ship would be far away, we had to change its attack to be in an arc, so that it could have global range and still make an impact. Check out the difference in the video below:
While thinking of what uniqueness the pirate could bring to the game alongside its ascension, of course rum immediately came to our minds (figuratively, maybe a little literally too) and thus was born the Pirate Rum rune! Alongside a new type of Versatility runes, which we are internally calling “the meme type”. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to play the game drunk and probably throw up here ya go:
“What will we do with the drunken sailor early in the morniiing? Way hay and up she rises!”
Cursed Captain - Character identity
When designing a new character, once we have the theme and the ascension ready, its time to think of the skills and how they will give the character a unique playstyle but also play well with existing skills, which is easier said than done when we already have hundreds of skills in the game.
For the Captain, in addition to a few new skill behaviors such as Plunder Shot that gives you Ammunition when the projectile hits enemies and Cursed Shot that is a projectile that hits the same target multiple times, we also wanted to bring something that tied together the theme of the character and its mechanics.
We already have a few instances of exclusive traits such as the Assassin that has Backstab, so we started thinking of what would be fitting for this character but also interesting for other characters, and that is how Cursed came to be. It works essentially like Electrified or Radiance, in this case you get X stacks of this buff to summon a ghostly tentacle, which strongly reinforces the theme of the character and brings the presence of the ghost tentacles to every weapon, becoming almost synonymous with the Captain.
Check out the video below for some cursed gameplay:
Gunpowder is also a new trait being introduced to the game, where a skill is no longer launched automatically, but instead, it consumes your Ammunition buff and is launched 5 times. We really like the concept of Ammunition, but if you made an ammunition stacking build before, you probably have had situations where you just stacked too much and couldn't spend all your ammunition. It is also sad when an uninspiring skill ends up consuming ammunition instead of your heavy hitter, and Gunpowder allowed us to create a sort of "Ammunition finisher" skill, that is super powerful and synergizes really well with a lot of what is already in the game, such as Ammo Box, and also opens up opportunities for other similar effects in the future, skills that depend on something to be used instead of just being automatically casted.
Check out this video below of gunpowder gameplay:
We hope that the cursed captain brings interesting and fun new gameplay for all to enjoy! We hope you all have fun with it. And as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Let us know in the comments!
We hope you are having a lovely day or night,
~ The Soulstone Team