Hello everyone!
Since it’s been a couple of weeks since our last update, and we might also be a couple of weeks away from the next one, I thought it might be a good idea to reintroduce our “DevLogs” and give you a brief update on what we are working on and what’s to come for the rest of this year!
As always, we never really know how interested the majority of the Steam community is in the more technical side of game development, but we feel it’s best to keep our communication as direct as possible, simply… because this is actually the only way we know how to communicate. So beware of a wild mix of technical game development insights and thoughts, as well as game update ideas that will hopefully spark your curiosity.
We might also use this DevLog format in the future to present more background lore and story, helping to bridge the gap until the game itself contains much more of it. Implementing dialogue, cutscenes, etc. is a fun endeavor, but it also kind of sets certain elements of the game much more “in stone” than we prefer at this stage. We want to avoid trapping parts of the game in its current state in a way that makes substantial changes and/or updates harder later on.
We’ve seen that some people are sad about the fact that there is little actual story in the game so far, but while this might also just sound like a lame excuse: It’s all part of a plan. Haha. (No, seriously, it actually is.)
One thing that will probably delay the next smaller patch a bit is that we are planning to update the engine version we are using to 5.8.1. This comes with a lot of advantages for our project and, among other things, might allow us to make some optimization improvements, especially for the medium settings.
In the meantime, we are changing a lot of the current skills to make them much more impactful. Elemental Fortress and Tremor come to mind, for example. There will also be a first rework of the skill tree layout to make some of the active abilities more accessible.
We are also reworking how you “equip” these abilities. Instead of simply overwriting your respective elemental slot, you will be able to freely assign abilities in a similar way to how you currently access consumable items through your belt:
We are also adding health bars to bosses soon and are currently spending some time trying to find the best way to display status effects on both the player and bosses.
We already display many status effects in a more “immersive” way through material indicators on the meshes themselves, but we think it will also be helpful to add the possibility of visualizing them directly in the UI. Both the health bars and status displays will probably end up being toggleable through the game settings.
2026 Outlook
As for what is going to happen for the rest of the year, the first big patch will most likely feature controller support, localization for a couple of languages, and a full sound rework.
The localization will be a first draft: English and German are handled by our team, while the other languages are handled by our colleagues at THQ Nordic through their network of professional translators.
As for the sound rework, we will keep the music and voice acting, but we are adding a lot more music tracks and will redo all SFX, as well as the mixing and mastering, from scratch. Hopefully, this will result in a major upgrade to the game’s audio experience in general.
On top of that, we are working on a proper difficulty system that should allow you to set up the game according to your personal preferences, while also hopefully enabling some special challenges.
The first larger patch is currently planned to drop sometime in autumn.
The first big content patch is planned for this winter. Besides new campaign content, with new areas, enemies, and 1–2 hours of additional gameplay, we are also working on an “Arena Mode”, which we are currently aiming to include in its first iteration in this update as well.
While separated from the campaign, we are planning for it to have some sort of “Meta Progression”, meaning that progressing through the campaign and Arena Mode will provide advantages in the other mode as well.
Hopefully, this will make both endeavors more motivating, but we are not planning any sort of forced grind. Arena Mode will simply be a pure-fun, no-strings-attached thing.
Besides this, we will continuously be adding new items, skills, spells, and overall changes to the existing game, trying to further pursue our goal of smoothing out the overall game experience.
In order to also have some imagery to accompany this huge wall of text, here are some of the new enemy types we are working on. As the game progresses, the enemy variety should end up being much more diverse than the rather similar enemy compositions you are currently facing in the Early Access version.
With all of this being said, see you next time, and thanks again for all the enthusiasm you are showing for Fatekeeper!