It's time to sit down, unwind and recap the development on Starveil for this past month and look ahead into the future. And wow, do we have quite the devlog for you this time!
Older devlogs are available on our Ko-fi page.
Steamy June
To get the obvious thing out of the way, since this is also where you're reading this post, we're on Steam!
This is a huge step for us. It will help us with getting Starveil seen a bit more, we'll also be able to use some nice features like the built-in Playtest feature. No more mailing out Steam keys manually! It also sets a bigger plan in motion, but more on that later.
We will also keep updating the page so there's not just the bare minimum, definitely keep an eye on it.
We'd like to thank our dear friend Hiz for his hard work on the store and library assets, logos, etc. They look amazing.
Speaking of visibility, it really helps us a lot if you wishlist the game if you are interested in it, so.. Please go do that :) There's a button in the sidebar of this post.
With Steam out of the way, let's look at what we've worked on in the game in June.
We have revamped a few things, with a few things more visible to the player than others:
- We have a more flexible animation system that should help us add more items more easily.
- Then we've gotten rid of the button in the bottom right corner to interact with NPCs and objects, now you use F to do that instead!
- Enemies are now trying to avoid eachother, so they don't end up on one unsightly pile when being kited.
- Skills that auto-targetted enemies closest to the player now target enemies closest to the player's cursor.
There have been also some quality of life improvements, or just making things feel more like an actual game. In no particular order, those are:
- Shield effect from skills now shows up on the health bar.
- The Necroforge battery event was tweaked a little, carrying the batteries slows players down more.
- On the topic of batteries, the effect bar above player health and skills will now show what is the player carrying.
- Floating damage numbers have been refined to look much better.
- There are now transition screens when rezoning.
- It is now possible to hide all of the UI and just the chat with F12 and F11 respectively. Great for taking screenshots :)
- Several skills now have awesome visual effects instead of just simple telegraphs.
- It is now possible to rebind keys.
Starveil has also seen a lot of additions and features in June:
- Added a new area to Necroforge
- Added a new skill: Block
- Added several new weapons. A staff, a new sword, and a bow.
- Added some new enemy types to replace the placeholders we've had since the beginning.
- Added an initial version of the party system. This will allow you to invite your friends to play together.
- Added an initial version of private instances. The server will now create dungeon instances on demand, putting players together when they're in a party.
There's a few other things that are in progress and not finished, such as a big UI revamp (yes, another one), as well as a lot of preparations for the upcoming months. So let's get into that.
Kicking things into high gear in July
We've got some big plans with Starveil and the official Steam page is just the beginning. We're aiming for taking part in the Steam Next Fest: October 2023 Edition! The deadline to sign up is July 13, and a lot of things need to happen by then.
Namely, we need to polish up the Steam page, add more screenshots and an awesome trailer to catch the eye of the players. Those screenshots and trailer mean we need to add some more content to the game to show off some variety.
While we don't need to have the game build ready when we sign up, we want to hold a playtest anyway to test out the Steam Playtest feature and all of the big ticket features we've added in June.
July very much look like a month when we'll try to stabilze a bit and prepare for what's coming, but perhaps some other big features and systems will have time to sneak into the game, especially in the second half of the month.
Phew, that was a long one! If you've stuck around and got this far, thank you for reading! And if you want to ask us about Starveil, give some feedback or just come say hi, please come do so on our Discord server.
See you in a month!