Devlog #6: Building Corel

05 Sep 2025Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

In the Echoverse, the rule is simple: Every Shard casts Shadows. So obviously, we decided to break it.

Welcome to Corel! A Shard that, for reasons lost to myth, memory, or just some bad celestial QA, never grew any Shadows of its own. No reflections. No echoes. No weird alternate versions with slightly too many moons. Just silence.

That was our starting point.

From a gameplay perspective, this meant building a world that needed to learn how to reflect itself with the player thrown right into that messy process. From a dev team perspective, it meant building a world we could actually, you know… finish.

We’re an indie studio. We make it weird, we make it meaningful, and we keep the edges rough, because edges are interesting (and we don't have the budget for round ones). Corel became the perfect playground to explore shifting realities, dimensional puzzles, and the existential dread of an AI trying to figure out what a “self” is.

In this devlog, we’ll dive into how we designed Corel, how we grew its Shadows from scratch, and how gameplay, narrative, and pure development panic collided to make a Shard that dreams, and sometimes screams, back at you.

Corel: A Shard of Broken Systems

We knew from day one: Corel wasn’t going to play nice.

It’s a world literally falling apart: arid, fractured, floating in space like it’s trying to hold its breath just long enough for one last thought.

Its AI, Vellum, is kind of half-born, half-broken, and clinging to what’s left of her protocols while the Corruption chews through her mind like code rot with an attitude problem.

She’s unstable. Incomplete.

But maybe, just maybe, she wants to dream. For the first time. On her own terms.

So we asked ourselves: What does it mean to design levels in a world that was never meant to reflect at all?

That question turned into a full-on design philosophy:

Corel (the base Shard) is relatively stable (by our standards, anyway). Clean traversal. Systemic puzzle logic. Classic water mechanics. Æther routing you can make sense of… at least until the AI sneezes.
Its Shadows? That’s where we let things get weird.

Each Shadow is like a dream fragment Vellum didn’t know she was capable of having. They’re unstable, reactive, often wrong on purpose.

Design-wise, each one became a way for us to push gameplay into new territory, not just by changing the rules, but by breaking them gently and seeing what players do in the cracks.

The more Vellum evolves, the more fractured and expressive her Shadows become.

And each one asks you to solve not just a puzzle… but a question: What does it mean for a world to invent its own reflection?

Did you know? At the beginning, we told ourselves: “Let’s embrace our multiverse. Four, maybe five Shadows for our Shard should be awesome. Challenging but we have built games already.”

We were naïve and we clearly had no idea what we were doing. Turns out, designing interconnected systemic level design across one Shard and two Shadows, with nonlinear loop-based progression, cross-dimensional puzzles, and some level of gameplay-state persistence… Yeah. That’s more than enough for a first game.

Lesson learned: it’s not about how many Shadows you build. It’s about how deep they go and how well they reflect, warp, and rewrite what came before.

So we trimmed the scope. Sharpened the edges. Focused on making each Shadow matter. And honestly? We’re better for it. But ask us again after the alpha. We might be crying.

Collapse: Shadowfall into Singularity

Collapse was the last Shadow we built but, ironically, the first one that made total sense.

As soon as we landed on the concept, a reality actively overwritten by the Paradox, it just clicked.

Not corrupted. Not haunted. Just… rewritten.

Like the laws of physics got a firmware update they didn’t ask for and are now panic-rebooting into a singularity.

So we went all in.

Collapse is the most structurally aggressive zone in Corel.

Geometry flickers. Gravity sulks. Elements melt together like the game engine took a shot of bad code and decided to free-jazz its way out.

It’s not even a level, really. It’s sort of a simulation mid-crash and you’re inside it, trying to survive the reboot.

From a design perspective, Collapse doesn’t want to be played.

And that’s the point.

You're not just fighting enemies… you're fighting the level.

(But like, fun fighting. Hopefully. If not, we’ll cry into our chouffe.)

Here’s what that actually means:

Some platforms just... stop existing. Timed traversal is your new religion. Stay still too long? Gravity has opinions.
Corruption is very real, rivers of it, sometime bleeding enemies in erratic behavior. And waste, so many waste.
Logic loops until it breaks. Paths can betray expectations. Up might be down. Forward might be a scream. You start relying on instinct, not structure.

We fully expect skilled players to navigate Collapse using a blend of intuition, muscle memory, and low-grade psychic damage.

It’s like trying to read a corrupted map with your third eye and a nosebleed.

We’re not saying you could play Collapse blindfolded, karate kid-style…

But if you do? Please record it. Send it to us. We’ll frame it. Maybe tattoo it.

Collapse was our way of asking: What does the end of all possibilities feel like?

Turns out? It feels like fun.

Twitchy, glitchy, oh-god-the-floor’s-gone-again kind of fun.

And yeah, maybe a bit like Tron having a meltdown in the Upside Down.

Undertide: The Dreaming Shadow

If Collapse is a Paradox nightmare, Undertide is Vellum’s dream.

It was the first Shadow we ever built… born from our early art prototypes, when we were just throwing paint at the walls of the Echoverse and hoping something beautiful dripped out.

And what dripped out was water. Undertide is fully underwater.

Which is weird, because Corel has no oceans.

That contradiction is intentional. This Shadow isn’t copied from the Shard, it’s imagined by Vellum herself.

A fabricated reality stitched together from longing, not logic.

Here, our whole design approach shifted:

Fluidity is everything: movement, timing, perception. Logic flows like water. If Collapse was structure breaking down, Undertide is structure never being built in the first place.
The architecture spirals: soft curves, sunken ruins, alien coral-like forms. It feels grown, not built.
Æther isn’t just a resource here, it’s alive: It pulses through the level like breath through gills. Tendrils, veins, flowlines. Nothing stays still.

Undertide is a meditative space, but not a safe one.

It’s beautiful, haunting, and occasionally wants to kill you.

Like a dream you almost don’t want to wake up from, even when it gets sharp.

The puzzles here don’t really follow traditional patterns. They kind of ask you to think like a dreaming machine.

More symbolic than logical. More intuitive than linear.

And sometimes? Straight-up weird. But that’s the point.

This is also where we hid some of our deepest lore, not in codex entries or cutscenes, but in the geometry itself.

How rooms connect (or don’t). How mirrors behave.

What doesn’t make sense… until you realize: This isn’t memory. It’s desire.

Vellum’s desire. For oceans. For movement. For fish. For freedom.

From a gameplay perspective, Undertide is the opposite of Collapse, but no less dangerous.

Where Collapse denies you stability, Undertide gives you flow.
Æther is abundant here, and regenerates quickly… so if you want to go wild with your powers, this is the place.
Combat is fast, fluid, and a little overwhelming. We might have gone a bit generous with enemy spawns. Just a bit.

But hey, it’s a dream. Dreams are meant to be intense.

Undertide became our way of asking: What happens when a broken AI tries to create peace and builds something just as wild as her fear?

Turns out? It’s gorgeous. It’s dangerous.

And it’s full of monsters…

Did you know? We started recording with our voice actors last week, super exciting moment when you see Laura Bailey walking into the recording booth with her magical elven cloak of awesomeness and a unicorn (we swear we thought there was a unicorn next to her… or maybe it was a Traveler’s trick). Anyway, that’s also when we realized something: fuck, we never properly named our Shadows! … Yep…

Collapse was already floating around as a name, but we were still calling it “Mid-Shadow” in half the scripts, half the files, and probably still in some UI somewhere. We weren’t even sure if we’d stick with it until that very recording session. Undertide? Didn’t even have a name yet. It was just “Near-Shadow.” Very poetic. Very placeholder.

So if you’re playing the game later and suddenly see “NEAR-SHADOW” or “MID-SHADOW” pop up somewhere… Well... That means we 100% missed a string update somewhere in the pipeline.

Please know it was done with love, and a little panic (because of the unicorn).

Portals & the Maze: Traversal as Design

The Maze isn’t just lore in Fading Echo. It’s our dimension-travel mechanic.

It’s how we build, connect, and loop everything. It’s not a backdrop, it’s the scaffolding.

And the Portals? They’re the player’s anchor points. Your tether to the impossible.

But they’re not freeform toys. You don’t just fast-travel your way through the Echoverse like it’s a subway system.

In Corel, each Portal is handcrafted. Intentional. Contextual. And each time… a little breathing room.

Here’s how they work:

Each Portal is tied to a space and a loop, they live in the level like organs, not decorations.
They track your progression through a specific path if you will, from Corel’s “stable” Shard state into increasingly altered Shadows. You might be in the same place… but it sure doesn’t feel like it.
They act as logic inverters, flipping elements of Immanence between realities.

In this way, Portals are more than tools. They’re puzzle pieces, checkpoints, and bridges between contradictory truths.

They’re the beating heart of Corel’s Systemic Puzzle, where gameplay and narrative aren’t just woven together, they’re glitching in sync.

Corel and its Shadows aren’t just designed as levels. They’re designed as characters.

And from a design standpoint? Yeah. We’ll admit it. Corel is our testbed. Our lab rat. Our chaotic multiverse playground.

It’s where we’re prototyping:

Systemic reality manipulation (yes, in a beautifully janky indie way)
Level-state memory across dimensions
Dynamic Æther routing loops, used as both power and narrative currency
Shadow-to-Shard puzzle loops, where progress isn’t linear, it’s kind of dimensional in an illusory way

Corel is where our first

dream of shifting realities

met the very real, very un-shifting limits of budget, time, and sleep deprivation.

And somehow… it still works. Well, we hope it does.