Greetings lost souls!
We're writing this as our first official Devlog which we will be posting weekly to keep you all up to speed on how the development of Heretical is coming along.
In case you've missed it, here's our gameplay trailer showing some mechanics that we have in the game:
After visiting a conference in Croatia, we felt encouraged to open our development to the community and invite you all to participate by joining our official Discord channel.
We began working on this game as a prequel to our other project, but it quickly grew into a beast of a project.
We started having too much fun with it and how, after a year of dedicated development we're aiming to release a free playable demo during June 2024. The exact date is yet to be announced but we're aiming for the first half of the month.
Here's a snippet of our character selection in which you can see Harald, the starting class of Heretical, as well as two other classes that you'd be able to unlock while playing the demo.
We intend to keep the demo updated so that it features all the mechanics and balance changes present in the final product, and you'll be able to transfer your save files from the demo to the main game.
We also plan to release the game in early access by the end of the summer, but we'll be posting more updates regarding that when the time comes.
Let's talk a bit about our game design philosophy and the design choices we've made so far.
Art Style
We opted for a stylized, simplistic, yet dark art style because we wanted to showcase the city of Sanctora in all of its glory while keeping the performance of the game in check. Currently, the game runs smoothly even on Steam Deck, gliding at 60 FPS while having the whole world of Heretical loaded in at all times.
The city of Sanctora is a dark and troubled place, plagued by a curse cast upon its citizens by a ruthless leader called Abidan. Death, disease, and corruption have spread deep into its foundations. The city is in a dire state and it weeps for cleansing of the curse.
Loop
Once you choose your character, you progress through the city of Sanctora, killing enemies and gaining power through leveling up and picking up loot until you're inevitably killed or consumed by the curse.
However, in each run, you unlock more items, skills, or even character classes by completing quests that we call Prophecies, making our subsequent playthroughs more powerful and potent. The game has enough prophecies to keep you coming back for hours while hiding powerful upgrades throughout our intricate level design.
Loot
Whenever you kill an enemy or open a chest, there's a chance that an important piece of loot might drop. Heretical doesn't have an inventory, instead you always choose to keep only one of the two items - the one you were already using, or the new one that just dropped.
This way, you can watch your character grow in power without having to worry about inventory management or having 5 swords to choose from.
Any item you choose to discard is converted into coins that you can use to buy things from the merchant, so nothing is wasted!
We decided to handle items in this way so that you wouldn't spend too much time looking at menus, but focus on the action instead.
Skills
With skills, we took an already tested approach, similar to what's seen in other games where you're offered a few skills from the skill pool and pick one. Once you fill out your skill slots you can upgrade skills when you level up instead of getting new ones. This way, you can't 100% control what you get, but with rerolls and banishes you can narrow it down to the skills you care about and want to create your build around.
Progression
Prophecies allow you to unlock new skills, skill slots, unique items, character classes, powerups, and much more. Each prophecy requires you to focus on a specific thing in the game making your character class, skills, and items crucial to completing it.
Phew, that's a long read! We'll reveal more updates in future devlogs, but in the meantime, you can follow our Twitter profile for updates and keep an eye out for more announcements here.
Frenchtoastfella - Three Swords Studio