This month, the traditional two posts about demo and full game progress will be merged into one. We're doing well, after the Christmas holidays with our families. We hope the new year treats you well!
We're preparing to have the best demo we can for the Next Fest next month! That means we go over the feedback you left at the end of the demo.
Performance
- A big concern was the poor performance at the start of the game. It is mainly due to Shader Compilation in Godot. In the next version of Godot 4.4, there exists a solution, but unfortunately, it won't be out before the game's release.
- Another concern was the transition to combat, which made you bump a monster, dissolve the dungeon around you, and make you enter the combat. I liked it a lot, but most people disliked it.
- We deactivated the default shadows. Their FPS cost on small computer was too important. You can activate them from the Settings menus.
- Similarly, you can tweak other graphical options such as FPS and FSR in the Settings.
We resolved both issues by implementing a new transition, that is less demanding, as well as hiding some compilation during loading time!
Feedback
- Menus were poorly responsive with the controller. You can now navigate menus with a single stick flick! You can also close all menus with the cancel button (B or Circle by default) like most RPGs.
- Text is tiny for the Deck users, we increased the font size across the board.
- Chests now displays the item that is inside.
- If you don't have stars in combat, the combat doesn't require you to press for each phase anymore.
- Updated Tutorials. Hopefully, they are a bit more clear and the first combat requires you to ingest less information at once.
Gameplay
- Star/Energy regeneration came a lot in the feedback, with requests of items allowing you to get back stars. While you have items to replenish your stars in the game, they are on other levels.
- We changed how you gain stars in the demo. You used to gain stars when you had none because the game is not funny if you can't do anything. Now, you gain stars if you don't do anything one turn. That means you can choose to not re-roll on certain turns, to amass energy for the good and bad turns. I hope people will feel more in control that way.
- If you're out of energy, the game doesn't require you to pass turns manually anymore.
Translations
- We finally encoded all the strings of the game! We have a story content of around 10k words and a lot of item descriptions.
- Translations of Asian languages are about to start! I'm excited!
Misc
- Our testers are finding bugs all over that we squash without mercy! The game is about 80% tested and playable right now!
- Steam Deck and Big Picture users can now use the gamepad to enter their notes on the map.
- Changes to some assets, like the fire.
- Added a bunch of VFX during combats.
- Plenty of little boring things.
We continue to work on the final version of the game in the meantime! Thanks for reading and thanks for playing!