Hello! Hope you are all doing well. This update for Diviner will be a larger one as there is a good amount of news to share, and I'm excited to talk about how the work on Diviner has been going. I'd also like to be transparent about the development process of Diviner and what to expect in the Demo.
So first off, the playtest is now finished, but good news! The Demo is now live and ready to be played! This should be and will be the definitive demo, for those of you who have been here since the beginning I'm sure you've seen Diviner's core gameplay shift quite a bit, and while this demo is making some larger adjustments which I will explain more later, I am fairly confident that this is the best version to date of Diviner, and what the rest of the game should look like. As a side note, your saves will "technically" work from the playtest to the Demo, though I would strongly recommend starting a new save file as there have been major changes to the items and flow of enemies that may be impacted by an old save file. This will not be an issue in the future and is a consequence of the large data refactoring and gameplay rebalancing I did while working on the Demo.
During the month of January and early February, I stopped marketing altogether and put all of my effort into reworking the game based off of feedback from the playtest. Here are some of the larger efforts that took up most of my time:
-Upgrading the engine from 5.4 to 5.6. This was recommended to help with performance, and while there were some improvements, Unreal Engine has continued to lack stability and still needed a lot of work.
-Significant optimization improvements, with increases of 10 - 20 fps. There were some trade offs to get here, but I want the game to perform better on older hardware and the Steam Deck.
-A new opening cinematic, which should help set the stakes and story when first playing the game. Unfortunately, for reasons outside of my control, there is no voice acting yet for the cinematic but I am working on a solution for that this week.
-A complete refactor of run time save data. I was using an older method that made more sense when the player would reasonably have 50 - 100 items. Now that the player can have hundreds if not thousands of items, I needed to change to a less intensive data structure which required changing a considerable amount of code.
-A overhaul of the core gameplay. More on this down below.
-Adding some much needed quality of life features. I've added a tutorial section imbedded in the settings menu (to accompany the tutorials that appear in the beginning of the game, which have been simplified greatly). I've added item sorting for the storage menu, and improved the intuitiveness of the controller navigation for menus like the Merchant and the Blacksmith.
-A complete rebalancing of most weapons, enemies, and items.
Lastly, I want to talk about the changes to the Demo itself, and how the playtest went now that it is concluded. The playtest was a great experience, having a decent sized group of people outside of myself playing Diviner was awesome to see, and I got a ton of really helpful feedback and also bug reports. There was one take away from the playtest though, which I mainly saw in the statistics but also in some people's feedback: The game looks great, the atmosphere is the strongest point, but the game doesn't really feel that fun, and borders on overly-complex. While I didn't want to "dumb down" Diviner, I agreed with this feedback, and I've made some pretty significant changes to the core gameplay, though it won't be vastly different than what you've already experienced in the playtest, but should feel more rewarding and more "direct". There are a lot of changes, too many to write down here, but here are some of the key modifications I made to the gameplay loop:
-You no longer switch Tethers (weapons). Now, your 4 skill menu has each of your 4 Tether with their own skill slot, 1 from each Tether. Every time you use a skill, that tether "rerolls" a new, random skill, with different skills having different weighting to how often they come up.
-No more multiple health bars. You have one health bar, and your enemies have one health bar. Also to help simplify stats, the "numbers" for stamina are reduced down into the 1, 2 and 3 digits, like Slay the Spire.
-Speaking of Slay the Spire, Enemies now no longer choose from a large roster of skills! While I enjoyed this aspect previously, it was overcomplicating what you should be doing on your turn. Enemies now only perform 1 action per turn, which they declare to you, and rotate through 2 - 4 pre selected actions.
-There are now several "gauntlets" where if the player does not complete the chain of enemies, either by dying or leaving the area, those enemies respawn. This should provide some much needed friction in certain areas, while also granting a boon if you complete the gauntlet.
-You can now critically strike. This one explains itself.
With all of this said, this has been a huge month for improvements to Diviner. I don't want to spoil anything for the future, but the demo will be featured in a few festivals in these coming months which I am looking forward to. If you got to the end of this larger update, thank you for listening and, genuinely, go give the demo a shot, if it didn't grab you the first time, I think it will click better with this new gameplay.
Instead of a new artwork shot, I'll post one of my favorite artworks still that I've made for this game: