Hey all, hope you guys are doing well, and looking forward to sharing more news on Diviner and how things are going!
I've hunkered down a lot on the art for Act 2 and even started some initial exploration into Act 3. A lot of my work over the past month has been focused on finishing a lot of initial enemy exploration for Act 2 and the general Forest biome, along with building out the environment kits for Act 2 and starting new environment art for Act 3. I've also been making some adjustment to my art workflow and plus-ing up my main shaders a bit to add some fidelity to the environments, namely making it easier for me to paint in color to a scene after the fact, and also making the close up camera shots look much better with some detail mapping and adjusted camera settings.
I've also been cutting out a lot of time to not only tackle some slight redesigns of smaller gameplay systems, though something that has been more on my mind recently is finding the best path forward to bringing the game to completion. There are still issues that exist in the current demo like progressing in the game, finding items, and general difficulty scalability issues that I want have solved once the game is fully released. This month has been really helpful for me coming up with a couple of ways to iron out a much more consistent gameplay, and also a better plan for scoping all of the game's art and content, though so far that is still going ahead on schedule.
I wish I had an actual date as to when Diviner will be complete, though as I'm sure people can guess from the demo, there is still at least a year of development that will be necessary to complete and polish Diviner, but I think I have a plan laid out that, if everything goes well and there are no engine hiccups or bumps in the road, would allow me to release Diviner content complete sometime next year. I will most likely release a new demo with the updated gameplay probably a month or so before launch, but I don't have any new demos planned until the game is complete.
In other news, and I hate to be vague, but I might have some pretty big news in a few months that could have a really huge impact on Diviner and its development, in a very good way, but I can't share anything at this time until it becomes more concrete. I'll be sure to share with you all any big updates and changes to the time table, but so far Diviner is right on track and work continues on getting Act 2 finished and possible even working through a lot of Act 3. For those of you still keeping up with these updates, thanks for listening and I hope I'll have more to share with ya'll next month.
I'd like to have more visual things that I could share like I have in the past, but I don't want to overshare later areas of the game. For now though, here are a few handpicked screenshots/progress shots from some earlier work last month in Act 2.
