Hello all! This is the 11th community update on Diviner, it contains some pretty huge milestones for the game's development and a continuing push towards completion.
So first off, greyboxing. If you are not familiar with that term, its a common stage of game production that involves using very basic shapes, usually boxes, to figure out the placement of important paths, objectives, enemies, rewards, etc before finalizing your art and levels. I have been doing this process consistently while making Diviner, but if you've been following the development of this game for a while, you know that I've remade the 1st act twice already and am currently reworking a considerable amount of Act One to fit into my vision for the game. As such, I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to fully greyboxing every area of the game, but now that development has opened up into finishing the game, I've created a larger 3D map of the entire game, and I'm now in the process of filling it with actual playable content and level design and all the fancy art stuff. Its also been very useful for seeing the full scope of the game and making it feel a lot more manageable.
Also, on a little side note, all of the enemies are added to the game! I still need to finish the art for the bosses and 2 NPCs, but having all enemies complete is a huge weight off my shoulders, and not to pat myself on the back, but I think the game now has a fairly deep roster that should help keep gameplay interesting and not too repetitive. It's been a lot of fun designing new enemies and finding new ways to present a threat to the player.
I've also been creating some time for myself to experiment with discoverables and things that aren't pure combat focused. I want to make sure that there is a consistent reason for you to explore the world, and its been fun making little interactable-s that a player can mess with or destroy to continue progressing. Possibly destructibles are involved.
Going into next month, and indeed the rest of the year, my main goal will be completing a first art pass on every Act of the game, from start to finish. The game will still be quite aways from a playable state (at least in terms of progressing through the individual acts, the core gameplay is very much playable), but if I can get the game to this state, then it will really set me up to finish the game come mid 2027, and potentially even have a month or two for extra polish to add goodies and secrets. Sadly no release date yet, there are a lot of things (both real life and in game development) that could skew my current timeline by months, so I remain cautious to give any estimates until more of the game is completed. But progress is going very well.
Here is a little teaser image I threw together of a small selection of the new enemies that made it into the game:
