Community Update #12: Implementing Bosses and Finishing the Level Art

Welcome all, this is the 12th community update for Diviner, and a pretty important one at that! I have a relatively small amount of information to convey on the game's progress, but pretty big strides have been made this past month.

The biggest task that has been staring at me for quite a while is the bosses, both their art and their gameplay implementation. Good old Tornes has been sitting there on his own for a while, so this month I started the process of giving him some boss buddies. I still have a ways to go with the bosses, as they take significantly more time to develop then a standard enemy due to their art complexity, and also that I prefer to keep the boss designs a bit more varied then the standard rigs/gameplay kits of the basic enemies, and that requires more time to add new features and new rigs. But it does result in some really cool and unique enemies, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy them. I'm also working on some new custom cinematic tools that make use of Unreal Engine's sequencer, but let me play around with my own dynamic camera system a bit more safely without any herky-jerky motion. These cinematics will be useful for establishing the entrance to the boss (and maybe a scene after? who knows). Overall I was able to add 2 new boss models this month with more on the way. Probably the one downside of all of this new art is I will most likely have to re-render a good chunk of the intro cinematic as it will now be out of date, though I knew that was going to be inevitable since those models were always placeholders to the final boss models.

I've also been hard at work expanding the environments. While each Act has a major theme (Dilapidated ruins, forest, raining fortress, etc) I want to add little sub environments that help keep an Act fresh since you'll be spending a couple of hours in each one. So this week I took a break from level design and focused on adding some smaller but varied environment kits to my toolbox.

Well, that wraps up this month's community update, I appreciate your guy's patience as always with how long Diviner has been in development, but things are moving at a steady pace, and, at least in my own opinion, the game is really starting to form a strong visual and gameplay identity that hasn't always been there in previous iterations.

I'm going to include a picture of some of my progress as I always do, this one is a slight spoiler for one of the new bosses so I'm going to keep it a bit vague then normal, and will most likely continue to do that with any new images I post since everything I'm working on at this point is deep past the 1st act and will be content that I'd rather you guys discover in game as opposed to on a steam forum haha. Hope you all are having a great month, and hope September goes well for ya!