Hello, all!
Thanks to everyone that took part in the Hermit Demo Playtest! It’s time to say goodbye soon – but only for a short while.
The Hermit Demo Playtest period is ending – but we’ll be back soon with a full game Demo release which I anticipate being ready for release sometime in the next few of weeks.
Excitingly, the Hermit Demo will be appearing at some PC Game festivals over the next couple of months – so stay tuned for more information about that.
In the end, over 2000 people accessed the Hermit Demo Playtest! Thanks to a huge influx of players (cheers to Splattercat for his video on this!) I was able to make major fixes to the game including dozens of bug fixes and gameplay changes. Huge thanks to those that used the Bug Report form and Steam’s Discussion section to provide feedback and report game issues - these insights have been invaluable towards improving both the game demo and the eventual full game release.
What now?
While my focus is still on preparing the Hermit Demo for its final release, it’s almost time to wrap that up and get back to working on the main game. I am expecting that it will take at least another 6-8 months of additional programming and game design work to get the final game ready - although there’s no definitive release date yet.
Ultimately, I want to make sure that the game is a clean, polished product – so a release window won’t be announced until I’m confident that the first release will be as good as I can make it.
For the immediate future, I’m working on:
Improving the ‘weight’ of attacks and blocks, better combat animations, and adding Foot IK to improve humanoid character appearances
Migrating both the Demo and Main Game to Unreal Engine 5.6 to take advantage of the new CPU performance optimizations in later versions of Unreal Engine
Finishing out the perks system, which is still in development
Finishing out the remaining spell trees and combat systems
Finishing the remainder of the main game world towns/villages (two major areas are still under construction)
When will the next update be?
The Demo release will come some time in the next couple of weeks. After that, while I’ll still continue to provide some updates here on Steam, it will be several months before any kind of Beta playtest build is ready for the main game.
Wishlist or follow the steam page here to follow along as development progresses.
Thank you all for your continued support of the project!