ENOUGH OF THIS SILENCE!
Today we would like to show you what we’ve been working on recently.
Gameplay:
New enemy AI. Work on the AI is still ongoing, but we want enemies to have greater autonomy in decision making and to feel more alive. Enemies will no longer chase the player endlessly, they’ll follow as long as they have visual contact. If they lose sight of the player, they’ll try to predict where you might have gone, and if they can’t find you, they’ll return to their routine. We’ve created a clean foundation for implementing enemies, so in the future creating new enemies will be easier and will allow for more interesting mechanics. Movement speed of enemy is reduced for presentation purposes, and it also uses some temporary animations.
Watch on YouTube Improvement of the ritual system The ritual system is undergoing a major overhaul, which will benefit not only you (more responsive drawing system with much better forgiving of drawing errors detection) but also us (easier implementation and design of new spells). For this purpose, we are stepping outside the engine and working in a custom tool that will be clearer and easier to operate compared to how we’ve been working so far.
Watch on YouTube Improving many player behaviors and systems This part currently is the biggest task and focuses on polishing and changing current systems, including inventory system (yes, you will no longer need to exit a puzzle every time to select another item, you’ll be able to do it directly from the same window), action readability (prompts like "R – Cancel spell" or "E – pick up item", etc.), sanity system and everything related to player.
Bestiary As we get closer to early access, it’s definitely worth having a quick-reference encyclopedia that tells you which demon you’re dealing with, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and what kinda of threat it is. It’s also a space to better explore the lore and gather additional information about the game’s world. More on that in future.
Contextual deaths
Currently, the character has only two types of death: either from physical attacks or from sanity loss. We want the death screen to be much more interesting, so depending on who or what finishes you off, you’ll see a different cutscene showing the end of your character. Few raw animations, without VFX, sound, or camera work.
Watch on YouTube
Environment and characters:
LAKE The first level, LAKE, consists of flooded areas (near "Długie" Lake) caused by recent floods. This made free exploration impossible for humans, but allowed the drowned creatures much more freedom of movement.
The level will serve as a kind of tutorial for the player, giving you space to gradually learn about the threats and to practice drawing spells.
This is not final work is still in progress.
MUSHROOM FOREST A highly psychedelic level, focused primarily on observing the environment, as it can pose a threat to the player (yes, not only demons will be a danger). Here, the player will no longer be guided by the hand as much and will have to decide which path to take, as each will hide different dangers and require a different approach. Still in blockout phase
FIELDS The Fields will be a grim and sad level in terms of worldbuilding, but full of tension from a level-design perspective. Here, the enemies will be much more territorial than in any of the previous areas, and you better like cornfield mazes. Still in blockout phase
New Animations for Smętek
Watch on YouTube
Bonus stuff:
New Low Sanity indicators With the current sanity system, it can be hard to tell whether sanity is dropping and what its level is. So, to push both the extra spice of low sanity and a bit of lore (the sisters’ relationship), here’s a small sneak peek of what Dahlia will soon start seeing when her sanity begins to fall.
The distorted images of Dahlia’s memories will be available only in the demo, as in the full game Laura will have different, more contextually tailored visuals, but we’ll focus on that later.
New UI It's an early concept before being pixelized etc. but the design is very close what do we want to have for mana and health. What do you think?
Loading Screen Yes, there will be screens that will show during loading
That’s all we want to show for now (we have to save something to tease you with in the future, lol).
The next dev blog will appear once we feel we have a similar amount of content to show and more production-ready material, because code or early sketches probably wouldn’t be that appealing to you.