Hey Hunters, how have you been?
September had a lot of polish, improvements, and quite a few new things to be implemented in Relic Hunters Legend. We’re close to having the new alpha build ready for you to play and give us feedback about everything we have made so far.
New enemy faction implemented
We’re not going to spoil who these new enemies are, but we’ll let you take a peek at one of their new abilities. We want you to discover strategies to defeat these enemies by yourselves when the game is fully released.
So, now we have in our system the possibility of grenades and abilities to pulse damage when activated and other fighting styles have been added to enhance the experience and the challenges that our players will face in Relic Hunters Legend.
This Faction also brings new weapons for you to collect! Take a look at this faction weapon design:
Kami Nari and new projectile behaviors
Kami Nari is the new Electric/Magnetic Kami species and we added new projectile parameters for their attacks. We are now able to create more complex behaviors with bullets, such as this “zig-zag” pattern!
The Gatecrashers
We finished developing the Defense Game Mode (we explained how this game mode works on the June Dev Blog), but we still had to design and implement the Ducan Gatecrasher and the Kami Boom - the enemies that summon waves of enemies and destroy your precious chests.
Gear Score Rank Outfits for Jimmy!
We’re creating Jimmy’s Gear Score outfits - clearly Pinkyy is not the only one with style in this team! You’ll unlock these new cosmetic outfits as you level up and enhance the character’s Gear Score with powerful equipment and weapons.
Second Act Features
We already said that we’re working on the Second Act of the game and to make it happen we’re adding more maps, scenarios, missions, and NPCs. So by launch, our players will have tons of new places to explore, characters to meet, and stories to be revealed.
Some of the new NPCs have a lot of personality and we’re super excited for you to meet them!
New VFX and Animations for bosses
We have some new bosses coming up and they have new animations and VFX. This one is Captain Flamebeak that you face on the Delve Game Mode. He’ll keep things heated on the battlefield.
New Design for Semilla City
Along with the development of the new missions and maps for Act Two, we realized that our old concept for Semilla City didn't quite fit the current art direction, and it wasn't very clear that there was an entire city within it. So we decided to change it and now we’re happy with how it looks.
Old Semilla City
New Semilla City
New props and assets
We kept improving the environments in all the maps and missions, creating new assets and props that will make your experience with the game more fun and immersive.
New Animated Cutscenes underway
We finished the first pass of the new cutscenes that are going to be in Act Two and Act Three and we’re working on recording the new VO’s, creating the scenes and animations, editing the videos, and so on. How excited are you to see what’s next?
New sound effects and Music
With all these new features being implemented of course we’ll need more sound effects and Music. This month our Sound Designers worked on:
- Music for Semilla City
- Music for Hilltown
- SFX for the Chat 3.0 system
- Sounds for the new enemy faction (characters and weapons)
Improvements and polish on new Game Modes: Delve, Defense, and Distraction
We talked about all these new Game Modes in the previous updates, but we kept working on improving and polishing them, so take a look at what we did for them this month:
Distraction Mode
- New announcements and feedback for edge tracking and VFX
- Fixing Blocker and Critical bugs
- Multiplayer Sync
- Fixed Chests at the end of the round
- New visual feedbacks and icons
Defense
- Hard and Epic mode implemented
- Multiplayer is working
- Gatecrashers: Receives heal when the team wipes; Implemented the death animation; Rewards when defeated
- Rounds working smoothly
- Refactor on team wipe and lose and win condition
- Bug fixes from the QA playtest
- New VFX and UI
Delve
- Implemented Hard mode
- Delve key working
- Multiplayer working
The second Act of the Story is fully implemented
We finished implementing the second act of the Story and now we’re focused on reviewing and editing possible parts to better fit the player experience with our story. Alpha players will not be able to test this part of the game, but we guarantee that we are taking care of all the details to make this story exciting for you.
Map and Missions improvements
We've also revisited all our previous mission maps to improve and better adapt them to our game style. As an example, we've increased Desert Hideout's access areas, filling in the gaps that previously existed
Desert Hideout Before
Desert Hideout After
We also changed the pacing of some missions and how some maps were allocated on the Cradle:
- Desert Hideout is on the way to Peaks Blockade
- Galyno Desert is now between Red Mouth Hills and Ducan Desert Outpost
- To Mend a Broken Spaceheart (Adventure) only unlocks after you made the Relic Hunting 101
- No Man’s Land from Lv. 1/2/6 to Lv. 2/3/6
- Desert Hideout from Lv. 5 to Lv. 4
- Desert Outpost from Lv. 6 to Lv. 5
- Galyno Desert from Lv. 4/5/9 to Lv. 8/9/11
IA improvements & fix
We improved and fixed some of our IA behaviors and we improved their efficiency on the System to avoid new problems
Chat 3.0
- Tutorial improvements
- Audio fixes
- UX improvements:
- Party as the main channel
- Focus on the whisper tab when the player receives a message
- Bigger chat list for whisper tab
- Previous chat 100% removed from the game
Option page
- Working 100% on controllers
- Redoing key rebinding
New Party System
- Transitions, Drop-In (Done)
- Kick, Promote (Done)
- Party Merge (In progress)
- Party Away (In progress)
All these new things came with a lot of new bugs that we needed to fix too (game development is hard :( ) but we tested out with the whole Rogue Snail team and we managed to fix most of them. We’ll continue to polish and improve the game until we launch for everyone.
Our new Alpha Players update is really close, probably in October we’ll be able to deploy it for our founders and backers to play and give us feedback, we’ll keep you updated about it here and on our Discord Community!
Thanks for reading and supporting our journey so far.
Cheers ~