Greetings mercs!
Hope you're all having a lovely Monday morning/afternoon/evening, wherever you might be out there in the big wide world.
As per usual, it's been a busy month for the Titan Roc team. Everyone has been hard at work fine tuning the gameplay experience of Vahrin's Call, bringing it up to the standard that both you and we have come to expect. Let's dive in to see what's been happening throughout March!
Dev Playtesting
Towards the beginning of March, everyone on the team took a week to sit down and play through Vahrin's Call from start to finish. The main objective was for each of us to clear the main story, with a secondary objective of clearing all the side quests and unlocking all the achievements.
The overarching goal though was of course to obtain as much feedback as we possibly could on the current state of the game. With a range of devs trawling through Vahrin's depths, experimenting with different playstyles, we were hoping to gain some new insight on what areas of the game were feeling fun and what areas still needed work.
And that's exactly what happened!
The playtest was a huge success, providing everyone on the team with tons of feedback for their respective areas. Our HacknPlan board quickly filled up with a plethora of suggestions that we could later discuss as a team, and potentially look into implementing in the near future.
Additionally, for some of the guys on the team, this was their first proper playthough of the game, which was fantastic news for us. Another fresh pair of eyes to provide feedback and critique is always welcome!
Since this playtest, we've been hard at work implementing many of these changes, and it's been really satisfying seeing them make their way into the game. My personal favourite are the small quality of life improvements; the little things that make the gameplay experience feel more satisfying, polished, complete and overall, fun!
For today's dev update, why don't we take a peek at some of the changes that have been making their way into the world of Leyda?
Adjustments to Collectibles
Exploring the world and discovering hidden treasure is the primary way of obtaining loot in Vahrin's Call.
Finding chests, skill books and other treasure and collectibles is a key part of the gameplay exprience, and so it's important we get it right.
With that being said, the recent playtest revealed some issues with collectibles that needed addressing. The primary problem being that many of these items were simply too difficult to find.
When placing collectibles throughout the world, we aim to keep them relatively challenging, while not requiring a magnifying glass to spot. The end goal is that you feel rewarded as a player for exploring the area and discovering the hidden treasure.
It can be easy to miss the mark on this though and end up with items that the vast majority of people never find. As we work on the game almost every single day, we can become somewhat detached from the perspective of the average player, making it hard to gauge the general difficulty of certain things.
But of course, that's where playtesting comes in!
The March playtest revealed that there were consistent patterns with the collectibles. Many devs were struggling to find a lot of the same collectibles, and so we're taking action to adjust things for the better.
How are we doing this? Well, I'm glad you asked!
There are a range of ways that we can make loot easier to find, while still keeping things fun and challenging.
One way is by keeping the collectibles in the same area, but lighting the area more, or providing other visual cues to show you that there's something there worthy of investigation.
Some chests and skill books were located in dark alley ways, ruins etc, making them difficult to find. Adding some lanterns or other environmental indicators is often times enough to give you that extra nudge in the right direction,
We're also working on the visuals of the collectibles themselves.
We have new particle VFX for collectibles to help distinguish them from general loot. This is because while playtesting, we found players walking into a room filled with loot and then picking everything up, not realising that amongst all the general loot, they had also picked up a rare item.
Adding these new VFX to unique items, as well as clearing out a lot of the general loot around these rare items in the world, is helping massively to ensure they pop. They now stand out much better from their surroundings.
And of course, we are at times completely relocating certain collectibles. Some were simply placed in not the most ideal of places, so we've taken the time to find better areas for them.
We're looking forward to seeing you all explore Vahrin and seeing what you can discover out there!
New UI Pop Ups
Tying into the collectibles are new UI pop ups that have made their way into the game.
These pop ups are more "grand" than what we had before, helping them to stand out massively from other HUD elements. They will be used when we really want you to know that you've collected something cool or achieved a great feat.
Discovering a new magic spell, levelling up, clearing a quest or slaying a boss, are some of the situations where these pop ups will appear. They are designed to be flashy and grab your attention, while not staying on screen for too long, to avoid interfering with gameplay.
Essentially, they are a new way for us to communicate to you, "Hey! You've just done this really cool thing. Celebrate and go check out what that means for you!"
Streamlining Trap Deployment
Moving on now to something different, let's talk traps.
As you likely know by now, traps are unique gadgets that you can get your hands on while exploring Vahrin's depths. You may obtain them through hidden chests or by clearing certain side quests.
While playing through the game, our attention was drawn to how you place traps in the world. We were looking at the trap placing animation specifically.
Once you pressed the button the place the trap, your character would bend down and move their hands around in a circular motion, before the trap deployed. This would lock your character in place and happen over the course of 1.15 seconds.
Now, you may think this sounds very fast, and overall it is! But this combined with locking character movement resulted in the mechanic feeling rather clunky, breaking the flow of combat whenever you wanted to deploy a trap.
We wanted trap deployment to be quick, fluid and freeflowing. It needed to work with the pacing of our combat, rather than against it.
With that being said, we got to work on implementing two fundemental changes.
Firstly, placing a trap would no longer lock you in place. You could deploy traps while on the move, helping to keep the gameplay flowing smoothly.
But how would that work with the current animation? You can't kneel down while moving around, after all.
Well, that's where the second change comes in!
We're now using a new upper body animation that works nicely when you're already moving your character. It also clocks in at just under one second, so slightly more speedy than what we had previously.
Implementing this change was a massive improvement. Utilizing traps in combat is now not only more viable, but also just feels a ton better in play. Looking forward to seeing you all catch your foes off guard with these deadly contraptions!
A New Alchemy Mechanic
A new mechanic for our alchemy system has made its way into the game. The core of it was actually implemented just before our playtest, but has since had its gold pass to bring it in line with all other combat mechanics.
As you can see from the gif below, by levelling up your alchemy skills and obtaining a specific perk, you will now be able to throw potions at enemies (or yourself!)
This opens up the door to a lot more experiementation, as alchemy is no longer just used for defense, but can be used offensively against your enemies too.
With this recent update, mastering the art of potion brewing just became a lot more exciting!
Do you think you'll utilise potions primarily for healing and buffs, or will you dabble in weakening your enemy's resistances too? Let us know!
Additional Changes
As always, we've been working on much more than what we've covered in today's post. Too many things to cover in detail, but I would like to list some of them off, because they're still important changes!
Completely re-worked a particular quest. Based on feedback, there was a lot of confusion with one of our late-game side quests, and so it has been almost completely overhauled. With voice lines adjusted, environments re-designed and NPCs relocated, this quest is now 10x easier to understand and is more fun to experience from start to finish.
Re-working the environment art and lighting of an early-game level. This is an on-going task that will be a massive improvement when finished. It's some feedback that we've been planning to address for many many months now, so it's incredibly exciting to see it finally in motion.
Tons of balancing adjustments to loot and mechanics, to keep things feeling fair but challenging. We're constantly making adjustments to balancing, but we don't talk about it too much. It's a lot of value changes and updating graphs and data tables, so it's not particularly exciting to cover. That being said, it's an incredibly important thing to get right, especially for an action-RPG.
Much, much more!..
Closing Thoughts
As always, it's been another productive month for the Titan Roc team.
The March playtest has given us a brand new perspective on where the game currently sits, allowing us to make countless updates and improvements over the last few weeks.
We're currently working towards our next dev playtest In April. It will be incredibly exciting to explore a newly refined and polished Leyda!
As always, thank you all very much for reading. We appreciate you sticking with us while we work tirelessly to get Vahrin's Call into your hands.
Thinking about announcing a release date soon. Thoughts?
We'll see you all again very soon..
- The Titan Roc team
