Hello wonderful people from the internet!
Welcome to the third entry in our progression blog series! These blogs are our way of bringing you along on our development journey and keeping you closely informed every step of the way.
This week marks the final stretch before a major milestone: on June 5th, 2025, we’ll be showcasing our very first prototype at Talk&Play. With the playtest just around the corner, our agenda is packed. Normally this blog will be weekly, but as we have the playtest next week and many other non-game specific tasks, this blog will also be for next week. Because there is only one goal, the playtest.
What is the current state of play?
A lot has changed since last week, though mostly in the form of tiny, behind-the-scenes tweaks that are crucial for the playtest but don’t actually change much in how the game feels. We’ve also realised we might’ve picked the worst possible time to start this blog series: we’re so deep in final prep of the Prototype that there’s not much room to jump in and help shape things right now. But the whole point of these blogs is to keep you in the loop. Even if it’s a bit chaotic, we’re sticking with it.
One of the big changes last week was the Auto Attack. This is now implemented and functions as a resource generation attack as well as a basic attack. For the playtest we decided to have this auto attack and an ability (the Echobolt). We already have another ability, but we don’t want to overwhelm the player with too much for now.
One of the most important advances we made for the prototype was the level design. Here we have now built a level that we are confident is beginner friendly, fun to play and gives us information on how we need to work in the future. In fact, the level will be a more guided level, which will not be the standard in the game, as you are supposed to explore the world freely. Nevertheless, it is important that we do it this way in order to be able to analyse problems better.
Another very important thing we managed to do was to fix and expand the enemy AI. The enemies are now orientation-dependent. This means that they only attack you if you have rotated in the same direction as the player. However, this only applies to the melee enemies, the ranged enemies will still attack you on any rotation orientation.
In addition to the major changes, there were also many small tweaks, adjustments and changes. For example, the hitboxes of the spikes were too frustrating and have been adjusted, we have replaced or improved some placeholder VFX, yes with other placeholder VFX but better ones. We also fixed a jump bug and created checkpoints. And these are only the more important things of the unimportant things.
Prototype: The hustle continues!
One of the big tasks we will be doing this week will be balancing. Of course, we have already tried to balance internally, but this now has to work for the playtest. It’s about how strong the enemies are, where they are placed, how strong is the auto attack and is the Echobolt still too strong…or now too weak? Many things we already know which we have to balance and there will also be many problems to be solved.
Furthermore, we will now make our custom animations. So far these have been generated because we only needed them for ourselves and it was not relevant that they really fit the feeling of the game. Now that we are using them for external people, we want to make our own animations. We also have to integrate these animations well into the code so that everything feels even better.
Other small tasks will be to rework the UI, even if it won’t be a UX test, then we will build a small menu that we don’t always have to restart in-engine or press a button or press ALT-F4 to exit. We also want the UI, or at least an image in the level, that shows how to rotate, move, use abilities and more things that we don’t want to explain every time. Then we will further decorate the level, like the crystal hollow below, and customise the VFX. Then we’ll do a build and find new things that we don’t know we need to do yet.
That concludes this week’s look behind the scenes. We’ve been laying important groundwork and inching closer to some major milestones. With the Talk&Play event and the first hands-on prototype test just around the corner, we’re gearing up for an exciting stretch. We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts as things come to life, stay tuned!
Thanks for following along whether you’re reading the blog, joining the discussion on Discord, or tuning into the livestream on June 6th. Your support means a lot, and we can’t wait to share more with you soon!
