Devlog #49 (Patreon)

For our first devlog of the year lets dive into what the team has been up to lately, starting with the next update, build 31, and the return of a certain mischievous gang tormenting another poor soul.

This update focuses on the procedural cave system we eluded to in our previous devlog. The idea is to have a randomly generated location where you can hunt monsters, for the repeatable quests offered by Kaldea's monster hunters guild, to earn some extra coins. After the Blackfur hunt of build 29, you will have the opportunity to get promoted to silver rank, and hunt troglodytes in their spooky cave while under the sassy supervision of Aya.

We decided to put in a decently flexible, but not overly complex cave generation system to keep hunts more fresh. Don't worry we aren't shifting game focus into procedural maps, as those would be used sparingly where it makes sense and might be limited to just specific caves.

And of course, if we are going hunting that means we are getting more of the frisky kobold trio...

Here are a few gifs of the development steps of this caves system. Those were the first tiles generated. The mesh are deformed to link seamlessly with the adjacent tiles:

This one demonstrates how the caves are dug, using either lines or spline curves:

Filling the holes of the previous version and adding the fog of war vision blockers (red walls).

Finally we added a bunch more tiles for variety, the navigation mesh on top, entry / exit, and implemented the procedural aspect of it, but you'll find that out in game. It's still very basic but we will improve it with time.

This update should be released this month, all the assets and dialogues are ready and are being integrated into the game. Expect the beta in the coming week or so.

Future build. Build 32 will advance the main story once again and will uncover more about the old goddess Yela, whom some might remember from the game introduction chapter. Visual content for it has being in the works a bit in advance since last year and thus the overwhelming majority of it is ready for implementation. A lot of new locations, new enemy types and a new dungeon crawl!

In some ways it might be somewhat reminiscent of Mara's cult dungeon, but we tried to extract some lessons from experience and feedback, and ended up making a bit more compact dungeon, with slightly different content approach to feel less monotone and long.
There will be a CG scene in that update but somewhat shorter than most scenes for sake of pacing with only 1CG, the characters involved we wont spoil yet :3

Even futurer plans. Parts of our team is already working for even more further content, some more main story development, some secret stuff we wont reveal just yet, but here is more CG scene brewing.

I'll come clean and admit we broke one of our internal rules: "Don't remake content", implemented very early, and for the good reason of staying away from eternal remake cycle of doom. We decided to rework our old Hiho and Samara 1st scenes, which were the first scenes we ever made, and that's where we draw the new line in the sand we hopefully wont have to cross again.

Those two scenes being literally the first one I've had to make, with incredibly rusty animator skills and being a way less adept artist in general. They seem to have aged poorly and they are ironically the first scenes players are going to encounter (not taking LW scene into account), giving a fairly false first-ish impression of the expected quality of the games scenes.

We likely will keep the old scenes somewhere as secret content for those who want to revisit them, and the new ones will generally try to stay faithful to old ones but expanding where it makes sense. The remakes will be woven somewhere between main story updates, but I can't say exactly when.

There's much more content both story and CG-wise in the works, but it's a bit too early to showcase it in this devlog yet, so until next time!