Happy September/October! I'm back with another development update on Soulbreaker. There's lots of cool news to share, so I'll dive right into it:
TL;DR: I changed item blueprints, revised looting, and added a bunch of new maps & rooms. Also, no Kickstarter this year.
Gorthan working on his anvil in an early version of Bundariko.
Progression: Recovering Lost Memories
In my previous update, I talked about how I added blueprints to unlock new items during your dungeon runs, but they didn't really fit that well thematically. So they've been rebranded as Lost Memories. Once you recover a lost memory, you can bring it to Gorthan's Soul Forge to forge them into the items they once represented.
"The infection has claimed the lives of countless souls in the Bellowing Wilds. Many of which have taken their trades, crafts, and knowledge to an early grave. However, not all is lost to the ages. As you reclaim the souls of the corrupted, so too can you reclaim some of their lost knowledge. Use it to avenge them. Craft weapons. Rediscover artifacts. And let do not let their deaths be in vain."
Level Design
Early level designs, zoomed out.
In the last couple months I've been hard at work trying to figure out what feels right in terms of level design. I've encountered a few different philosophies from different game designers. From "Just don't have a background, nobody looks at it anyways." to "Every background MUST be a work of art." I'm pretty sure I've now settled on a nice medium.
The screenshot above shows a zoomed-out perspective of a few rooms I've been tinkering with. I want to make sure they don't feel too same-y, especially since many of them will be explored countless times during dungeon runs. Rather than fully randomly generated rooms, I've settled on hand-crafting them with some randomized elements to keep them fresh. This helps me not kill myself trying to hand-design 10,000 rooms, and ensures that every dungeon run is completely unique.
Oh, and I've been adding a lot of traps too...
Demo & Kickstarter Rescheduled to Next Year
The one thing I, and probably most gamedevs, completely underestimated was time. Originally I wanted to have a large chunk of the game finished and ready for public testing for Steam Next Fest October. But I haven't been able to work on the game full-time, and that combined with a few interesting life events, have delayed my dream timeline quite a bit. I would really like to launch the public demo & Kickstarter in conjunction with a Steam Next Fest, which happens a few times every year. However, I may do some closed alpha testing sooner than that with some of our Discord members. We'll see how things go.
I know nobody likes to hear about game releases being pushed back, but this is exactly why I never promised an exact date to begin with. I was happy to announce that we're working on it, and I love doing our little devlogs, but until the game reaches a more complete state I can't share any release dates of course.
Secret Fool's Gold Project Reveal: Early October
We're about to announce a HUGE secret project that we've been working on for over a year now. It's currently scheduled to be revealed in the first half of October, so keep a close eye on the Fool's Gold socials to make sure you don't miss it!
What's Next?
Here is what I'll be working on now:
- -Finishing up all of the writing for Act 1
- -Revising Sword FX
- -Boss Arena #1
Until the next devlog!
- Felix