Dev Update: Heroes, Summons, Boss Voices, and a Huge Week
The Fight for Beardlandia Demo · published
Hey everyone! 👋 It's been a big week of development, and I want to walk you through everything that went into the game. 😃
🎰 A whole new Hero Summon System
You can now spend Remnants of Beardlandia to summon heroes into your roster, and I put a lot of care into making the pulls feel rewarding:
Single summons play a card-pack climbing a rarity ladder (common ➡️ rare ➡️ legendary ➡️ mythic) before bursting open to reveal your hero
Ten-pulls deal a grid of face-down cards you flip one at a time. Rarer cards flip slower and land heavier, with glowing orbs and crackling electricity on the best ones ⚡
A wishlist lets you pick a hero, and pity pulls guarantee them
Duplicates are never wasted. They convert straight into skill-tree gems 💎
⭐ Star Powers for all 11 heroes
Every hero now has three stacking star powers that unlock as you awaken them, so each one grows deeper the more you invest. A few examples:
Azure 💙 – her clutch heal grows into a whole-team save with invulnerability
The Berserkers 🔥 – cut every shop price and boost your XP and gems
Highroller 🎲 – gains a triple dice-cast when he drops below 25% HP
The Oathsworn ⚔️ – the brothers heal and shield one another
Every hero genuinely plays differently at each star, and I'm really proud of how they came together. 😊
🐉 Bosses can talk now
Every boss now has a voice, and it changes the whole feel of an encounter:
A taunt when it arrives, and a final line as it falls
Five different lines each, so you rarely hear the same one twice
When a boss speaks, your party falls silent so the moment carries weight
🔊 A full boss sound pass
Mother Hexroot went from completely silent to fully realized
You feel the ground rumble as she burrows beneath the field 🌍
She screams as she turns desperate at low health
Every attack now lands with real weight
I leveled all the boss audio so nothing sits too loud or too quiet in the mix 🎚️
🗣️ Heroes found their voices too
Azure, the Bound pair, and the Sunlord all speak now
The Bound two even mourn each other when one of them falls 😢, which turned out to be one of my favorite touches
The Sunlord roars to life the moment he transforms mid-fight 🔆
⚔️ Combat reworks
The Oathsworn brothers now grow stronger while they fight alongside each other rather than as they die, which plays far better
The Returner's revive is much cleaner now. He falls, fades out, then returns at full HP with a visible countdown ⏳
I reworked how attack speed caps so the fastest builds ramp up smoothly instead of spiking
🎨 Polish across the board
Redesigned the status icons so poison, bleed, and stun read clearly at a glance instead of blurring together 👀
Fixed portrait framing across every screen, so characters sit properly centered
Rebuilt the Heroes tab into a clean carousel that presents each hero well 🎴
Beard and weapon touch-ups, plus a fix so cloth and hair move naturally with the body
⚡ Performance and FPS optimization (I spent a LOT of time here!)
This part wasn't flashy, but it was one of the biggest efforts of the week and it makes a real difference in how the game feels. 🛠️
Once you reach the large late-game waves with dozens of units on the field, the game was doing a lot of wasted work every frame. I profiled it carefully and went after the biggest offenders:
Sprite bounds caching 📉 – the game used to re-measure every character's sprite the instant they spawned, causing a hitch. A full late-game battle used to take around 617 milliseconds to start. It's now closer to 14 milliseconds, roughly 40 times faster! 🤯 Reinforcements arriving mid-fight no longer stutter either.
Off-screen culling – the camera follows the front line, so units far off at the back were still running all their cosmetic work (icons, bars, animations) that nobody could see. Now anything off-screen skips that work entirely while still fighting, moving, and taking damage exactly as before. The result is smoother frames in large battles with no change to how the game actually plays.
The Heroes tab now opens 7 to 20 times faster on a fresh save ⚡
The goal was simple: put more of your machine's power toward what you can actually see, and stop wasting it behind the scenes. 💪
🔮 What's coming next
I'm working on this every day, and here's what's ahead: 👇
Overhauling the Steam page
A free demo on Steam so you can try the game before buying
Beginning proper marketing to get the game in front of more people
A full VFX overhaul to make combat hit harder
And after that, a complete gacha animation and sound-effect overhaul to make summons feel incredible
There's a lot more on the way, and I'm genuinely excited for what's ahead.
Thank you for following along. It means a great deal to me, and I'll see you in the next update. 💛