Happy Halloween everyone! We hope you're having some scary fun and enjoying some candy today.
We are making a new effort to keep the community up to date with what we're doing throughout Septaroad Voyager's Early Access. We are going to start posting monthly updates here on Steam and through our other official outlets to let you know about all the work we have been doing on Septaroad Voyager.
Thanks to all of your help so far, we have been able to create a solid core gameplay loop. Now we need to take the core of the game and build a full campaign around it. Our first step in creating a new campaign was finalizing the characters you'll play in the campaign, and then creating new art to show off the new characters. You might have noticed our new art already.
We created new menus and new levels to allow the player to choose a starting character.
We created a new prelude level that hints at events to come.
We have been working on an entirely new world and we've been creating new resources to make the new areas feel unique.
We have been adding some little polishing touches, like new camera functionality. Here you see the camera reaching a boundary, and zooming out automatically as the player walks beyond it.
Other new cinematic touches include scripted movements of NPCs and player characters, and improved blending from a player-controlled view to a preset cutscene camera.
We added functionality for NPC guards who attack monsters that get too close to towns to make the world feel a little more detailed and alive.
And with NPC guards, we had to address a bunch of new issues: reducing XP earned if an NPC did most of the fighting, making enemies target NPCs as well as PCs, handling dialog and quest turn-ins if an NPC is fighting, returning the NPC to start after combat, and so on.
We have been adding lots of new functionality for managing a dynamic party. For example we can now stash the rest of your inventory and party safely while you play a new character's solo mission, showing you the background of how the new character got here and why that character wants to join you.
Our efforts for the last few months have built the foundation we will need for creating a deep, narrative-driven campaign. The new features and content you see here aren't ready to play yet, but we are getting closer every day to releasing the first chapter of the main campaign to you. We hope to have lots to show you soon, and we hope you enjoy it!