Hello again! As promised, we are back at the end of the month to update you on our progress. Throughout May, we were fixing bugs, adding features, and adding new content to the upcoming campaign for Septaroad Voyager.
We added a new level, Gloomwood, between Halgdalir and Gearbridge. Here you'll encounter skeletons, ghosts, bats, spiders, and goblins trying to stop your quest.
In that picture you'll notice that we're reading a sign. That's a relatively small functional addition this month, but we felt it was important for you to have signs to guide you.
We spent some time trying to get the right look in Gloomwood.
Some of the tools we use to get the right look include lighting, a color-grading lookup table, and postprocess effects like the vignette. We want to make sure each area has the right look, so we've been revisiting each area to test different settings to see if we can get the effect we want.
We also added some more enemies this month, trying to make each area feel unique. We tweaked the crab sprite, added a new froglin enemy, and a new tortoise enemy. We also created new loot drops for the crabs and tortoises. Right now their shells are only useful for selling to vendors, but we'll try to add something else fun you can do with them in the future.
With a lot of the enemies, it's not immediately obvious how tough they are just from looking at them. We thought we needed a more explicit way to communicate their relative difficulty. So this month we added the enemy level to their HP bar. And for bosses, if we don't want to tell you exactly how tough they're going to be, there's a skull where their level should be.
A new feature this month is the ability to use generic items from the action menu.
Alchemists who unlock the abilities to use various potions can use those items much faster through the Alchemy skill. But for characters who haven't unlocked the alchemist's potion skills, or for using other items, like food and drink, we thought this would be faster and easier than going into the pause menu.
We received some valuable feedback this month. A friend told us:
What kinda rubs me wrong is that your store page leads with "The borders of reality start to crumble as an unseen threat breaks its way into the world" and some other rhetoric it doesn't really indicate visually. It really just looks like a bunch of dudes whacking flora and fauna because they can. I'm all for whacking monsters with misfits, but a looming threat needs presence lest it just sounds like marketing.
And we thought that maybe it was about time for us to start working on some stronger, scarier, more threatening enemies. Here is the first batch. You'll see these in the campaign soon.
In addition to all of the above, we've been working on lots of other things.
- Enemies will notice the player more easily and get a quick burst of speed while entering combat. This makes it harder for players to run through an area, skipping all the enemies.
- Added functionality for status effects that change stats over time, and not just damage over time or healing over time. This is currently in use for the Caffeine status effect, which raises your speed immediately but decreases speed over time. We plan to use similar functionality for enemies that will grow more powerful the longer it takes for you to defeat them.
- Fixed some visual bugs relating to the outline filter and translucent objects.
- Improved, more intelligent music change from a zone's peaceful theme to its combat theme. This will prevent the tracks from starting at the beginning each time you enter or exit combat, so you won't constantly hear just the beginning of the songs.
- Added lots of new music.
That's about it for right now. We are still constantly working away at the game. We hope to release the first chapter of the campaign to you very, very soon now. Check back next month to see more.