Let’s take a look at the end of year report for Lorne and its progress!
First off, everyone here at Lorne would like to wish you and yours a fantastic New Year, and we hope you had a wonderful end to the previous year however you chose to spend it. As we mentioned in the previous update, this one is a bit delayed so let’s jump into it!World changes: The world of Lorne continues to evolve, and over Q4 we’ve made a number of changes to help make the overworld feel more alive, more readable, and more rewarding to explore. Now, let’s go through them.
Guidance From the Village Elder: To help players traverse the world, the Village Elders can now point you in the right direction by giving you hints toward the nearest shrine. Exploration is still key but a little guidance never hurts.
Buff Icon polishing: To make buffs clearer and easier to read at a glance, we’ve created new icons specifically for buffs and updated the existing ones. This should make it easier to understand which effects are active during combat and exploration, while also better matching the overall art style.
Creatures Now Drop Meat: Animals in the world will now drop meat when defeated. This pads out the food stuffs available and gives you a easy source to replenish your HP.
Crafting & Resource Tweaks: Several adjustments have been made to improve resource flow and crafting clarity
Added color and changed symbols in the crafting UI to make selection clearer
Increased rock yield when harvesting to help you build out your Bastion
Greatly increased the availability of Dark Iron Ore in the overworld, making it more viable as a progression resource The old crafting UI's symbols: The new crafting UI's symbols:
Vendors: The world of Lorne wouldn’t feel empty without its inhabitants, and during Q4 we’ve looked into expanding and continued to work on the vendors. From new types of vendors to better balance and better interactions, vendors are now a much more integrated part of Lorne.
We’ve introduced several new vendors, with different types of specialities including food vendors, a blacksmith, or potion vendors, each with their own inventories and roles. A food vendors for example would offers consumables for example apples, cookies, fish, meat, bread or cheese depending on the vendor. While a blacksmith would have different weapons, arrows or trinkets for sale. Example from a blacksmith vendor:
Finally, vendors are no longer limited to only a few areas but are now available in all zones, making it easier to restock, prepare, and adapt as you explore Lorne. Changes to the building system: During Q4, a large part of development went into improving and stabilizing the building system, as well as the invasion system. The goal has been to make building feel more intuitive and better integrated with both combat and progression, as this is a cornerstone of the gameplay.
Improved Building Feel & UI: We’ve made several visual improvements to make placing and managing buildings much easier. Building placement has been refined, collision issues have been fixed across walls, connectors, ramps, gates, traps, and explosive barrels, and hover feedback has been added to building buttons. Missing resource messages and clearer tooltips now help explain why something can’t be built, rather than leaving players guessing.
Building visuals have also received attention: placeholder icons have been replaced, new thumbnails have been created and imported, descriptions have been added to inform you what resources each building requires, and the entire building system widget has been reworked and polished for better clarity. Several new resource types have also been added to the building system, and the first full cost iteration has been completed for further balancing.
Towers and Traps: Towers and traps have seen both visual and balance updates. Projectiles have been scaled up to improve visibility, tower models have been rescaled to better fit the world, and several bugs related to explosive traps have been fixed.
Tower Tier 3: Known as the Mage Tower and it's now finally fixed and ready to be shown off! This will be the strongest tower available, the Mage Tower has a slow attack speed with long range, higher maximum damage and splash damage.
Invasions: Invasions are one of the cornerstones in Lorne and during Q4 a lot of work went into laying the foundation for them. While many parts are still very much a work in progress, we’ve made solid strides towards a better and more complete system.
A new enemy type: Finally, we'd like to introduce a new enemy the Exploding Ent. These volatile foes add a new layer of threat by damaging buildings (and anything nearby) when they detonate. Exploding Ent behavior has been implemented, added to invasion waves, and balanced to work alongside existing enemies. Invasions are still one of the hardest systems to get right, but with each update they’re becoming more stable, engaging and we’re excited to keep pushing them further. Miscellaneous: And let's drop a bunch of smaller changes that's also been implemented during Q4!
Fully implemented the undead warhound into the game
Optimized culling interval for destructible terrain
Fixed various bugs that crashes the fame
Fixed bugs with explosives such as staggering and sfx
Fixed a bug where arrows collided where they should not
Various visual bugs fixes
Fixed a minor bug with Soul Dust collection
Implementation for WIP targeting systems for monsters with various checks and behaviors
Fixed a bug with zone presentation
Fixed a small bug with the Undead Archer
Made sure that the death sfx for the Ibex is local
various code clean up
Fixed a bug with stat gain when a character leveled up multiple times at once.
Cleaned up stat window
Increased the number of stat points gained on level up by 3
Created an area to try out an emote call on the character.
Porting: In the spirit of transparency, we’d like to inform you that there has been a snag in the porting process. It’s nothing we don’t believe can be resolved in time, but it will delay you receiving Lorne for console. If you’d like to change your platform selection to PC instead, please let us know and we’ll make a note of it.Game Jam: As a final note, we’re excited to announce that we’re hosting a game jam! Submissions will be open from January 12th, 2026, to January 26th, 2026, and it’s open to everyone so whether you’re a seasoned dev or just getting started, we’d love to see what you create!
Not feeling like joining in this time? No worries! You can still check out all the awesome submissions and take part in the voting, which runs from January 27th to February 10th. Voting is open to everyone, so come help decide the winners!
Community feedback: And as always we're interested in your input, and we’ll continue to your ideas and feedback on Discord as we move forward and if you dont have Lorne wishlisted yet feel free to whislist Lorne on Steam feel free to do so!
We hope you all had a fantastic New Year celebration, and we’ll see you in the next one!