Heya everyone! We announced VOIDFACE officially with a reveal trailer quite a while ago (it's been 9 months!?), but haven't said much about development since - so consider this a catch up for the steam folks :)
When the demo dropped, the game promised to have 12 main campaign levels, not including the tutorial. Unfortunately, I decided to scale it back to the original concept of 9 levels. Adding three more was something I really wanted, but development is admittedly pretty slow and it was an overscope I decided on spontaneously. So, most of my energy has went into making the existing levels as cool and exciting as I can! So, most likely the release will contain the tutorial and 9 stages. Here's a look at the level select screen when you have every stage unlocked...
I've also released a few updates to the demo over time when the changes were major enough - for example, did you know the boss "evil" from intro1 was completely redrawn?
Before...
After!
Each stage is a mini boss rush of three bosses that you have to kill in succession. Part of the challenge in the game is the tension you get the further you progress, since there's no checkpoints.
Sometimes it can feel unfair or too daunting to make progress through the bosses, just to die and do it all over again - it's something I'm well aware of, but I didn't want to change the core design of the game. I've always wanted VOIDFACE to feel like that deathless challenge you've always shied away from in all your favorite games. That being said, I've put a lot of effort into designing the bosses in a way that feels fair and fun, while not sacrificing the daunting difficulty of the original game. To oversimplify it, the general guideline I've followed (but not strictly!) for boss design is that:
The first boss is usually the smallest and quickest. It might have attacks that are unpredictable, or challenging to learn. Since you can try the first boss again immediately after dying, there's less tension overall. They're occasionally a one trick pony, demanding you to adapt, but also respectful of your time since you'll probably fight it multiple times.
The second boss tends to be a pacer - these bosses are a great moment to teach the player something about the game's difficulties or types of bullet patterns. Unpredictability becomes a lot less appreciated once there's progress on the line, so bosses become generally slower and more readable.
The third boss is almost always the slowest, and sometimes immobile. At this point, most attacks are clearly readable, but also become noticeably harder. This boss takes the longest, and often has a final attack up it's sleeve, so be ready to adapt to some denser bullet patterns or save up your spell energy!
You can play in both easy and hard mode, but keep in mind that easy mode is still quite challenging for most players! Some might ask why there isn't a normal mode, and the simple answer is that I like that players have to choose an extreme! Let's be real, you choose normal in pretty much every game you play. Now, you must pick a side! (cue evil laughter) (also cue long conversation about how more fluid difficulty doesn't necessarily enrich a gameplay experience blah blah blah)
The original game only had a hard mode, but I did introduce easy because hard mode was past the limit for some players. Ideally, players will pick the difficulty that pushes them just enough - though I'm sure some of you are hardcore bullet hell fans and will find hard mode a piece of cake :P
Oh, okay :(
We're getting pretty close to finishing the game, actually! All 9 stages are pretty much completed, with an awesome dynamic soundtrack for each and super flashy bosses that I'm real excited for everyone to see. There's still the matter of polishing some things up, looking into things like localization, and that playtesting phase I mentioned earlier.
That being said, the game might be dropping in the coming months, or some time in early 2026 if I decide to randomly overscope again.
Thanks for checking out our page and demo, and reading this very professional dev-log.
Wanna chat with us directly? Check out our discord!