Hello there!
This is Michael Wolf, Game Director of WaxHeart, and this is the first of (hopefully) many official monthly dev logs for the project.
We've been in development for over 5 years now - so why start posting dev-logs now?
To be perfectly honest, we've been meaning to do this for awhile, and it just hasn't been easy for me to find the time to write these. Given where we are with the project, we figured now would be as good a time as any to get started. Let's just hope we can make this into a habit!
Check out this month's post to see what we've been up to!
Milestone - Playable to the End!
This month, we reached a major milestone - the game can now be played from beginning to end!
This isn't exactly "content complete," because we're still iterating on some of the puzzle designs and some bonus challenge puzzles in the works.
With that said, it's surreal to see the ending planned over five years ago finally take shape!
Players can now play all the way through and reach the "ending," which is currently just our "thank you for playing" screen from our demo.
The ending is hard to talk about without spoiling too much, but here's a bit of a preview:
The Scope of the Game
For those of you unfamiliar with the scope of the game, WaxHeart is a 4-6 hour experience, spanning three major areas:
1) Ruined Village
First, the Ruined Village, which is what is currently playable in our Steam demo.
This part of the game has been "finished" for a long time now, but has gotten some love here and there.
Recently, we've added a neat layer of frost over the village, and we've made some dramatic improvements to the library's textures.
The Library in particular has gotten a lot of love recently, and I'm excited to see how playtesters react to it in the coming months.
2) Dark Forest
The second major area is Dark Forest, which has been our main focus for the last 2-3 years.
This is the largest area of the game, and - in contrast to the previous area - is very non-linear.
There are big set pieces all throughout this area and a bunch of new mechanics, such as powered puzzle elements, "wall crawlers," and some fun platforming sections.
3) Radiant City
The last area of the game is the Radiant City, where the player finally reaches the Sun Tower and concludes their journey.
A LOT of the narrative of the game happens in this last chapter, and we're hard at work putting together cutscenes and animations to communicate that story. This area is currently very much in the "gray box" stage, and the art team is working on dressing it over the next few months.
Our Fall playtesters will probably have whiplash when they go from the previous areas to the probuilder boxes of this area!
Challenges: Sun Tower Interior Vis Dev & Art Direction
Currently, one of our biggest art challenges is figuring out what the INSIDE of the Sun Tower looks like.
This is the last gap in our visual development, and there's a lot of pressure on the team to "get it right."
We've known what the outside of the tower looked like since the first year of development, but the inside is a completely different beast. We want it to look unique, a bit "alien" and even "organic," but there's not a lot of things to draw on for reference.
Since we tell our story through the environment, we need to explain how the tower works and what it's for without a single line of text. To do so, we have to design a couple of rooms that do a lot of storytelling just in the contents of what you see.
The major lesson here is that we should've started figuring this out ages ago.
Naturally, this is all a MAJOR spoiler to share - but here's a couple of scrapped concepts that show off the kind of space we're exploring:
Challenges: The "Sun Tower Chase" Doesn't Feel like a Chase!"
The last section of gameplay in the game is a big climactic chase sequence, not unlike Ori and the Blind Forest or INSIDE.
This would be the third chase sequence in the game, and we wanted this one to be different.
The other ones are intense and break-up the gameplay, but this is the last challenge of the game - we want to emphasize what WaxHeart is best at: puzzles!
We decided to make this chase into a series of "puzzle rooms" as you ascend the Sun Tower while chased by a large monster climbing the tower from the outside. It reaches inside and acts as an obstacle in the puzzles that you need to avoid - if it sees your light, it reaches in and grabs you.
The large monster was fun to design, and we think it really challenges the player on their mastery of the mechanics that they've been learning throughout the whole game.
July was the first time we were able to test the design, and... well... it doesn't FEEL like a chase.
Fundamentally, if you stand still in the puzzle rooms, nothing happens. That's not very exciting!
We've debated a couple of options to make this feel more intense, and we're going to try adding a "rising lava" mechanic, where the tower is being flooded with ichor, and if you stand still for too long, you drown.
We don't love that we don't have a great way of justifying it, but we need to see if it's fun first before we commit to figuring that part out!
What's Next?
That's all I can share for this month, but rest assured that this is only a fraction of what's going on within the team.
I hope to cover more of our projects and challenges in future dev logs!
Here's a short list of future topics I want to talk about:
- Entering the Corpse of the Whale God
- Cornering Candle Girl in the Radiant City
- Strange Lessons in Optimization
- Radiant City's Factory & Warehouse
That's it for now, thanks for reading!