The final stretch is upon us! All the pieces are basically in place now. The plan being to start internal playtesting by the end of this month. You might have also seen that there is a public release window now, Q4 2026!
Heres some of the stuff ive been up to, tho i had to cut a lot so as not to spoil the full game.
(i STILL dont have names for any of the areas)
At first I finished up all of the gameplay for this area, then continuing with decorating and texturing everything.
The start of the level is now set up and partly decorated - it used to be a staging ground for smaller ships to be deployed into the "sea". Trash (including you) washes up here.
Going outside you see the expanse of the area. I did some changes to its looks, the strong volumetrics which made everything a bit blurry and glowy are gone, in favour of clearer colors (the pillars blueish now, the clouds are white).
I still dont fully like how this looks, mainly the visual clarity of it.
I did settle on a "design style" for this area tho. A big chunk of this month was spent starting out the decoration process on some of these areas, so that now i can easily finish everything up, as i often just have to copy things around.
Exiting the expanse of the previous area, we enter some sort of industrial underbelly.
originally i wanted it to be with actual gameplay (and looking completely different) - but i had to scale it down.
At first it was way more.. yellow, but I didnt like it all so i iterated some more.
Through this area i realised a really cool trick you could do with post processing - by controlling luminosity vs saturation you can create beautiful gradients (here: low luminosity being saturated going to the less saturated high luminosity)
The biggest addition here is finishing the gameplay, which includes this big final "port", where you need to fly through.
The idea here is the floor being very cold, and the roof very hot... and you having flying wings... cannot end well
Previously these platforms were just hanging around, completely empty, and devoid of purpose. Now theres a few variations. Above you can see one which creates huge soundwaves to negate effects of the NET encroaching on reality..
Another variation is this refueling platform.
The other big-ish change is for the inside of the short puzzle section. It is now all mapped out, with some outside parkour as well.
The Boss office from where you fetch a code.
Im still having problems with the flying physics - tho i atleast figured out how the player will obtain his wings.
After losing your wings from the previous area due to fire, mirroring Icarus, the player enters this huge spiral, with another elevator.
This elevator takes you far down, to an enclosed trash processing space, where you will need to use a (small) elevator to catch some trash boxes which you need to progress.
I first added some deco props like the cranes and the big hanging magnetic cranes, as well as falling trash and whatnot. But the whole mood thing didnt feel great.
So i completely flipped the colors, making the fog orange, losing saturation as it grows stronger. This fits really well because it makes the outlines of the props way more noticeable and also just looks cool.
Theres also some hallways to explore here.
Now, the final area of this level. The bottom (not really) of the megastructure where trash has compounded over centuries.
The most noticeable change here is the clouds and the smoke. Im stilll not quite happy with the visuals as it all looks kind of muddy.
One little lookout platform, with a little roof for protection from falling debris. The parkour in this area was also very bad so i reworked it a bit.
Theres a lot of new stuff for this level as well - ill refrain from showing it so as not to spoil the game.
Here is a little update to the post processing of the thing you might remember from last devlog.
I took a bit of a gamble with some of the new Gameplay and Areas in this last level, as well as the Ending, but i think it turned out pretty cool.
Breakable planks - doors can be blocked by them and you need to pull them off, or find a way around if youre on the wrong side.
Besides that, some other noteworthy additions are a bunch of new models (like the windmills or hangars you mightve spotted) and a million other small changes like OST, Ending Scripting and Optimisation.
You can check the Patreon version(s) for some more details:
https://www.patreon.com/stefaaan/posts/mik-progress-165179890
Thank you for reading
-Stefaaan!!