Demo Update 0.3

Hey folks! We’re very excited to share our first ever update for our first ever demo of our first ever game. Our focus for this update was making the experience of exploring the Domino Den more rewarding, with more detail and variety to the world you explore, and more incentive to keep poking at every corner of it! We’ve got puzzle-piece collectibles, a new NPC, three new challenges, some fancy new landmarks, and SO. MUCH. LORE.

Major changes

• Spellsided has always been called Spellsided. But as many of you noticed, we previously made a minor typo in the name, so now it is correctly called Spellsided in the taskbar.
• This change will cause your save file to be reset. We recommend starting a new game anyway due to other potentially breaking changes, but if you wish you can restore your old save by copying %LOCALAPPDATA%\Local\Hexaquest\Saved\SaveGames\Unnamed save.sav to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Local\Spellsided\Saved\SaveGames\. We’ll always endeavour not to break save files, but the demo is a work in progress and it may be required sometimes - sorry about that.
• We’ve added a lot more visual variety to the Domino Den! An abundance of unique landmarks can now be discovered all across the world, giving glimpses of life before the Age of Dust.
• Introducing puzzle pieces! Collectible items to reward you for reaching those tricky nooks, and perhaps even crannies.
• The opening ‘crypt’ area of the Domino Den has been significantly reworked, including the addition of a peculiar new NPC…
• Three new challenge obelisks can be found throughout the world!
• MORE. LORE.

Minor changes

• New adorable character portraits for all NPCs
• More satisfying sound effects! (and less annoying ones)
• Level design tweaks throughout the world to keep you on your toes.
• A persistent HUD explaining the controls has been added. In the future, it will be made dynamic and elements will only appear when needed.
• You now receive three Chop spells instead of two, making it a bit more viable for a chop-focused build.
• Esc now also takes you to the main menu (before it was just P…)

Bugfixes

• The wiggle animation no longer causes pieces to fly off the map when the framerate is very low.
• Fixed a bug that resulted in players losing their inventory after resetting while in a pacifist zone.

Known Issues

• The dash spell has some strange behaviour when it is stacked on top of other spells. It seems to be fine when other spells are stacked on top of dash though, which is the workaround for now.
• The crush spell sometimes doesn’t rotate the die when it’s cast. Kinda op. Dunno why it does that. Have fun with it for now…
• The settings menu is very janky and the controls don’t always represent what the values are set to when you open the menu. However if the controls are moved, then they will be accurate.

What’s next?

Now that we’re feeling happier with ‘RPG’ side of the dice-builder RPG, let’s get into some DICE-BUILDING.

The Challenge Obelisks will awaken, and many more will appear in the upcoming ‘Challenge Update’, where our fellow min-maxing sweats may compete to find the optimised paths through each challenge. We’ll be using this for future releases of what we previously called mini-demos, and we’ll also package the old Discord mini-demo releases into the Steam demo.

Some systems such as UI and sound will largely remain in their current drafty form for a while, as we are prioritising perfecting our gameplay systems for now. Our intention with the demo is for it to be a rolling, up-to-date snapshot of the Domino Den area as we progress through development.

A message from the team

On January 12th this year, we released our first short video, "First devlog for Hexaquest!!" (whatever that means) to a couple thousand views and a dozen or so comments of support, beyond what we expected. Now that’s grown to over 30 million views, 60 thousand subscribers, a Discord server of almost 7k members, and even a booth at PAX AUS where we got to meet some of you lovely people in-person! Every milestone has been a rush of affirmation showing that we have truly found our people (puzzle nerds). It is unbelievable.

If you've been following the game dev industry, you might be aware that it's been going through a bit of a rough patch lately, to say the least. People have been laid off, games have been cancelled, and funding has dried up. But through it all, your unwavering support has kept us pushing full-time for our silly little dice game ❤️ . We’re very lucky to have a community like this right now.

Many have asked how they could support us. Simply playing/wishlisting the game or engaging with the videos already helps a lot (our only source of income right now is YouTube revenue lol), but if you want to go an extra mile, ‘Super Thanks’ are enabled on our channel, which lets you add a little bonus donation with your lovely comments. We’ll obviously be making the game either way, but the support is always appreciated 💝

For now, enjoy the release of our latest update to the Steam demo, focused on making the experience of exploring the world of Spellsided even more rewarding, with collectibles, landmarks, and SO. MUCH. LORE.

Happy holidays! We’ll see you next year :))

-Mass Transfer Interactive