Hello everyone !
It has been a little bit since our last update here, so I thought it would be a good occasion to have a long-form written one here, instead of our usual twitter screenshots.
Our last update was all about Tokyo Game Show in 2018, which was a great source of joy for us as the game was very well received (and the food was delicious, as always…). One particular meeting we had will also prove to be very beneficial for us in the future, but telling you all what it is will have to wait just a teensy bit longer !
Anyway, without further ado, here’s an update on a few things we’ve been working on, and what’s gonna come after that. But first off, let me show you our most recent progress video !
Combat, maps and stuff
Our biggest focus post TGS was fixing a few extra things regarding combat, as well as finally bringing the “roguelite” aspects of the game (IE map generation, randomized items and such) into our main build.
This means that a lot of the work was spent mostly behind the scenes this time around. If you have followed us for a while, you probably have noticed that the game hasn’t evolved far beyond the usual forests and caves that we’ve been showing since the beginning of the project. That is because we have always been comitted that we wanted the game to be absolutely mechanically sound before moving forward.
And in a game where you’ll spend 90% of your time hitting things, that means combat has to be top notch !
Thankfully, we are now at a state where we are pretty darn happy with how the overall game feels. Since TGS, we’ve reworked Divico’s heavy attacks for instance, and have also added more discrete changes like soft autotargetting, smoothed the hitstops, fixed some bugs in the groundbounces, etc etc…There are of course still a few tweaks and adjustments to be made, and we actually plan to have one more change to the core moveset. But other than that, the fundamental workings of combat are now sound enough to us that we don’t need to bring major changes.
Map generation is also now fully implemented, meaning you can play the game with different room combinations, enemy encounters, breakables, and all of this separated into two acts for the first level. This isn’t really impressive visually wise of course, but for us this is a huge milestone as it was still one of our big missing “core” features. In addition, we also now have proper main menus, and a level select !
And with all that, we’ve also had time to add in a new boss. Now we would love to add more, but our time was a bit more limited during the end of the year, and other features had to take precedence. However, we are very happy to say that Oberon is now the second working boss in the game.
Going forward !
As mentionned above, we still do have a few tweaks to do we wish to bring on our existing combat (mainly, we want to expand the available moved for ranged attacks as we feel it is now pretty stiff in comparison to the plethora of moves available in melee).
However, the BIG thing we will be adding throughout the month of april will be…more summons ! Indeed, we think summons (or Divine Icons, or even Eikons, as that would be their official names) will play a huge part in bringing more fun to the fights, but right now we only have one !
Now Cernunnos, our first summon, has always been a special case as he’s also one of the more complex ones. Follow up summons will work in a way more straightforward way and will work almost as unique skills that will help expand your moveset. They will still be flashy as heck tho ! But that does mean prepaing a bunch of new cool animated assets for these gods to be seen in their full stand-like glory.
After that, our road is pretty much clear…meaning an ACTUAL LEVEL 2 ! With new enemies, new bosses, and new traps !
We’ve been waiting a LONG time to just bring in new content. It know it seems like we’ve been on the same thing forever, and trust me when I say that it feels the same for us. But now that we’re at a point where the foundations are solid, we feel confident enough to keep building upwards.
Future cons
So for people who have been wondering where we’d show up, well we WILL have a few announcements ! Sadly, a few of those we must still keep a secret for a little while longer, but do feel free to follow us on twitter and we will update you all as soon as possible. Let me just tell you tho: it’s way sooner than you think !
We can however already announce that we will be present in our home turf, at the Fantasy Basel expo that will take place early May in Basel, Switzerland. If you live nearby, feel free to drop by ! There will also be tons of other Swiss indies present !
Lastly, Dev Vlogs
A few people have questionned me on the state of dev vlogs, and they are very much still planned. In fact, the script for the first one is being written. However, I cannot give a date as of when it will be available, as we will have a pretty packed month of April and May. Rest assured tho that we will update everyone on twitter once it goes live ! We still plan to have the first one being all about the evolution of our combat mechanics, from the early prototype to where we are now.
In any case, I hope you enjoyed this litle update, and feel free to stay updated by following us on twitter at @HelvetiiGame !