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Steam News25 June 20261mo ago

DevLog #7: The cave

Well, this one will be pretty short. Whole month was spent mostly for one thing - the cave. It was a huge technical challenge for me, honestly. First of all - the cave itself is bigger than whole main location.

Full notes

Full Death Afterparty update

Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.

What changed

0 fixes1 addition4 changes1 removal
  • Events
  • Gameplay
  • UI and audio
changedIt was a huge technical challenge for me, honestly.
addedFirst of all - the cave itself is bigger than whole main location. It also has it's own regions, just as main location, so I had to draw lots of new sprites - several walls sprites for each region, several resources nodes sprites and many other stuff.
changedSecond of all - each tile in the cave is a diggable object with resources, so there're THOUSANDS of them. The game architecture was a bit not ready for this, so I had to upgrade the loading process to initialize every tile of the cave before the game starts to avoid freezes and stutters.
changedThird of all - the loot behavior was not ready for such closed environment. It was often colliding through walls and objects, and also it wasn't reacting to a water or world edges. So, the loot behavior was drastically reworked - from small 200 lines script it became a 2000 lines monster with lots of physics and corner cases.
removedIt was one of gameplay loop issues I had in mind for months - I needed to allow player to upgrade the Extractor somehow, but upgrading an unknown piece of tech on a workbench would be weird. So, I found a solution - now player can extract with it special crystals which can be found around the world, and it will upgrade the extractor. But to access these crystals player will have to grow high quality crops and feed them to a hungry maw : D The torns then turn into hedge and player can remove it with scythe.
changedWhen the hedge was drawn I thought... having it in town would be nice, huh? Imagine, actually growing the hedge properly, planting it along the roads, watering, see it growing, and then you get an actual hedge, hand-grown. Sounds so nice and natural.

Death Afterparty changes

changedIt was a huge technical challenge for me, honestly.
addedFirst of all - the cave itself is bigger than whole main location. It also has it's own regions, just as main location, so I had to draw lots of new sprites - several walls sprites for each region, several resources nodes sprites and many other stuff.
changedSecond of all - each tile in the cave is a diggable object with resources, so there're THOUSANDS of them. The game architecture was a bit not ready for this, so I had to upgrade the loading process to initialize every tile of the cave before the game starts to avoid freezes and stutters.
changedThird of all - the loot behavior was not ready for such closed environment. It was often colliding through walls and objects, and also it wasn't reacting to a water or world edges. So, the loot behavior was drastically reworked - from small 200 lines script it became a 2000 lines monster with lots of physics and corner cases.
removedIt was one of gameplay loop issues I had in mind for months - I needed to allow player to upgrade the Extractor somehow, but upgrading an unknown piece of tech on a workbench would be weird. So, I found a solution - now player can extract with it special crystals which can be found around the world, and it will upgrade the extractor. But to access these crystals player will have to grow high quality crops and feed them to a hungry maw : D The torns then turn into hedge and player can remove it with scythe.

Well, this one will be pretty short. Whole month was spent mostly for one thing - the cave.

It was a huge technical challenge for me, honestly.

First of all - the cave itself is bigger than whole main location. It also has it's own regions, just as main location, so I had to draw lots of new sprites - several walls sprites for each region, several resources nodes sprites and many other stuff.

Second of all - each tile in the cave is a diggable object with resources, so there're THOUSANDS of them. The game architecture was a bit not ready for this, so I had to upgrade the loading process to initialize every tile of the cave before the game starts to avoid freezes and stutters.

Third of all - the loot behavior was not ready for such closed environment. It was often colliding through walls and objects, and also it wasn't reacting to a water or world edges. So, the loot behavior was drastically reworked - from small 200 lines script it became a 2000 lines monster with lots of physics and corner cases.

Not loot not just bounces of objects with colliders, but also drowns in water, and more than that - if loot falls off the world edges it will start to float away. If there'll be a walkable for player land on its' way it will stop floating and stay on it, if not - it will float away and get destroyed when not visible. Well, the world of Death Afterparty is surrounded by nothingness, so.. if it drops away - it's lost forever, sorry. It correlates nicely with theme of the game, actually.

(Second gif is way too heavy for some reason, had to cut its' resolution down to fit 5mb limitation, sorry. Check out my Discord or Reddit for proper videos and weekly updates!)

And the last thing - is a hedge and extractor upgrades.

It was one of gameplay loop issues I had in mind for months - I needed to allow player to upgrade the Extractor somehow, but upgrading an unknown piece of tech on a workbench would be weird. So, I found a solution - now player can extract with it special crystals which can be found around the world, and it will upgrade the extractor. But to access these crystals player will have to grow high quality crops and feed them to a hungry maw : D The torns then turn into hedge and player can remove it with scythe.

When the hedge was drawn I thought... having it in town would be nice, huh? Imagine, actually growing the hedge properly, planting it along the roads, watering, see it growing, and then you get an actual hedge, hand-grown. Sounds so nice and natural.

So, it is done! The hedge drops its' seeds, so player can grow more and grow as much of it as they want with some time. You can even plant and grow a whole labyrinth like in some movies : )

Well, and that's it. Next month will be short for the project - I'm going on a holiday for couple weeks, so next monthly update will be shorter.

But the demo is very close now. I will finish it this year, I swear :' )

Source

Steam News / 25 June 2026

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