Updates from the Lair : October '25

Here's a little update from us about game progress. When last I posted I had just started on combat. Since then I've done ... almost nothing on combat! Because we've started gathering a fair bit of publisher interest in the game (and of course because we want to get a demo out when we can), we realised we needed to go back and polish what we'd done so far. Most systems have been at about 50% - 70% ready and I wanted to get those a lot closer to being fully functional.

Same with towns - we have the first two towns designed, and there's a dungeon I'm using as my testbed for exploration but it's pretty rough right now. There's a band of goblins that leaps from the shadows and surprises you, that's where the game pauses and combat theoretically begins ... but not just yet :D

Steam post image So the last 4-6 weeks or so I (Oli) have been been working on the following:

• Towns - NPCs now appear in towns and have walk routines, can disappear in and out of buildings, some have random movement like ducks/chickens etc. Every NPC can be interacted with (at least for a line of dialogue, some for proper events)

• Dungeons - doors can be opened/closed. Dungeon fog now works to track where you've been. The party moves in a natural formation now and the leader holds a torch as they move. Pathfinding is fully working for both keyboard or mouse

• Overworld - fully working events , terrain, enter and leave locations

• "Gather your party" screen for assembling your heroes. You can just start with a premade hero (or create your own ) and meet NPCs along the way, or you can create a full party of up to 5 heroes to adventure with you

• Y depth sorting in towns so you can walk behind buildings and trees etc

• Saving and loading systems ( mostly working, I still need to work out how to get map progression saved ( as in, once the hero has explored a bit, flagging what has changed and so on)

David has been iterating through the towns and adding tons of NPCs from glistening ponds to cheesemakers, butchers and gossiping townsfolk. He's also nearly finished with all the combat figurines, each of which have a ton of variety of weapon and armour options ( so cool to look at!)

We're pretty close to having a fully working 'game engine' sans combat. Next up for me is a simple shop system ( should be easy as I already have inventories and trading between party members so it's just a small step to add in buying/selling, and then I'll return to combat proper. There's also the matter of a proper 'quest system' but that can come after combat. Looking forward to showing off more when we can but rest assured progress is being made consistently - its a massive project but once we have the game engine working nicely, content and story itself should come together pretty well as the in-game editor is really powerful for creating everything from locations/events to monsters, NPCs and items. Cheers, Oliver Joyce and David Aron Whiskeybarrel Studios / Nostalgic Realms