From the Forge: Dev Notes #1

Slowly, then all at once.

A lot happens in two weeks.

There was a time not long ago when yours truly was playing an early build of Rinthine - navigating our little virtual spaceman through a giant digital maze, taking notes to forward to the team. It's a beautifully odd experience working on games. You watch an amorphous thing evolve from notebook scribbles and whiteboard sketches to digital mock-ups, and eventually, you find yourself interacting with things that simply didn't exist just days prior.

That said, and as cool and exciting as it was exploring what we had at the time, there was still something missing. It just wasn't quite fun yet.

Fast forward two weeks.

In only a matter of days, the game became a completely different beast. A group of our earliest and most loyal supporters jumped into the labyrinth, accumulating hundreds of hours of playtesting and sending back a massive wave of feedback, ideas, and bugs. In a single sprint, Rinthine evolved into a fully-fledged demo packed with crafting options, rare materials, special events, and hidden secrets - none of which I had even seen, yet.

Fast forward two more weeks.

At this point, I hadn't personally played the build in nearly a month (it’s bad, I know). So while sorting through footage to edit, reading community comments, and gathering dev notes, I suddenly realize the game is completely different. The playtesters are talking about stuff I've never heard about, let alone seen, and it hits me that that nearly a year's worth of work - an entire team of experts tirelessly working together day in and day out - allowed two weeks of progress to feel like months of content and changes. I went from knowing almost every detail of the game, to feeling just as new to it as all our playtesters - and it was tremendously exciting.

It felt fun, and has been a joy to explore and experience - something I hope we can share with many, many more people in the weeks and months to come, in our next playtests.

A marathon, one sprint at a time

Foundations take a long time to pour, and sometimes even longer to cure, but they are what allow the rest of the structure to rise. The team has been laying this groundwork for a long time, and this past month has been a flurry of activity and growth.

Our development cycle is split into two-week sprints. We focus our efforts on specific features, pause to look at what worked and what didn't, and then plan the next steps. Right now, our sprints are entirely dedicated to refining the maze based on past playtests and preparing for the next phase, which we anticipate will welcome a lot more testers (which you can sign up for on Discord, by the way).

To mark our first major playtesting milestone, we wanted to pull back the curtain and talk about a few of our favorite features, most difficult challenges, and the actual craftsmanship going into the labyrinth right now, which we hope can be a part of our regular progress updates here on Steam and across our social channels.

🗺️ Engineering the unknown

You might think coding deadly enemies or expansive biomes would be the most difficult part of a game set in a labyrinth, but it turns out a feature players use every single day—the mini-map—is an absolute beast. Because Rinthine is projected in an isometric view and dynamically wraps around itself, tracking your coordinates gets incredibly technical. One of our engineers weighed in on the complexity:

"...The map is actually so complicated. It wraps, is projected into an isometric view, has to scale, zoom, and save, and you have to be able to draw on it and place things on it that save their relative position. I also had to come up with ways to map where the player is in the room for the player marker, and then even trickier, how to keep track of where the players have been in the room to modify the fog of war texture."

In addition to the map and our complex procedural world generation, building meaningful reasons to actually explore said world presented an equally daunting challenge. Our design team focused heavily on creating intuitive puzzle layers that give players distinct milestones to achieve alongside mere survival. Our technical designer reflected on the process:

"Working on puzzles is incredibly fun. I like building goals for players to complete and latch onto on top of surviving. I also enjoy thinking of how puzzles can look and feel, and working with the art team to pull them off is great. Seeing how players figure it out - or struggle to even get started - is always rewarding and a massive learning experience to watch and observe."

He added that crafting the literal visual "recipe" of these spaces has been an incredibly rewarding part of the sprint:

"This sprint, working on biome visuals was fun. For me, it already makes each room feel different and I started feeling a good sense of space in the world. Putting together terrain generation, room features, lighting, post-processing, and particle effects and seeing them all work to make biomes have a distinct identity is rewarding."

🎨 Exploration and Survival

To complement these new atmospheric elements, our 2D artists revisited our front-facing art to visually define the two primary pillars that drive the entire gameplay experience of Rinthine:

Exploration and Survival.

Our art team created two distinct Key Visuals (KVs) to represent these core aspects. Our lead artist gave us a look behind the design curtain on what it took to visually represent the gritty, tense reality of "Survival," and how that dark aesthetic marries right back into environmental storytelling:

"My biggest challenge was definitely designing the 'survival' key visual. Balancing the exciting energy of gameplay with the monochromatic and somber tone of the labyrinth was a difficult task that took several iterations to get right. I ended up relying on an intense-but-limited color palette with strong silhouettes to really push the feeling I wanted to represent while maintaining the throughline between front-facing visual and gameplay. After the difficult design decisions were made though, I found myself really enjoying the painting process, as it's not something I get to do often for this project."

Q: What was your favorite part of this last sprint?

A:"Plants and biomes! I really enjoy environmental storytelling. Designing the olive trees for the [SECRET] was really fun because I had to find a creative solution for maintaining the weirdness of pockmarked trunks without triggering trypophobia for our players. Additionally, I really like brainstorming what food and resources can be harvested from different plants and drawing their respective food icons."

Uncovering the Path Ahead

Each of these elements - especially the resource harvesting, the evolving food mechanics, and exploring the new and unique biomes - will be vital in our upcoming playtests. But what we've covered here barely scratches the surface of the work poured into Rinthine over the last two weeks. We have a massive vault of content, designs, and developer insights we can't wait to share in upcoming Dev Notes, Devlogs, and Discord community Q&As.

It isn't uncommon for folks who work on games to pause in the early stages of production and say,"This just isn't fun yet."It's a phrase that shivers many a developer timber, given that fun is, above all else, what a game should be. This is one of the first great walls a dev team must scale, but never fear! The Rinteam is not lost.

The dev team knows where it is because it knows where it is not. And so, we do what any sensible person does when they are not where they know they are supposed to be: we keep going.

This is what the Wayfinder must do, and it is what we all must do, too. Life is a pretty funky maze, and there will always be more work we can finish, something more we can improve, and always some new room, nook, large staircase, underground dwelling, suspicious-looking crevice, foreboding chasm, grue-ridden cave, disappointingly empty treasure chest, unsettling statue, forbidden swimming pool, intimidating corridor, creaky doorway, or suspiciously moldy-smelling, empty yellow department store to explore.

But exploring more of those things, uncovering all their secrets, finishing all that work will always leave more questions than answers, so it's important to remember - the journey IS the destination. So while we must all press on, it's important to take a look, from time-to-time, at how far you've come, and appreciate those with whom you've traveled.

You can never be lost if you know where you are, even if it's knowing where you're not.

And we're so thankful to be here, with you!

• Rinthine Team