Devlog #1

Dear diary,

Welcome to our first fortnightly devlog! As mentioned in our announcement last month, now that we have funding we’re able to spend a bit more time on Community Engagement and that means you’ll all get a lovely letter from us every two weeks!

Challenge roundup

Last fortnight’s challenge was Rotating Challenge #3: Goodfellowship, where we dumped three Goodfellows into an arena and gave you fully upgraded faces to use every spell currently in the game. We were a little swamped with production, so this was flagged as sort of a “low effort” challenge from us. But apparently, giving the players full reign of the game’s mechanics actually made for a crazy sandbox of some very creative solutions.

This challenge was the most we’d ever seen the Discord server pop off, with everyone trying to break literally every facet of this level.

The best solution from our Discord server was, as usual, from merijn2018. And he barely even needed the upgraded spell faces because he was able to just exploit the OP ‘Dust Bomb’ spell that we debuted in this challenge. Maybe giving everyone THREE bombs to use was a bad idea.

But the most entertaining part of these solutions was when players realised they could trap one of the bosses in the starting room, and started strategizing ways to optimise that. The technique centred around summoning a coin to hold the door open, then breaking and resummoning it to re-enter. All of this just to acquire a friend...

Technique for trapping a Goodfellow devised by merin2018, The Book Wyrm, and Grolter

What have we been up to?

We’ve been quite enjoying ourselves over the past 2 weeks as we start seeing the fruits of our many backend improvements that we’ve been working on this year. An example of one of the backend changes is that now we can make everything and anything pushable, as seen in today’s challenge release…

We’re also now fully using our in-house plugin that allows for drag-and-drop importing of voxel models created in MagicaVoxel. This means we now get to keep all the original voxel data, and in the future we’ll be able to dynamically combine models together, add decals, fun physical-feeling particle effects, and more! Plus, it’s sped up our workflow (which is always good).

Speaking of particle effects, we’ve been testing out some new particles for a few of our upcoming areas too…

A dusty open cliff

Dion gave a speech at the University of Melbourne’s Game Maker’s Club, and judged its “Click & Claw” game jam. It was a lovely opportunity to take the lessons we’ve learned from our three-year journey and impart them to a crowd of aspiring young devs. Our favourite submission was Brisk Bloom, a cozy Tetris-style biome builder with impressively smooth graphics and gameplay for a three-day jam.

A new challenge awaits

As mentioned, this fortnight’s challenge makes use of some of the backend migrations we’ve been working on. The challenge is a test of the Gust spell! Upon step, the spell summons a gust of wind in the two spaces ahead of you...

For detailed patch notes, see the patch notes post in the Spellsided Playtest library page, or on Discord.