Devlog #2

Another one!

Welcome back for our second devlog! A little late because of Easter break, hope you all had a good one!

Challenge Roundup

In last fortnight’s challenge we finally introduced a new spell, along with some new enemies which you folks found many ways to circumvent, resulting in some very satisfying solutions, weaving through dust and clearing enemies away. Discord member Grolter managed to find the best solution for this one, just slipping right through everything in their way. (Dash spell is visually bugged right now)

Grolter’s 21-move solution

But our favourite solutions were from people who just went cat-mode with Gust spell, using it to knock everything off the table.

What have we been up to?

As mentioned in the last devlog, the new in-house voxel plugin we’re now using allows for some fun visual effects! The first of which has come online: the new death particle effect (some of you may be aware it’s been broken for a while) which directly reads the voxel model’s data and then particle-ifies it, making it look like the model is crumbling into voxels rather than exploding and disappearing.

In other voxel plugin news, we’re continuing to improve its performance and features, with boolean functionality hopefully coming online soon. And with the help of the new voxel workflow, we’ve been making very significant progress on Domino Den’s levels, with art passes completed on the entire zone. We can’t show you just yet, so you’ll have to trust us that it’s looking incredible. We’ve been so excited to see the zone come to life!

We’ve also been honing the game’s fluidity through playtests and one of the things that popped up was the ambiguity of enemies' attack directions. We’re experimenting with adding a direction indicator that can be toggled on by holding shift:

This change should be live in the next challenge update for you all to try. If you have any feedback we’d love to hear it!

A new challenge awaits

This fortnight’s challenge further explores the dust and gust mechanics introduced last time.

Also, we’ve completed the systems migration that we started a few weeks ago for all the remaining challenges. They aren’t in this fortnight’s challenge update, but they’ll all be back next time!

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