Devlog #5 - Back in Gear

We’re finally back with our fortnightly devlog! Hopefully you’ve been enjoying the demo 🙂 If you missed it, you can find the demo here:

Spellsided Demo We’re making a small change to the devlog - patch notes for demo updates will now be posted here instead of in a separate post. Hopefully this consolidation helps to make it easier to find patch notes and avoids redundant information.

We’re also making some changes to the Challenge Roundup! We are instead going to move to doing the Challenge Roundup separately to the devlogs, a week after each challenge release. We felt that reviewing your best solutions a whole two weeks after the challenge comes out dampens the excitement a bit. Let us know what you think.

What have we been up to?

So much has happened! Besides the new Domino Ruins campaign, we’ve made significant progress on UI, audio systems, voxel tech, optimisation, and other behind-the-scenes work. We’ve shipped the first version of the new spell switcher with the demo release, with more improvements to come.

Localisation

A major piece of work that happened since the demo release is localisation! You can now play Spellsided in 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇧🇷 Brazilian Portuguese, 🇷🇺 Russian, 🇯🇵 Japanese, and 🇨🇳 Simplified Chinese. Our store page is also now translated into said languages. These translations are still a work in progress - some strings are not yet localised, a couple are temporarily machine-localised, and they haven’t yet been through QA. If you have feedback on the localisation please don’t hesitate to let us know!

Feltfields

Lately, we’ve started work on the Feltfields area, with some initial planning and visual design. It’s been great to work with a brighter, more cheery colour palette again after so long stuck in the blues of Domino Ruins 🪴

Steam post image Some preliminary environment models for the Feltfields.

These grassy plains should be good fun to roll around in as Hex, with the grass swaying in the wind and flattening as you roll over it. We're wanting to add this kind of passive interactivity to other areas of the game as well to help bring the world alive.

Last fortnight’s challenge also included an initial implementation of the pool balls that will be featured in the area 🎱

Feedback Review

We've also been doing a lot of reviewing of feedback from players; reading your Steam reviews, YouTube comments, and Discord messages. We've found the feedback super useful to go over and have already made some immediate tweaks to solve some pain points. On a wider level, the feedback has informed some more holistic design tweaks, especially towards overall progression. We’ve been working on some very interesting spell stuff, but we can’t quite reveal anything yet…

What's next?

With the demo released and the team back on our usual schedules, we've full steam ahead on production. Some of the tasks on our board include

• Controller support

• Loading time optimisation

• Music system

  • We had a dynamic music system planned that didn't make it into the demo release due to some bugs. As a team founded by a trio of composers, this one is something we're really excited about!

• Spell switcher improvements

Stay tuned!

A new challenge awaits

This weeks' challenge is a test of a work-in-progress Spectral Blade spell! (using Goodfellow as a testing dummy as usual) Trigger (Press Q) to summon a sword attached to your face which rotates with your die. It can be a lil brain bending, but seems to allow for some very unique new combos which we're curious what you'll do with.

NOTE: There were some issues with this update and at the moment it has been quarantined :( Please see the patch notes below.

Patch notes

• Updated to Unreal 5.8

  • NOTE: This seemed to cause a hard error-out for a lot of players, with a message quoting “The following component(s) are required to run this program: Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64)”.

  • We think this is an issue with Steam’s backend not providing the latest 2026 redistributable for Visual C++ (The error message is outdated itself) which Unreal 5.8 seems to use.

  • For now, we’ve quarantined the update into a separate beta branch [c]ue58[/c] which you can find by going into Steam library properties for Spellsided Demo > Game Versions & Betas.

• Gust now activates on bump as well, allowing you to push something right next to you while also stepping into its space. We found in playtests many players would expect this behaviour. Let us know what you think.