Starveil Devlog #8 - September and October 2023

It's the end of October and that means the spooky season is upon us. And also a new Starveil devlog and it's yet another double month one. Lives have been far too busy, but we also got a lot done, so let's get into it!

Busy Bee September and October

Like mentioned above, life kept us busy, be it work or family related matters, or vacations. But we are not slowed down so easily and we got a lot of stuff done over the last two months!

In Starveil, dungeons stay for a whole season and then get re-generated. It's a sort of middle ground between the typical MMO experience where dungeons always stay the same and a more Action RPG style where maps are random all the time. We want the best of both worlds and to achieve that, we have built some in-house tooling to help us generate dungeons we can then polish up, customize and add into the game ready for the next season. Over the course of September and October, we have improved our dungeon generation tooling to support the environmental hazards we have in the Necroforge - namely moving conveyor belts and lava pools.

We have also refactored our Effects system (buffs and debuffs, essentially) to be more flexible and more easily support some exciting boss encounters and skills.

Speaking of exciting bosses, we are doing more work on the Mycotic Grove and have added two new bosses we can't wait to test out with more people. We don't want to spoil much, but one is a banshee with a devastating sonic attack, and the other is a shaman commanding a fierce wolf. Both bosses should require some strategy and cunning to beat.

And last but not least, we have started implementing persisting character data between logins and everything that needs to happen around that! For now that only means characters, storing equipped skills and inventories will come later but this is a huge step for us. As a part of the persistence work, the character creation screen got a much needed facelift, and to accompany it, there is also a character selection screen now.

There have also of course been some bug fixes and tweaks and the never-ending work on making art assets. Check out some work in progress on those!

Full Steam Ahead November

The big ticket item for November is still persistence. We want to get in storing character items and skills, so players can actually start customizing their characters properly. After that is done, we are planning to hold a public playtest, so keep your eyes peeled on our Discord and this Steam page for that! We will also be showing Starveil to complete strangers for the first time early November, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

The other very big thing on our list is figuring out how skill unlocking is even going to work. Many discussions and design sessions will be had for sure :)

On top of that, we will of course be adding more things to the Mycotic Grov, truly turn it into a grove. Who knows, maybe we'll even tackle some environment sounds for that little extra mood...

And that was us at Mice with Dice for another devblog. Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the news about a playtest and see you in the next one!

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Hi, us again some hours later. We're happy to report that the Signups for the Playtest are now live!