Starveil Devlog #9 - November 2023

December has brought snow, and also the latest Starveil devlog. November has been a busy and exciting month, let’s see what have we been up to.

Novel November

Early in the month, Vildravn has shown off Starveil to the local game dev community at an event hosted by Game Habitat. It was the first time ever that people outside of friends and family could play the game, and it was a very valuable and interesting experience.

Speaking of playtests, we have also launched the signups for a Steam playtest, and we’re very happy that we got over 90 signups so far! We have been working hard all November to get the game in a shape good enough for people to play without a developer present, and we really want to launch the playtest soon.

That brings us to a recap of what we’ve done in November, and it’s quite a list.

Following up on last month when we talked about persisting characters, we now store everything. This means that player characters, their inventory, selected skills and equipped items are all persisted between logins and server restarts. This was one of the biggest hurdles to making a public playtest possible and it’s quite a relief to have this feature finally in the game.

Another big feature we’ve implemented is client-side telegraphs. This makes combat much better, since you can now see where a skill will land before you cast it. At the moment we only support click to cast, but we are also planning to implement options to enable fast casting you know from games like League of Legends or Guild Wars 2.

We are also looking at making the game flow better, mostly when it comes to maps. Roaming maps are intended to be largely solo-able areas with some group content sprinkled here and there while Dungeons are where groups will be necessary. With that in mind, Necroforge is getting a bit of a makeover, making sure large parts of it are solo-able, putting group oriented stuff off the beaten path.

Pictured above is the Necroforge map as the server sees it.

Last but not least, we worked on some UI polish. Most of the windows and panels with some exceptions are now consistent with the HUD/Action panel design, we now have new skill icons, and you can now see the status effects on your character clearer than ever with new icons placed above the floating health bar.

Dramatic December

As we mentioned above, we really want to launch a public playtest soon, as in, in the coming weeks, so our focus is on that.

This means polishing up what we have into a playable experience and making sure it’s fun and rewarding. With persistence now fully implemented, some issues with itemization have become much more apparent, so we are putting out designer hats on and figuring out how do we want to make item drops work in each of our areas.

Another area of focus related to the public playtest will be on UI and making things are easy to understand.

And that’s pretty much it for this devlog. If you are interested in playtesting Starveil in the coming weeks, make sure to sign up on our Steam page. And if you’d like to chat with us about the game or anything else for that matter, we practically live on our Discord server.

Until next time! ~ Sukkoy and Vildravn