Under a Desert Sun: Seekers of the Cursed Vessel, progress update

I’ve started active work on content beyond the demo, beginning with the Dweller dungeon — the immediate next part of the story right after where the demo ends.

I previously shared a short video showing an early look at this dungeon, and I wanted to follow up by continuing to show progress so you can compare how it evolves over time.

Before showing comparisons, a quick technical deep dive.

With these more narrow, enclosed areas, I ran into a classic top-down game challenge: the player must always remain visible, even when moving underneath structures or environmental objects.

To solve this, I built a custom system that dynamically manipulates materials. When the player moves underneath geometry, parts of buildings smoothly transition to semi-transparent or fully transparent, depending on the situation. By blending between these two states, structures appear to temporarily “melt away,” keeping visibility clear without breaking immersion.

I’m quite happy with how this effect turned out, and you can see it demonstrated in the test map shown here:

After that, you’ll find two walkthrough videos of the new dungeon:

• The first is the earlier version I shared before:

• The second is the updated version, featuring more content, more detailing, and a denser atmosphere:

That’s it for today. Thanks for following the progress — more updates soon!

Wishlist the game on Steam:

Under a Desert Sun Seekers of the Cursed Vessel

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https://discord.gg/g5fK7Df