Forward! Said grandma in the snow.

A lot has happened in the last couple of weeks.

We released a demo, did a stream, participated in the Steam Next Fest which is soon over and The Days of the Ramadan festival started! During these times, we haven't been resting and taking it easy. No! We have been hard at work listening to your feedback, fixing bugs and optimizing the game. We also released a whole new mechanic to the game on our latest patch update. Read more about it here.

Now it's time for us to turn our heads forward towards the full release! We are already well on our way to finishing the second map as well as all the other new content. But there's still a lot to do. The next month or so we will focus heavily on finishing the game!

Even though we will be focusing on new content and the Steam Next Fest is ending, the current demo will still be playable for some time.

Updates & Progress

Made the third and final character for Versebound: Aino! The team is now complete!

She is fast and can teleport for a short distance! Her playstyle revolves quite a lot around her movement skill and experience gain. Her damage output is not that strong though, so getting through the difficult early game is the key to victory

Added a feature many testers have hoped for: the ability to use Skills in Hub!

Skills are character specific movement abilities that bring dynamic vibes to the gameplay! It was a bit of a hassle as the Hub wasn’t designed for Skills and Skills weren’t designed to be used in the Hub. But as always, I made it work!

Added kill amounts to bestiary entries!

Now there is something to do for those who like to see big numbers! Can you get a million Kyy (snake) kills?

Did the final secret boss of our game!

This one is a classic dual boss, where the player is tested with a melee and a ranged boss at once! Once managing to fell one of them, the remaining one goes into a rage mode and challenges the player’s skills with advanced attacks to avenge their companion! That’s going to be causing some panic in the release for sure.. Also, now there is only one more boss to make, wonder who that could be..?

Other updates

• Did a weapon unlock quest chain for the first unlockable weapon of Tuonela! It involves mysterious wintery statues, freezing gusts of air in a snow-covered forest, and bottles. Yep, definitely Finland.

• Did lots of bug fixes and small tweaks! These are good to do in a batch once in a while, and give nice variation to the usual grind 🙂

• Added logic for unique “player damaged” sound effects. Now it’s needed since our cast of characters also has a female in it.

• Added Aino unlock event to our second map, Tuonela! Now almost everything regarding playable characters is done! Woop woop!

• Did LOTS of tweaking, bug fixing and polishing for our final public demo! It’s been quite crazy, but I managed to do everything that was planned and even some “nice to have” things, like the long-awaited hover menu system that let’s players check precise stats of their equipment. It was a total hassle and I almost went a bit crazy trying to make it work, but managed in the end, and now it works perfectly!

• Did lots of scene tweaks and made great progress on the second map of Versebound, Tuonela! Also implemented one cool visual gimmick for one of their bosses, it’s quite nasty now!

• Updated main menu graphics

• New SFX for XP Fairy artifact

• Updated graphics for Poem of Oppi

• New SFX’s for when Joukahainen gets freed

• We’ve gotten lots of amazing feedback from the demo testers, super hyped about that! However, we’ve also gotten reports of heavy, yet seemingly random fps drops during runs. While we had no clear idea what might cause this, there was one huge thing that could be regarding optimization: enemy pooling. Most of the often used objects are already recycled in Versebound, but I had made the base for the enemyspawner two years ago, and then I was just too lazy to implement pooling there. Also I didn’t have the skills to do that properly. Now I have though, so it seemed like the correct moment to implement that!

Expect lots of new cool content coming in the coming weeks. Until then, don't let the Hiisi eat you :)