July Devlog (Patreon)

Alright, time for the first full devlog since... What, April? Christ...

Anyway as most of you probably know, I spent the entire last 3 months working in the first real island of the game. This included new tiles, NPCs, enemies, mechanics, characters, and even a new crewmate! It'd be kind of boring to explain a lot of these things in detail, so I'll try summarizing most of the major things added. (Also, I might've shown a few of these things off already on here, so bear with me if I end up repeating myself)

Rogue's Rest

Rogue's Rest is the main town that you'll be revisiting throughout the game. The town's first iteration has been implemented into the game. (yes, there will be multiple iterations of the town as the plot progresses) This includes some basic generic NPCs, as well as Isaac's blacksmith shop. (The blacksmith shop also gets an upgrade later in the game, however for the first iteration he can only upgrade your tools to L2)

Wolf Rock

This is the "first" major island in the game you can explore. You can do islands in any order of course, but this is intended to be the first one you do. Like the rest of the main islands in the game, Wolf Rock is home to a dungeon and plenty of secrets. However, the way you get to that dungeon will be a challenge within itself...

Fore Shore

While this won't be the first dungeon in the game, it is the first major one. The dungeon itself is Captain Jonas's previous ship which met with an... Unfortunate fate. This is where the residents of Rogue's Rest originated from, and it's where they initially received their supplies from. However, the ship has become overrun with monsters and has been deemed too dangerous for them to reliably use for resources anymore. I don't want to spoil too much about the dungeon itself, however if you're a fan of Zelda games then you may be in for a surprise or two.

New Mechanics/Improvements

Firstly, the game now has boss battles. Each dungeon will have at least two bosses (a mid-boss and an end-boss) I'm also planning on implementing special optional bosses outside of dungeons, guarding things like Life Rum and Atlantium.

(Fore Shore's Midboss)

I also finally included a death system, along with fully implementing the revive item.

(Don't let this screen fool you, saving isn't implemented just yet)

There's now a config menu as well, which allows you to tweak basic game settings, along with setting your desired control scheme.

The last thing to mention would probably be the map system, which is really useful for a game like this. (Or so I've heard) There's not too much to say about it, other than you can zoom in on the room you're in for a more detailed map.

There's also a plethora of other small tweaks and improvements as well, but I can't exactly remember all of them off the top of my head. 

What's Next?

Before writing this, I released a playtest build of the game for a handful of people to try out. With the feedback received, I plan on making as many improvements to the game as I possibly can. (Which should only take a few days) I mainly want to add gamepad support to the game, fixing bugs, and improve certain visuals.

After that's all finished and accounted for, I'll try recording and releasing the game's first trailer. I'm not a marketing genius, but I know I need to spread the word about the game and get a little more support for it. I love making this game (if that hasn't been obvious enough) and have found myself mostly without income for the past 3 months, so ideally I'd like to try getting this page a bit more "out there" as well in order to help smooth out development.

Once the trailer is finished, I'll move onto figuring out a "roadmap" for the rest of the game's development. Since the game is technically in an alpha stage now (which means mainly focusing on adding real content to the game, rather than focusing on the base mechanics) it's going to be a little tough finding things to write about. (Especially since I don't want to spoil too much of the game for you all) With this though, the Patron server has been a lot more active than I've ever seen it before, so it isn't too hard to catch updates there.

Anyway, thanks for reading this all! Sorry about the radio silence for the past few months, I just wanted to make sure this post would be more "impactful" when I was finally able to make it. To make up for it (or at least, attempting to) here's a couple unreleased sketches and a new rendered piece of concept art.

(Ike and Isaac concept sketches)

(New crewmate)

(New Algo art)

Thanks again, and I hope to see you soon!

(Also for those who aren't in the server yet, here's a link to it.)