Season’s greetings!

After a lot of hard work, this week we released a Pre-alpha build 10, which contains a major tech update to introduce our new filler building and alleyway systems. These two systems are the biggest gameplay change we’ve introduced yet, and also drastically improve the appearance of The Village and the third biome. We’ll leave you guys playing the pre-alpha to figure out how this affects everything :)

If you would like a more detailed look, you can read all the changes and build notes here

Programming Team

Camille

I prepared the build, pushed it out, and behold, it was very good!

Narrative Team

Alex

We’re making a big push to populate our procedural world with encounters, so I’m shifting my efforts from recording barks and cutscenes to fleshing out encounters. David has written a huge gigantic spreadsheet detailing all sorts of shenanigans you can get into on our various islands. My job is to take his gameplay specifications and make them into encounters that feel meaningful in addition to being fun challenges. Writing dialog is easy (well, I’ve been doing it for 25 years); the hard part is figuring out who the NPC we’re meeting is, what his unique agenda is, and making sure that is revelatory of our world, our lore and our theme.

Also, Sam and I put together my new standing desk. Thanks, Sam.

Design Team

Vince

I’m still working part time on the intro, making sure the artists and animators can integrate their work smoothly, and I’m working on the more specific functionalities needed for this particular sequence that arose from all the crazy ideas we had.

And when I was not doing that, I worked on a complete re-work of the loot distribution on the first Garden District island. We have a new loot system from Camille and I’m using that to make all containers give you more predictable loot. It will also be a lot easier to tweak those numbers without having to go inside each map. That also includes exciting new items and new crafting recipes!

Also in the Garden District, I started cleaning up all the houses so that the NPCs have more space to navigate because a lot of them would get stuck, and it was also sometimes a bit of a pain for the player to navigate without getting stuck in weird places.

We’re going to test and tweak this new progression throughout the next weeks, so prepare yourself for a brand new game start experience in the next update!

Mike

Hello!

This weeks I have integrated a new house in the Garden District. This house seems empty at first glance but is actually full of stuff :) If you pay attention you’ll find them!

I have also created 4 new encounters and a new quest for the Garden District, which you’ll have to discover in game ;)

Art Team

Marc-Andre

This week I did a bunch of small props!

Thanks for tuning in!

Compulsion Games