Since it’s important to get information across & hype/promotion can be a bit reality warping, a blog-post both about the demo I’m hoping to release by the end of this month and the future of development.

The infamous phases of development (and where we’re at):

(you should take these with a grain of salt as they’re likely not an industry standard)

–Pre-alpha (current phase)

Pre-alpha is the phase I’m at in development. It obviously precedes Alpha and means that most features are missing as well as missing levels & monsters. I’m constantly re-iterating mechanics/code and sprites. The demo coming soon(tm) will be in this phase, so there won’t be much to play around with, more on this later on the post.

-Alpha

This is the phase I want to get to after the demo. It’s where most of the major features are added in rapid phases. I’m considering an Alpha test phase, but whether it’s Open or Closed is still up in the air. In this phase the game gets more structured. I would also like to stream it if it’s possible with my PC rig. Est. Before Summer

-Beta

In beta, most if not all of the major features should be done and then be tweaked during the beta. There might be (depending on the player feedback) some major changes but hopefully to not longen the development time this is not the case. This is the major bug/glitch fix phase to get ready for release. There will most likely be a pre-order bonus or something to get in to Beta (or just ask nicely and I’ll probably just give you access). Estimating when it hits beta is futile, but hoping to get there by summer.

The demo, what to expect and what to give me feedback off of!

I’m branching out of the dev build soon and cutting off some incomplete features & obviously buggy mechanics. But as an estimate, the list of what it will include is:

-Combat, I’m currently re-iterating some of the major combat features to be finished before the demo comes.



-The first dungeon. In the form of sub-dungeons, I’m hoping to have Waldir’s Castle/Basement fully playable. It includes 1_1 – 1_2 – 1_3, every sub dungeon is anywhere from 7-18 rooms.

-Minibosses are probably available

-I’m still on the fence if I’m gonna include the first boss as it might be a spoiler (if I’m even worried about that) and a complete buggy/unplayable mess.

-Sub-items & weapons. Throwing axe, knives, shield & the mechanics included in those will be explained in the coming weeks. Also hopefully I’ll get done with one or two magic spells for feedback.

-Leveling is in-complete but I’ll still include it in the demo.

That said, there’s a couple of important things about the demo. I really don’t want people to hype and play play it. Meaning if you want to see the full release in all of it’s glory & are not interested in heavy play-testing to get it better, you should probably steer away from this messy demo. (The full run of the current build takes only anywhere between 3-13 minutes, so if you want you are allowed to make a youtube video of it, but please emphasize that it’s only a free buggy demo 🙂 )

It’s intended purely to give me important player feedback so I’m not developing the game blindfolded.

Some things that are completely incomplete/buggy include:

Enemy AI, sometimes does very stupid things and generally is not very intelligent at all. I will be improving and tweaking it up until the very release.

Leveling, there’s no benefit other than slightly increase your health-pool from leveling. I’ll try to squeeze an ability or two (mostly passives) before the end of the month to see how they fit in.

Currency/Shopping/Treasure, getting hearts is really really easy in the current version, and will likely remain so in the demo. Just because I want to test the stuff you can do with them as much as possible. Treasure is also something problematic because there’s no rhyme or reason to it, it’s completely random for better or worse. Might be tweaked before the demo.

Pacing, the pacing of the gameplay is pretty terrible, there is a better way to accomplish this than to just roll a random number and see if enemies spawn in the room at all, but I’ll be tweaking it a lot later.

Even though this post was returning some hype to the ground, probably even killing it for some people, I hope you will participate in the test & give me a lot of valuable feedback, I don’t want to go gamedev blind while doing it and selling a sloppy game to people. Help me make the best game in my power!

Back to work! (sorry two of the gifs weren’t high fps)