December 2025 Update

Happy New Year!

Lots of progress has been made even despite the holidays this month!

Omni-directional attacks

The player can now point the cursor anywhere and shoot in that direction, all fully-animated. I wanted faster-paced action for the player but originally I’d planned to have the player only shoot in the direction they were facing. This made player positioning critical and more strategic however it came at the cost of pace-of-action. Ultimately allowing the player to shoot wherever they are running or not makes the game flow much smoother and having each direction fully-animated I think makes the icing on the cake.

Disciples abandon you

If your devotion score drops low enough, disciples will begin to abandon your citadel. They will fall to their knees, relinquishing all hope from their souls and vanish…potentially leaving a critical job vacant, for which you’ll need to find a replacement!

New player experience blocked out

When a new game is selected the appropriate cinematic screens and starting points are all blocked out. The actual cinematics have yet to be designed by me, but for now the general flow exists making it easier to come back to that work a bit later.

Re-introduced background parallax

In the last few months I’ve been making significant progress in upgrading performance with lower-end machines. However, that meant removing some cool features that made the game pop more, like background parallax. I was able to re-introduce this effect after making a few more performance improvements elsewhere.

First full “new player experience” playtest!

I was able to conduct my first play-thru demo over the holidays! I captured about 30 minutes of gameplay footage which gave me a long list of features of bugs. As a result I’ve been working through several small quality-of-life features such as tooltips-on-hover, interactions like mouse-clicks completing dialogue, and tweaking enemy spawn behavior over the past few weeks.

Onward & upward

Bobby @ Long Tooth Llama