New Features & Progress of work – Dev diary September

Hello folks!

We haven’t written any updates for a long time, but that’s only because we’ve been working hard on the project. 🙂

Today we would like to summarize everything we’ve improved and created over the past few months. Many of these elements are improvements and features created based on your requests and will be available in the full version of the game 🙂

The End of the Sun – a map of the world and inventory list [ With intentionally blurred elements to keep things in secret 🙂 ] Map will be uncovered with the progress of the game

Improvements and new features based on your remarks:

1. Map and inventory: We’ve added a cool world map and an inventory list, two of the most requested features. The map will gradually uncover as you explore, and it will show all fireplaces in the game, as well as their state. It will also help you orient yourself in the world but not in a direct way. The map is super unique and immersive. We worked a lot to give it some physical feeling and animations.

2. Making player experience smoother and less confusing: We’ve implemented a bunch of new features to make the game smoother and less confusing. Here are some highlights:

-Fireplace call the player: Now after completing all tasks belonging to the fireplace, the player will see sparks and sounds calling the player to make an action.

-Cutscene attention grabber: We heard you were confused about where some cutscene characters were, so now sparks will lead you to the starting position of the cutscene, even if they’re hidden in the environment.

-Different colours for stable Faith Path sparks: We know it was confusing that the sparks of finished Faith Paths were the same red colour as the sparks of incomplete ones. Now, the sparks of stable Faith Paths will be yellow/golden and show calmer behaviour, so it’s easier to distinguish them.

-New icons and text reorganization: We added new icons for some special actions, like “Object Put Back” and “Use Magic.” We also changed some text and action names to make things more clear. For example, “Stabilize” is now the clear mouse hint name for Faith Paths instead of “Inquire.” This will make it easier for players to understand what they do.

-Fireplace border indicator: We know you wanted a visible border when you’re about to lose connection to a fireplace, so now there’s a video and sound effect to let you know. This will help players avoid losing connection to a fireplace by accident.

-Video effects no longer affect icons: We fixed a bug where video effects were affecting item icons, which made it difficult to see them when moving fast. This is a big improvement for players who like to move quickly through the game.

3. Better and more immersive walking animation and head bob: We’ve improved the ashter’s (player’s) head animation a lot. It now looks much more natural and has more impact.

4. Special light for objects hidden in the dark: Previously, when a player picked up an item hidden in the dark, it would be totally invisible. We have added a weak artificial light that emanates from the player (when an object is lifted), which will now illuminate an object, making it easier to see.

5. Game Settings new options and Improvements: We made a lot of changes to the game settings:

– Hints: Now every advanced feature has its own hint text, so even the most advanced option should be easy to understand.

-Auto Save toggle: You can now disable autosave, so your manual saves won’t be overwritten.

-Motion Sickness Options: We added an option to disable the head bob animation, which can help players who suffer from motion sickness.

-Rebinding Input:  This is a highly requested feature. According to our survey, 65% of you think it’s very useful, and 30% of you said you wouldn’t buy the game without it. We’ve now fully implemented this feature, and you’ll be able to rebind keys not only for keyboard and mouse but also for gamepads! (It was quite time-consuming to do especially as we had to prepare all custom style icons for every button of the keyboard and gamepad)

-Motion blur and Antialiasing independent from graphic presets: We’ve reorganized the video settings so that motion blur and antialiasing are no longer tied to the graphic presets. You can now change the graphic preset independently of these settings. We made this change because many players disable these features, so keeping them together with the graphic presets wasn’t the best way to go. It’s also helpful for players who suffer from motion sickness.

-Minor reorganization of video settings: We’ve made some minor reorganizations of the video settings to make them easier to understand.

-Simple subtitles font: We’ve added an option to change the subtitles font to a simpler font that’s easier to read.

-Subtitles size: This is an important option for players who like to play story-driven games on large TVs or sit far away from their computers and play with controllers. It is also a good option for players with vision problems. You can now increase the size of the subtitles so they’re easier to read.

-Bug Fixes: We’ve fixed a lot of bugs and made other minor changes. We can’t even remember them all! 🙂  You could also read that Steam update to see what we improved (based on Your remarks) in the earlier update.

Progress of game development and new content that we can’t share yet:

Of course, the elements we mentioned above are just a small part of what we did last month, but they still took us quite a while to implement. It may seem strange, but some of these features forced us to reimplement some core mechanics of the game code. Either way, we spent most of our time working on the full version of the game 🙂

Keep in mind that we already have like huge amount of new content in the game. We just don’t want to make new screenshots and videos as we are keeping the best parts for final marketing. This is why we are sharing with You only 2 new screenshots now 🙂

Sorry we can’t share more screenshots with You, For now, we are keeping the best ones for the final promotional time before the game release 🙂

The End of the Sun – a map of the world, with intentionally blurred elements. The map will be uncovered with the progress of the game

Here are the main things we’ve been working on for the past few months:

• We finished translating all the story text and recording all the English voiceovers. You may think this is an easy task, but recording voiceovers remotely is hard work. Very often, even a single word has to be fixed or recorded differently to keep the cutscene in the right mood. 🙂 The only last element that we have to record is the narrator’s voiceover, but this is because an ashter (narrator) gives hints to the player, so some text may need to be corrected after game testing. You may read blog post about how we recorded voiceovers here.
• We finished 75% of the cutscenes and puzzles for the game. It’s worth mentioning that we created 50% of this in the last 2.5 months. (More information below.) [ You could also read some making of about one of the game characters here]

What we still have to do before starting game testing:

• We need to finish the last 25% of the puzzles and cutscenes. Keep in mind that this is not 25% of the whole game development, it’s just 25% of the final work of putting everything together into puzzles and cutscenes (elements prepared earlier, such as animations, voiceovers, models, etc.). Based on our calculations, it seems like we can do this in the next 2-3 months. Then the game will be ready for testing. (And then, depending on the tests, we will know if the release will be in Q4 2023 or Q1/2 2024. It all depends on the tests.) When the game testers are working, we will send the game script for translation into other languages and record the narrator’s voiceovers. (So then work will be done simultaneously)

We have been working on the game 6 days a week for the whole summer holiday, often for 10 hours or more a day. We decided to write this update now because we want to take a little break and have a 2-week holiday. 🙂

Of course, we understand that you can’t wait for the release, but we think the demo [available on Steam and Gog] should give you some peace of mind that the game will be a high-quality piece of art. As we mentioned before, it is impossible to say the release date for such a complex project before the proper testing full version of the game. However, in the next 2-3 months, everything should become much clearer. 🙂

Hope You understand that!

If You have a few minutes, You could share that update or one of our trailers. Thanks for Your time and support!

Would like to help? Leave Comments and Thumbs up on our trailers on YouTube. Of course, you could also share it on your social media. Thanks!