We have finally released the
third alpha, the first one since we started using
Godot.
The bigger purpose of the new alpha release was to demonstrate, to the world and to us, that we can deliver. In many ways, Alpha 3 is a short game in itself, with a definite beginning, middle and end.
The game has its own flow. You begin with only one spirit and a single goal: to defeat the Red Menace corrupting the depths of the Temple of Truce.
To gain access to the inner sanctum our protagonist, Exekiel, must attain the help of Skrymir, the spirit of Earth, to solve a pretty straightforward environmental puzzle that is supposed to train the player into using different spells.
The game then opens up and you have a chance to fight different monsters, bind a second spirit, use more combo spells and access the deep underground.
The final boss is a custom one for this Alpha, tougher and with some limited tactical options. After the climax you have a moment of denouement when you need to reach the final gate.
From the technical side, many of the core game systems are in place: spells and combos, gaining spirits, tactical movement, basic interactions, random level generations with visual details, dynamic field of view, standard and custom monsters, dynamic music and even some limited gameplay options.
There are, of course, plenty of issues to solve though, and not only bugs to be squashed.
One of the biggest is the use of lighting. As of today the lighting is not reliable, sometimes partially showing up. This is a very frustrating bug.
The bottom-left braziers are not lit…
Another problem to be fixed is that Godot, to my understanding, doesn’t support lighting as part of 2D Particles. There are at least a couple workarounds. Maybe the easiest is for me to generate my own particles as children of a custom 2D Node and provide them with Light nodes (all Components of a Scene, in Godot, are Nodes that are part of the Scene Tree). Another possibility is to use
Shaders, which is something that I would prefer to avoid. Both solutions have trade-offs: I expect the former to be more heavy from a computation perspective, while the former are heavier on the GPU and I would need to learn yet another specialized tech that, as of today, seems like overkill.
Of course there are a bunch of others under my radar, but polishing and refining the game will still be a long process, so please, don’t fear and if you are so kind as to want to provide us your feedback, by all means use our
contact form or leave a comment in any of the game pages while we prepare for the exciting future of the project.
Thanks for reading.