Hey everyone! We’ve been extremely busy getting the game ready for the campaign chapter-1 release, so this update is a little late. We’re still very excited to tell you about what we’ve been working on. We’ve been fixing bugs, adding features, and adding new content to the upcoming campaign for Septaroad Voyager.
We added a new level, Gloomwood, between Halgdalir and Gearbridge. Here you’ll encounter skeletons, ghosts, bats, spiders, and goblins trying to stop your quest.
In that picture you’ll notice that we’re reading a sign. That’s a relatively small functional addition, but we felt it was important for you to have signs to guide you.
We also spent some time trying to get the right look in Gloomwood.
Some of the tools we use to get the right look include lighting, a color-grading lookup table, and postprocess effects like the vignette. We want to make sure each area has the right look, so we’ve been revisiting each area to test different settings to see if we can get the effect we want.
And here is Sun Fields, the area outside Nicopolis, where Thekla starts her adventure.
We want the area to have a Byzantine feel, so we added some elements of Roman mythology. We’re also teaming up with a musician to add some unique music for this area. We hope to give you a lot more detail on that next month.
Another new area you’ll see is the Drowned Road, which you’ll have to pass through to get from the northern areas to the southern areas.
We made lots of new assets to make this area feel unique and dangerous. Here you see our heroes fighting froglins. And if you look carefully you might also see a swamp moccasin and a life-draining bat.
This area is also haunted by dangerous undead.
Not shown are some of the high-level slimes in the swamp. The cute colorful little slimes near the starting areas don’t pose much of a threat to adventurers. But here, the acid slimes, poison slimes, infectious slimes, and dreaded toxic slimes can cause some serious problems.
We also added more enemies, trying to make each area feel unique. We added the satyr enemy above. We tweaked the crab sprite, added a new froglin enemy, and a new tortoise enemy. We also created new loot drops for the crabs and tortoises. Right now their shells are only useful for selling to vendors, but we’ll try to add something else fun you can do with them in the future.
While traversing the map, you’ll also pass through some new snowy areas.
This scene from South Pass shows you the new ram and snowmen enemies.
With a lot of the enemies, it’s not immediately obvious how tough they are just from looking at them. We thought we needed a more explicit way to communicate their relative difficulty. So this month we added the enemy level to their HP bar. And for bosses, if we don’t want to tell you exactly how tough they’re going to be, there’s a skull where their level should be.
Now let us tell you about a new feature: the ability to use generic items from the action menu.
Alchemists who unlock the abilities to use various potions can use those items much faster through the Alchemy skill. But for characters who haven’t unlocked the alchemist’s potion skills, or for using other items, like food and drink, we thought this would be faster and easier than going into the pause menu.
We received some valuable feedback this month. A friend told us:
That’s it for now. It’s time to get back to work. We’ll be back soon with more news, and hopefully a fully playable chapter 1 for each of our seven heroes.
