We meant to get this update out sooner, but May ended up being an incredibly busy month for us. Between finishing a brand new trailer and wrapping up our updated promotional art and logo work, a lot has been happening behind the scenes. With all of that said, we have a really big update to share today, packed with new areas, mechanics, music, programming improvements, and story updates.
Northern Mountain Region
Even though this is technically our spring update, most of the content we worked on over the past few months takes place in the Northern Mountain regions of Velare, a dangerous snowy and icy biome.
One of the landmarks players will encounter is the new dungeon area in region 4×0. While we have not started building the dungeon itself yet, we completed the surrounding exterior while developing neighboring sections.
Heading north from the Southern Mountain town into region 5×0 immediately introduces players to danger. The Northern Mountains are unforgiving, and one may find themselves greeted by a snowball to the face shortly after entering the region.
Traveling west into region 4×1 takes players through a frozen valley filled with enemies and narrow icy paths.
Connecting two of the tallest mountains in Velare is a massive bridge stretching between regions 5×0 and 6×0.
Region 7×0 is the coldest location in all of Velare. Even if players collect every piece of cold resistance armor, Asteric can still take damage in this region due to the extreme conditions. The area also features a giant maze-like fort in the southern section and two Centaurs waiting in the north.
Outside of the snowy mountains, we also worked on region 7×2, part of the Southern Mountain biome. This area focuses more on forests and caves, with plenty of puzzles and hidden secrets scattered throughout.
We also completed work on region 5×3, located northeast of Jasper (formerly known as castle town.) This grassy farmland area is currently blocked off by mysterious black rocks, making it inaccessible during the early parts of the game.
New Features
Because so much development centered around the snowy regions, we also added several new snow-related gameplay mechanics. One of the biggest additions is environmental snowballs. Many cliffs throughout the mountains now contain falling snowballs, so players will need to pay close attention to where they walk.
Ice Tiles
We also updated our ice tile palette to improve the visual quality of frozen surfaces throughout the game.
Snowballs
Players can now pick up and throw snowballs as projectiles. Since players can already throw rocks, grass, and mushrooms, adding snowballs was a no brainer. However, enemies in these late game areas are much tougher, so projectiles are less effective than they were earlier in the adventure.
Sliding Block Puzzles
Of course, we could not make an icy mountain biome without introducing sliding block puzzles. We added mechanics that allow blocks to slide across frozen surfaces, opening the door for new puzzle designs throughout the region.
Music
Eugene has continued creating music at an incredible pace, and alongside the Northern Mountain development came several new tracks for the area.
Northern Mountain – Day
Northern Mountain – Night
Northern Mountain – Enemy
We mentioned the Southern Mountain town previously, even though the town itself is not fully complete yet. While development continues there, we already have music finished for the area and wanted to share a preview.
Mountain Town – Day
Mountain Town – Night
Mountain Town – Enemy
New Sprites
Tony is nearly finished updating Asteric’s redesigned appearance, and we are very excited with how everything is coming together. Below is a montage showcasing many of the updated sprites and animations.
This redesign was heavily influenced by community feedback, and we feel the updates help Asteric better fit the role of the game’s main character.
Tutorial and Story Updates
Another major focus recently has been improving the game’s opening and story presentation. Based on community feedback, we decided to integrate more of the actual story into the beginning sequence instead of holding too much back. Kennedy has been working closely with Dan to include more story beats to the beginning of the game.
Players who have played the demo may recognize Minhaga, who will play a much larger role in the full game. In hindsight, we realized the original demo did not showcase enough of the game’s core story. We didn’t want to give too many spoilers but realized we overcompensated.
In the updated tutorial, Minhaga now taunts the player and steals an important letter, forcing Asteric to chase after him. Aka, we’re fully leaning into Minhaga being a core character in the game.
Story Programming
On the programming side, Dan has been working heavily on improvements to cutscene and story sequence handling. One major issue involved the Remembrance Ceremony sequence in Castle Town (Jasper), which was being fully loaded every time the town loaded, even after players had already completed it. This created unnecessary overhead due to all the extra NPCs, logic, and scripted events involved.
To solve this, we began implementing a new system that allows “special sections” or “scenes” to exist separately from the normal world structure. These scenes can temporarily replace sections of the world when needed, similar to how scenes function in a stage play. Once the sequence is finished, the special scene can be discarded entirely, reducing unnecessary loading and improving performance.
Additional Programming Help
We also received additional programming help from Hyreon, who previously assisted with our draw_container task and other technical tasks. This time, Hyreon helped improve both our custom pathfinding extension and async loading systems.
Part of our A* pathfinding padding implementation relied on a very messy collection of conditional checks that Dan originally wrote quickly during development. Hyreon helped refactor this into a much cleaner and more maintainable system.
On the extension side, we continued expanding our garbage collection optimizations from previous updates. Since our pathfinding and async loading systems constantly create separate threads during operation, reallocating memory for these threads became expensive resources over time. Hyreon integrated a thread pooling library that allows these systems to reuse threads instead of constantly creating and destroying them.
Community Building & Networking
Cedarville
Outside of development itself, we also spent time building community connections and networking. After presenting at Cedarville, Dan was interviewed by the university to discuss the game’s development, Cedarville’s impact on his software engineering career, and our Best in Show award at Cleveland Gaming Classic.
Podcast Interview
Kennedy and Dan also appeared on the Sandbox.Space Weekly Podcast, where they discussed programming, story development, and many of the design philosophies behind the game. Special thanks to VolpeCreates and TheGDEX team for having us on the show.
Tutorial Improvements for Future Conventions
With convention season approaching, we wanted to improve the onboarding experience for new players visiting the booth. The updated tutorial sequence is now designed to guide players naturally without requiring direct assistance from Dan or Kennedy. After completing the introduction, convention players will also see a new prompt to help them freely explore the world. (Note: We are in the process of updating Asteric’s portrait).
Other Notable Updates
Reflections Update
We also completed several additional technical and gameplay improvements over the past few months. Reflections and redraw systems were updated so layered characters (like Asteric and generic NPCs) correctly display clothing, Violets, and other attached layers in reflections and frozen states.
Rocks breaking on Water
Anthony also discovered a bug where thrown rocks could incorrectly break when landing on water as though they had hit the ground. This required significant adjustments to our throwing system, but the issue has now been fixed.
Loader / Garbage Optimizations
Loader and garbage collection optimizations continue to improve as well. We added a delay before unloading sections after crossing boundaries, preventing excessive loading and unloading when players move back and forth rapidly. We also migrated more callback functions into our static system so they are only created once instead of repeatedly recreated.
Torch Realism
Torches received a realism update as well. Previously, rain would extinguish torches, but they would instantly relight themselves once the rain stopped. Torches now only relight after leaving and re-entering the area (as if something else relit them…)
This also allows us to do puzzles where, instead of lighting torches, we have to do the inverse (like putting out the fire with a water rod). This was impossible as, until this update, torches would relight themselves after being put out.
Jump Calculation Fix
We also fixed inaccuracies in cliff jump calculations. Previously, some jumps relied on approximated values that could occasionally behave incorrectly. These calculations are now exact.
Infinite Skeletons
One particularly memorable bug involved infinite skeleton spawning. A friend playing the demo discovered that pausing the game during the exact frame skeletons attempted to spawn caused them to generate continuously every frame while paused (which actually scared her!). While admittedly terrifying, the issue has now been fixed, though it may have accidentally inspired some future ideas…
Enemy Mechanics
Finally, we added a new EnemyStareDir attribute for enemy behavior. Previously, enemies that needed to stand guard or face specific directions required custom code. Now this behavior can simply be assigned and has reduced a lot of heavy lifting.
Conclusion
We did so much this season, and we are excited to finally start sharing more of it publicly. As mentioned earlier, our new Steam capsule art, logo, and promotional materials are finished, but we held off releasing them because Dan also wanted to create a new trailer showcasing all the progress made over the past year. The good news is that everything is now complete, and we plan to release our new capsules next week! We will make a new post for it so stay tuned.
We have also been asked several times whether there is a way to support the project financially outside of Kickstarter. Because of that, we decided to launch a Ko-fi page as our support platform. There is absolutely no obligation, but for those curious, it does currently contain a sneak peek at our updated branding and logo work.
Thank you again for following the project and reading through this update!