Good evening my fellow Kindred,

We welcome you all with this 1st dev-diary in the next year! The project has been around for a while longer but it passed in the blink of an eye. Today's diary will be - because of that - a summary of our progress during this year. We are still kicking and we’ll not stop!

The first release was prepared for Vampire Game Jam in 2022. We shared further plans for the project - enormous in scale, but before that, we wanted to provide you with cut content intended for the Game Jam release. Throughout the last year, we worked with what we already had adding missing (and intended pieces). And we are closer than farther from providing you with the release containing missing parts from the first one.

Firstly we changed the render pipeline from URP to HDRP. High Definition Render Pipeline allows us to reach a greater graphical fidelity. It required setting up the project again and adjusting existing assets to work with the new pipeline. What it exactly means is that we have more visual candies at our disposal that are unavailable in the URP.

What is most important is that the part containing the combat system is up and pretty much ready. This was the most difficult and at the same time crucial to implement it as it was intended for the first version. It also required UI, VFX, and SFX to look and feel like a game. It took us the most time from end to finish since it is linked with other systems that the player will not see from his side. Like creature management, navigation, animation, UI actions, AI for enemies… the list goes on and on. As you see it’s not as easy as it sounds since such systems are complicated and need preparation first to work fully.

We also did a lot in the graphics department. Aside from additional assets that were needed to populate our scenes we added additional UIs, created new shaders, and expanded existing scenes to make them look better than in the original release.

Our composer - Edifice of Echoes - created additional tracks to fill our world with musical flash that builds up the atmosphere. Especially in the case of combat engagements.

Also, we did a lot of work in case the script. We expanded and corrected it filling in all the blanks or parts that needed adjustments and other fixes. You still can eat that eye though if you want.

When do we plan the cut-content release? We wouldn’t like to give empty promises, but we’re closing in on the testing phase so it’ll be sooner than later and our followers will be first to know that (after the dev team of course). 

As a team, we thank you for your support and patience. And as we start a new year we hope that the only thing we’ll gain will be more and more momentum so we may even go further and make a new step on the development road. Our plans reach much further than cut-content release and we are set on reaching those goals. See you next month!