The Slormancer News

Hello everyone! Sorry for the delay between devlogs, we're getting close to the Early Access stage of the game so we are (a bit too much) focused on getting things done and we sometimes forget about people that actually care about the development of the game.

Lately we've been focusing on improving the overall experience of the game, we've added a bunch of Quality of Life features, things that were not needed but that were fun to do for us and that felt like a nice addition. Here are a couple of examples:

Featured Quality of Life #1: Pixel Font
You now have the option to switch between a standard and a Pixel font in-game.

We know some people really prefer pixel fonts in Pixel Art games (it's also my personal preference in our game) but we also have a text-heavy game with lots of skills descriptions and tooltips so we had to have a smooth and readable font (in which Pixel fonts do not shine).

Here is the Profile Menu (a brand new menu by the way) with and without a Pixel Font.






Featured Quality of Life / #2: Highlighting stats
So we wanted to slightly improve the overall experience of a player that is looking for a specific stat / set of stats on items. So we've added a small option: in your inventory, you can now click on the stat(s) you wish to highlight and they will appear in a different color on your items, making it easier to find items that might be of interest for your current build.


On this Screen, the "Evasion" stat is highlited.
This is a small addition but it is super useful actually.



Some elements in the game needed a bit of an upgrade and felt slightly below the rest.
For example, we updated the Level Up screen/message. The old message was really basic and clearly underwhelming compared to what Leveling up is supposed to feel.

The new Level Up screen:



The Old Level Up:




We've had to make/update a bunch of menus to go with some of are features. Here are a couple of examples:

Score Screen: This is the screen you get when you complete an Expedition (it's just a screenshot (duh!), the result ingame is full of fancy animations).




Area Overview: In The Slormancer, you gain "Influence" in every Environment you visit. And Influence lets you unlock Perks in these Areas: this is the Area Overview of The Graveyard.




Main Menu: And here is the Main Menu of The Slormancer. Everything is animated ingame but this gives an idea of the actual look. :D





One very important note (for us at least), a demo of The Slormancer will be playable during between June 9 and June 14 during the Steam Games Festival. We are incredibly excited to get feedback on the game. So please make sure to give it a try and share your comments on our Discord channel.

That's it for now! We'll be back sooner next time!

Hello Everyone!
We're finally done with environments (at least for the Early Access release). The last area: "The Wizards Academy" is ready.

We're pretty happy with how this one turned out! Check it out:

The Wizards Academy








Environments are ready
So we have a total of 5 playable, unique and procedurally generated environments. The Wizards Academy, The Prison, The Graveyard, The Gardens and The Royal Wing.

The Graveyard

The Gardens

The Prison

The Royal Wing

The Wizards Academy

What's next?
Now, the next step is to finalize player's progression throughout the story and these environments and create a nice transition to The Slormancer's late game.

We're super excited!
That's it for now!

Hello everyone!

We're still working on additional procedural environments right now and for the upcoming couple of weeks. We've completed "The Prison" area last week and we took the time to slightly rework "The Royal Wing".

The Royal Wing was the very first area that we created, around 2 years ago, and was our first try with procedural generation. So we had a few things to upgrade.

The Prison










The Royal Wing










If you want to check the other areas we've completed: The Graveyard and The Luxurious Gardens, you can read this post!

That's it for now! We should be back around mid-January with informations about the last area we want to have ready for Early Access.

Hi everyone!
We've been working on new environments for the past month! As you may not know, The Slormancer will feature various procedurally generated environments.

We aim to have 5 differents places for our Early Access release, and our goal is to create a different atmosphere and a specific "procedural behavior" for every environment, we don't want to just swap a tileset and be done with it.

We've finished The Graveyard area about two weeks ago and we just completed The Luxurious Gardens area today!

Here's how they look!


The Graveyard








The Gardens








We hope you'll like it!

It takes us two to three weeks to create a new environment so we should be done by the end of 2019.

Next, we'll be working on The Prison followed by The Mage Academy. And we'll probably have to spend a bit of time on reworking The Royal Wing (our first environment, shown in the trailer and in pretty much every screenshot we've made so far).

That's it for now!

Hello everyone!

From now on, we're going to try to keep you updated on what we are working on. This time, we are revealing a new layer of customization called the "Ancestral Legacy", which is a Skill Tree that is common to every class of the game.

In the Ancestral Legacy tree, you will find 51 Active Skills and Auras, 49 Element-Related Effects or Triggers and 50 General Passives for a total of 150 nodes, and room for more.

The Ancestral Legacy Tree:



The Ancestral Legacy tree is heavily oriented toward Elemental Magic and new mechanics that can be added to your class' Skills such as setting your weapon on Fire to deal Burn Damage or triggering Thunderbolts when dealing Critical Damage .

It is divided in 5 big chunks: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Shadow and Light. General passives and actives can be found everywhere on the tree.

Each Element has its own set of mechanics and has unique visual effects.
Here are a few old tweets that are still relevant:

Fire Example - Setting everything on Fire!

Ice Example - Creating an Ice Storm

Lightning Example - Becoming a Sith

Shadow Example - Becoming the Avatar of Shadow

Light Example - The Judge of Light

If you're not a huge fan of fancy and colorful Elemental stuff, there are also lots of neutral passives and actives that you can build with or around.


The In-game Menu:



There are two main things that the player can do on this menu:
1/ The player can activate an area (the circles above, containing up to three skills) by socketing an Ancestral Stone to it. The area has to be connected to a previously activated area.
2/ The player can invest Slorm in skills inside an activated area to unlock their effects and upgrade them.

Socketing an Ancestral Stone is free and can be done at any time on the fly. You can also unsocket Ancestral Stones. When you do so, you lose the effects of the skills/passives inside, and the ability to upgrade them, until you decide to socket your Stone back again.

In The Slormancer, Slorm is infinite: as long as you slay enemies, you will gain Slorm.
This means that you can actually upgrade every skill of the Skill Tree without restriction if you want to. What creates your actual build are the areas you decide to activate with your Ancestral Stones, because their number is limited.

This lets the player discover and invest into new skills without having to worry about making mistakes or having to refund/reset his build later on. You can also collect every skill of the Skill Tree if you want to.


Bonus:
This is how the Ancestral Legacy used to look like before. It was much smaller in terms of depth and customization, that's why we decided to change it. It wasn't perfect but was still super fun to use.



That's it for now!
Feel free to ask any questions!