The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker News

Greetings once again, medieval adventurers!

The day we’re releasing the next open playtest for The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker is here! The playtest is now live and you can join it by clicking “Request Access” for the Cursebreaker playtest on our Steam Store page. You’ll automatically be granted access to try out the current version of our game, which we think showcases a solid foundation for an adventure RPG that will only mature to be more intricate and intriguing in terms of its gameplay and storytelling. You’re also most welcome to join our Discord if you haven’t already, we’re happy to answer questions while you play as we’re able, click the banner on the bottom of the page for an invitation link.

Please also let us know on Discord for example, if you’re planning to stream or make videos of your gameplay; we’ll be happy to give a shoutout to your content on our social media and we’re also curious to see how you approach the game.

If you tested our game before, much of the content will be same. The focus has been on shifting to a consistent art style that also makes our development easier from a technical perspective. What you will notice, however, is that the playable area has become several times larger in the process. There’s more to explore and more variety of enemies to fight and – of course – to loot. We tried to also include more of a sense of progression this time around, which we felt was a little lacking in the previous open playtest.

If you encounter any bugs, please report them via ingame menu, aptly named “Report a Bug”.

These red magic barriers set the limit for explorable area in the world for this playtest, so you shouldn’t expect to move past them.


We’ll keep the playtest open for a month until closing it on 9th of May. We might even patch in some updates and improvements in the following weeks while it’s live, no promises though! But we’ll write and let you know if we do so. So go ahead, click Request Access, hop on in and we hope you enjoy the journey!



Pura
Writer and Developer

Greetings fellow medieval adventurers!

March has gone by quicker than we expected and we’re still fixing bugs and making adjustments, but…! We’re making progress and I have news; we’ll release the next open playtest on April 8th! There’ll be a lot more land to explore, lots more enemies to slay and more exciting stuff to loot than before, so we think this new playtest should offer more hours of enjoyable playtime.

There’s more story content too, though the main story cuts off the same place as before, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself. What I will say is that we’ve put in work to deliver story more in a cinematic form so you wouldn’t feel stuck in dialogue window all the time.

We’ve also added skill trainers, which you’ll need to interact with in order to progress your skill levels past certain points. They sort of act as a way to pace level progression in the game, so you won’t be able to level your combat skills by killing zombies indefinitely in the first graveyard you encounter for example. Sorry to those few of you who’d love nothing more than to do just that.



We’re also thinking of using the trainers as a way of unlocking other traits beyond what you’re able to pick in the character creation screen later down the line, or as a way of unlocking new spells and abilities, but that’s a possibility for the future.

That’s all I have for now, but I’ll be writing again on April 8th letting you know how to join the playtest. I also hope to see you on our Discord then!





Pura

Hello, gamer-folk! We’ve been a little quiet recently, sorry about that, but we’ve been working hard to get the game into a state that’s ready for the next open playtest. When is that coming out again? We know we keep saying soon, but it’s coming out soon – definitely in March. We’ll just need a bit more time for testing and um… making all the broken things a little less broken.



[h2]Scope of the playtest – what to expect?
[/h2]
If you participated in our previous playtest, all the same content will mostly be included again but in completely new environments. Additionally there’ll be some new content including a prologue quest-chain / area. We’ll be giving you quite a large area to explore compared to before, though it will probably appear a little content-light relative to its size, we’ll work on that. There’ll be some more of the main questline to play in the form of a prologue, so it should be more apparent this time around that there will be an actual story in the game to progress.




From our perspective the simplified graphics have felt like a good solution, performance should be greatly improved and by streamlining our graphics workflow we are able to focus much more on the quality of gameplay as we move forward. The environment and graphics rework has been our main focus this round, so there’ll be less polish on game features / mechanics than we’d like. But there’ll be something new in that regard as well and I’ll go more into that in a later post. Cheerio for now!


Pura

Greetings again, fellow gamer-folk! I’m Pura and I come bearing news of our progress with The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker.



First of all, thanks to all you who participated in our first playtest and provided us with feedback and bug reports – it is much appreciated. We’ve left the playtest open of course in case anyone still wants to jump in and see what the game is about.

Onto the issue at hand; last time I posted, I mentioned that we had a pretty fundamental problem with the graphical assets we used to make that first version of the game and their impact on performance and framerates. We were facing down a nightmarish amount of development time spent simply on optimising the assets. Moreover, we had some inconsistencies with the artstyle and quality between how some things looked and this would have become even more apparent later on.

So we decided it was best to completely rethink the looks of the game at this stage, to somewhat downgrade the graphics, in order to have a more solid foundation especially with long-term development in mind. Unfortunately for us that also meant we had to start a lot of things from scratch, including all the environments. But with that out of the way, let me reveal the new graphics style we’ve settled on – tadaa!



Sooo... if you played before and now feel terribly disappointed, you have my sincerest apologies. The new look is definitely more cartoony, less detailed and less… gritty? However, we’ll have a much more consistent artstyle now and it’s already making the game “feel” a lot better. Thanks to vastly improved performance, we’ve also been able to almost double the draw distance and implement less restrictive camera angles than before. No more nerve-wracking LOD-flickering and things appearing and disappearing in plain sight.

Since we had to start reworking the environments, we took the opportunity to remedy how we previously built everything pretty crammed in and close together. This time we’ve added plenty of space between points of interest and reserved room to lay down forests large enough to actually get lost in. Coupled with the increased draw distance, the world looks and feels a lot larger now.



Working with more space has allowed us to also create smoother transitions between different looking areas, or biomes. The starting crypt you might be familiar with from the playtest is now situated within a forest and, as you start moving toward the city of Haywind, the trees clear away into open meadows which slowly turn to crop fields as you’re nearing the city. Haywind itself has increased in size quite a bit (though still very much under construction) and we’ve added smaller villages along the way to the outskirts.



We also enjoy making caves. Caves make for good adventures.




Then on top of that, we’ve been in need of new models for armor and outfits, weapons and that sort of things. Here are some examples of those.





The simpler artstyle helps us create new ones at a much more efficient rate too so we’ll be able to have more variety and special looking items in game. But that’s about it for now. We’re working toward delivering the second open playtest of the game. In the meantime, we’ll try our best to keep you updated on our progress through these dev diary posts. Until next time, therefore – cheerio!

Pura

[h2]Welcome![/h2]



I’m Pura, the writer and a developer for our newly formed, Helsinki-based studio Olipa Games and I’m excited to introduce you to our upcoming game, The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker. It’s an indie adventure RPG taking a lot of inspiration from the slow-paced, strategic adventure RPGs of few decades past. I won’t overtly go into its features in this post though – we’ve already tried our best on our website and store page with that – but instead I’d like to announce that we’re releasing a completely open test / demo version of the game on Steam.

[h3]Playtest is now live![/h3]

So if the materials we’ve put out so far have piqued your interest in any way at all, please feel free to play the demo-version right now. You can do so simply on our Steam-store page by clicking “Request access” for the Cursebreaker playtest. We feel it’s the best way to get an idea for what our game is all about. You can also join our discord channel for any feedback you’d like to give us directly – the links can be found on our web-pages as well as within the game itself.

[h3]Feedback from early testers[/h3]

Something we’ve noticed regarding the framerates in the game at the moment, we know they aren’t great and it’s something we’ve already received feedback on. We were initially working on a more top-down camera angle but later wanted to allow for a wider field of vision. That brought with itself the performance issues the game’s currently struggling with and despite our best efforts to optimise, we sadly haven’t been able to bring the performance up to a good level with the assets we’ve been using.

[h3]Ideas for the future[/h3]

We’ve been testing ideas for how to fix this and it’s currently looking like the game will have to undergo some radical changes in terms of its looks and visual style. We’re obviously pretty bummed about this, as we’re really quite fond of the environment we’ve created thus far that you’re able to now play on the demo, but there it is.

We’re still experimenting with a different art-style and we’ll share our progress and screenshots in a future dev-post. At the same time we’re looking at fleshing out content and the skills-system by adding in meaningful unlocks as you progress. But for now, if you made it this far, we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the open test-version of our game for what it is and let us know what you think on our discord channel!