Blind Descent News

Hello, everyone!

As we ramp up our efforts in development, we're excited to share more updates from the game development itself!

Following last year's private demo, we received valuable feedback from you all. This feedback helped us prioritize what matters most to players, so instead of rushing out new features, we've spent the past month refining existing ones that caused some challenges. We believe these refinements will significantly improve the gameplay experience.


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Melee combat is at the heart of Blind Descent and we're committed to getting it just right. We've started by upgrading the swing animations, sound effects, and camera moves to make each swing feel more natural.

But there's more to melee combat than smooth animations. Having smart, challenging enemies is key to keeping the fights interesting. We're early in our rework efforts for better combat, but rest assured, it's on our list and we're excited to bring you updates in this area soon.


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Another important improvement has been done on Campfires. Setting up a campfire is crucial in Blind Descent, not just for cooking but for surviving the night and the dangers that lurk in the dark. Based on playtest feedback, we realized our campfire system was a bit awkward. We heard your feedback and completely revamped it for a smoother experience. While we're still polishing things up and the current UI is just a placeholder, our changes mean you'll spend less time fighting the interface and more time enjoying the game.

We're also improving other aspects like camera bobbing, climbing mechanics, and more. Plus, we're working on a big update for our inventory system, but it's not quite ready for the spotlight. Keep an eye out for more news on these updates!

As always, your feedback is incredibly valuable to us. We appreciate you being part of the Blind Descent community!

—Pokuch Team.

Hello, everyone!

We hope you're all having a great start to 2024! We're excited to share monthly updates with you again.

It's been quite some time since our last Monthly Update—precisely 10 months. Since then, we've completed our demo, conducted a private playtest with our Discord community, received invaluable feedback, and began preparing for pitching and documenting our game. Over the past two months, we've shifted our focus back to development. As we entered the new year, we thought this might be a good opportunity to start sharing news from the game as well. In this monthly update, we would like to talk about the Game Design Document.

[h3]Documenting Blind Descent[/h3]

One of the most important things in game development is having a Game Design Document (GDD) that defines basically everything. While we had one when we first started, it was lacking some important aspects. During this period, we put significant time into improving our design document, which led to a better defined scope, and a more precise timeline. It also helped us realize certain things wouldn't work best, so we changed these things in the game and in our plans.

Previously, we've been using traditional methods for our documenting process: a single Google Document that contains everything. Imagine something like a huge Word document with many sections. We transitioned from that to something more like a Wiki. We used Notion for this, which ended up being a really good knowledge base for both the team and others who needed to get onboarded. The new approach also saved us a lot of time in communicating things, as it had many powerful tools that our team could utilize.

When we were working on the documentation, we defined many things, such as every single item, story, quests, characters, creatures, dungeons, points of interest, and many more. We also created new concept arts for the art team, so they could have a better idea of what needs to be created.

[h3]Concept Art[/h3]

Creating concept art for our creatures was a significant part of this effort. As creatures are important for both storytelling and gameplay, we needed to have all the details about their backgrounds, why they were inhabiting here, why they looked the way they do, and so on. We used these details to finalize our design, and we will use the visuals to help our 3D artists and animators finalize these creatures. As a player, you will initially see these creatures in the world, but you will also have an opportunity to answer the questions that we just asked. Having all this work in harmony requires these efforts, and we truly hope to provide the best experience in the end.

We are excited about the future of Blind Descent. In our next monthly update, we will share more details about the gameplay.

What are your thoughts on this update? Would you like to learn more about the hidden aspects of game development, or are you more interested in the gameplay itself? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Thank you for being part of our community.

—Pokuch Team.

Hello, everyone!

It's been two months since our last update, as we've been hard at work on the demo and didn't have much to share during that period. We recently concluded a private demo event for our active Discord community members, which wrapped up just yesterday. We received some really good reactions from the participants, and their invaluable feedback will be instrumental in enhancing Blind Descent even further. We truly appreciate and value our community's input.

Having completed the demo, we've reached a significant milestone. It's been a long journey, but now we're prepared to move on to the next phase: pitching our game to publishers. Over the coming months, this will be our primary focus. As a result, we may not be able to provide monthly updates every month, since we won't be working on the base game for some time. However, we'll make sure to keep you informed whenever there's important news to share.

Thanks for your support, and have an amazing day!

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/GeQ926zEyn
Twitter: @theblinddescent
Website: https://blinddescent.net/

Hey, everyone!

This month, we were extremely busy with trying to complete the demo. We were aiming for late December or early January, but unfortunately the amount of required work exceed our expectations. We are truly sorry that we have to postpone the closed demo event to February. This will give us enough time to complete the missing parts and fix the game-breaking bugs. Due to complex nature of gameplay systems and so many unintegrated assets we've created in the past two years, it caused tremendous amount of workload that we couldn't foresee. Everything is getting together pretty well so far and it's great to see that we are getting the gameplay feeling that we aimed for, but the game is not ready for a true gameplay experience for now and requires additional time. A demo test at this point wouldn't go so far, so we decided to postpone it. It's more like a construction site that requires cleanup and this is what we will do in the meantime.

To enlighten these difficult and complex gameplay mechanics, we would like to show one of them for the first time: Inventory Management.

In Blind Descent, we wanted to provide an immersive adventure experience. This is why we went with a 3D inventory system, where you can see everything you have in a 3D dimensional space. You will be able to put your things on the shelves or wardrobes, and this will populate your house and give you a better sense of home and where you belong to. But creating a 3D inventory system is hard. We have to put some extra work on user experience and item creation. Interactions between objects, how we store them, how we pick them up and many more become way more complex than traditional UI-based inventories, but we believe they are worth the effort. We look forward to giving you a taste of it during our closed demo event and hearing your feedback about your experience as well!

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Carrying items on your hand is another way to interact with objects. Some items may be too large to be stored in a backpack. In such cases, you can carry them by hand or place them on a cart. This means the preparation of extra animations and integrations. But when all this comes together, it's a truly satisfying and consistent gameplay experience that we have aimed for.

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The environment, the creatures, plants, resources, consumables, drinks and so on. There are so many layers of things that affect each other. But this is what creates an immersive survival game experience. It's really hard to build an ambitious project like this, but we are getting there and we are excited to see what you think about the gameplay once you participate our closed demo event. It will be a huge milestone for us and it will change the way we have worked so far. We are truly sorry for the delay, but we are working hard and we hope to bring a good demo experience that you will hopefully enjoy.

Thank you so much for your patience, and merry Christmas!

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/GeQ926zEyn
Twitter: @theblinddescent
Website: https://blinddescent.net/

Hey, everyone!

In the previous monthly update, we mentioned about our demo plans. This is exactly what we've been working on this month, and we've done a lot of bugfixes, quality of life improvements and so on. We were also trying to get the new environment assets to work with the weather conditions, such as making leaves wet when it's rainy, or applying wind effects when there is a thunderstorm.

Everything is going well, but for now there is not so much new content that we can share here like we did before. We are mostly working on improving things and creating the gameplay rather than adding new mechanics, so that keeps the list short. This month will be crucial for us to see where we are, and hopefully we will reveal more details in the next monthly update about the upcoming demo.

Here's last month's progress and next month's plans:

✏️ COMPLETED PAST MONTH

- Environment assets are now working well with weather conditions
- Quality of life improvements in many areas
- Major bugfixes
- More work on the level design
- Gameplay experience integration

📌 PLANS FOR NEXT MONTH

- More work on the gameplay experience
- More work on level design
- More bugfixes

If you are interested in participating in the demo, please join our Discord channel to see more details about it. It will be a closed demo where we only invite active Discord members.

Thank you for being here, and have a great day!

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/GeQ926zEyn
Twitter: @theblinddescent
Website: https://blinddescent.net/