Hi there!
Just wanted to share a quick update on some of things that we’ve been working on for the last few months.
First of all is the new keyart for the game which you can see below. Jeanna at Null Games did an amazing job at really capturing the feel of the game and getting the tentacles to look as gross as possible! The work that goes into an creating something like this is huge, and it takes a massive amount of patience to get every detail correct and also ensure that the image can be cut up to work for various different aspect ratios. I’m super happy how it turned out!
[h2]TAKING MORE THAN ONE HIT[/h2]
After playing the Steam Next Fest demo, people gave some amazingly positive feedback but there were also a few complaints of how unforgiving the demo was. Dying in a single hit can create a lot of tension in a game, and tension is super important for the horror genre. For this reason, I always wanted the game to be hard, but when you failed I wanted you to feel it was your fault. I didn’t want you to be shouting at the game for being unfair and throwing the controller at the screen in a fit of rage :)
But no matter how well you telegram that a creature is about to attack you, players can still make small mistakes. And when death happens out of nowhere after you’re already deep into a run, it can be pretty frustrating. We’ve been spending a lot of time addressing this over the last few months by adding a health system to the game.
[h2]A HEALTHY CHANGE[/h2]
Adding health to the player is actually quite a huge change. Previously, a lot of creatures would just move toward the player, touch them and instantly kill them, ending the game right away. Now they don’t instantly kill, and the game continues, and so they need to do something interesting instead when they reach the player!
For the growing tentacles, I decided to have them send mini tendrils to the player to latch onto them and drag them towards the main tentacles. Not only does this feel absolutely terrifying, it also slows down the player momentarily to allow other creatures to take advantage of them being trapped, making it feel like the enemies are working together.
A big benefit of scrapping one-hit-death is that we can now allow hazards like acid or fire to damage the player also. Previously I didn’t want those things to cause damage to the player because accidentally throwing an exploding barrel at a doorframe in front of you and instantly dying would not have been fun! Now you have to be careful and really think about where you throw that vial of acid, but if you do accidentally walk into it, it won’t be game over.
Another advantage of having player health is that it can feed into the progression system. To gain health you have to find lab personnel that can heal you. But it isn’t as simple as just finding them - you also want to make sure you pay attention to any creatures trying to eat them. If the person is killed, they won’t be able to heal you!
The health system has also fitted into the map navigation gameplay in an interesting way. Now the player has 3 distinct choices when trying to navigate to the exit - aim for a better weapon, aim for a piece of equipment or try to get a health upgrade. With only one of those available per floor, it’s a very precious upgrade and something that requires careful consideration.
On reaching the room with the health upgrade, the player can permanently increase their maximum health, which is a benefit that will last the entire run.
[h2]PAX WEST[/h2]
The health changes were put in just in time for the demo shown at PAX West, and those players that had already played before gave a huge thumbs up! Also Demon Spore even got selected by Kotaku as one of the best games of the show, which is an amazing result! You can
see the article here.
There’s been a lot of other great updates but I’m running out of space and really should get back to work! Until the next time.
