Strange Seed News

Our demo will be going live on September 26. Here’s a link to the demo page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3224660/Strange_Seed_Demo/

We’ll be closing the playtest at the same time. In case you never got into the playtest — the demo is the same, but with more content and more bug fixes. I hope you’ll try it out, and give us any feedback!

[h3]Here is the list of major features added or changed since day 1 of the playtest:[/h3]

• New Cliffs area with two quests
  
• Expansions to the Forest area
  
• Many changes to controls and camera
  
• Keybinds and video settings in main menu
  
• Creature part upgrade minigame
  
• Total revamp of attack indicators
  
• Destructible barriers and pushable buttons
  
• Player invincibility frames to prevent insta-deaths
  
• Rebalanced body parts and all enemies
  
• Polish effects like screen shake, water splashes, running trail, environmental sounds, dialogue typewriter, etc
  
• A boss that was pushover easy, then Dark Souls NG+ hard… hopefully now he’s at a good level
  
• Bug fixes… so many bug fixes 🫠
  

To everyone who has provided feedback so far, THANK YOU! It makes a huge difference; we’re changing and improving things based on your notes every day.

In case you didn't spot our feedback button in-game, you can access it here. Steam forum threads are also very welcome!

Do you want exclusive, early access to the next big game? The upcoming hit of 2025?

Then look elsewhere! 😅

But if you want to try out an interesting, quirky RPG, look for the button directly above this post that says “Request Access”. Then click it!

[h3]What’s in the Playtest[/h3]

• 9 enemy types with 45 equippable parts
• 3 areas: the Caldera, the Ant Tree, and the Mushroom Forest
  
• 3 quests and 1 boss fight (or 2 if we can jam out the second)
  
• Various other features — try it and find out!
  

[h3]Playtest, or wait for a demo?[/h3]
Your feedback will be an immense help to our development:

• What was most or least fun
  
• Whether the difficulty level was low or high
  
• What ideas YOU envision for what your creature can do
  
• And of course bug reports
  

We’ve got a playtesting form linked in multiple locations through the game; it looks like this:



Obviously, when we move on from the Playtest to the demo, the latter will be a bit more polished and have more content. If you’d prefer to wait for that, just make sure you’ve clicked the Follow Button at the top of the page!



[h3]OK, so when will the Playtest be open?[/h3]
We’ll be letting in small groups of testers from July 15 to July 30. If you request access, you’ll get to play within that date range.

Thanks so much for following our development! We’re trying to make the best, most interesting creature evolution RPG possible and every bit of feedback or encouragement is priceless.

We’re well into the phase where the game starts to feel pretty cohesive. Here’s our new “forest hallway” environment that I haven’t yet added to the Steam screenshots:



Some of the tasks that went into making our new environments included:

• A fully featured lighting and shadow system
  
• New shaders for all vegetation and environment objects
  
• Completing the climbing system
  
• A bunch of new vegetation models made in Speedtree
  

The challenge is getting these environments to work well on lower-end computers.

I’m testing on my old Nvidia 1060 laptop and they’re stable at >30 FPS; I wonder if anyone with a lower end rig will be wanting to play? Luckily there is still some low-hanging fruit left for optimization.

[h3]The quest system[/h3]
The other major feature we’re working on polishing right now is a quest system. After some back and forth about how to code the quests, we settled on a pretty powerful system using a visual scripting system, via a 3rd party package.

We've successfully put together a quest that involves grabbing a hat for the Queen Ant. Maybe you'll get to wear the hat afterward...?

Finally, a grab bag of other things we’ve been working on:

• Set up permanently flying creatures (like bees)
  
• Implemented a wrapper scene and sub-scene switcher that should both ease our workflow and make the game more stable
  
• Investigated and fixed various weird results from unexpected part combos
  
• Added a “treasure chest” feature tied to completing enemy encounters
  

Is a demo ever coming? Well, the game is nearly ready for it! … but, we kept putting off final polish on the movement system. Early playtesting surfaced a few bugs in that area, so we’re spending time stomping those out before doing a fully public demo.

I think we’ll be ready in a couple months (probably after Steam Next Fest, because releasing a demo in that time frame without being in the Fest is a bad idea). That said, if you want in on pre-public playtesting, DM me or join the Discord.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading and following Strange Seed!

October was a very productive month for us! Strange Seed is beginning to feel very “playable”, even though there’s much work left to be done.

[h3]Combat lock-on[/h3]
Combat feels completely different with this change: locking-on to enemies. This includes an auto-rotate to attack and auto camera rotation while moving around.

[h3]New creatures: ant and bee[/h3]
😀

[h3]Controllers (of all types!) enabled[/h3]
Pretty much everything should work now! I’m a controller-first guy and being able to constantly test Strange Seed using a controller is a huge, positive change for me.

… actually, I haven’t tried playing with a joystick or rhythm game accessory yet, so I can’t claim “everything” 😅 Let’s just say, any typical game controller.

[h3]Controller: ranged attack hold to aim[/h3]
Once we had the controller in, we realized that ranged attacks need a special control scheme when there’s no mouse. With a mouse, you just click wherever you want to attack. With the controller, hold L1 and move the joystick to position the landing zone. (This makes me want to play Valkyria Chronicles again…)

[h3]Final word[/h3]
Originally I thought we’d have a rough demo out by now, but the plan was to have very incomplete combat mechanics. When it came down to it, combat felt so central to the game that we needed to work on polishing it before the demo.

So that’s what we’re doing right now — in November, we’ll be running some private playtests of combat in greybox levels, ensuring that our attack timing, movement scheme, encounter design and so forth is really solid.

Thanks for reading!

This month we added a material and color user interface. Every creature has its own skin, and now that skin can be applied to others and recolored. Here's a quick video:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

… I have a personal compulsion to make everything neon, but normal colors work just fine too.

This was pretty complex to set up because of all the small details: tying into our evolve system; making decisions for sub-parts and special cases; and accounting for a variety of shaders. All that said, the feature was completed within the allotted time (there are still future improvements to make, of course).

Other things we completed this month:

• New creatures: tortoise and snake
  
• Performance testing and work within scenes to improve FPS for low-end devices
  
• Some dance animations (just for fun… for now)
  
• Continued improvements on AI movement via the NavMesh
  
• Started on ambient enviro sounds, bugfixes for existing creature sounds
  

Headed into October, we’re working on controller implementation, combat polish, and some new environments. By the end of the month, we'll also revamp our Steam store page with a bunch of new assets -- exciting!

Thanks for reading!