HexWind Update 14

Hey VR die-hards. Update 14 this week is our biggest in a while, bringing the first in a series of updates revamping missions and mission progression. This is the first time in a while we’ve gone more than a week between significant gameplay updates - Update 13 last week was really a hotfix and quality of life pass - and I think that extra work has paid off in the new starting mission you’ll see on the map in the Mausoleum. Let’s dive in.


[h2]New Mission Chain[/h2]
This update has included a ton of under-the-hood work to allow us to create more and more varied mission types. We added a new mission chain starting from the Chaos Rift, showing off some of our new level design concepts. We had three big goals with this new design:

[h3]Communicating in-mission goals[/h3] We’ve used glowing arrows fairly often to show mission objectives in previous mission types, which is functional if not the most enchanting approach. On this pass we’re leaning into our team’s extensive environment art experience - our game director Derek started out as an environment artist many moons ago and has been working with Will, whose past achievement with rocks have been truly groundbreaking (I’m so sorry). The result is definitely a step up from the current flat arena levels, with more natural pathfinding in-mission.

Original concept art for what would become the Chaos Rift mission



In-game screenshot from the new Chaos Rift mission

[h3]Element themed levels[/h3] You’ll see the first pass of visually distinct levels in this update, with the Fire Rift and Ice Rift showing a marked contrast. This is setting us up to deepen the impact of the elemental ability system by making your map path choices more important.

[h3]Combat pacing[/h3] Behind the scenes, we made a bunch of changes to how and when we control enemies spawning during missions. This will make it easier to create new mission types and better tune combat intensity and difficulty.

Try these out and let us know what you think!

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We'll be back to a weekly schedule with Update 15, which will bring more big changes to missions.

NOTE - Save game data changed for this build, so you will lose progress from previous early access builds. This shouldn’t be a big loss though, since most content is still ungated in a new game start.

We love hearing strong feelings so come on over to our Discord server to let us know what you think!

The Charm Games Team