HexWind News

Hey VR die-hards. Update 18 is live with scoreboards now implemented and we want you to come test your skills against our team! Let’s dive in.

[h2]Scoreboards[/h2]
We’ve been working on adding scoreboards to HexWind for a while and they’re finally here. In this update, you’ll see a global scoreboard for points tallied across a campaign. Right now you’ll see the list of top scorers, and you can see your total score. We still need to add the ability for you to see your rank on the global leaderboard, and that’s coming soon. We’ll also be adding other leaderboard statistics soon (speedrun times, for example). This feature is very much still in progress, so be warned we will have to reset leaderboard stats multiple times between now and when HexWind is ready to leave Early Access. Enjoy the competition in the meantime!

[h2]Beat the Devs Contest![/h2]
Now that we’ve got scores to tally, we want you to come test your skills against our team here at Charm. Between now and 10am Pacific Time on March 18, anyone who posts a score higher than our highest scoring person on the dev team will get a permanent in-game place of honor, with your Steam username listed on our upcoming Champion’s Wall in the Mausoleum. You can also come to our Discord server to get a free HexWind key to share with a friend. Folks on our team will have “Charm Games” at the end of their username. Our Audio Director Cory looks to be getting the early lead on this. That guy already has way too many awards and accolades to his name, so somebody please come in and knock him off the top!

[h2]Other Updates[/h2]
We also added a new board layout in this update which you’ll see in Act 2. Plus there are new music tracks (that’s Cory again), a new axe-throwing enemy variant, and some quality-of-life bugfixes to spell behaviour and other stuff listed in more detail in our build notes.

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

Hey VR die-hards. Update 17 is live with even more changes as part of our current work deepening mission variety and the overall game flow. Let's go!

[h2]Campaign Progression[/h2]
The big update to missions and the game board this week introduces a campaign structure where you will experience multiple maps with tons of mission variety in a single gameplay run. This week, that includes two maps with randomly generated missions. We're building up to a 5-Act structured campaign, where maps will ramp up in difficulty and variety along the way. Right now, the visual feedback for progressing through the campaign is fairly straightforward, but we're improving that for Update 18 along with other work.

[h2]More Enemy Variants![/h2]
We have almost the entire family of elemental enemy variants now, as of this week's update. Again we're building up to having a ton of dynamic variation between enemies both in terms of which elemental family they're associated with and which weapons and behavior they use. Check out the new Earth Knight in the Earth Rift:


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Update 18 will include big changes to the game board layout and still more refinement of mission variety and the map generation system. Plus live leaderboards!

We love hearing strong feelings so come on over to our Discord server at discord.gg/charmgames to let us know what you think!

Hey VR die-hards. Update 15 is a quick one continuing our current phase of improving missions and map runs with changes to mission variety and map generation. Let’s dive in.

[h2]Procedural Map Generation[/h2]
We’ve included the first updates working toward procedurally generated maps on the game board. This will be a big focus for the next few updates, gradually building up the variety of mission types and map layouts, with a focus on making your choice of path through the map more interesting and important.

Mission and map variety will be our focus for at least the next 2-3 updates. Here’s a preview of Update 16:

[h2]In-Mission Combat Variety[/h2]
We’re continuing work changing how we spawn enemies in missions, to have better control over pacing and difficulty. We found that a lot of our older mission types end up either way too easy, or way too hard, and we hadn’t built the tools to tune that in a straightforward way. It’s taking a while, but we’re feeling pretty good about the results in the new mission types. Old mission types will still be spread across the map, but we’ll be sunsetting or revamping those in favor of missions built with our current approach.


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

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

Hi folks. Update 10 this week continues our work to improve spellcasting in HexWind. Let’s get into it!

[h2]New “Spell” Slot[/h2]

Until this update, lightning has been the only spell available in HexWind. We’ve always wanted to add more spells, but HexWind isn’t supposed to be about managing a big spellbook in a mission during intense combat. So before we jumped in to creating a bunch of new spells, we took some time to think about how spells and choosing spells should work in single missions and across multiple missions.
As we build out the mission system down the road, we want the choice of which spell you pick to matter. As we alluded to last week, we’re building up a light but meaningful slot and loadout system that, if we’ve done it well, should have you asking questions like “Do I want to be a fire wizard or a lightning wizard today?” and filling your slots accordingly before jumping into a long session of either setting bad guys on fire or electrocuting them.

For now, we settled on adding a single slot for a single spell which can be cast using the spellcasting action added in Update 9. This will always be for the hand/controller that isn’t holding your wand, and we’re going to call it your Spell Hand. The idea of spells cast from your Spell Hand is they should be more powerful, and used less often, than wand slashes. The two most basic examples are casting a “clear the screen” spell if you’re overwhelmed by lots of basic enemies, or casting a single more powerful attack when you’re up against a boss with lots of health.

Down the road, we want that choice between spells to matter by having you commit to a loadout used across multiple missions, but there’s a lot more mission design work to do before that makes sense, so for now you’ll be able to switch spells between individual missions.

[h2]New Spells[/h2]

Obviously choosing between spells isn’t helpful if you only have one spell to use, so in this update we added three brand new spells, Lightning Storm, Fireball, and Fire Burst. We also reworked the existing lightning telekinesis spell into Lightning Grasp. You can check out the details of these spells in the new Loadout area in the Mausoleum.


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We love hearing strong feelings about new work after updates, so come on over to our Discord server to let us know what you think!

The Charm Games Team