HexWind News

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

Happy New Year everybody! We have big plans for HexWind in 2025 which we're going to share in a roadmap update after our team ramps back up from the holidays. In the meantime, HexWind Update 8 this week brings major improvements to wand combat, with a focus on melee and HexTime, the time dilation mechanic for when you're up close and personal with lots of enemies.

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[h3]Wand Sword Parrying[/h3]

In HexWind, your wand has always had a "sword mode", useful for parrying melee attacks from up-close enemies and to deflect projectiles. But the sword's auto-retraction could have hilariously bad timing. Think of reaching up to parry an incoming sword swing and seeing your blade auto-retract at the perfect moment to allow an enemy attack right to your face. Well we fixed that! Your wand will now always be in sword mode while you have threats in close range, so parrying should be much more reliable and predictable. (Note - being in sword mode does not stop your wand from slashing to fire projectiles) This change will also feed directly into a family of new combo mechanics we're working on for both melee and ranged combat. More on that soon!

[h3]HexTime Threat Indicator[/h3]

HexTime is always active while you have threats in close range, the goal being to give you ways of slowing down the chaos of melee combat. Our first version of the visual feedback for HexTime was really hard to see and understand with tons of enemies and projectiles around. We redid the visual design for this entirely, and added some new information to show you how many threats are nearby at any particular time. The goal here is to give better situational awareness in close combat without overloading the screen, but that's a fine balance to manage so please let us know how you think these changes are working!

[h3]The Mausoleum[/h3]

We've trickled out a bunch of changes to the Mausoleum over recent updates, as we build it up into your Mission HQ for the fight against Chaos. Be sure to poke around there to see what's new, and keep your eyes open for even more new improvements for mission planning and overall quality of life.

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As always, your feedback gives us life! So let us know what you're thinking here on the HexWind Community page, or come on over and say hi in our growing Discord community.

The Charm Games Team

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[h2]Hey new folks! Want to try HexWind?[/h2] We do our best to keep the free HexWind demo up to date with all major changes to the full game, so if you like what you see here but aren't sure if you're ready to buy yet, head to the HexWind Store Page and grab that demo!