#49 – CAVES OF RUND

Many thanks to those of you who warmly welcomed Nikita, our new team member, with their comments on the last week’s blog! It makes a huge difference when you feel connected to the community. When we create games, we focus on the assets first (code, visuals, texts) – but the ultimate goal is always the user experience.

For sure, we want to make the best art possible, and write the fastest and cleanest code that we can write. However, we judge our studio’s success or failure based on the emotions and experiences that our players get through our games. As such, the community is at the center of our work. Like a chef at a restaurant’s kitchen, we keep sneaking a peek into the dining hall to see if people are happy or sad, when they eat the food that we cook for them.

Today, let’s talk about one of the twenty biomes currently in the game: the Caves of Rund.




Caves are an underground biome that exists within another biome: they can be found in the hills.

“As we started to search for the required “look and feel” of the caves, we focused on presenting their size – which can be huge, as caves can contain multiple sub-locations.”

Caves are an explorable point of interest. Once your party of disciples discovers a cave on the map, they will need to explore it in order to locate possible sub-locations there (in this, Caves are similar to another biome – Ruins, which also require exploration in order to discover possible sub-locations that exist there).

Exploration of Caves happens faster (i.e. with more success) if the party that explores them, has someone with the skill of Geology.

“We ended up with this sketch, which in our opinion delivered all the right impressions. The next step was to find the right colors of this underground biome.”

One of the things of interest that can be found in Caves is chests. Earlier, we showed different versions of chests that exist in Rund. Because chests are very heavy, in most cases your party will have to deal with opening (and disarming) them right on the spot, as the spell of levitation requires pretty advanced skill of Travel Magic (as well as considerable magic energy to use it).

“Here are the three color options of the biome that we explored, among many others. We also played around with just how much light there should be in the distance. At the bottom are the various types of chests that can be found there.”

Caves can also hold deposits of minerals. Some minerals are easier to collect than others. For heavy-duty work, having a secondary skill of Mining is very valuable.

“This is the final version of Caves that you will see in the game, as well as some of the minerals that can be mined there.”

Caves can be populated with Creepers, which presents a certain challenge to a party that wants to camp there.

Stingtails are also known to use Caves to sleep there during the daytime, so when exploring a new cave, the party runs a risk of being attacked by such a group – if the cave is occupied by them at the time of exploration.

The caves feature two kinds of non-humans:

Sometimes, Pale Ones will have their dwelling set up in a cave. They are nearly impossible to negotiate with, but can be subjugated.

More often, Cyclops would inhabit a cave. Being a more intelligent species, Cyclops can be traded with – as well as negotiated with.

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And this is it for today! See you next week – and don’t forget that every Friday, we run a stream here on Steam, showing the current development build of the game. The recordings of this stream can be found on the studio’s YouTube channel.



ːsummer_magicː Spire of Sorcery – Character Generator (Steam)
ːsummer_magicː Official Discord server
ːsummer_magicː YouTube recordings of the development live streams
ːsummer_magicː Twitter (game updates)
ːsummer_magicː Facebook (game updates)



ːmaliceː Official Discord server
ːmaliceː Twitter (game updates)
ːmaliceː Facebook (game updates)
ːmusicː Original Soundtrack on Spotify



ːnotebookː Charlie Oscar’s developer page on Steam
ːnotebookː Twitter (studio news)
ːnotebookː Facebook (studio news)
ːnotebookː "Behind the scenes" Instagram
ːnotebookː YouTube