Pixelcomet Games Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android

Hello everyone,

We hope everyone's holidays went well and that your New Year is off to a great start.

During the past month, we've went dark on the socials a bit for the holidays and made some internal changes. A lot of the core mechanics have been reworked in order to make adding in content for the game easier. A lot of experimentation has been done during this time, and I'd like to share these changes with you.

First, we've decided to go back to using Spine for our 2D character models. We have a lot of experience using Spine from our previous project Land of Fire. It makes adding animations a lot easier and there's a lot of things you can do using Spine implementation.

Our first playable character Soren has been refitted, here's how he looks now:

While implementing Spine, we also doubled down and reworked our particles for the projectiles. Originally, we wanted to supply the player with different weapons, we've decided to go back to this idea and create projectiles for the first fire based element staff.

The projectile will now fire off the tip of the staff, and some have a charging animation. Also for greater accuracy and readability, the projectile will travel towards and hit the reticle displayed by the mouse.

One of the many benefits of this switch is we can now do animation blending. Previously, Soren was unable to move and shoot at the same time, however, now we can pull that off:

We are also able to visually display where the player is aiming:

Taking it another step further, we can now apply effects to specific areas of the model:

This effect is displaying something new we are introducing called Affixes. Each Affix applies a unique effect to whatever player or enemy is wielding it, and some come with drawbacks.

This particular affix is called Vengeful, which increases your move speed, damage, and attack speed by 50%, but halves your health.

As you travel throughout the realms, you will begin to encounter enemies with different affixes.

Our new enemies moving forward will now be created using Spine as well:

As we continue to the add new enemies, the older ones seen previously will be phased out.

We've made some changes to the death animation, now for the new enemies they get knocked back:

In my spare time, I've been going through the item list on our Trello and tackled some of what was missing.

Raijin's Thunderbolt is a legendary item that summons lightning on critical strikes:

Rune of Mana is an uncommon item which has a chance to launch magic missiles at the enemy attacked and also reduces skill cooldowns.

I think we'll be starting off the new year right as a lot of these new changes have created a more stable foundation for us to build content on.

The devlogs will now be changed to monthly devlogs instead of weekly as that will allows us to post updates even when we have to spend a week or so changing backend systems or doing boring engine work/optimization.

We're going to be posting regularly again on Twitter so if you haven't already, give us a follow on there

Pixelcomet Games Twitter