Hi, Necromancers! Although you haven't heard from us for a while, we have been working on The Unliving throughout this whole Summer. So here's what we've been doing lately.
The Capital – Location Concepts
Our art team has been creating The Capital – it's the 3rd location you'll lead your undead armies through in The Unliving. This ancient city rises high to the skies, embodying the strive of its inhabitants to reach the heavens – albeit, its shiny facade hides a dark foundation. The location is still in the work-in-progress phase, but we can share these concepts to give you a general impression:
And this is one of our early concepts to outline the layout of this level:
Necromancer's Abilities
We've been also working on several abilities that Necromancer will be able to use to give you more variety and options to choose from when you lead your army of the undead against the Church of Zolar and more otherwordly foes. Here are some gifs showcasing the latest abilities that we have come up with:
Fireworks – an ability that detonates nearby bones that drop out of the undead upon taking damage.
Phantasmal Army – сreates aggressive wraiths from the Echoes – remnants of the life-force that spawn upon the death of each creature.
Blood Tide: Forms explosive goo from the blood spilled by the living.
Swamp Enemies
In the meantime, our 2nd major location – the Swamps, needs to be populated by a new set of creatures to fight and interact with. That's why we have been digging through the hundreds of visual references, drawing and throwing away dozens of concepts – all to create the most visually interesting creatures and make them exciting to look at. They are the Mirefolk (melee), the Slinger (ranged), the Mirefolk Warrior (pulls enemies), the Dryad (summoner), the Ashbringer (fries his enemies, but has no VFX just yet to showcase that), and the Commander (focuses his attack on Necromancer) unit concepts. These all are just drafts and will require more work in the future.
Miscellaneous
Several of the following tasks are still in the stage of research and development, so we won't be able to show you much just yet:
– A brand new mechanics of distributing Combat Resources – the ones that will be spawned during the combat and picked up by the player to amplify the abilities of Necromancer and his units;
– Gamepad controls implementation and balancing. We need to make The Unliving work smoothly with the gamepad – basically all of them;
– We are experimenting with the health drain and restock system which is still a bit of a tricky thing. As the health of the Necromancer is tightly knit with his combat powers, we need to invent something really interesting rather than just a plain health-bar.
That's it for now, Necromancers! Keep your scythes ready for more content in the future. Sorry, that it takes so long, but as you can see, we are doing our best to give you the game which is captivating and fun in the result!
Important notice. Our game is still a work-in-progress – features and content demonstrated in our devlogs can be amended, substituted in favor of another content, or become completely unavailable in the latter stages of development. We hope for your understanding.
Don't forget to add The Unliving to your wishlist!
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The Unliving Discord community
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Nice pixel art. Keep it up!