This has been a super busy week after presenting first Alpha builds and prepping them for release! We've been toiling away in our caves squashing bugs left and right while we put the last touches on our graphics and the final tweaks into some of our major mechanics. Some of the biggest problems we fixed included gathering certain objects, like currency and special equipment, and certain system effects, like those items appearing in the Journal after you had collected them in the Abyss. We also fixed a ton of collision throughout the tutorial and Abyss, where the player could get stuck and soft lock the game, or strange behavior between the spawned enemies and environmental objects. We spent a good portion of the last week testing the flow of our tutorial and transitioning into the game, making sure the player was familiar with the controls of the game and understood the mechanics behind moving, shooting/reloading, and interacting with objects like doors or item chests.

In tweaking the transition when entering the Abyss from the Sothoth Inn, we decided we needed at least some small narrative element to explain the change in scenery, explain thematically how it's working. Something that we thought was suiting was having Grace dragged down into the Abyss by some creatures. Since we had all the pieces already, this was relatively easy to construct and animate the tentacles and the smoke cloud. It's triggered when the player interacts with the bed as usual, but will "grab" Grace before switching scenes into the randomly generated levels.

While we were polishing up a bunch of interface graphics in the weeks prior, another one of our artists was hard at work crafting away a plethora of more levels with new forms of intricacy, barriers and elevations. Using the same room template allows us to rapidly prototype a number of configurations. We found that lots of walls and partitions, accompanied with the zooming the player camera in slightly, really enhanced the feel of our levels being labyrinth-like.

There are going to be even more improvements and fixes inbound with the release of our Alpha and we hope players enjoy taking back Duluth with Grace!