Today, we say good-bye to our old home. The Hub's layout has been unchanged since the very beginnings of Starveil, since November 2022, when it was still called Project Ouroboros.

Here's the earliest screenshot; while the art provided by asset pack is very different, the layout is very familiar :)



This patch introduces a new layout and look to the Hub. It's very much in-progress still, but as we're making larger changes to how things work, we wanted to roll it out already now.

Here's how it looks like now.



[h3]0.11.2.0 Patch Notes[/h3]

• Changed the look and the layout of the Hub. This is still very much in-progress.
  
• Changed the way players rezone into the Mycotic Grove, Necroforge and the Hub. Instead of talking to an NPC, players can now walk out. In the Hub this is indicated by a change in the tileset. In Mycotic Grove and Necroforge, players need to walk back beyond where they spawned.
  
• Tweaked some networking logic to try and prevent "ghost" players from spawning.
  

• Loading Necroforge may take a moment the first time a player rezones after launching the game
  
• The game is way too zoomed out on higher resolutions than 1080p.
  
  
  
  • You can use the F3 button while logged onto a character for some debug settings with resolution and scaling
    
  
  
• Using skills too fast with the Mouse click Cast trigger option may result in skills being interrupted
  
• Not all abilities have audio effects
  

Hot on the heels of yesterday's updates, here's a small patch to fix some issues that popped up

• Fixed a bug with the item list not showing quantities of stackable items
  
• Fixed items with the same name being sorted randomly
  
• Fixed an issue with the Thorns effect
  

[h2]Steam Next Fest[/h2]
The Steam Next Fest came and went, and it was actually quite good! The demo was downloaded a whooping 6960 times, out of that we've had 221 unique players check out the game and our wishlists jumped from 170 to 417! And the Godot Engine devs and community manager checking Starveil out on the last day of the next fest was certainly quite unexpected! You can check out the VoD here.

Thank you all who gave Starveil a shot, we will continue working on it, improving it and getting the word out there, it is a marathon, not a sprint :)

As Valve recommends, we will keep the Demo up for a while afterwards, and then we'll see what the next course of events is, we will definitely keep you up to date on that.

[h2]Patch 0.11.1.0 Notes[/h2]

Now that we've recovered from the Next Fest and general life being a bit busy recently, we've also released a small patch.

• All windows that have a list of items (Character, Trade, Dismantle) had the item list reworked and unified. In practice this means all those windows now have an item list that is sorted alphabetically and can be filtered by item type or searched for by name.
  
  
  
  • This has been something the community has been asking for for a while and we've finally been able to deliver. Hopefully this makes it much more pleasant to find the right items to equip, trade and dismantle.
    
  
  
• The Character (Tab) window has been redesigned slightly to match our original design.
  
• The Help (F1) window no longer pops up automatically on log-in
  
  
  
  • Unfortunately, we've only realized on the last day, during the Godot stream, that this is probably the reason why a lot of people download the game, make a character and then immediately log out. Our theory is that they saw a window that couldn't very obviously be closed (you have to press Esc) and that blocks movement, and thought it was a bug. We'll definitely be working on improving the "new player experience" to make sure more people give Starveil a chance.
    
  
  

Welcoming all viewers to come test our game Starveil on our live server!

Sukkoy one of our 2 man developer team will be streaming, answering to all your questions and criticism live, come give us your feedback and help us make a better game.

Welcoming all viewers to come test our game Starveil on our live server!

Sukkoy one of our 2 man developer team will be streaming, answering to all your questions and criticism live, come give us your feedback and help us make a better game.

We are excited and a little bit nervous to announce that the Starveil Playtest is now underway with the first handful of players being granted access to the game!

As time goes on and as we test and adjust our server capacities, we will be expanding the playtest to more players, so if you did not get access in the first wave, your time is yet to come. And if you have not signed up yet, you can still do so our our Steam page!

If you run into bugs and issues or have some feedback for us, you can either share it though a form in the game's Esc menu when you log in, or just come visit our Discord server and share and chat there.

See you in game! ;)

~ Vildravn and Sukkoy

December has brought snow, and also the latest Starveil devlog. November has been a busy and exciting month, lets see what have we been up to.

[h3]Novel November[/h3]

Early in the month, Vildravn has shown off Starveil to the local game dev community at an event hosted by Game Habitat. It was the first time ever that people outside of friends and family could play the game, and it was a very valuable and interesting experience.

Speaking of playtests, we have also launched the signups for a Steam playtest, and were very happy that we got over 90 signups so far! We have been working hard all November to get the game in a shape good enough for people to play without a developer present, and we really want to launch the playtest soon.


That brings us to a recap of what weve done in November, and its quite a list.

Following up on last month when we talked about persisting characters, we now store everything. This means that player characters, their inventory, selected skills and equipped items are all persisted between logins and server restarts. This was one of the biggest hurdles to making a public playtest possible and its quite a relief to have this feature finally in the game.

Another big feature weve implemented is client-side telegraphs. This makes combat much better, since you can now see where a skill will land before you cast it. At the moment we only support click to cast, but we are also planning to implement options to enable fast casting you know from games like League of Legends or Guild Wars 2.



We are also looking at making the game flow better, mostly when it comes to maps. Roaming maps are intended to be largely solo-able areas with some group content sprinkled here and there while Dungeons are where groups will be necessary. With that in mind, Necroforge is getting a bit of a makeover, making sure large parts of it are solo-able, putting group oriented stuff off the beaten path.


Pictured above is the Necroforge map as the server sees it.

Last but not least, we worked on some UI polish. Most of the windows and panels with some exceptions are now consistent with the HUD/Action panel design, we now have new skill icons, and you can now see the status effects on your character clearer than ever with new icons placed above the floating health bar.



[h3]Dramatic December[/h3]

As we mentioned above, we really want to launch a public playtest soon, as in, in the coming weeks, so our focus is on that.

This means polishing up what we have into a playable experience and making sure its fun and rewarding. With persistence now fully implemented, some issues with itemization have become much more apparent, so we are putting out designer hats on and figuring out how do we want to make item drops work in each of our areas.

Another area of focus related to the public playtest will be on UI and making things are easy to understand.

And thats pretty much it for this devlog. If you are interested in playtesting Starveil in the coming weeks, make sure to sign up on our Steam page. And if youd like to chat with us about the game or anything else for that matter, we practically live on our Discord server.

Until next time!
~ Sukkoy and Vildravn

In the Devlog yesterday, we talked about setting up a test through Steam Playtests.

We are happy to report that the signups are now open! If you go to our Steam page, you can request access to the Playtest. We are not ready to open the floodgates just yet, but once we do, Steam will let you know that the playtest is live and running.

It's the end of October and that means the spooky season is upon us. And also a new Starveil devlog and it's yet another double month one. Lives have been far too busy, but we also got a lot done, so let's get into it!

[h3]Busy Bee September and October[/h3]

Like mentioned above, life kept us busy, be it work or family related matters, or vacations. But we are not slowed down so easily and we got a lot of stuff done over the last two months!

In Starveil, dungeons stay for a whole season and then get re-generated. It's a sort of middle ground between the typical MMO experience where dungeons always stay the same and a more Action RPG style where maps are random all the time. We want the best of both worlds and to achieve that, we have built some in-house tooling to help us generate dungeons we can then polish up, customize and add into the game ready for the next season. Over the course of September and October, we have improved our dungeon generation tooling to support the environmental hazards we have in the Necroforge - namely moving conveyor belts and lava pools.

[previewyoutube=sigTE0s-01U;full][/previewyoutube]

We have also refactored our Effects system (buffs and debuffs, essentially) to be more flexible and more easily support some exciting boss encounters and skills.

Speaking of exciting bosses, we are doing more work on the Mycotic Grove and have added two new bosses we can't wait to test out with more people. We don't want to spoil much, but one is a banshee with a devastating sonic attack, and the other is a shaman commanding a fierce wolf. Both bosses should require some strategy and cunning to beat.

And last but not least, we have started implementing persisting character data between logins and everything that needs to happen around that! For now that only means characters, storing equipped skills and inventories will come later but this is a huge step for us. As a part of the persistence work, the character creation screen got a much needed facelift, and to accompany it, there is also a character selection screen now.

[previewyoutube=jfj7GLNNJnI;full][/previewyoutube]

There have also of course been some bug fixes and tweaks and the never-ending work on making art assets. Check out some work in progress on those!

[previewyoutube=vszaIO17RLc;full][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Full Steam Ahead November[/h3]

The big ticket item for November is still persistence. We want to get in storing character items and skills, so players can actually start customizing their characters properly. After that is done, we are planning to hold a public playtest, so keep your eyes peeled on our Discord and this Steam page for that! We will also be showing Starveil to complete strangers for the first time early November, so keep your fingers crossed for us!

The other very big thing on our list is figuring out how skill unlocking is even going to work. Many discussions and design sessions will be had for sure :)

On top of that, we will of course be adding more things to the Mycotic Grov, truly turn it into a grove. Who knows, maybe we'll even tackle some environment sounds for that little extra mood...

And that was us at Mice with Dice for another devblog. Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for the news about a playtest and see you in the next one!

---

Hi, us again some hours later. We're happy to report that the Signups for the Playtest are now live!

It has been a while and the keen eyed among you might spot we skipped a month. The simple answer is that summer got in the way and we took a bit of a break. But weve also done a fair amount of reflecting, thinking and work on Starveil, lets get to it!

[h3]Sunny July & August[/h3]

Lets start with the most recent news. We took a stock of the current state of the game, and with the Next Fest hurtling ever closer, weve made the decision to postpone. It was not easy decision to make, but the reality is that we were not ready for the Next Fest in October, and each game only gets to participate in a Next Fest once, we dont want to blow our chance. Instead, were really putting our noses to the grindstone, and are now aiming to participate in the Next Fest in February 2024 instead. This also means that our release will happen after February.

With that bit of heavy info out of the way, lets take a look at what weve accomplished since the last devlog, outside of spending time with friends and family over the summer.

We have started working on our second map next to the Necroforge, called the Mycotic Grove. Check out these awesome enemy designs.



The Mycotic Grove is going to be a more open and definitely more fantasy inspired area with a different set of enemies.

Work has also been done on implementing a new UI look. UI is something that really ties any game together and it should not be neglected. Heres a quick look at our skill bar, with some work-in-progress skill icons.



It would not be a good RPG without a large variety of skills and spells at the players disposal, so we made sure to expand the arsenal and added 11 more skills. Among those freshly added are skills like an AoE taunt, a healing station that pulses healing to nearby allies, a chain pull for the pesky enemies that always run away from you, or an adorable-yet-deadly familiar that shoot laser beams out of its eye.


Apologies for the grainy gif :)

We have also been experimenting with some other things like adding ambient sounds and more skill sound effects into the game, using a proper resolution so we dont play in a small 720p window, and a host of tweaks, fixes and improvements.

[h3]Refocused September[/h3]

Now that we dont have the October Next Fest looming over our heads, we had the chance to refocus and prioritize a bit, and lay out a clearer plan for the coming months up until the February Next Fest and the Early Access release. For now, lets take a look at the focus for September.

The first of the two big ticket items for September is finally storing player characters and their items and equipped skills in a database - no more losing progress on logging out!

The other big task were setting for ourselves this month is finishing up our dungeon system, generate some dungeons and fill them with enemies and new bosses to kill and loot.

Among relatively smaller things weve got some rebalancing on the public (non-dungeon) areas and some more UI work.

Were also planning a larger playtest that wed like to have before the Next Fest to see where we are, so stay tuned for that!

Speaking of staying tuned, the best way to do that is on our Discord server where you can chat with us and see the progress more or less in real time.

And that wraps up this devlog, see you in the next one!

It's time to sit down, unwind and recap the development on Starveil for this past month and look ahead into the future. And wow, do we have quite the devlog for you this time!

Older devlogs are available on our Ko-fi page.
[hr][/hr]
[h2]Steamy June[/h2]

To get the obvious thing out of the way, since this is also where you're reading this post, we're on Steam!

This is a huge step for us. It will help us with getting Starveil seen a bit more, we'll also be able to use some nice features like the built-in Playtest feature. No more mailing out Steam keys manually! It also sets a bigger plan in motion, but more on that later.

We will also keep updating the page so there's not just the bare minimum, definitely keep an eye on it.

We'd like to thank our dear friend Hiz for his hard work on the store and library assets, logos, etc. They look amazing.

Speaking of visibility, it really helps us a lot if you wishlist the game if you are interested in it, so.. Please go do that :) There's a button in the sidebar of this post.

With Steam out of the way, let's look at what we've worked on in the game in June.

We have revamped a few things, with a few things more visible to the player than others:

• We have a more flexible animation system that should help us add more items more easily.
  
• Then we've gotten rid of the button in the bottom right corner to interact with NPCs and objects, now you use F to do that instead!
  
• Enemies are now trying to avoid eachother, so they don't end up on one unsightly pile when being kited.
  
• Skills that auto-targetted enemies closest to the player now target enemies closest to the player's cursor.
  

• Shield effect from skills now shows up on the health bar.
  
• The Necroforge battery event was tweaked a little, carrying the batteries slows players down more.
  
• On the topic of batteries, the effect bar above player health and skills will now show what is the player carrying.
  
• Floating damage numbers have been refined to look much better.
  
• There are now transition screens when rezoning.
  
• It is now possible to hide all of the UI and just the chat with F12 and F11 respectively. Great for taking screenshots :)
  
• Several skills now have awesome visual effects instead of just simple telegraphs.
  
• It is now possible to rebind keys.
  

• Added a new area to Necroforge
  
• Added a new skill: Block
  
• Added several new weapons. A staff, a new sword, and a bow.
  
• Added some new enemy types to replace the placeholders we've had since the beginning.
  
• Added an initial version of the party system. This will allow you to invite your friends to play together.
  
• Added an initial version of private instances. The server will now create dungeon instances on demand, putting players together when they're in a party.