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!

Sunny July & August

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.

Refocused September

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!