Looking for some dev updates?
Since announcing the game in September last year, we’ve been working on our internal game demo and building a solid foundation for the core game experience. This will soon become our pre-alpha! We can’t wait to start sharing regular development updates with you, covering all kinds of mysteries taking place within the museum. Until then, let’s light up a torch and take a peek behind the scenes, giving you a glimpse of what we’ve been up to…
Animations and AI
Once you start to unravel events within the Ancient Egyptian areas of the museum, you’ll quickly learn that you’re not alone. In general, you’ll face lots of challenges and creatures. We’ve been having a lot of fun customising these interactions through our own MoCap sessions and scripted animation scenes. Check out this mummy spawning as an example!
Our animator in action, capturing some mummy-like motion...
...to tweak for our minion mummies after playtesting.
As well as improving our animations, we’ve been improving the AI minions and bosses' behaviour too. We’ve particularly been working on making the bosses more responsive when targeting players, to feel like a more natural encounter. But most importantly, to seem more aggressive to the player’s presence.
Don’t mess with the Mummy…
Look here and listen up!
While some areas are prohibited for public access right now, *cough* while we continue developing, here’s a closer look and express audio tour of a few places you’ll discover deep within the museum. As well as dressing the levels, we’ve been building up the atmosphere throughout the mysterious environments you’ll encounter in-game.
Internal Playtesting
As we’re a small indie team, we’ve each been wearing a lot of different hats while developing Macabre Museum. But being such a tight unit also makes it really easy for us to huddle together and jump into a playtest session. Better played as a co-op, we test the game as a group throughout the working week. We’ve also been testing the game on the Steam Deck!
We’re also working on all the little details too
On top of reworking level layouts, cleaning up animations, improving AI behaviour, continuous bug fixing from our QA sessions and so on, we’ve been updating other aspects of the build as well. From art passes that help us improve the look, to small optimisations that improve the gameplay performance. One thing we’ve improved very recently is the UI that you’ll see in the lobby, as well as Steam integration when joining a game.
A before and after look at our Game Lobby UI.
Closing time for now…
There’s a lot of work going into Macabre Museum, this is just a glimpse to kickstart our development updates for you. What do you think of the game so far? Do you like what you see? Got any suggestions? Join our Discord where we want to chat more with the community!
Until our next devlog, come and find us here:
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