Hello and welcome to another Soul Split Devlog, this time for February 2024.
In January we showed off a lot of stuff relevant to the second major area of the game, the Khorsian Lowlands, and this month we'll be focusing on this area even more and likely finishing it with the next development update.
So far for the Lowlands we have setup a lot of the assets we're going to use and now its just a matter of putting it together and figuring out the level design. Since this is an overhaul we already have a previous version of the area to work from, however there's one major change that we've made when creating this area.
Whereas before all areas in Soul Split were framed as interior spaces, we've decided to switch it up for this swampy hamlet and make it an exterior space. What does that entail? Well rather than raising the walls and pretending the black void outside of the rooms doesn't exist we instead lowered the walls added water and a skybox to give off the feeling of really being in a swamp.
This change along with some lighting adjustments really sold the swampy feeling of the area much more. Especially now being able to see the enormous towers in the distance makes the area feel much more interesting than previous iterations.
These changes in perspective aren't exclusive to just the Lowlands however, they're taking place all over the game as recently we've begun experimenting with enclosing interior areas. This would make it impossible to see over the walls and would ground the area in a far more immersive way.
Here's a before and after of the changes.
On top of those additions we've also begun to swap out some of the older assets for newer versions that are more in-line with the aesthetic of the game. For instance the plant life has been overhauled. Whereas before they were 2D sprites in an X pattern that swayed around slightly in the same way Minecraft does their foliage, now we've made proper 3D models for our beloved plants.
Speaking of lovely plants, we've also added a lot of much larger plants throughout the area as well.
Plant life has a very strong thematic presence in the Lowlands. Despite the area sitting far underground, the plant life grows incredibly fast despite the lack of sun. Which begs the question of where they're getting their sustenance from?
But plants aren't the only thing in the lowlands, wild beasts roam the lands and many of its residents have taken to worshipping them wandering the copses of trees hunting alongside them in a deluded state. Yet a small few remain locked in their dwellings shuttered inside from the violence happening on their doorstep, you may be able to pry answers out of those who remain, if you can find them that is.
But that's content for our next update where we go over the third and final part of the Khorsian Lowlands, where we talk about enemies and finishing touches.
Thanks for reading!
Soul Split Devlog #5
Welcome everyone to yet another Soul Split development update for January 2024.
This month's additions comes in 3 different flavours, player tweaks, new spell content, and the beginning of a new area. Let's start with the new spell content.
Recently we changed the progression of the game to better reflect what it'll look like in its final iteration now spells will progressively get more powerful the deeper in a run you are. Gone are the days of acquiring tremendously powerful spells and wiping rooms in the very first area.
However In doing this, a new problem arose. We realized that the variety of the combat came from those higher level spells that have since been pushed into the later areas, and that the early game sandbox was rather weak.
Spells are divided into 4 categories based on their strength with the first and weakest being called "Standard". These standard spells were initially designed to be a low cool-down, spammable option that can always be used that usually took the form of a semi-automatic projectile. They tended to feel very gun-like.
This approach had some flaws. Since only one semi-automatic spell could only be used at a time, it only ever made sense to have one of that variety of spell. Rather than having a category of say 20 standard spells it was instead split between semi-automatic spells vs cool-down based spells effectively shrinking the sandbox.
This sandbox shrink often meant that your load-outs consisted of one of a list of 7 or so "gun" spells, and a small pool of maybe 6 cool-down based spells. This lack of variety bogged down the early game making it somewhat boring due to the similarity of your load-outs.
So one of our goals this month was to expand the early game spell pool with a strong emphasis on new and interesting spells with a short cool-down that stay far away from the "gun" feeling of other standard spells.
To achieve this we pulled down a couple spells from the higher level categories to level 1 and tuned them down to make them fit in. A couple spells were reworked to have less overlap with the new additions, and a new subcategory or two was made.
Blackfire Sweep A new take on an old spell type that eventually turned into shadow magic. Dealing both fire and dark damage this spell shines in the early-game but falls off unless built around. Cold Snap A newer take on ice spells. The majority of ice in the game involves conjuring some sort of icicle but this breaks away and instead focuses on inflicting frost bite with freezing winds. Ray or Ice A former adept spell brought down to standard. Its one of the few spells in the game with a chance to freeze an enemy and will be the cornerstone of early-game freeze builds. Vine Lash A plant spell in the poison category, this spell is part of a small group of spells in the poison category meant to deal direct damage instead of status effects.
A much smaller addition we've made recently is the implementation of camera adjustments that allow a full 360 degree view of the player. This was done to both enhance the atmosphere of the game and make it easier to react to enemies that may have been hiding in places the camera couldn't quite reach before.
This change has required the reworking of a few systems, but it should allow for far larger more interesting set pieces in addition to giving players more control over how they view the world.
In addition to these additional spells we've been beginning to shape newer areas of our game slowly but surely. In February we will be working extensively on the second major area of the game giving it a complete redesign.
We're redesigning the area as the last time it was touched was in 2021 and the vision for the region and the game itself have changed significantly since then. Things have broadly gotten darker, the art style has become more detailed and with the aforementioned camera changes areas must be designed with more perspectives and camera angles in mind.
All of the new assets in one scene
A comparison of a shrine before and after the rework
The new towers to scale next to the player
New mausoleum and graveyard models next to one another
Various ruins and scaffolding models next to one another
That's everything we've done in January this year! First month of 2024 down and we're looking forward to sharing what we've been working on in the coming months. A lot of exciting content is in the works with a couple surprises here or there so keep your eyes peeled!
Thanks for reading!
Soul Split Devlog #4
Hello everyone and welcome back to another monthly development update for December 2023!
We did a lot in December, from making a handful of new spells, to implementing several new mainstay enemies and massively updating the UI and game world. There's a lot to go through, so lets get into it!
Several aspects of the game's UI were updated and a handful of new features were implemented. This includes the ability to change colour of the reticle, an FPS display toggle, and adding in a retro mode that adds in PS1 era filters. These filters used to be a very prominent part of the art style of Soul Split early on, but were eventually stripped down a bit to our current art style.
Retro Mode off Retro Mode On This toggle will crunch the display resolution down to 640x360p and revert the colour settings to 8-bit resulting in a much older looking PS1 bit-crunched aesthetic. This obviously has little effect on gameplay, but its a homage to the early iterations of Soul Split and was added for fun in our artist's spare time.
Alongside the aforementioned UI changes we've overhauled several enemies within the Ghost World, our game's mirror dimension; making them far more enjoyable to fight. What prompted this? Previously the small overly-aggressive enemy pool was annoying and uninteresting to fight, and put plainly lame.
The new core additions to the Ghost World's enemy roster
To solve this issue we've added 5 new enemies to the area to help increase the variety of encounters. In addition to those enemies we've added new synergies that greatly increase the difficulty of encounters without relying on hyper aggressive enemies and homing projectiles swarming the player.
The main addition we've made are Bone Piles, a harmless enemy that can spawn on the floor and do nothing on its own. When these Bone Piles come into contact with certain triggers they will sacrifice themselves and summon a powerful Bone Spirit in its place, and in rare instances Bone Haunts which are akin to mini-bosses.
A Bone Spirit and Bone Haunt in a test scene.
Other enemies will be able to summon these Bone Spirits as they function as environmental hazards anything can interact with. These unique spawn mechanics make way for emergent gameplay, do you aggro the summoners away from the Bone Piles? Do you kill Bone Piles first so they won't spawn spirits? Is there a way to summon your own Bone Spirits?
These sorts of additions are what fuels enjoyable gameplay, and makes for diverse combat encounters. Several of these types of changes were made to the game recently, although I'll keep the rest under wraps.
Lastly since this month was all about polishing what we have, the Hub got a considerable visual update in preparation for further content to be added soon. Large braziers can be found shining through the storm. Enormous ruins can be seen just hardly in the distance, ruins are strewn about the area, the plateau feels like the ruins of a fortress long surrendered to the storm.
Some of the revised Hub, looking outwards into the storm.
That's about all we have! we hope you enjoyed the read and we'd like to thank you for your continued support of Soul Split over the years and we're looking forward to sharing more with you in 2024!
Soul Split Devlog #3
Hello everyone and welcome to another monthly update for November 2023!
This month we've changed gears from the usual spells, enemies and dungeons to instead focus on something different, progression. Progression has always been on the back-burner, its hard to really gauge how it'll work when the rest of the game that we'll be progressing through doesn't exist yet.
However, since the completion of the first major area of the game, we've begun to take a different approach. We've decided to start making multiple areas at once to get a better handle on how progression. While we've mainly worked on the foundation of the game and the first area for a while that was all part of defining the feel of the game, now that's locked in we can get a bit more crazy with how we handle things.
So what's new?
Over the past month we've worked on progression in every sense of the word, increasing player power and mapping out how it'll look over the course of a run and the entire game. We've got a few new additions we've been working on listed below.
Items Items have been greatly expanded upon with both common and legendary variants the latter is obtained exclusively after defeating a boss and can play a huge role in crafting your build.
Levelling Up We've added a levelling system through the addition of a new item called a "Soul Jar". A minimum number of these items are guaranteed to spawn in every dungeon. When consumed, you'll be able to increase your elemental damage as well as health and luck. A WIP of the levelling screen is below.
This menu also shares many elements with the player equipment screen such as spell damage, defence, player attributes, and spell scaling. Any of these elements will be able to be viewed on the fly through the equipment screen.
Specializations Specializations have been added to compliment levelling up from Soul Jars. Upon investing a certain amount of points into an element, you'll be given the choice to select a specialization tied to said element. These specializations will have an emphasis on making a particular subcategory of spells shine above the rest. A maximum of 2 can be earned in a single run, afterwards even reaching the thresholds with other elements will not allow further specializations to be picked, so you'll need to choose very carefully.
There's also a handful generalist specializations for those who would rather not worry about builds and want a more arcadey experience where everything is of equal power.
Spell Mutations Spell mutations are a special subgroup of spells that are direct upgrades from the originals. These spells can only be acquired when selecting the relevant specialization and will largely function in the same way as the original spell but will have some sort of extra benefit that plays into the power fantasy of its associated specialization.
Talents Passive benefits unlocked when selecting a specialization. These benefits ranged from dealing more damage, to unlocking a superior status effect, to modifying how the player rolls. These are what makes specializations feel unique as all talents feed into a play style associated with the specialization.
The Unprogressed Parts
We've covered quite a bit on how progression is shaping up in the game here, but there's still more to be done. We still have to fully address and test internally how spell unlocks will work. Should you have access to high level spells in earlier areas? Will unlocking a specialization enhance the experience of using those spells or make the rest of the elements feel redundant? What happens when you find a chest that should drop a powerful spell before you have any unlocked?
These are all very important design and balancing questions that'll be answered sometime in the near future, for now though we'll leave it ambiguous.
Thanks for reading, see you in the next update!
Soul Split Devlog #2
Where We’ve Been
Our last development update was in June 2022. Slightly after that update, it became very clear that the game was a bit early in development for full updates on a consistent basis and we changed our focus. But now is the time for our return. As of October 2023, you can expect to see development updates towards the end of every month until early access covering everything we're doing with Soul Split.
This soft reboot of the dev-log however; calls for some catching up to be done. A lot can change in 16 months after all.
A Visual Overhaul
Originally Soul Split was made with a very heavy PS1 aesthetic, everything was a bit crunched and pixelized to give a nostalgic retro feel to the game. For a long while we were struggling to make that art style work with the game. Oftentimes the visuals being used for the magic of the game had a lot of details lost that made the game feel visually flat.
After a long period of transitions and changes to the lighting textures of the game, we've finally found a middle ground between the early 3D retro look we always wanted and the high-quality VFX and the punch that comes with slinging spells that demand more detail to feel good, We've now fully moved away from any pretense of a PS1 aesthetic while maintaining a few tricks to keep that early 3D look we wanted, but we've embraced a more clean look for the game that fits much better.
In addition to all that, we've also overhauled the entirety of the Exilis Archives to be much less claustrophobic. These are the same rooms before and after the update.
That visual polish makes quite the difference, looking back on the old art style I can't help but be glad the game looks the way it does now with its art style finally settled. But enough about reworks, we have new content to cover.
Another Dimension
We've also made a lot of progress developing what we're currently calling the 'ghost world'. When you die on a run in the waking world you get a second chance to salvage your run, but in order to earn that second chance you need to trudge your way through a dark mirror dimension crawling with ravenous creatures to earn your second chance at life.
Although the 'ghost world' namesake implies this dimension will be filled with undead and ghosts, that's far from the truth, Many powerful creatures have found themselves stuck inside this alternate dimension, and their influence is even felt in the waking world. One such example if the frozen mind a greater ice elemental that's consciousness persists across dimensions.
Environmental Expansion
Since our last development update, we've added a multitude of new areas with their own stories, enemies, NPCs, and spells. Some of them are accessible on your first run rather easily, others need to be found, and others still need to be unlocked and have been right under your nose the whole time. Here's a couple screenshots of the newest areas we've been working on.
The Terrarium
A wing of the Exilis Archives dedicated to agriculture and the marriage of plant magic and machines, the supplies for which lay waiting silently below the Terrarium itself.
Khorsian Lowlands
A underground swamp of fire and poison, its inhabitants have long since been corrupted by the fell goddess who lurks within the darkest corners of the bog.
Crystal Burrows
A winding network of tunnels littered with enormous arcane crystals that leak magical energy into the air. Unfortunately this makes the entire cave system more than slightly unstable.
A Flurry of Magic
The last time we made a development update our pool of spells was somewhere around 90 or so split between 7 elements. In the time since then, we've crossed the line of having over 190 spells in the game. There's been a lot of expansion to the spell system across the board not just in breadth alone but in function. There are over a dozen status effects. many of which have special interactions with particular elements that can lead to some very chaotic gameplay.
A powerful dark spell exclusively obtained as a rare drop from a yet unnamed boss. A series of poison clouds being electrified by a player. That's all we have for this month's update, there's much more to come next month and we hope to see you soon, thanks for reading!
Dungeons & Dwellers, Devlog #1
Our First Devlog
Hello everyone and welcome to the first ever Soul Split development update! As we inch our way closer to early access we've begun to document the game far more and, as a result, we’re going to begin sharing more of that sweet, sweet behind the scenes content with you, our community. So strap yourselves in, we’ve got some teasers to go through!
Overview
Recently, we’ve been tackling the foundation of the game itself in the hopes of making it faster to develop; our primary focus has been on both the dungeon and enemy pipelines. With the goal of having larger, more interesting dungeon generation and a much more diverse swathe of enemies than was seen in any of our previous demos. Let's start with the dungeons.
Dungeons
Various areas have been concepted in-game this month all of which are very different from the last. From abyss sunken archives, to poison drenched swamps and demon stained crypts there’s a little something for everyone. These are all early concepts rather than full blown areas and their designs might not be quite as detailed as in future showings, but they’re shaping the world to be something truly extraordinary. In the meantime, enjoy an early screenshot of the Flaying Halls, the third major area of the game!
A big part of improving the dungeon pipeline however was overhauling the first area of the game and preparing it for the sweeping dungeon generation changes that were going to take place. So we finally settled on a finalized aesthetic for The Exilis Archives that could be applied to any number of new strange room shapes.
Speaking of strange room shapes, in previous builds of the game, dungeon generation has been relatively limited to bland box rooms. However we've since addressed this issue through doing a lot of work on the backend. Now dungeons can spawn rooms of all shapes and sizes, making combat and exploration far more interesting and memorable. Below is a screenshot of just a small amount of room layouts we've added to The Exilis Archives.
Dwellers
Enemies have always been a big part of our game, what fun is being a spellslinger without punching bags to explode? As of recently we've been giving a lot more attention to the pipeline of making enemies since for some time its been underdeveloped. The game files are plagued with tens of enemies that have yet to be given any functionality but are fully textured and animated. However now that has now begun to change, and more enemies are being brought into the fold. In fact we'll even share a handful of them with you! All of which can be found in the first major area of the game.
Exilis Knight
Knights guarding the inhabitants of the archives, these automatons are very nearly sentient and act as personal bodyguards to the young inexperienced mages of the archives.
Observer
An elusive mini-boss found throughout the world, Observers are strange alien creatures that appear in unexpected nooks and crannies. Little is known about them, save for their hostile behavior and their fearsome magical abilities.
Defender Golem
A hulking automaton and an earlier design of the Exilis Sect. These golems have been repurposed as guardians of the archives, defending the area from would be invaders with their boulder-like durability and strength.
All of these enemies have been implemented into the game and are fully functional with a couple of fixes that need to be done here and there; the Observer especially makes for an incredibly chaotic fight. We have plenty more enemies to show off but we'll save them for another time. After all, we do have quite a ways to go before early access!
Conclusion
That brings us to the end of our first devlog! Thank you everyone for reading, we hope you enjoyed the first of many development updates on Soul Split! We'll be back soon to share more progress on the game, and who knows? Maybe a cheeky trailer will drop before then?
Hi everyone, hope your enjoying the demo! Here are the notes for our most recent patch - 1.1.2
Notes: - Spell bar shows cooldowns for spells - Spells reset to default when brought back to hub world - Music plays on all dungeon floors - Fixed Archivist spawning in the middle of the room - Slightly reduced the health of The Archivist - Tweaked The Archivist's healthbar - Made knights more likely to use spells - Adjusted resistances of all enemies - Made Seething cores slightly larger - Various spelltable tweaks - Various spell tweaks - Reduced size of the mini-map - Reduced size of currency tracker - Increased amount of currency given by all enemies
Soul Split Demo 1.1.1 Patch Notes
Happy Going Rogue Festival everybody! The Soul Split Demo is back up and we excited to show off what we've been working on. There will be more updates throughout the week so keep checking in to see what changes!
Fixes: - dropped spells can always be picked back up - health fully restored when going back to hub world - starting loadout applied when going back to hub world - hitting esc key while in spell table no longer causes camera issues - no longer lose ability to shoot after death in certain scenarios
Hi everyone, the team is still hard at work fixing as many bugs as we can! With todays update dungeons should be much more stable and we have added a new item (Health Jars) to some rooms. Health Jars will provide a large amount of healing when picked up so keep your eyes out for them.
Patch Notes:
Fixes: - Dungeons not having an exit room to the next floor - Dungeons spawning 2 rooms on top of each other - Boss Room not accessible in 3rd floor - Music progression on first floor
Updates: - Health Jars drop in some rooms instead of spells
