Vee Rethak: Deep Under the Mountain cover
Vee Rethak: Deep Under the Mountain screenshot
PC Steam
Genre: Role-playing (RPG)

Vee Rethak: Deep Under the Mountain

I'm not dead, nor is the game ...
... but it was pining for the fjords for some time. After doing the unthinkably stupid and upgrading VRTK and Unity nothing worked anymore. Paying-Work and other stuff kept me from fixing the game, so the source code was rotting away on my hard drive.

Well .. I took a look at the code again, decided that I would need to scale down my goals and rewrite some (a lot) of code. Basically, the only part that stays, apart from most assets, is the level generator. I am currently rewriting the AI (which, IMO, wasn't bad per se ... but the code wasn't flexible enough resulting in some awefull spaghetti code when adding new types of monsters), and I will also rewrite the parts controlling how you interact with objects, and of course the magic system.

The overarching story I wanted to tell will have to wait too, as real life constraint makes it impossile for me to work constantly on the game ... thus the renaming (which isn't yet mirrored in the banner, sorry) "YARL" ... as in "Yet Another Rogue Like".

SkyrimVR is releasing tomorow, Karnage Chronicle is amazing, and Vanishing Realms is still available, so in case you need a good Hack Slash dungeon crawler, get one of those! They really are great! YARL will see the light of day.. but it might be some time.

until then ... cya :)
/me heads back to his editor

Early Release date set to June
The good news is that, as of April 5th, my Vive works again, which means I can finally fix all the problems people have pointed out and add some more content. Ironic that I got my replacement station the day I actually intended to release.

The bad news is that some of the changes will probably break a lot of existing stuff, so I moved the release date to June. I should have done it earlier, but apparently I was blind and didn't find the correct button to change the release date. My apologies.

A new version of the demo with an overworked magic system should be up in a couple of days.

Complete rework of Magic and R.I.P. Base Station
After watching people struggle with the way I implemented magic and reading your comments I decided to scrap the way magic works at the moment and make it much easier.

The current implementation works fine when you know what you are doing but it is way too complicated to explain without being personally present and showing exactly the motions needed. In short, the system is neat, but not practical and not fun.
So .. I was working on something much simpler when one of my base station decided to die. The vertical laser does not light up, which means the tracking is always a bit off or goes away completely depending on which way I turn. this means I will have to wait for a replacement before continuing to work on the game.

No biggy (as long as it falls under the guarantee), but just to let you know that I didn't abandon Vee Rethak, I just have to delay the release :/

Casting spells is now much easier
As of 20170311a3_2, two sparkly objects appear when you try to cast to show you where your hands have to go for the current spell.
For multi-part spells (the fireball for example) they will repeat each part a few time then go on to the next one, and then start again.

The speed at which they move is good for casting. You can move faster but you don't have to and your precision might suffer.

If you can create the initial firelight but can not shoot the fireball, check where where they are in the second part of their pattern, which starts after three revolution.
By the way, casting is always relative to your orientation (but NOT by the inclination of your head!)

I hope this will solve most magic-related problems.

CHANGELOG :
20170311a3_2:
added magic guides while casting
added vibration while casting
fixed spell lighting
tweaked the wumpus attack distance

New, improved demo coming up soon
The feedback so far has been overwhelmingly "I can not pass the calibration scene, no matter what", which, while frustrating for me (but probably not as frustrating as it was for those who were stuck in the room and kept gesticulating around) means I had to rethink the whole approach to magic.

The next version still has the same mechanics for spells, but now there are "guides" showing you how your hands should move in order to cast the spell. Apart from making casting *much* easier it also looks quite cool, so I am quite pleased with it so far. I still need to tweak a few lose ends, but a release on the March, 12th (my time zone) seems realistic.

cheers,
Sammy