Boy I haven’t actually published a devlog in ages. This is a more substantial update so lets get to it:

I’m trying to move towards something I can actually call done and release. I don’t have particularly high hopes for the game’s success so I’m mostly just aiming to polish up what I’ve got and cut as much from scope as possible.

One thing though that a lot of people have asked about (that I am working towards with this update) is some actual story elements. I was going to do comic-book panels during loading screens but I’m not a great artist so drawing them would take me months. Instead I’m going to just draw a couple of VN-style portraits and use them with dialog boxes to convey the story. The dialog boxes are partially implemented already, though for now they’re just used for tutorial messages on the new starting level (actually the first level, for reals this time).

I also had a chance to work on the game for full time for a couple of weeks and a whole bunch of graphical improvements such as distance fog, actual occlusion for skylights and point lights on entities that aren’t part of the worldspawn, and a bloom effect when staring at the sun.

There also finally a new weapon (for the first time in 6-7 years): the railgun! It adds a much-requested long-range weapon option to the game. There is also a new enemy, the grenadier drone, which can fly and will fire bouncy grenades at you (somewhat like Quake ogres). For now they’ve both just been haphazardly slapped in without much thought, at some point before release I’ll need to do a big pass to review out all the pickups and encounters but I still have a few elements left to add.

At my current pace I’m aiming to release sometime around Q3 of 2025 with just seven levels. I really want to move on to another project so if I can come up with a way to release faster I will, and there’s always a chance I may slip into hiatus, but I really want this game done and out of the way so I think Q3 2025 appears to be a realistic estimate for now.