The goal for this devlog is to have a fully playable demo area and even though I made decent progress, I didn’t get there yet.

But lets go through this area and the progress from the last devlog. One reason for the massive delay from the last devlog (10 months), was that the game had a lot of issues, and I didn’t want to build on top of broken fundamentals.

Lots of things were also breaking without my direct involvement, like upgrading unreal, which you should expect to break some stuff, but annoying regardless.

First things first, we can compare the start menus from this devlog and the last and I think it did improve, but it wasn’t a focus subject - so, I was just drive by fixing and improving things. Same goes for the UI in game, however with a bit more effort, as you can see, I made some mock ups in figma, for the pause menu, HUD, as well as some miscellanious stuff, like icons etc.

And here the comparison between the pause menus from this devlog and the last:

The Monster/Equipment Slots have their Health/Durability wrapped around, which I really liked. with some attribute at the bottom right, for monsters its their level and for equipment their main attribute (Damage, Armor). The UI is also both usable with Keyboard/Mouse and Controller and detects it automatically. This also applies to the HUD.

Speaking of the HUD, I worked on that as well - but let me explain what we are even looking at. Starting top left.

This Circle thing is the “Player Status”, which will shows the players health, temperature, food satiation and below the Player Status your team of monsters will be displayed.

Food Satiation is a new feature, which decreases over time and when you eat, you guessed it, it fills up, and this serves the purpose, that you cannot eat _food_ if your full, so you can not use food as healing, but other heals still work, like potions or abilities from your monster team.

Temperature indicator is currently in the middle of the circle, and indicated your tempereature, depending the environment you’re in.

So, If you’re somewhere really hot, you can get tired (decreased movement speed) or worse if really really hot, you could start burning and start to get damaged periodically.

The same applies to the opposite, when too cold.

Ok, back to the Demo map - top right is the mini map, that I didn’t touch at all.

Bottom right are your quick slots for an item and three weapons, the item quick slot allows you to consume items quickly in run time, and the three weapon slots, allow you to switch quickly between weapons, also, in run time with no pausing.

Bottom middle is not visible, until you actually start sprinting, flying, climbing or whatever, it displays your energy/stamina.

Bottom left is nothing, besides the indicator, that on hold, will reveal the menu to activate your team’s abilities.

Besides all these visual adjustments, I also completely rewrote the UI system, which is still very unreliable and will improve in the future.

Alright, so when we start the game in the Demo map, I expect the player to go forward, and they will immediately spot the left trees and big rock - on the right, the structure with barrels close to it and the monster or obelisk in the distance.

The structure on the right serves to solve multiple problems, to showcase, that the player can jump and climb onto things, and to pick up the equipment on it and equip it in the pause menu.

And then some, might just go down and keep heading towards the monsters or some might first try to break the barrels and they will be rewarded with some more loot.

The climbing also got another iteration, which now, not only works better, but also looks much better - but still has a lot to improve.

So, from here, looking out, the player has one main point of interest, which leads them to go that way towards the monster and obelisk.

Obelisks are mysterious structures which normally look like this:

But throughout the game, the Obelisks change and start throbbing with this corrupted evil aura. The corruption can be removed however, which gives you additional information about the story and serve as warp points for easier traversal. There are different ways to clear a Obelisk from corruption, so it doesn’t get boring.

Clearing an Obelisk:

- Puzzle

- Defeat Boss

- Defeat Obelisk with nearby corrupted monsters attacking

Form here the player would probably go further down towards the enemies or to the house they see in the far, which is the blacksmith.

But before we go there, let’s talk a bit about the combat improvements. If you’re close to an enemy you now rotate and slightly move towards it. I also tried improving the animations and VFX, and created a crit hit-impact VFX for critical hits to be indicated.

In the video version, this is actually a still image as well, because my old combat logic would crash quite often, so since the last devlog I went and fixed all the broken code, and basically rewrote all of the combat logic.

Now the hit detection runs through Anim notifies instead in Tick (every frame).

Enemies (and you) can now be staggered/disrupted, besides regular hit reactions, when hit a certain amount of times - they cancel their current attack or task, and play a disrupted animation, which stuns them for a little while.

And when the player get hit, you now flash red.

For melee combat (but honestly for everything basically) I miss a lot of animations, or they are just bad. I did not spend too much time in animating this time, so I’ll try improving that in the future.

Bonuses

I implemented the Bonus System and you have now certain bonuses your weapons or potions could give you, like lifesteal, which heals you for a certain amount from the damage dealt to an enemy.

Weapon Bonuses

- Lifesteal

- Crit

- Pierce

Armor Bonuses

- Increased Move Speed

- Increased Attack Speed

- Health regeneration

- Tenacity agains negative status effects

- Decreased Energy drain

But these are not final, so I might add or remove in the future and there will also be special trait armor, think of, armor that lets you jump higher or lets you swim faster or lets you roll or double jump, or knockback resistance - there are a lot of ideas floating around.

These Bonuses can either be already attached to equipment when you get them or you can enchant them onto equipment at the blacksmith with ores.

Element System

The Element System also got a massive upgrade and was, just as the Bonus System, VERY bare bones in the last devlog, so I’m happy that I made some progress in both.

Elements are self explanatory and what they do, like Water > Fire in combat, Wet Actors would move slower and have get increased damage when hit with electric attacks and so on, but actually implementing it and applying the effect to an enemy that then starts burning, and receiving damage periodically, was very satisfying.

I also improved the Defense System, added some animation, VFX and timing for parrying, which for now is the same animation as the default defend, so it doesn’t look very distinct, but the enemy gets disrupted after a successfull parry and you have a opening to attack the enemy.

AI

In the last devlog, I wanted to improve the Enemy AI for the next devlogs, and I did manage to improve it and implement some fundamental stuff, like Environment Awareness, Ticket System and other things, but the AI is far from being good. So now the Enemies are not spamming anymore, but assess the environment, wait, attack if they have a ticket and so on.

I also improved the Bow and now it actually behaves like an actual Bow and Arrow.

But enough with that, lets finally go to the blacksmith - heading towards him, we will find a treasure cheast on top of this rock and it will, again, drop some loot.

Finally at the blacksmith. NPCs also improved a bit, they too, were a bit buggy before. But yeah, I implemented a simple upgrading system, no UI yet, though.

After the blacksmith, players can wander wherever they want to go, but for this video, we’ll just go further back here, where we can see another point of interest, with some kind of reward for the player.

Besides this, there is also a cave on one side and a monster camp on the other, as well as above the cave you have the whole top of the mountain to explore as well.

And yeah, this was most of the things I wanted to cover, and I hope that I can improve the game a lot until the next devlog. (I did somewhat, devlog 6 coming Dec 12, 2025, yes a year later)

This was posted originally `Dev 18, 2024` on YouTube, and is a slightly edited version written `Nov 21, 2025`.