New Foundations –2025/12/14 – DEVLOG#32

Hey everyone!

Most of this week was dedicated to shaping the narrative form I want the game to have for the next update and beyond.
This meant a lot of story and lore tweaks, as well as important decision-making about structure and pacing.

1.     State of the Overhaul

This week was split in two parts.

First, I focused on applying the new visual direction to actual in-game assets, just like I did with the main hall last week. This time, I extended that work to several other backgrounds and new scenes, pushing them far enough that I can almost consider them final reference scenes.

After a lot of tweaking and experimentation, the goal shifted to something more concrete:

• confirm that everything works,
• fix the remaining problems,
• and establish an easy, repeatable pipeline.

The visual overhaul is still partly theoretical, but it is already actively reshaping many locations in the game.

The second part was originally meant to be narrative work, but it naturally evolved into defining a broader spiritual direction for the game, and that turned out to be for the best.

2.      Visual Before/After

Several interiors were worked on and brought up to the new standard:

• Kitchen
• Hall
• Bedroom

The work this week included:

• Final shader adjustments on large flat surfaces.
• Better handling of material reuse and instancing.
• Lighting refinements to improve depth and readability.
• A stabilized compositing setup that will be reused going forward.

I tried switching to Blender 5.0, but it kept breaking node setups (whether in geometry nodes, shader nodes, or compositing). So for now, I am sticking with Blender 4.5, which is stable and works fine for my needs.

I also noticed that GooEngine 4.4 was released, so I will take a look at it and see if it can fit back into my workflow.

Overall, these scenes now feel visually coherent with each other, which was the main objective before moving on to other locations.

As for the kitchen, I had to completely rethink it. I really liked the original design, but it was essentially a modern kitchen inside a medieval fantasy manor, which felt completely out of place. I reworked both the lighting and shaders to better match the manor’s overall atmosphere.

3.      Behind the Scenes

Nothing particularly new here this week, mostly bug fixing.

After spending so much time on 3D work and narrative, I almost forgot how to code properly, so that part was a bit rough. But everything is running fine again now.

4.      Narrative Progress

Narrative progress was the second and most intense part of this week.

I was surprised by how quickly I managed to rework Chapter 1, which is definitely a good sign.

However, I realized that the dream scene with Dream and Eryandel was introduced far too early in the game and gave the wrong impression of what ROTM is about. So I made the decision to remove it entirely.

That scene was replaced by something new, a scene I am extremely proud of.
It sets the right tone for the game and works as a much stronger transition between the prologue / Chapter 1 and the “real” start of the journey.

In many ways, it is a proof of concept inside the concept itself.

As much as I would love to talk about it in detail, I will not. I want players to rediscover it fresh when they open the game again for the first time.

5. Next Steps

Next week, the focus will be to:

• Continue applying the locked visual pipeline to the remaining manor interiors.
• Keep working on character sprites.
• Probably return to the prologue and create new scenes from scratch to give it the cinematic feel it deserves.

The foundation is now solid enough to build on — which is exactly what this phase was meant to achieve.

Thank you all for your continued support. More soon.

— ZephyrA0