Hey, we've decided to do a dev blog of Reclaim Earth, hopefully some of you will find it interesting and will leave feedback on how we can improve. At the moment we're unsure if it'll be a weekly thing or just when we have enough content to make an interesting blog. Either way, expect more! :)
Since the demo release we've been pretty busy. More features, bug fixes & pretty much everything is nicer. We've been working hard to take feedback and to implement everything which people have suggested. A lot of great ideas have been suggested as feedback, maybe not things you would even notice while playing it, but it all improves the overall experience.
Inventory
Last week we worked on the inventory system a lot, it's now had a complete overhaul. Instead of having the traditional icons when an item is equipped, we've decided to go with a more visual approach. Rather than explaining it I'll just show the before & after pictures.
Map
A few people who played the game said they struggled with figuring out where they are. This was partly reason to the fact the resolution was very low, but people also suggested a map would be good. So we added a map this week too. James did the art for it.
The map also is blocked off for regions you haven't explored yet, it's not in the screenshot above but I think it's a pretty cool screenshot so I'm using that one :)
Videos
Thanks to everyone who has made videos about the game. If you want to see them, they're at the bottom of the game page :) Chase has been super helpful with marketing stuff and getting feedback from people, there should also be some new music by him coming when we start on the second area, so look out for that :D
New Enemies
Previously the enemies we had needed updating, and James managed to make some new pixel art which looks awesome :D The crawler enemy is fairly similar to the previous one, just more buff and scary looking. Although for the robot, he went for a completely different approach which I like, I think it fits the game more. The last one looked more like it should belong in a medieval RPG or something, rather than a sci-fi game.
Powerups
We've been experimenting with powerups recently, one of the ideas were by Chase. His idea was that if you're finding the game a little too easy and think it needs more of a challenge, you can use the powerup and the enemies will go crazy at you, and become a LOT more powerful. The other was a focus powerup, where time goes in slow motion to represent how the player can now focus a lot better. Here's a video of the slow-mo effect.
Turns out itch doesn't support the <video> tag, so here's a link!
Illustration
James has also been working hard on the illustration for the game, we now have the first bits of colour in the art. We'll keep this updated throughout the dev blogs.
Smaller Details
I don't have a complete changelog (although I should probably make one) but there are a few smaller things which have been updated such as the resolution. We've doubled it because a few people were getting motion sickness from the low resolution-ness. We still want the game to be low-res, because that's how it started and it's what we had in mind when designing everything, but we think it was maybe a bit too low-res.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed the first Dev Blog, I think it's nice to see all of the progress in 1 post. If you have any opinions on the game or what we could improve on the blog, be sure to send us some feedback! If you haven't played Reclaim Earth yet, what are you waiting for? :D
The demo is free on PC, Mac & Linux. Everything on this blog will be available soon if it's not already out when you're reading this.
If you'd like to follow the team on Twitter, be sure to check out us out here.
Thanks for reading!