StarvingFox Studio

Devlog 22

Pierre — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 08:46:53 +0000

SMYS finally released on Steam Early Access after almost 3 years of development, and has received its firsts 3 major updates already.

Vanta Black – Adding AI to the game and a new Vanta Black game mode
Arsenal – Adding new bonuses and the game configurator
Yums Book – Adding a yumyum collection system, achievements, and Steam Cloud

Now that the main feature updates are live, we’ll be taking a break on the roadmap to focus on polishing updates to refine what is already available in the game. It desperately needs a new trailer and soundtracks, so we’ll start with that as the first big polishing update, then we’ll improve little things here and there. Feel free to use the feedback panel located in the main menu of the game to share with us what you’d like to be improved.

Also we think the game would benefit in having more picking phases so we’ll probably add a few nodes to the roadmap as we progress towards 1.0.

New asset releases

Voxel – Nature Bundle released on May 27th, it includes Voxel Meadow, Voxel Mountain Forest and Voxel Desert. Getting the bundle instead of buying each asset separately saves you 33% on the total price.

It’s currently available on the Unity Assetstore and the Unreal Marketplace.

Voxel – Simple Dungeons released on July 13th, it’s a lighter version of Voxel Dungeons and offers similar looking models but way more optimized, which makes it my first voxel asset to be usable for mobile games. I’ve made a little prototype and it’s running 90+ fps on a low end device.

It’s currently available on the Unity Assetstore, the Unreal Marketplace and Itch.

Voxel – Simple Nature released on September 1st, it’s a mobile ready nature voxel asset pack. The Unreal version has more models for now as I needed to make an update to fit in the store guidelines to publish it, the update is on its way for the Unity Assetstore and should be available soon.

It’s currently available on the Unity Assetstore, the Unreal Marketplace and Itch.

Voxel – Classroom released on September 4th.

It’s currently available on the Unity Assetstore, the Unreal Marketplace and Itch.

Voxel – American Diner released on September 4th.

It’s currently available on the Unity Assetstore, the Unreal Marketplace and Itch.

Itch voxel assets port

All of my voxel assets have been published on Itch earlier this year following the recurring request for source files that have now been added to every single one of my voxel assets, both on the Unity Assetstore and on Itch.

You can check out my Itch publisher page here : https://starvingfoxstudio.itch.io/

I also recently updated my website assets’ page, which on you can now see and access every asset on every store they are available.

Unexpected events

With all the Unity fiasco happening, I had to change my plans and pause everything I was doing to start porting all of my voxel assets to the Unreal Marketplace.

I had it planned for January 2024, but the odds of Unity changing the rules again, so bad that I would be at risk, spiked to a point I felt the need to have more backup plans as fast as possible. This event also made developers skeptical, which impacted asset sales on the store.

Now that leadership has changed, I hope Unity will get back on track, especially considering the amount of ungoing projects I have with Unity that are years into development and that would be too costly to migrate to other engines.

I still need to port Voxel Planets and Voxel Modular Chalet on the Unreal Marketplace, unfortunately I’m afraid Voxel Planets will not make it as the store guidelines require at least 50 models in a pack to be published (which Voxel Planets does not have), I will however add the Unreal Project to the package you can buy on my Itch page. On the other hand, I had an update planned for Voxel Modular Chalet so it will be ported once it’s ready.

All of my mobile apps monetization have been moved from Unity Ads to Admob, which led to some crashes here and there the first day, but I eventually fixed enough stuff that it’s stable again. Somehow switching to another ad provider cut all my apps crashes by half and increased my ads revenue. I still need to re-enable some features that were not working due to the switch but I guess this change was a good decision in the end.

The Unreal community has been welcoming and I’m quite a fan of the publishing process, this is definitely the engine I’ll switch to once I’m comfortable enough with it to start a long time project.

Devlog 21

Pierre — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 11:18:25 +0000

These last few months have been pretty intense for SMYS, we started the year with a graphics update for the game while preparing the february’s Steam Next Fest, then using all the feedback we received we had to prepare the game for Early Access, it’s been a wild ride to say the least !

Graphics Update -

There have been multiple graphics updates for the game since the start of its development, and I think we’re now pretty close to our final look. We left the vector style we were sticking to for a more hand-drawn organic style with outlines.

Preparing for the festival -

This graphics update was not planned as we were already preparing for the Steam Next Fest, and the demo trailer was already done, which led to the Steam page having different graphics in the trailer and on the screenshots. This difference already being misleading we decided to go for description headers featuring elements that were not even yet in the game : Yumyums. Those are a big part of SMYS’ lore that is not yet public as we’re focusing on gameplay first, but anyway the Steam page was kinda weird entering the festival, which fortunately no one noticed.

Hours of testing and feedback from the demo kept us busy to the very last minute before the festival and we did not have enough time to fix everything before it started. Minor issues were encountered by players during the festival so I think we did a decent job.

I also set up a dedicated page for the game so everything about it was regrouped in one place, you can check it out here.

Steam Next Fest - February 2023 -

Let’s get the numbers out right of the gate : SMYS started the festival with around 250 wishlists, and ended with close to 1100 wishlists. Considering the difficulty it is to market a game without online multiplayer I think it’s a great result.

The main feedback we got from the festival was not having enough tutorials and not being able to understand how to play right away, even though I added short tutorials before each picking phase and a panel with all the controls before the festival. The thing is the quick tutorials were easily skippable and the controls panel was only available in the pause menu. I even saw people playing without ever using a bonus or not rotating a bloc for 20+ minutes which told us right away there was an issue.

The overall readability was clearly bad and as developers having already played hundreds of hours we miserably failed to understand how hard it was to jump into the game as a first time player. We did test the game with first time players before the festival, but as we were doing stuff they could see things were possible and they did not really have to understand them by themselves, they could ask while playing.

So on the second day of the festival a new race began : making a dedicated tutorials panel for a mid-festival update and improve readability as much as possible. It was hard, but I made it in time, unfortunately most players we got during the festival were from the first 3 days, which prevented the game to get enough feedback with the new panel available to know how big of a difference it made.

Festival Feedback -

Apart from the tutorials and readability, we were pleasantly surprised with the feedback we received. Every suggestion we received was on point and made it to our to-do-list or has been added to the game already. It really helped us getting the game more stable and easy to pick up.

SMYS releasing in Early Access -

We decided to release SMYS in Early Access after the festival because we realized how hard it was to balance the game with so many different players trying it. We can’t go blind and balance the game without proper feedback from the community as we are adding new content.

The game is planned to release in Early Access on May 3rd with :

Building Phases : Meadawn and Jungle Night
Picking Phases : Canons, Trampolines and Thorn Fields
Game Modes : Local Multiplayer and Time Attack
Bonuses : Bomb, Upside Down, Rotation Locker and Weight Overload

Here is the roadmap for Early Access as we advance towards 1.0 release :

As you can see Online Multiplayer is at the very end of the list, BUT, as we noticed a lot of players asking for it, I already started working on it and it might actually make it to the game faster than planned. If you have a decent internet connection Steam Remote is available for the game right now.

The game will launch with a 9.99$ price tag and the price will increase when exiting Early Access. It is really important to us that early supporters get a price reduction as it is what allows us to work on the game without having to spend time on other projects to get fundings. To be clear, whatever the fundings we receive from Early Access sales the game will make it to 1.0, the only difference is the time it will take.

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Since the last devlog, 3 new assets were published on the Unity Assetstore : Voxel Meadow, Voxel Mountain Forest, and Voxel Desert. These 3 assets will be part of a bundle that is currently sitting in the review queue of the store and that I hope to release late May / early June.

Voxel Meadow released on December 16th 2022, it is the first pack meant to replace Voxel Nature.

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Voxel Mountain Forest released on February 18th 2023, it is the second pack meant to replace Voxel Nature.

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Voxel Desert released on April 7th 2023, a desert environment pack with cactuses, rocks and dead trees.

Devlog 20

Pierre — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 13:24:10 +0000

SMYS now has a Steam page, it’s been up for a few months now and I’ve been able to collect a few wishlists. Feel free to wishlist if you haven’t yet.

I’ve been working on a demo to participate in the next Steam Next Fest coming up in a few months, and I also made a short trailer for it. It’s maybe a bit too short and I realize that it may be hard to understand precisely what the game is about, but it will allow me to get some feedback for the final official trailer.

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The game has reached its final state, and the name, formerly AHEAD, is now Libe.

Rebranding, Linux support, optimization, new graphics, new trailer,… a lot of work has been done for this last update, you can find all about it in this long post I published on Steam : https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1330500/view/5641338588657581438

Releasing the game’s soundtrack has also always been something I wanted to do, so here it is proposed as a DLC for the game on Steam for just a few more cents using the game bundle Game+OST.

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Voxel Sushi Bar released on July 9th 2022, a restaurant interior pack themed after chinese and japanese establishments.

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Voxel Nature received a winter themed update, basically doubling the number of prefabs including versions with snow on top. I first tried to had snow using a custom shader but the results were pretty mediocre and I think it looks way better with dedicated snow blocs on top, and the geometry is about the same so it doesn’t impact performances.

Working on an update for Voxel Nature I ran into an issue : this pack theme is too general and choosing which direction to go in when working on updates is difficult.

So I decided to depreciate the asset early 2023 and split it into 2 new nature themed asset packs in which the models of Voxel Nature will be included. Owners of Voxel Nature on depreciation date will receive the 2 new assets for free. The price of the 2 assets combined will exceed the current price of Voxel Nature so needless to say it’s a great time to acquire the asset.

On top of Voxel Nature’s models, the 2 new assets will have optimized custom shaders, subsurface scattering, and a ton of new models. For instance Voxel Nature features 9 tree models for now, and the first asset to replace Voxel Nature, Voxel Meadow, features already 60+ tree models, plus a lot more new models like tree trunks, mushrooms, flowers,… and that’s not counting the snow variants.

The point of all of this is to extend drastically the creation possibilities by adding loads of new quality models while staying in a set theme, which will also allow devs to purchase what they really need.

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Voxel Camping released on October 18th 2022, it is a small asset pack meant to be used with other environment packs like Voxel Nature.

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Defense of Humanity : Major Changes

This project has been under development for around 5 years now, it’s been put on hold multiple times and I’ve had the chance to change the gameplay radically everytime for the better. The project had an advanced prototype really close to what I wanted it to be, unfortunately the game still felt like there was something off even at its best.

It is when I started having ideas for sequels and that the game design documents for these future projects reached an advanced point that I think I understood what was the real issue with the game : the genre.

While the game had some original gameplay ideas as a 2.5D action platformer/tower defense, it was not enough. And as the sequels were all RTS games, it was so weird thinking about how confused the players of the first game would be, seeing all the sequels were too far from the first project gameplay wise. So I’m officially changing the game genre to a RTS.

I already have a lot done thanks to all these years prototyping RTS systems, from production management to units micro-management, grid building systems, procedural map generation and a ton more. A prototype only took a week to set up and it already feels better than the advanced prototype I had before the genre switch.

I’m on for a wild ride and I can’t wait to work on this project. All I need to do now, and that’s quite an understatement, is find a budget, so I might have to work on other projects before this huge one to be able to sustain myself and reach a playable demo I can show to publishers and investors.

Devlog 19

Pierre — Wed, 25 May 2022 09:45:35 +0000

URP Support Update

A major update has been published to all my assets on the Unity Assetstore : URP support!

All the different shaders used for my voxel assets have been re-done in URP and you can now switch between the different render pipelines by opening the corresponding material package located in each asset pack under Models/Materials/RenderPipelines.

I am not planning on adding HDRP support, and I just removed it from Voxel Planets which was the only asset pack supporting it.

From now on, each new voxel asset pack will come with both Built-in and URP support.

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Pixel Assets

I talked about it a while ago, and it is finally happening!

I am working on porting my voxel assets to 2D to be used on their own, or along the voxel packs of the same themes. I have seen great performance increase from using 2D assets for backgrounds in my voxel game projects, similar to what you would get with impostors or LODs.

The first 2 packs that will be published will be Pixel Planets, then Pixel Nature shortly after.

As I’m not working from scratch to make these assets, their price will be lower than the voxel assets of the same theme, something like 50% cheaper. Also I think it would be great if owners of the voxel packs could get the corresponding Pixel pack (e.g. Voxel Nature => Pixel Nature) for even a cheaper price so I’ll look into setting up a discount in the store once they are published.

Here are some WIP shots at Pixel Planets and Pixel Nature :

Devlog 18

Pierre — Thu, 12 May 2022 09:57:10 +0000

As I recently mainly published assets, I felt like it would be a great time to set up a newsletter specifically for these.
So you can now join my Unity Assetstore newsletter HERE.

You’ll be notified at least a week before an asset is published to the store so you can grab it with the launch discount when it’s available.
You’ll also have a say on what the next assets will be as I have many assets planned but not a clear idea of what developers really need right now, so I’d appreciate your feedback on what assets you actually need, or what I could improve on the already released ones.

If you’re still hesitating about whether or not you should buy my assets you can now have a taste of my work.
By joining the newsletter you’ll receive a free voxel sample pack, featuring unique models to go along my paid assets. You’ll be able to see if the quality of my assets meets your expectations and how I structure my packages.

Here are some shots at this free sample pack 1.0 :

You can find more screenshots on the newsletter joining page.

Everytime I publish a new voxel asset pack on the assetstore, a new unique model themed after this new pack will be added to the free sample pack.

Devlog 17

Pierre — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 15:48:42 +0000

It’s been a while since the last devlog, and a lot of projects have been released since. I have been working mostly on assets so let’s talk about these first, and then I’ll finish with some progress I’ve made on SMYS, CastleQuest, and what’s coming up later this year.

The development of Voxel Modular Chalet started in early december 2020, and this unfortunately is the asset I spent the most time on, ever. Being my first modular asset I wanted it to be as complete as convenient, and I ended up overscaling the project REAL HARD. At some point the asset contained OVER 16000 bloc prefabs and while being as complete as it could be, it was far from convenient for someone importing the asset for the first time.

The asset also lacked optimization and I decided to do a first refactor, then a second one… 6 months had passed by and I still wasn’t statisfied with the state of the project. It still had 6000+ prefabs and was unconvenient to use. So even if the asset was pretty much ready for publishing I decided to hold on and move to another project : Voxel Nature.

I learned my lessons and made an asset that way more people would actually have a need for, went straight to the point and set myself a prefab limit right at the start. Even with the water shader I included and hadn’t planned at the start it took me 2 months to finish and I was proud of how it looked.

I also learned a lot about optimization during Voxel Nature’s development, squeezing more than 4 times the performances I had importing my models straight out of Magica Voxel. (https://twitter.com/i/status/1452612006620680195)

I then released Voxel Interiors Vol.1 two months later, then Voxel Dungeons 4 months later… 2021 passed by and I felt like I only got work done from July to December.

We are now in 2022 and Voxel Modular Chalet FINALLY released on March 19th! Making great use of everything I learned along the way, I did an ultimate refactor of Voxel Modular Chalet, reducing the amount of prefabs from 6000+ to 350~. It is now optimized and easy to use, and even though I spent 8 months total on this asset I feel like I did accomplish something in the end.

Voxel Nature released on November 22nd 2021, this is my most popular asset on the store to this day even though it is one with the least amount of prefabs in it.

To me this asset is lacking content and while you can easily create beautiful landscapes with the included models it would benefit an update. I have a huge todolist for this asset and 2 updates are already planned in 2022, adding more models and improving the existing content.

Once I feel the asset is not lacking content anymore I am planning to rise the price of the asset which is sitting as low as 20$ for the moment.

Voxel Interiors Vol.1 released on December 23rd 2021, it is the first interior/prop asset I have made and I think it turned out pretty nice!

I’m already planning on doing different styles of furnitures in the future so that’s why it is stated as « Volume.1 ».

Voxel Dungeons released on February 20th 2022, it is my biggest asset so far with over 1000 prefabs included on release.

To be honest I’m extremely surprised how optimized this one turned out to be, after some proper testing with a lightmap and a few scripts running in the demo scene the framerate skyrockets and shows plenty of room for gameplay logic. I still won’t use it for a mobile game because voxel tend to be expensive in general but I might give it a try just out of curiosity.

It already feels super solid and I have a huge todolist for potential updates, can’t wait to add more content to this asset.

After learning so much about optimization I couldn’t let my first asset as it was, it received a huge optimization update, as well as new models : asteroids!

I’m thinking about updating the current planet shader to incluse atmosphere simulation, an update should be available later this year.

Game Projects and Coming up this year

Some progress has been made on SMYS, in particular on the gameplay and main interaction system, and I’m currently working on getting the Steam page up so it might be available soon-ish.

CastleQuest has been paused and I’m actually thinking about bringing back my first big game project Defense of Humanity as my main game project, it is way more creative and original in its concept and gameplay than CastleQuest and I’m planning on getting an early access version ready for this year to secure fundings and to be able to go full-time on this project. I need at the bare minimum 50k to finish the game and I don’t think I’ll be able to fund it myself so let’s hope I can find a publisher or that early access sales can make up for it, or both if I’m optimistic.

About assets I have already started working on a new one, Voxel City! I have still no idea when it will be released but this year for sure. I’m also working on releasing Pixel versions of my released Voxel assets, Pixel Planets and Pixel Nature are almost ready!

I’m also working on a free asset pack to be released this year, containing a unique asset themed after each one of my already published Voxel assets.

Thank you for reading, see you on the next devlog!

Devlog 16

Pierre — Mon, 16 Nov 2020 18:40:42 +0000

Three projects released

This project is finally coming to an end, after an initial release on Android, then Steam, and recently Itch.io, I gathered players feedback for a post-release update bringing new features people asked for.

I’m still looking to port the game to Linux, and a Switch release is a possibility but no precise date for now.

• Google Play Store Page •
• Steam Store Page •
• Itch.io Store Page •

Being familiar with quiz games, I decided to make another one, this time on movies.

Since its release in July, more than 1500 people already downloaded Movie Quiz and this number keeps growing. More movies are added to the app every month with a priority to what the users ask for. This month, the app will surpass 100 quizzes, for a total of over 1000 questions on movies of all types from action blockbusters to japanese animation.

• Google Play Download Page •

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VoxelPlanets is available on the Unity AssetStore and is the first of hopefully many assets I’ll be publishing. The theme for the next one still remains a mystery but you can take a look once from time to time at the Assets page to see if the In Development caption has been updated.

• Unity Asset Store Page •

After publishing 3 projects, SMYS was supposed to be my new main focus until its release, but as it is a collab project and not everybody working on this is a fulltime developer, I ended up having most of my tasks completed and being too far ahead because of how much time I was able to work on the project compared to others. Therefore, I decided to set this game as a side project.

Here are some screenshots of the current state of the game :

I finally finished the map design of the entire game, and everything have been digitalized and ported to Unity. Next is gray-boxing the everything to have a proper idea of how the game scales, and especially to be able to start programming map interaction systems, AI, and Character Controllers.

Experiments

I was previously experimenting with sim-building and map generation in 2D, but this little project continued escalating and I decided to go from 2D pixelart to 3D voxel as i’m most familiar with voxels and I believe this game will benefit from this change. The building and map generation being pretty much done, it’s now time to turn this into an RTS and add units we can interact with, so lately I’ve been experimenting with crowd simulation. It’s still not perfect, but I believe it reached a point I’m somewhat satisfied. I can’t wait to put everything together.

Robot model used for prototyping from Quaternius.

StarvingFox Studio Website

A quick update on some changes I’ve been doing recently on the website : Games and Assets are no longer displayed on the homepage and have their dedicated pages you can access using the navigation menu at the top right of the website. There might not be much content on the assets page for the moment, but more assets are in development and will be added to the page as soon as they are available.

Devlog 15

Pierre — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:55:01 +0000

Welcome to the new StarvingFox Studio Website

It took a while, but I finally finished the revamp! As the website is not hosted on wordpress servers anymore, I now have pretty much full controll on the design and customizability of the website.

Beside the new design, every released game has now a dedicated page on which you can access the different download pages according to the games’ platforms, specific informations related to the game, and a press-kit download button for anyone willing to share the game on his own website or media platform.

First there was a page dedicated to every project I am currently working on, but as there was nothing on their dedicated page beside some infos about the game, it felt meaningless and I decided to keep it down to the games that are currently available.

I did also set up a mailing list you can join to be notified everytime something important happens, like a game or asset release, or a new devlog. As these happen once in a while it won’t be spammy at all, I’d say maybe around 10 mails per year considering I release between 1 and 3 games per year, and a new devlog pop up every 2 months ish.

Release date

The game will be officially released on Steam August 8th 2020. Watch the new trailer :

What's different from the Android version

The main difference is of course the absence of advertisement, but this also impacts game mechanics as cancelling your last move, beeing now limited to 5 uses per level, or skipping the level, now free of use.

Some other noteworthy differences :

Post Processing Effects
Settings Menu
More Soundtracks
Partial Controller Support (not working in the settings menu)
Steam Achievements
Better Graphics

>>> STEAM PAGE <<<

This game is the first I’ve ever published and it has been around for a while now on the Google Play Store, so as I was redesigning the entire app I decided to include English translation.

With almost 50.000 downloads and a rating of 4.7/5 out of 800 ratings to this day, it is my most popular game so far and I’m glad it is now available for everyone.

The translation might not be perfect and I’d appreciate any feedback on this.

>>> GOOGLE PLAY STORE <<<

The final asset, the Moon, is finished, and I also reworked Mars, Uranus, and Saturn models.

This asset pack is finally ready for publishing and will be available soon.

The graphic redesign of DoH has been paused due to the numerous recent releases, it will be resumed in August.

Taking a step back from this project, I think the game graphics might be too generic, or common to what other developers are doing at the moment. I think it is due to the fact half of the models in the game come from Synty Studios asset packs and as other games use the same assets it just doesn’t feel right to me anymore, I need to find a proper identity for the game.

That said, I decided to not use Synty Studios assets as they come out of the box, but rather use them as a base material to still get a time boost and at the same time have the game to look like no other. It is quite time consuming as Synty Studios models are not designed to be modified or customized, this means I have to import each model into Blender to rework the model, then redefine UV maps, then import each model into Substance Painter for texturing, then import the new model into Unity.

I think I’m still getting a slight time boost doing all this, even if I have to rework most of the models to get a decent UV mapping I might spend half the time I would spend on modeling these from scratch. So let’s say if modeling represent 30 to 40 % of the work on each model and I have to spend half of this time reworking the model for UV mapping, and as Synty Studios models represent half of the assets I use in the game, in the end I still get a 7,5 to 10 % time boost on 3D models.

Here’s a look at a room I reworked :

I’m quite comfortable making lowpoly assets and no matter the direction this project take I feel confident about the final look of the game.

Experiments

I’ve been working on grid systems for quite a long time now, starting with square grids, then hexagrids, and now back to another square grid system. With the soon release of 3 of my projects I think it might be the time to turn these systems into something. I first thought about an Android game, but writting a paper on the core game mechanics has rapidly turned this idea into a PC game as the amount of content can’t suit a mobile game anymore.

It was at first a simple medieval builder/management game but then I made an entire tech-tree, added seasons, deseases, military and diplomacy. On paper this is quite a large game and I’d have to find a way to split it or cut things out to be able to release it. I’ve been wanting to make a building-management game for a while, and I hope this time has come, more infos on this to-be-project soon.

Devlog 14

Pierre — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 04:58:08 +0000

The code refactor is coming to an end, and what I can say is that, beside being way more optimized, the game has changed A LOT.

To list a few changes :

The inventory has been expanded to 5 slots (instead of 2)
No more health doors, every health related item will now be stored in the inventory and usable at any moment.
New item (coop only) : Life Syringe, used to revive your friend during a wave.
No more random guns, albeit you can still buy a random gun for a mid-range price, every gun will be available in the Item store. These will still spawn on gun doors all around the map, each door having 3 slots and every gun bought once can be picked by both players in coop.
All health doors replaced by gun doors.
Both the Upgrade Store and the Item Store are now already built on every level when starting the game.
Some upgrades have been removed from the game as they were never used.
No more stamina
Separate banks in coop

I’ve been really inspired to rework the current models of the game and I can’t wait to start building the new face of the game once I’m done with the code refactor.

The asset is finally close to being ready for a release, will be available : Earth (and the Moon), Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Mercury, Venus and Mars.

I wish to publish it on the Unity Asset Store in the first place, then Itch.io. As I have very little experience with Unreal, nothing is planned yet for the Unreal Marketplace, but it is not to exclude in the future.

3 assets will be available : Voxel Planets, Pixel Planets, and a discounted pack with both Voxel Planets and Pixel Planets.

The last « planet » I’m currently working on for this asset is the Moon.

Depending of how it goes with the publishing process on the Unity Asset Store, it should be available April or May 2020.

With Defense of Humanity’s code refactor and the release of Voxel Planets approaching, the prioty has shifted off CastleQuest and will remain as it is until Defense of Humanity’s graphics rework is done.

If everything goes according to plan, I should get back on working on CastleQuest once Voxel Planets is published, around April/May.

The game is most likely ready for a PC release at this point, just need to take time to add some more soundtracks, rework the menus and port it.

The PC release is planned for the second half of 2020, not yet decided on which store.

Devlog 13

Pierre — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 04:38:21 +0000

Ahead reached over 100 players

So far the recent reviews have been 100% positive. Thanks to the huge feedback since the initial release I feel like I managed to improve the game to a point it is getting ready for a PC release.

I’m currently working on adding more soundtracks and improving the menus to start working on the PC port.

Download the game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.StarvingFoxStudio.Ahead

With Casler Graphics, we recently announced a couch multiplayer game called SMYS (Show Me Your Stairs).

For now it is planned as a local multiplayer game only, but an online networking solution has been discussed and might come later to facilitate connectivity between players.

We wish to publish this game during the first half of 2020, and a month before the release date, we have planned to run a closed beta to collect players feedback. We’ll give away beta keys on Twitter so stay tuned.

A huge progress on the level design have been made, with new rooms already prototyped in the game engine, and much more on paper waiting to be built. The 50% milestep have been passed.

An entire code refactor have been recently started and as the project have been on hold for a long time (~6 months), it allowed me to step back and get some fresh ideas to improve the game.

A lot has changed since the beggining of the refactor process and I gotta say the project is heading in a way better direction thanks to this break.

More news coming as soon as the code refactor ends.

Experiments

I’ve been playing around with grid systems for a long time, but I recently had the pleasure to experiment with procedural hexagrid terrain generation.

This was a real pleasure to build and it turned into a game ready system I’ll certainly use in a future project.