Development Update #20

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the twentieth development update for Haunted: Attack of the Dead Men.  A lot has happened in the past month and to be honest, I've quite surprised myself with just how much I've been able to get done.  Not only was Map 13 finished in record time, but (almost) all of the work needed to polish Maps 5, 6, 7 and 8 has been done.  On top of that, the demo has been updated again, some extra finishing touches have been done for Maps 10, 11 and 12, a whole host of bugs have been fixed, and a new feature has been added to the main game to ensure that there will be a seamless transition from the demo.  What all this means is, the game is finally ready for its first beta release through Steam Playtest!  More on that later though, as there are a few videos to start this update off with.

Unlucky for Some

That's right, Map 13 is finally finished and it's time to reveal it.  Without further ado, here's the video I'm sure many of you have been waiting for since the last update...

Well that sure looks hard doesn't it?  I died a lot while recording this video, and I also died a lot while testing it.  Before you get scared off though, this was all recorded on the hardest difficulty, and it is designed to be punishing on that difficulty.  However, it is not trying to frustrate players either - all of these deaths were avoidable by learning the layout of the map.  The enemies in each area (each of the trials, if you will) always spawn in the same locations so they are predictable.  This means that once you learn where enemies will be coming from, you can anticipate and prepare yourself much better for each area which makes the level much easier.  It's a good idea to go secret hunting as well, there are eight secrets in this level and each of them will help you a lot with the next area.

You've probably also noticed the last few floors are... interesting, to say the least.  Aren't we supposed to be miles and miles underground down here?  How can we possibly end up going outside?  Who knows?  Who cares?  It's supposed to be hell!

That background though, that's quite something.  This map has the unique feature of "dynamic fog", where the fog colour is slowly blended from the blues of Map 12 to this nice shade of red at the bottom.  I think it really completes the look of these last few areas.

For those of you who read the previous updates on the final boss (here and here) and are now curious, this new look has lead to some changes to Map 14's visuals as well...

I think this arena looks a lot more menacing than before, but that's just me.  Let me know what you think of this change!

The Second Act

As promised, I also have some new gameplay footage of Maps 5, 6, 7 and 8.  Some of this is just a refresh of older clips and videos, but this video shows off some areas of Maps 7 and 8 that have really only been hinted at before.  Specifically, this includes the inside of the station in Map 7 (which was previously a bit bare-bones), the fights in the train carriages (which were a bit buggy before!) and also the full hundred-man fight in Map 8, which I'm sure many of you have been curious to see in action.

It will be interesting to see how people react to these levels when the game opens up to a full closed beta.  Speaking of which...

What's Next

With all but the secret level finished, plus all the polish that's been done on it over the past couple of months, the game is finally in a decent enough shape for more players to actually try it in a beta release.  I have just started investigating what I need to do to make use of the Steam Playtest feature for this and I hope to have something ready by the end of this week!  Unfortunately, since itch.io doesn't offer a similar feature those players who want to play the game DRM-free will have to wait until the final release in order to do so.

With 6th August only two months away, there can't be a whole lot left to do right?  That does seem to be the case, so I figured that now would be a good time to provide a more in-depth roadmap containing exactly what features are going to be added in this time.

• Implement Map 15
• Implement the rest of the achievements (there's only about ~15 left now)
• Implement the "beastiary" (the screen that shows the descriptions of all the enemies)
• Implement the 3 bonus difficulties
• Touch up the enemy sprites a bit (5 are left to do)
• Implement a secret "bad" ending
• Record some custom voice lines for the final boss
• Add an ending cutscene that plays while the end-game text is displayed

That isn't a lot, and hopefully it won't take me all of the time I have left before release to implement it all.  However, I did cut a few small features from this initial release:

• Achievement icons - this will be fairly time consuming as there are going to be around 54 to do
• Hats - each difficulty was supposed to get a corresponding "hat" for the player character to wear.  For example, Feldmarschall would give the player a very fancy fur hat with the "deaths head" insignia on it like a true Prussian field marshal.  These would be visible in both the main menu and on the player character in the HUD

These two features were considered not worth delaying the game over as they are really only cosmetic things that won't affect the gameplay.  However, the above roadmap does not account for any major issues that may come up as a result of the beta period.  If such issues arise that cause the game to be delayed until the backup date in September, then I likely will have the time to implement those little extras for the initial release.

Anyway, that's it for this update!  Next month you can look forward to the reveal of the game's final level, Map 15 - Dungeons and Draugr, the secret level.  Until then, thanks for reading!