Sundered Helix Devlog #1

Sundered Helix is the game that I made for the Dungeon Crawler Jam 2023. In keeping with the rules of the jam, you explore a dungeon in first person view with movement locked to a square grid. In this game the combat is real time with an ATB-inspired ACT bar that limits how often your party members can attack or cast spells.

Since the Jam ended I've been working on updating Sundered Helix to a version 1.1 to fix bugs and quality of life issues. I had a lot of things that I wanted to put in the game that did not make it in before the jam ended. Originally, version was supposed to release 'soon after' the voting period for the jam had ended. That was two months ago.

During the one week that the Jam ran for, I had taken those days off of my full-time job as vacation days, so I got a lot of things done in a fairly short time. I took a break from game dev almost completely during the voting period of the Jam since we were not supposed to add any updates during that time. I did get into the swing of working on this project after my break, but it still took longer than anticipated to update the game.

This version 1.1 that I just released has fix most, but not all, of the bugs that I am currently aware of. It also makes a lot of changes to the controls and UI of the game to be a smoother experience for the player than when it first released. I am planning on fixing the last of the bugs I am aware of with version 1.2.

One of those changes is how you attack enemies.  Previously, you would click the character portrait of one party member, then select the option from the list, then select target.  Now, you click on the enemy and a window appears telling you what info you know about the enemy and showing several options.  You can have all party members 'Quick Attack' which will use melee weapons if they have them or ranged if they don't have a melee option.  Quick Attack does not use your spells or throwing weapons.

Selecting a specific party member will give you options based on what they have available to them.  So, if we click on Bianca we get:

This pop-up menu is also used for opening chests.  I need to update that version of the UI to tell the player if the chest is locked or not and give some more info about how well each member would be able to pick that lock.

Going forward I want each release to add a bit more to the dungeons that are present in the game. Not only making them bigger, but also more interesting to explore. I don't want to make them longer only for the sake of saying they are longer. I am taking this project one step at a time to make the best dungeon crawler I can. There are some pieces of art in the game that are still placeholders at this time. Treasure chests and some of the weapons are the most noticeable things that do not have specific art assets and are just colored boxes. That art is currently being worked on by the same artist who made all the other art for this project during the Jam. Those assets will be integrated as they are available.

One of the new features that I added in is damage types, but right now they don't serve much use to the player. In the future there will be a larger variety of enemies to face and options for the player to use all the different damage types. Currently, there are a number of damage types that technically exist, but there is no way to inflict them. I've also added skill and spell trainers to the town menu. These trainers will not likely be of that much use to you right now though. The pacing of the game is... less than ideal. That is something that I want to sort out as we move along though.

I'm just going to wrap up this Devlog by saying that there is a lot that I know I want to do with this game and equally a lot that I am still debating with myself about. For now, I am going to focus on what I know I want to do.