Category: Eldritch 2

Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.

Today I finally tackled the Anxiety system. I wrote about it two years ago, and the basic concept has existed in the game for a long time, but it hadn’t actually done anything yet.

I’m keeping it pretty simple. Anxiety is a gameplay resource which the player needs to manage. It increases whenever the player takes damage or does certain stressful actions. When the player’s Anxiety reaches a threshold, NPCs who would normally be neutral will now aggro on sight. Anxiety can be reduced by smoking cigarettes, at the expense of health. (Incidentally, I had to update the content survey on Steam because of the inclusion of tobacco, pushing the game to a 12+ rating in Brazil. Oh well!)

Later, when I build out the “main quest” for the game’s “true ending”, I intend to add another stricter Anxiety threshold check, requiring the player to not only complete all the required main quest goals, but do it expertly, without accumulating Anxiety.

Since I was already working on this, I also decided to finally add all the food items that interact with the same Health/Anxiety space: meat and fruit (+1 HP), rotten meat and toxic fruit (random chance of +/-1 HP), and coffee (+1 HP and +1 Anxiety). I haven’t done any of the art or audio for those items yet, but the dungeons and shops are now populated with a lot more items, and Eldritch 2 is feeling closer and closer to the target experience.

Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.

We’re so back! The first half of June was not my most productive, but I’ve made up for it in the last week. I did a bunch of work over the weekend polishing the tripwires I mentioned in my last devlog, and added a new player power to place tripwires.

I implemented a couple of new pieces of gear (Swift Boots and Spring Boots) along with some stat mod support to let them let the player bypass spike traps and tripwires respectively. That led me to also add a Double Jump aspect, and the combo of Spring Boots and Double Jump is ridiculously fun.

I also brought back the body dragging stuff from NEON STRUCT (and my Thief homage game jam Li’l Taffer) because even though Eldritch 2 isn’t a hardcore stealth game, it seems like the sort of thing players might expect to be able to do. And then I realized it would be cooler if you could still use your left-hand powers while dragging bodies, so I did that.

I also did a bunch of less exciting things regarding tutorials and the in-game map and just generally cleaning up a bunch of messy scripts and technical debt. It was a productive week, and I’m having a lot of fun working on this game again!

Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.

I finally had a reasonably productive week after a little bit of downtime.

• Moved glowing cave mushrooms from floors to walls, to distinguish them from pickups
• Fixed friendly/neutral NPCs being unintentionally hit by friendly fire when they are near the player’s melee attacks
• Added some points of interest around Innsmouth to hopefully address players getting disoriented
• Reimplemented tripwires!

Tripwires in the original Eldritch were always aligned along one axis (X, Y, or Z), which worked fine because the worlds were built of voxels and everything in my engine uses axis-aligned bounding boxes for collision because it’s cheap and easy. I just scaled a box mesh to span their range, and checked for collision overlaps the same way I would with any other entities.

That doesn’t work anymore, because there are angled surfaces in the world of Eldritch 2. I needed to rewrite the component from the ground up to account for that. I was on the fence about whether to bring tripwires back at all—they make great traps for level design, but the tripwire gun in the first game wasn’t a very popular weapon—but I finally decided that it was the right thing to do.

There’s a few things left to do: mostly I need to also reimplement the player’s Disarm interaction, and then add a bit more VFX/SFX polish. But hey, it’s one little step closer to the game being done!

(Oh also they’re magic now. They probably won’t be neon pink like this, but something along these lines:)

Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.

No real progress to report this week, but I’m posting here for accountability anyway. Most of this week ended up being eaten by other projects, my job search, and learning how to do electrical HVAC work so I could get my air conditioner working again. Hey, if video games don’t work out, maybe I can pivot into a career that genAI can’t steal.

Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.

Hey, I did the thing! I got the whole unlock/progression system in Eldritch 2 finished this week, along with all the associated UI. It took a lot longer than I expected, mostly because my UI system is trash and I would love to rebuild it if I had the time. Anyway, it’s done, which closes the main loop of the game!

A lot of the rest of my week was spent on some freelance work and my ongoing job search, but I’m eager to get back to building a pitch deck for Eldritch 2 now that I’ve closed that main loop and can demonstrate it. This has been a weird year, and I don’t know if this game will become my full-time job or remain a side project, but I’m having fun working on it.