Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
I don’t have a lot to share today; my week has been a little scattered between Eldritch 2 work, job search stuff, and a healthy amount of Real Life™.
Most of my work on Eldritch 2 this week has been in preparation for pitching to publishers/funds. Pitching is one of the few things in game development that I’ve never done before, so I’ve had to do a lot of research (with a little help from my friends) to make sure I know what to present. I still do not actually have a deck ready to go, but I feel confident in the budget and timeline.
I’m hoping to wrap that up today or this weekend, and get back to development next week. I want to start building out the meta/progression systems of Eldritch 2. It’s a key part of the game’s main quest, and a feature that wasn’t present in the original game, and it could dramatically change the way the game plays over the long term. Eldritch 2 is still fundamentally a roguelite, but I think it may also end up having a bit of a single-player extraction shooter flavor with this addition.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
It’s been a pretty productive week. I did almost none of the stuff I was planning to, but made a lot of progress anyway. On Saturday, I spent a while revising the title screen to use the posed characters I’d made for proxy key art. I’m not sure if this is actually what I’ll want for the final title screen, but I’m happy with it for now.
Also on Saturday, I spent a while doing a UI audio pass. The UI in my games has usually been entirely silent, but it makes everything feel a little more responsive and polished with some little clicks and page rustles as the player navigates the menus. Then while I was thinking about UI, I implemented a proper version of the ending sequence and credits roll. I’m nowhere near being finished with this game, but it’s nice to already be able to test the ending.
Late Sunday night, I was watching some old GMTK videos on accessibility and I got an idea to try adding a game option to switch the HUD and menus from my default serif font to a sans serif font. On account of some of the work I’d previously done to reload the whole UI for switching languages, this turned out to be pretty easy to implement. I’m not sure if the font I’m using (Alegreya Sans) is necessarily more legible for players with visual impairments, but it’s nice to be able to offer the option.
On Monday, I tackled a handful of Steam Deck-oriented tasks. I’d noticed that there was a brief flash of a 100% white screen when launching the game, which was very ugly and painful on the brilliant OLED screen when playing in the dark. It took a surprisingly long time to track that down, because it didn’t seem to behave the same on PC, but ultimately I just needed to clear the backbuffer to black before presenting the screen for the first time. On my PC, in both Direct3D and OpenGL, it appeared that the backbuffer was initialized to black. Maybe it’s undefined, I’m not sure! But anyway, glad to have that fixed.
I also rebuilt my input binding screen to fit better on the small screen of the Steam Deck. It was previously one big column with all the input actions, and I kept having to make the font smaller to make everything fit as I added more actions. I finally split the actions into two columns, which was trickier than it sounds because my UI system is not the friendliest. (I guess I could also have implemented a scrolling list, but that would be an even more complicated task, and I’ve tried to avoid scrolling lists because they’re just never great to navigate with controllers.)
I got sidetracked with other non-Eldritch 2 things midweek, but finally got back to it today, adding iron gates, polishing up HUD markers and the minimap, and making some changes to AI faction relationships and behaviors to ensure that weaker NPCs and enemies always flee from unstoppable monsters like shoggoths.
Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
It’s been a fun week tackling an odd array of tasks as I get back into the flow of working on this game.
Monday: I revisited my localization pipeline, to add support for CSV files in addition to my existing support for PO files. I also addressed a long-standing issue where every localization file got recooked any time I ran the cook process, even if no text had changed. It wasn’t causing a real problem, but it bugged me and I’m glad to have it fixed.
Tuesday: I put together some notes for a pitch deck and started figuring out what I would need in terms of non-placeholder art.
Wednesday: No work on Eldritch 2 as I was busy with job applications and interview stuff.
Thursday: In order to support some of the goals of pitch deck art, I decided to finally give my NPCs some animated eyes. It took a while to nail down a style I was happy with, and it’s still a little odd after playing the game for so long with faceless characters, but it adds a lot of life. Late Thursday night/early Friday morning, I also revised my dynamic music system to layer in a rhythmic combat track when enemies are aware of the player. I’m not sure it fits the mood of Eldritch but it’s something I’ve wanted to evaluate for a while.
Friday: I built a rough model of the player character Elle, mainly to use in art for a pitch deck. Her model wasn’t a high priority otherwise—this is a first-person game, so the opportunities to see your own character are going to be rare if they exist at all—but it was nice to get back into Blender.
With the work on NPC eyes and Elle’s model done, I put together a little homage to the original Eldritch‘s key art (by Kale Menges):
Next week will be more pitch deck work, more Blender-ing (aiming to finish a lot of assets that are currently using placeholders/proxies), and maybe some level design.
So, this is going to be a bit of a more personal update than I usually make. As I’ve said before, I try to not mix stuff about my day job into this devlog. But it’s going to be unavoidable here.
Since its inception almost three years ago, Eldritch 2 has been a side project, something I would spend evenings or weekends working on as I was able. Consequently, progress has been slow but steady. I got a bit burnt out toward the end of last year as the demands of my real job ramped up, culminating in a temporary pause on these journals.
Sadly, my full-time employment came to an end this week. I won’t go into the details here, as it’s not my place to do so; but suffice it to say, I parted on good terms. Everyone involved hopes that we will work together again.
I don’t know what the future holds. I am searching for jobs, but the job market in the video game industry is rough right now. And it is possible that other employers would not be as cool with me continuing to work on a side project as Question has been, which might permanently halt Eldritch 2. I am also considering pitching Eldritch 2 to small- to mid-scale publishers, though I’d guess that finding funding for even small projects is rough right now too.
In the meantime, I’m treating my work on Eldritch 2 as my day job. I want to see how far I can take it, and how fast I can move when it is more than a side project. And if nothing else, I hope it will keep me occupied and help me avoid the pit of despair that can come from layoffs.
Between being a little scrambled this week and uncertain about the future, I’m still figuring out how to prioritize Eldritch 2‘s schedule. Before my hiatus, finishing the full set of Innsmouth dungeons rooms was my top priority; but in light of potentially pitching the game, I may put a pin in that task and switch to some new feature work to demonstrate the macro progression systems of the game. And in any case, I think finishing up some unfinished art assets would be useful so I can put together a playable demo or a trailer or anything that won’t require “dev glasses” to evaluate.
If you know of any studios that are looking for expert game engineers, or publishers who are looking for small-budget indie titles, or anyone who could use short-term contract or consulting work, please reach out!
It’s been a busy winter at my day job; we launched The Killing Stone in Early Access in February, and released the first big subsequent update this week.
