Sin Spire - Dev Log 14 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! This week has been a bit unconventional compared to what I initially planned. I had intended to focus on more animations, but I soon realized I needed to prioritize getting the Steam page ready to meet my personal goal of launching it before sharing the test build, which I still aim to release this month. So, I shifted my focus and fast-tracked the work needed for the Steam page which has now been submitted for review.

The review process is a bit unpredictable in terms of timing, especially with the Steam Next Fest happening, which likely means a lot of submissions are in the queue. Hopefully, everything goes smoothly. In the meantime, while waiting for the review to go through, I've been working on the test build—Ensuring that everything necessary is included and that the build ends at a defined point.

It might be a bit disappointing to hear that there is an endpoint to the test, but I'd prefer players test a small, replayable section and provide feedback from that rather than explore unfinished areas. I've also been doing additional bug fixes and clean up. The build is currently around 1.87GB uncompressed, which is a manageable size for most people to download and try out, I hope.

If all goes as planned, I should have a build banked this week. If the Steam page gets approved, I'll share the test build likely next Sunday in place of the usual dev log. I'll be away next weekend so I won't be able to work on the game or write a dev log but I can schedule a post in advance.

The last few things I'm working on for the test build include some audio edits, particularly adding voice lines to enemies that have been recorded but aren't implemented yet and ensuring that all current enemies have purification animations, as that's crucial to gameplay.

Since I've mainly been focused on the Steam page and test build, I'll take this opportunity to introduce Ophelia, who you can see at the top of the post. She is the last story character in the game to introduce and plays a significant role. She's also currently the poster-girl for the Steam page. She's a lot more reserved than Savina, with a blunt and taciturn personality that contradicts her gentle appearance. Her story will unfold as you progress through each dungeon. With her revealed, all three story characters have now been shown off. Every other character is either an enemy or Stalker with either limited or no dialogue.

Ophelia, Savina and the Raven will all be present in the test build, and you'll be able to progress their storylines but only to a small degree. The rest of their stories still need to be written and I hope to tackle that soon.

So, that's it for this week. Most of my time has been spent preparing the test build and the Steam page. Once those are done, development will resume as normal. While I did complete a lot of animations this month, my priorities shifted a lot more than I expected.

Getting the Steam page up will be a major milestone for me, and I hope the feedback from the test build can help motivate me to push forward. It's easy to hit a period of stagnation when working on a project day-in and day-out, so once the test build is out, I'll likely take a short break mostly focusing on any bug fixes and feature requests that pop up.

Thanks again for all your support. I'm excited for you guys to try the test build when it's ready. As for the animations and other things I planned to discuss, I'll try and post a few images and gifs sometime this coming week.

Thanks for reading, take care, and I'll hopefully be back with another update in a couple of weeks. If anything goes wrong with the Steam page, however, I'll make a post here ASAP as that could impact the test build's release date. But if all goes well, make sure to keep an eye out for its release next Sunday.

See you all later!