Sin Spire - Dev Log 20 (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Welcome to 2025! This marks the first full year I’ll be working as “Krasue,” having started this journey midway through 2024. While this is a dev log, there’s not a ton to share yet. After taking a couple of days off for New Year’s, I got back to work on the 3rd, so progress has been a bit limited so far. No visual aids this time.

I’ve managed to work on two things the past couple of days. Their importance isn’t very high but they’re still nice to have. The first thing I did was revisit the opening cutscene, focusing on redoing animations and polishing the environments. I haven’t shown off the cutscene as of yet but 0.0.3 should feature its rough debut. It currently runs a little over two minutes and is designed purely as a mood-setter – there’s no dialogue. Pacing it has been a challenge, and I’ll admit that cinematography is not my strongest skill. That said, I think it’s coming together.

I’ve also worked on cutting together and implementing Savina’s voice lines. Xeraphina, her voice actress, provided me with some miscellaneous lines, which I’ve been editing and assigning in-game logic to. For example, like the Raven, Savina will now react if the player attacks her. She will also comment on the player climbing around on various objects in the starting hall.

I also intend to work on some animations for her pretty soon. Currently, Savina has a simple idle animation, but I want to make her feel more dynamic by adding some subtle motions and more dialogue specific animations. While I haven’t started animating her voice lines specifically, that’s on the to-do list. Unfortunately, due to the lack of any good lip-syncing plugins (I’ve tried a couple) all the lip-syncing will have to be done by hand so that will take some time.

For the rest of this month, I plan to finish off what I’ve started with Savina’s lines and animations and then immediately dive into working on dungeon three. The third dungeon’s gimmick has been rolling around in my head for a while now. However, the timeline is tight, so it might not be as polished as I’d like once the 0.0.3 build drops.

The dungeon itself needs to be visually redesigned from scratch, which does give me a chance to incorporate some lessons learned from the second (manor) dungeon. Many players have mentioned that they appreciate the wider spaces in the manor compared to the claustrophobic catacombs. While the cramped design was intentional, I hear the feedback and plan to balance the approach to future dungeons.

So, for 0.0.3 I’ll need to work on:

• The Duchess Boss Fight

• Dungeon Three’s Layout

• Dungeon Three’s visual design

• Third Stalker’s Logic and Animations

Alongside that, I also need to keep writing the story and communicating with my voice cast. So, like I said, quite a lot to do.

Anyway, that’s all for now. This has been mostly a brief check-in after the Christmas/New Year’s break. Next week, I’m not sure how much I’ll have accomplished as I’m still easing in to the year, but, as always, I’ll keep you all updated. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next time!