It's been a bit quiet since the final demo build was published last week. But that's because I've been hard at work adding new content to the game and taking advantage of all the refactoring and systems I had built up over the course of development. Progress is going fast as I am actively working on the new level of the game, as well as the long-promised Forge. 

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So let's start with the new level. I'm almost ready to publicly share the name of the new stage, but before I do I'd like to share with you some of the art work of this new stage.

It takes place in an industrial setting far removed from The Slime Warrens. Gone are the bright shades of blues and greens, and swapped for it are deep shades of rust red and the bright sheen of molten metal. I'm still adding in some additional background details and objects, and no NPCs have been added yet. But it's looking pretty close to the final build. Here are a few scenes showing what's been made so far:

I'm really excited for what the final product will be! There will be more NPCs to talk to, lots of powerful new items to buy, and even some special encounters and secrets. What are they? You'll find out soon!

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The other feature I wanted to talk about is the Forge. The Forge is a feature that has been listed on the game's front page since I published the very first demo of the game back in April 2023. But I never intended for it to be something you could use in the first few levels of the game - it was always meant to be something that you unlocked later on when you had more power and money to play with. 

I'm still deep into finalizing its implementation, and there's still a lot of code to write and debugging to do. But after days of work it is beginning to shape into the thing I always planned for it to be. Here is a brief preview showing how it will work:

As you may have noticed as well, the name of the item changed. Depending on the combination of gems you choose, the name you get for your item will change as well. There are a total of 120 unique names in total, reflecting all the different ways you can organize your gems.

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It's going to be some time before a new build is published, but I plan for that build to contain all of the new content at once. I have set up my game so that adding in new content is relatively easy - a fact I plan to take full advantage of. There will be more things to do in this level than the Slime Warrens, and there will be a total of 15 stages to fight through, rather than 10. You'll have much more gold than before, more Feats, more levels, and many more ways to customize your gear.

I'll keep publishing regular updates here as devlogs, but I post even more frequent updates on my new Discord server! This server contains a community of other fans and game developers, and they receive more frequent content updates for the game as well!

The link to join the server is here: https://discord.gg/Mu9BSg7wVg