October 10, 2021

Hey there, fellow catz! A lot has happened in the past few months and I made some nice progress with ZpellCatz. Lets have a look.

Pumpkin Prologue

In case you missed the announcement, ZpellCatz: Pumpkin Prologue will be released next week (Oct 14, 17:00 CEST). It's a free singleplayer campaign with a story set preceding the events of the main game.

As you can imagine, creating a prologue with its own overworld, dungeons and story required most of the working time since June, but I'm super happy with the result. :-)

Input System

I finished working on the input system that we already covered in our last DevRecap.
There is an article available here ( https://www.indiedb.com/games/zpellcatz/features/how-to-control-a-cat ) for further info.

New Cover Art

A very talented freelancer created the new cover art for ZpellCatz. In my opinion he did a really great job here. What do you think? Check it out:

Music & Sound Design

In order to be able to release the Pumpkin Prologue, ZpellCatz needed sound and music.

- Composed songs: "Main Menu", "Overworld", "Village", "Temple Ruins", "Boss"
- Lots of sound effects for combat, UI, etc

Quality of Life Improvements

Some of my former gamedev colleagues tested the early builds of the Pumpkin Prologue and allowed me to watch silently (big thanks to Ingo, Alex, Robi & Daniel). This way, we found lots of hard-to-use features and design flaws. Here are some of the things that worked a lot better after small adjustments:

- Bags now show what kind of item you just collected
- Items in the inventory now follow the mouse to reduce confusion
- Teleporters are now animated to indicate that they are no usual floor plate
- Enemy stat balance (yes the first testers had to play in "developer hard"... :-D )
- Input polishing

Backend Server

We now have a backend server that we can use for highscores, speedrunning times and of course to detect further design / balance issues. Be assured, that we don't collect any personal data.

That's it for today. Thanks for reading. If you want to receive development update more regularly, feel free to join our discord.
Have a nice day!