Welcome everyone to yet another Soul Split development update for January 2024.

This month's additions comes in 3 different flavours, player tweaks, new spell content, and the beginning of a new area. Let's start with the new spell content.

Recently we changed the progression of the game to better reflect what it'll look like in its final iteration now spells will progressively get more powerful the deeper in a run you are. Gone are the days of acquiring tremendously powerful spells and wiping rooms in the very first area.

However In doing this, a new problem arose. We realized that the variety of the combat came from those higher level spells that have since been pushed into the later areas, and that the early game sandbox was rather weak.

Spells are divided into 4 categories based on their strength with the first and weakest being called "Standard". These standard spells were initially designed to be a low cool-down, spammable option that can always be used that usually took the form of a semi-automatic projectile. They tended to feel very gun-like.

This approach had some flaws. Since only one semi-automatic spell could only be used at a time, it only ever made sense to have one of that variety of spell. Rather than having a category of say 20 standard spells it was instead split between semi-automatic spells vs cool-down based spells effectively shrinking the sandbox.

This sandbox shrink often meant that your load-outs consisted of one of a list of 7 or so "gun" spells, and a small pool of maybe 6 cool-down based spells. This lack of variety bogged down the early game making it somewhat boring due to the similarity of your load-outs.

So one of our goals this month was to expand the early game spell pool with a strong emphasis on new and interesting spells with a short cool-down that stay far away from the "gun" feeling of other standard spells.

To achieve this we pulled down a couple spells from the higher level categories to level 1 and tuned them down to make them fit in. A couple spells were reworked to have less overlap with the new additions, and a new subcategory or two was made.

Blackfire Sweep
A new take on an old spell type that eventually turned into shadow magic. Dealing both fire and dark damage this spell shines in the early-game but falls off unless built around.
Cold Snap
A newer take on ice spells. The majority of ice in the game involves conjuring some sort of icicle but this breaks away and instead focuses on inflicting frost bite with freezing winds.
Ray or Ice
A former adept spell brought down to standard. Its one of the few spells in the game with a chance to freeze an enemy and will be the cornerstone of early-game freeze builds.
Vine Lash
A plant spell in the poison category, this spell is part of a small group of spells in the poison category meant to deal direct damage instead of status effects.
A much smaller addition we've made recently is the implementation of camera adjustments that allow a full 360 degree view of the player. This was done to both enhance the atmosphere of the game and make it easier to react to enemies that may have been hiding in places the camera couldn't quite reach before.

This change has required the reworking of a few systems, but it should allow for far larger more interesting set pieces in addition to giving players more control over how they view the world.
In addition to these additional spells we've been beginning to shape newer areas of our game slowly but surely. In February we will be working extensively on the second major area of the game giving it a complete redesign.

We're redesigning the area as the last time it was touched was in 2021 and the vision for the region and the game itself have changed significantly since then. Things have broadly gotten darker, the art style has become more detailed and with the aforementioned camera changes areas must be designed with more perspectives and camera angles in mind.

All of the new assets in one scene
A comparison of a shrine before and after the rework
The new towers to scale next to the player
New mausoleum and graveyard models next to one another
Various ruins and scaffolding models next to one another
That's everything we've done in January this year! First month of 2024 down and we're looking forward to sharing what we've been working on in the coming months. A lot of exciting content is in the works with a couple surprises here or there so keep your eyes peeled!

Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone and welcome back to another monthly development update for December 2023!

We did a lot in December, from making a handful of new spells, to implementing several new mainstay enemies and massively updating the UI and game world. There's a lot to go through, so lets get into it!

Several aspects of the game's UI were updated and a handful of new features were implemented. This includes the ability to change colour of the reticle, an FPS display toggle, and adding in a retro mode that adds in PS1 era filters. These filters used to be a very prominent part of the art style of Soul Split early on, but were eventually stripped down a bit to our current art style.

Retro Mode off
Retro Mode On
This toggle will crunch the display resolution down to 640x360p and revert the colour settings to 8-bit resulting in a much older looking PS1 bit-crunched aesthetic. This obviously has little effect on gameplay, but its a homage to the early iterations of Soul Split and was added for fun in our artist's spare time.

Alongside the aforementioned UI changes we've overhauled several enemies within the Ghost World, our game's mirror dimension; making them far more enjoyable to fight. What prompted this? Previously the small overly-aggressive enemy pool was annoying and uninteresting to fight, and put plainly lame.

The new core additions to the Ghost World's enemy roster
To solve this issue we've added 5 new enemies to the area to help increase the variety of encounters. In addition to those enemies we've added new synergies that greatly increase the difficulty of encounters without relying on hyper aggressive enemies and homing projectiles swarming the player.

The main addition we've made are Bone Piles, a harmless enemy that can spawn on the floor and do nothing on its own. When these Bone Piles come into contact with certain triggers they will sacrifice themselves and summon a powerful Bone Spirit in its place, and in rare instances Bone Haunts which are akin to mini-bosses.

A Bone Spirit and Bone Haunt in a test scene.
Other enemies will be able to summon these Bone Spirits as they function as environmental hazards anything can interact with. These unique spawn mechanics make way for emergent gameplay, do you aggro the summoners away from the Bone Piles? Do you kill Bone Piles first so they won't spawn spirits? Is there a way to summon your own Bone Spirits?

These sorts of additions are what fuels enjoyable gameplay, and makes for diverse combat encounters. Several of these types of changes were made to the game recently, although I'll keep the rest under wraps.

Lastly since this month was all about polishing what we have, the Hub got a considerable visual update in preparation for further content to be added soon. Large braziers can be found shining through the storm. Enormous ruins can be seen just hardly in the distance, ruins are strewn about the area, the plateau feels like the ruins of a fortress long surrendered to the storm.

Some of the revised Hub, looking outwards into the storm.
That's about all we have! we hope you enjoyed the read and we'd like to thank you for your continued support of Soul Split over the years and we're looking forward to sharing more with you in 2024!