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Branding
We’ve got a new logo and fresh capsule art—hand-drawn over three weeks, featuring our three ,ain characters. Now comes the “fun” part: slicing and repositioning everything for each platform. Steam alone wants multiple capsule sizes, and every social channel has its own aspect ratio, so we’re shifting characters and logo per crop to keep faces readable at thumbnail size. Expect a couple rounds of tweaks as we review how it looks on Steam, X, YouTube, Discord, and the rest.
Spells
I’ve taken the ranged/spellcasting setup from “works fine” to – as it should be – modular. The new pipeline defines clear hook points—cast start, in-flight (which is not used at all currently), impact, and destroy. Particles and sounds trigger exactly when they should. This lead to cleaner visuals, and less trial-and-error for future spells.
Although I use in game (read unique) particle effects, I bought few on asset store. And offcourse because every VFX pack does things a bit differently, I needed to add an adapter layer. That means I can plug in particles from different vendors without rewriting half the game. Some components are also tweaked for game to know where VFX is currently and on which stage of lifecycle, as well to know when they die, and when they hit something.
Unfortunately, there are components that needs to be rewritten due poor memory management, but that’s whole another story.
Traps
Barrel destruction can now trigger poisoned traps—when a trapped barrel is destoryed, it explodes in a toxic burst, applying nice deadly debuff. It’s the first trap in the game and it already looks punchy in motion.
Fun fact: the initial version came together in about 15 minutes, visuals and all.
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