Hey everyone!  Welcome to our first Helms of Fury devlog, hope your year is off to a great start!  We got a few things to cover this month, so let's jump right in! =)

Kickstarter Surveys

First a quick reminder, we sent out Kickstarter Surveys in December to help fulfill some Kickstarter rewards, such as which name you would like in the game credits.  If you haven't completed your survey yet, you can do so by logging in to Kickstarter.  For anyone who hasn't completed the survey by March we'll try emailing you at that time, then if we still haven't heard from you by April, we'll assume for the game credits you prefer to be uncredited.

Bug Fixes

To kick off our game dev work for 2022, the first thing on our todo list was a bunch of bug fixes.  Having recorded a lot of footage for Kickstarter and our Trailer, we discovered many small bugs in the game, but weren't able to fix most of them at the time.

Most of these were gameplay fixes, but we ran into a couple issues with Godot as well.  I like to praise the Godot Game Engine whenever I can, as I've always found the devs and entire community around the engine so positive and helpful.  Earlier this month we ran into an issue where images went reported missing after a reformat, but Godot wouldn't say which ones.  This made it hard to solve, and we spent quite a few hours on it, but a fix already existed in the upcoming 4.0 version, and within 15 minutes of commenting on the issue Remi backported the fix to the 3.x line, solving it for us!  Godot being open source with a public issue tracker and awesome devs is such a nice benefit for gamedevs working on the engine =)

Boss Fights

Along with bugfixes, we spent time working on Boss Fights this month.  We're planning to keep these mostly under wraps as surprises for the beta, but I can mention a bit of the structure we're going for.

In each biome you may end up fighting enemies, elite enemies, bosses and elite bosses.  Regular enemies are the ones you encounter in most room types, with elite enemies being souped up versions that are faster, tougher and deal more damage!  Bosses are unique and difficult enemies that will have special attacks and abilities they use against you.  And finally, Elite Bosses are the most dangerous and deadly enemies in the game!

What's Next

Next month we're going to be working on new abilities for the game, as well as design updates and additional content for our levels.  Around the last week of February we're also going to be reaching out to backers who choose Design Rewards to start talking about what they would like to create, so we can begin work on some of them in March!

That's all for this post, see ya next time! =)