Lair of the Leviathan

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• Announcements·27 Aug 2026Official

  The Devil's in the Details : News from the Lair - August

  David (Art) - This month has been a few changes and a couple of new cool things. The amount of assets currently in the game is really starting to pile up and look really cool now. First off this month I have been working on the portraits for the game. The old ones were really cool and I loved them but the resolution was too high and we had to scale them down resulting in mismatching pixel sizes. The new ones (currently still a WIP) are half the size and look a bit more pixely and take up a lot less real estate in game and are a lot less intrusive. Secondly I have been getting more enemies done for the game this month 3 new orc enemies (the classic non green skinned pig faced kind) I've also been working on some water assets for the larger version of the old river town. Oliver (programming)Hey guys, I swear I just finished writing last last month's update and yet here we are again. Every morning I import David's new assets into the game and just marvel at all the little details. The fish swimming in a river. Peasants chatting idly. Birds that fly by. None of these things seem like a big deal, but all these little details add up to making a world feel more alive. I've had a bit of a distracted month ( every now and again I have to maintain my other games like Swords and Sandals etc ) but my focus this month was on starting to tie all the various game systems we have built together - by which I mean the combat, the conversations, shops, quests, level transitions and so on. I spent most of my time on the Level Up editor, adding more combat powers and tinkering with the Cutscene editor, which allows small simple cutscenes at key points in the game. We're not talking Baldur's Gate style cinematics, but just little 10 second letterboxed moments where the characters might automatically walk , say something, the time of day might change.The cutscene editor allows us to create little animated scenes with the in-game charactersMost systems are about 90% complete or more, with ...
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• Announcements·29 Jul 2026Official

  *We have fireballs!* News from the Lair - July

  David (Artist) Hey everyone! Yet another month has passed and we find ourselves heading into the second half through the year. This month has seen a lot of progress yet again on getting core systems finished and making the world feel more alive. Town ImprovementsThis has been the main thing I have been working on this month. We now have over 100 props for the towns, trees, stones, buildings, animals. All the kind of things that will make exploring towns and coming home more interesting.How it started How things currently look in game Oliver has also been working on getting the waypoint systems working really well. We can now do all kinds of cool stuff. NPCs can walk through town, we can set how rarely they spawn, the delay between them, whether they appear during the night or day, the paths they take, they can even walk together as a group or singularly. I have also started doing some effects. Some of these are really difficult and large so it has been challenging to do them in pixel art but I think they are starting to look quite cool. Other than that on my end I have mainly been polishing up the player figurines, working on enemy sprites and making more props for the dungeons. Oliver (Coding)Greetings, adventurers! One of the cool things about David increasing the scale of the town to the new 1:1 scale, where the buildings and NPCs are larger, means we can just fit more detail in everything and also allow the party to interact with the world. That knight who gallops past the party in the earlier screenshot can be stopped and questioned, for instance. I've implemented a simple conversation / chatter system into the game now. Clicking on NPCs will trigger dialogue. Most NPCs will have one or more lines of dialogue but we don't want to get into a 'Pillars of Eternity' style lore dump. As excellent as that game was, it was really heavy on the exposition and we don't really want to build that kind of game. There'll be lots of lore but it will be revealed through the wo...
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• Announcements·23 Jun 2026Official

  Exploration at scale: News from the Lair - June

  Greetings adventurers, Oliver (coding) here! This month's Lair of the Leviathan update will largely focus on art and design, so David's taking it from here - then I'll run through some of the new trap systems, editor improvements and (finally) save game systems. David (art) This month has seen some big changes as well as progress on some things I hadn't gotten around to yet. First off, after doing some testing with the various systems we decided that the separate town and exterior system wasn’t working well with the game overall. Going from the world map, into separate town/exterior maps, then into larger scale dungeon maps was all feeling very inconsistent and it also meant I was needing to draw up a whole heap of separate artwork for each of them. Like 3 games in one! Formerly you would explore towns in kind of a mid size of map that was in between the world and dungeon exploration sizes. So instead we have decided that towns will now use the same exploration system and view as the dungeons do. You will go from the world map straight into locations you visit. Whether they be towns, dungeons, or outdoor locations. This means you will now see your characters walking around these areas at full size and we can utilise all the cool dungeon systems to make interesting encounters within towns and outdoor areas now even having combat encounters in these locations.It also means that the game is feeling a lot more consistent: no going through 3 separate viewpoints and separate gameplay systems. You use the world map to travel over large distances and everything else will take place on these larger maps.Still a very early work in progress! We think not only will this cut down on an extra level of work but it is way more interesting to explore and we can really flesh out these locations now.As well as that big change I have started working on traps this month to go with Olivers’ new trap system And last of all, I have started working on the first extra large sized enemy! (sti...
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• Announcements·26 May 2026Official

  The Battle Is Joined!

  Greetings, adventurers! Of all the updates we've shared so far, this is probably the one you've probably been the most interested to see. I've been promising to show off combat for months and months. Even back as far as when I visited David in Japan, my plan was to get onto combat on my return. Game dev is nothing if not unpredictable of course, and I realised I had to get all the other systems up to scratch before starting on such a complicated new part of the game.In an old school RPG, combat is at the heart of everything and one of those things you really have to get right. So many hours of a game are made up in combat, whether its clearing trash mobs in a dungeon or the climactic battle against the final boss, and if combat doesn't feel right, the whole game can be a chore. I've been working on combat for the last 6-7 (six seven) weeks or so , but of course other systems that are tied into to combat like pathfinding, equipping inventory and so on, I started much earlier. Like everything in game dev, combat is an iterative process and I've already done a number of different versions of early combat before locking in the direction I wanted to go with. Here's a good example of something I tried and threw out pretty early. Abandoned prototype - An early 'non grid' iteration Early combat used the same gridless system the rest of the dungeon uses. Monsters and players could move anywhere and if they were within a distance radius of each other, they could perform melee attacks and so on. What we found was combat quickly got bunched up , with everyone right in each others faces like a scrum. It got confusing pretty quickly, and was starting to feel a little closer to Baldur's Gate 1+2's combat ( which worked in realtime, but in turn based would probably suffer from these issues) I realised we were starting to get a little bit away from the "Gold Box" era we've been promising, and this just wasn't feeling like it captured that spirit at all. What was needed was that clas...
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• Announcements·24 Apr 2026Official

  April Updates: Preparing for combat.

  Greetings, adventurers! Time from another update from the Lair. After so much work on the editor tools, I'm excited to finally be working on combat itself. For all the exploration, conversation, quest giving and loot, our RPG is, at its heart, a game that will be defined by the battles. So, we need them to be engaging, tactical and most importantly they can't last for 20 minutes each!! ( Looking at you, 1980s epic Knights of Legend! ) With that in mind, I've been striving to make combat feel fast paced, despite it being turn based. Originally the plan was to have combat all be grid-based, but with monsters being of all different sizes, and with maps having obstacles of various shapes and sizes that can get in the way, I wanted a more flexible system. So, movement will still be technically on a grid, but each pathfinding tile size is only 8x8, so it will feel like your heroes can move basically wherever they need to in combat.Monster turns I want to feel snappy. When monsters are moving, they'll move quickly ( as opposed to the kind of tedious lumbering movement in Baldur's Gate 3 where a mephit would fly across the map slowly and you'd have to watch ) and engage. Monster logic will be snappy, aggressive and hopefully feel challenging. I've assigned 'behaviors' to various monster types, so there will be 'defenders' , 'spellcasters', 'berserkers', and so on. Berserkers just target the closest enemy, skirmishers target those with the lowest HP and so on, healers look for teammates who are in trouble and try to cast healing spells etc. So far none of this is in the game yet, but I do have basic turns working. Monsters have a list of powers similar to heroes ( Attack/Defend/Do Nothing/Defend ) etc, and we can assign special powers to them like "Dragon Breath" or a banshee's wail. Right now monsters just choose to 'do nothing'. Today in particular I'm working on movement options in combat , which is really tricky because I have to support both keyboard movement ( which wi...
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