Scourge of the Reptiles

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• Announcements·14 Sept 2026Official

  September 2026 Dev Progress Report

  Anyone who has seen Jason and the Argonauts, the Ray Harryhausen classic from 1963 might see a familiar scene here. The old blind man furiously defends himself from the daily curse of three fetid screeching Harpies. Save him if you want to get off this Island, but the price will not be simple at all. Greetings and salutations, friends, from sunny Adelaide, where the Spring almond blossoms are out, and the Pale Ale is quite well made and delicious. Hi there to anyone coming in from Party-Based RPG Event on Steam - Scourge is indeed both of these things. In fact the whole crux of the game design is to get back to that Party-based adventure feel from the CRPGs of old, the ones that were influenced heavily by table-top RPG games of the 80s, and hit their PC peak in the late 90s. I don't think I need to list out the best ones! Over the last month, a great deal of testing has occurred with the most excellent test team working with me on Quality. We have managed to play-test right through Act 2 and are now starting on Act 3! Of 3 Acts! So that's pretty exciting. I'm only just keeping up with their swift progress and reports.Want new features? I've added character Re-spec, smarter Enemy turns when they are packing special powers, better detail on Statuses like poisons, a more easy to navigate spell training UI with the spell chain easily read, and mounted Packs. Plus a great deal of super minor/tiny features that just improve the flow of play. Steams Cloud Backup is on now. So you can play on from another device. But mostly the work right now is focused on bug-fixes and "tweaks". Each week brings about two hundred of those! Most are minor, but the more serious ones are still being uncovered. Like the save game issue fixed this week, where loading old (scenes past) save games would only sort of work! And infrequent errors that the cause the enemy turn to just lock up. Not ideal. The light is at the end of the tunnel here though - the nasty ones are getting more obscure. Even...
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• Announcements·9 Aug 2026Official

  August 2026 Dev Progress Report

  Casting a battle spell, the super useful buff spell "Enhance Reflexes". It gives +3 to Pace - thats how many hexes you can move in a turn - which by itself would be worth the 6 mana points. But ALSO giving +3 to Dodge? Verging on O/P! But a strong defensive line relies on magic like this and makes the team-turn based method of initiative really shine - everyone on your side gets to act before the enemy does.Oh hello dere! Let me know if I am re-using the same witty intros ok? Wassup! Leets gooo!! :)First up is that testing is really happening now, with nearly ten people running through Act 1, and myself running through Act 2. After that, Microprose will test it all again with their QA team. I won't bore you with the bug lists, but the intention is to smash all those bugs and polish the mess of bug shells away. In order to get the experience nice and solid, I've had to shift the release date to Feb next year. Remind me not to make an RPG next time! :)New features keep arriving despite "feature freeze", whoops!. Steam achievements are added and quite cool to get. Assist mode, for accessibility, to what is essentially an invulnerability mode. You can now dismount your dino/giant wolf/tiger/hippo/mammoth at any time to start combats on foot, making your big mount into more of a battering ram missile! Meals are shared at camp so you don't have to divvy up meals. Main sprite can now auto-match the portrait choice on character creation (hair, beard, skin, shape). And lots more minor things too.Feedback at Adelaides Avcon event regarding the new hand-made portrait art was extremely positive, so it's certain that the right choice was made to go "GenAI-free" for the game. Comments like "much better than the old art" and "finally fixed the portraits!" is what I needed to hear that weekend. It feels right also to get back to the solo-dev roots of the project and focus on the innards of the game working great.Until next month, when I can update you on the testing schedule and ho...
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• Patch Notes·2 Jul 2026Official

  Placeholder Art Begone

  Face Portraits have been updated, and panel art is gone (the text box on the right side no longer has an image with it).I spent this week getting rid of the old placeholder art for portraits and event panels to finally bring Scourge of the Reptiles to a state where there is no Generated content left in the game. All Code, Design, Art, Music/Sound, and Text in this game is now human made. Using a cool and fun to use pixel art portrait maker from Itch.io, I was able to get the new portrait art style to fairly well match the style of the human-made pixel art in the tile-sets and sprites. The art also keeps the 90's retro look intact without heading too much into JRPG style or cartoon style. It uses similar restricted colour palettes and resolution to achieve that consistency. I went up a level in Aseprite (pixel art tool).With the scene images, I decided to just remove them entirely! This makes the event panel much smaller and less "in the way" when exploring, so you can more easily ignore it if you wish. You can certainly see more of the cinematic sequences (moving sprites) that occasionally tell the story - the smaller panel not only shows a wider view of that but also is often merged with the dialogue panel text to leave most of the world view clear. I also upgraded the camera systems to zoom into NPCs, objects, and scenes that are being described by panels or dialogue events - thus focusing the experience on what is happening for the player. It works as a good replacement for the old panel art, as its in-game and not over the top of the world view - it feels more involving.
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• Announcements·22 Jun 2026Official

  June 2026 Dev Progress Report

  Arriving at the Palace of Pallasia. Let's meet the Queen - perhaps she will give refuge after we ended her forced tribute to the Island Labyrinth.G'day there mates! Ky (Kyoti Games) here with a monthly update for Scourge of the Reptiles as it nears its completion after just ~7000 hours of hard work. I was enjoying a Retro Gamer magazine the other day and reading an interview from an 80s game dev about the type of "crunch" dev time they had back then. Instead of a normal working week, they just worked 80-100 hours a week until the game was done and then took a short break to rest up! Can't help thinking that Scourge could have been finished a year or two earlier under this brain-destroying strategy. But then again, they made charting games in just 6 months, so that might have been the best way to create something in good time? Perhaps the deadline of the platform becoming suddenly obsolete was part of it?Since the last report, I've been doing extensive testing on Act 2 and 3 - the back half of the game. This involves testing every quest update, zone trigger, dialogue node, and enemy unit just to make sure they fire up and do as expected. Doing this often finds a lot of bugs, particularly in code that was written to support a particular scene event. You sometimes see hilarious bugs - like birds flying backwards or a huge boss enemy turning to face a bunch of dead soldiers in combat. Act 2 has the most complex exploration scenes and Act 3 has some very ambitious combat setups. Some cool new features too - the Gauge action is like an Aim action for melee Strikes, as a nice alternative to the Guard Action when waiting for enemies to approach your superior position. The Info Action replaces the unwieldy right-click panel, and provides enemy summary data like status and effects, and abilities. Cinematic parts now have black bars to make it clear what's happening without player input.Meanwhile other features are being constantly refined to make them work reliably under vari...
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• Announcements·15 May 2026Official

  May 2026 Dev Progress Report

  Seeking answers on how to protect your tribe from the Witch - in a tomb of a long lost holy people. Hi everyone, this is Ky here, your devoted ozzie Dev smashing together an amazing dinosaur game in just a few years! First up, Scourge is right now in the ANZ Indie Fest event. https://store.steampowered.com/sale/anzindiefest26Fraser from Microprose and myself recorded a hilarious talk-show play-through for the event and you can watch it stream on the Scourge page or linked into the ANZ Indie Fest event. It's worth watching just to see my mad skills at my own game :) Slaughtered the tutorial fight "Raptors" in 5 rounds flat. I look forward to recording with Fraser again, he is top fun.The main news of the month since the Microprose publisher announcement - which came with a brand new trailer and page refresh - is that I just finished my second run through the first half of the campaign. These are QA runs, finding and stamping out bugs - tweaking narratives and zone triggers - altering the UI for Quality of Life. In the first run I took 600+ notes! In the second, just 150. Now thats what I call progress! In fact its good enough now that I am moving on to the second half of the campaign.In my second run, I decided to play it differently in order to test other things. For example I played the main character "Neutral" instead of "Good". That involves selecting dialogue options at key points in the NPC chats and skill-roll events that portray your personality as Greedy, Cowardly, or Paranoid! I call this the Path of Egotism. There are 9 endings in the game based on 3 paths with 3 personality traits each. The Paranoid option is particularly dark - you travel down a road of creeping madness.I also used different Companions this run. I dropped Mandla the Prowler and took Kamaria the Hunter, addressing some concerns that "Archers are too weak". But I found with the right skill purchases the Hunter makes a fine sniper AND scout (detecting/disarming Traps, Clues, Secrets, Tracki...
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