Solstride

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• Announcements·20 Mar 2026Official

  Devlog: Animating VFX

  Hey everyone,After a little exposition to game design, let’s take a look at VFX together!VFX stands for Visual Effects, and in our case that means Effects, such as Lighting. With the purpose of providing gameplay feedback and establishing the right atmosphere. Our process begins with gathering references to solidify a general idea and resolve any doubts about the visual directions, especially for specific characters, such as Meho.You already know Meho, our main character from our first Devlog and we wanted to convey a lot of the sentiments of that character into VFX, which is why the effects are light-based to convey a “main character” feeling that complements her staff weapon. The color section is driven by the character design, so that we avoid a clash of colors that don’t go well. Meho’s effects use blue to match the crystal on her weapon , with hints of yellow representing light.For Thistle the VFX are flowy and floral, since the name and character are based on a flower. Thistle has a magenta and pink VFX color to match her design and the flower she is based on.It is very important to ensure visibility of VFX. We use a grayscale layer to check values of the VFX and ensure that the effects remain distinct and clear visually on various backgrounds, preventing them from blending in or becoming hard to look at.The Animation for the VFX starts with rough shapes to test how the effect fits the character’s attack. VFX is primarily about impact, which requires significant time and iterations until it feels just right. Only then, do we polish the shapes and colors.To achieve a professional finish, we apply post processing effects, such as Gaussian Blur and a Glow effect to make the blur bleed over the edges to mimic real light behaviour and give the VFX a convincing glow! Now look at this convincing, menacing glow here from a robot attack. Impressive isn’t it? And that concludes our Devlog for this week, we hope you enjoyed our little VFX explanation! Stay tuned for more...
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• Announcements·13 Feb 2026Official

  Devlog: Balancing Solstride

  Hey everyone, In the last two Devlogs, we focused on Creating the Characters and finding the right aesthetic for Solstride. Now we want to dive into some of the game design of Solstride. Without further ado, let’s talk about how we balanced Solstride!!To understand Game Balancing, we need to first go over some game design basics, such as the core principles of game design and balancing. Game Design is much about the idea of risk and reward, something you can identify in almost any game. Take Space Invaders for example: In Space Invaders you control a space ship and need to defeat the aliens, which approach you systemically. You can hide behind those barracks to hide from the enemies and their attacks , and you are in a “No Risk/No Reward” State. But as soon as you decide to get out of that comfort zone, you enter a “High Risk/ High Reward” Situation, because you can now attack the foes yourself, but are now in a vulnerable state, as you are not shielded anymore. It’s a really simple, yet effective balance of a 50/50 setup, because it rewards you for being courageous to be in a vulnerable state, yet punishes you for coming out of the No Risk Zone at the wrong time. You notice, I’m throwing words out like reward and punishment. Each game has to define those terms and qualities for themselves. For Solstride we wanted to have clear trade-offs, interesting decisions and a readable difficulty curve for the player. The core principles that we used as reference are the aforementioned Risk/Reward, a Flow State, Fun over equality and Trade-offs, instead of optimalism. To compare and measure balancing, the game design team set up a structured documentation system to log each run in Solstride with consistent parameters, such as resources, rooms visited, objects, abilities, enemy types and a few more. This approach helps to keep quantitative data and qualitative observations clearly distinct, but connected at the same time. That way we could identify issues, such as combat encou...
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• Announcements·6 Feb 2026Official

  Devlog: Designing Our Companions

  Hey everyone, After our first Devlog, in which we discussed Meho’s Character Design, we would like to go over the process of creating the character companions for Solstride!Let us introduce you to Diphy, the first companion you will meet in Solstride!We wanted the characters to neither appear as animal-like nor too human-like. We ultimately decided on a design that looks like animals but still incorporates human-like traits, such as having thumbs. Thumbs were considered important so the characters could hold weapons. Another key design decision included, having the character think for themselves. As a juxtaposition to Meho being quite static and not having much expression, the companions shine with expression. They express themselves verbally and they have their own consciousness.As you can also tell they walk on two feet, which was also important from a resource choice on our side, since animating four feet is A LOT more difficult, but also having the animal companions walk on two feet incorporates another human-like trait to the mix. This specific design choice was made very early in the development process as you can see down here!We went through multiple iterations of Diphy, because Diphy is a very important character for Solstride. Diphy is the first character the player meets and therefore Diphy should look friendly and inviting. We went with a simple red vest, and some buckle details to convey that friendliness. They also have a crystal similar to Meho, as an accessory. They use a projection of a flower as a shield. It is shaped after a skeleton flower (Diphylleia grayi), which is also reflected in their VFX animations.In preparation for animation, Diphy was designed in Clip Studio with every little body part separated and on its own layer via PSD Files. The animation is manually done in Spine, which takes a lot of hard-work and time from the Art Department, we really appreciate their efforts!In Spine, Diphy has different body parts that can be moved, and the...
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• Announcements·30 Jan 2026Official

  Devlog: How we designed Meho

  Hey everyone,To celebrate Solstride’s head start on Steam, we decided to create a devlog-series, in which we break down our development processes in the various areas of game development.Without further ado, let’s talk about our main character, Meho!Meho wakes up in a mysterious world, not knowing what transpired before her awakening and especially what part she played in the horrible event that transpired before her awakening. Meho has a strong sense of purpose and a certain drive to figure out the mystery that is her life. Visually we already had an idea of how we want to approach a character like Meho, since we knew where the game was headed in terms of visuals. Solstride is set in a solarpunk world, which translates into some of our Design choices, such as patchwork clothing, handwoven, quilted and natural dyes. Before we designed Meho as a character, we looked at how a main character should look and then translated Meho into those considerations. For the sketch process, we tried to blend in more recent clothing styles with the in-world style of Solstride, which resulted in a mix of modern, yet post-apocalyptic outfit concepts. It was quite the challenge, because these aesthetics usually oppose each other. By the end of the sketch phase, there were some very interesting outfits, please check them out!Finally, we decided on this sketch and started drawing a character concept based on that sketch. We went through multiple design iterations for our main character, since there were so many ideas on how they could look, because of this unique blend of traditional, modern and futuristic aesthetics. It was both a challenge and a pleasure to get creative and mix-match thosedifferent styles together.Now that we decided on the kind of silhouette our main character was donning, we wanted to pinpoint, who exactly our main character was going to be. Both the art and game design department came together to collect everything there is about our main character story-wise. What ...
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