Rinthine

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• Announcements·25 Aug 2026Official

  Fractured Paths

  Pathfinding. It's exactly what it sounds like.When you play a game, something has to decide how things get where they're going. How does an enemy work out where you went? How does a creature cross a room without walking into a wall? How does anything navigate a space nobody placed it in by hand? Pathfinding is what makes that happen, and even though a lot of work goes into it, when it's working properly, you never think about it once.In our case, “Pathfinding” is a great way to describe what we’ve been doing the past two weeks, because we’ve been pathfinding in more ways than one.Image courtesy: DragonRollZ, Discord Rinthine's creatures don't use Unity's built-in navigation.  Underneath every room in Rinthine there's a second map you never see: a grid that marks which parts of the floor can actually be walked on. Everything that moves shares that one map, and when a creature needs to get somewhere, it searches the grid for a route. Ordinary enough.What is not ordinary is how much that map now changes while things are standing on it - and that applies to the bigger question of Rinthine’s design itself, too.Throughout the process of building this world, each change, improvement, refinement, redirection brought new questions with respect to how each element should interact with the next, and as you read in last week’s blogpost, the impacts of those changes have come to a head, and we’ve really had to step back and ask ourselves what kind of game we want Rinhtine to be. I’m happy to say, we’ve found our path forward, and we’ll talk about that more, soon. Photo courtesy: Spider Archivist, DiscordIn the game itself, we built procedural fault lines: terrain that fractures mid-run and splits rooms and walls apart. A lot of what we built this fortnight changes the world while you're standing in it. Procedural fault lines crack the terrain open mid-run and split rooms apart. Bridges extend across gaps, traps close off routes when they trigger.All of that is a problem for path...
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• Announcements·12 Aug 2026Official

  From the Forge - Volume 6

  CrossroadsTwo weeks of playtesting, two more of analysis, revisions, and continuous work. We sat down and played Rinthine, and something about it isn't clicking. That can be an uncomfortable thing to notice about your own game, but it is something we have prepared for, and we are in very good company when it comes to working on a project for a long time, only for it to not be quite there yet. Almost every game you can think of has come to a similar fork in the road, and has had to sit together and hash out how to best move forward. Dank meme courtesy: Spider Archivist I think there's a combination of pressure and excitement as we push through this challenge, because we really want to get it right, and there are so many possibilities, so many things that Rinthine can sprout into from what we decide in the coming days and weeks. Our playtesters have loved it so far, but it's still not quite meeting our expectations - what do we do, then? We keep on workin'! Here's some of the stuff we've done the last two weeks. Seeing it coming. Wind-up animation passes on every regional creature, and a hit-feedback overhaul across the board.Leading the shot. Ranged enemies now fire where you're going to be, not where you are - and interactive nests seed fresh threats around them. You'll enjoy resenting both.A-suh-wingbattabatta. Wider melee animation sets, re-tuned impact timings. Weapons feel distinct rather than reskinned.The Cartographer Table & Waygates. Don't wanna spoil too much about these yet!Watch your step. Reworked step-up traversal.Rooms. New bathhouse doors, truncated wall variants, optimized wall meshes, and decorative statues to give rooms a center of gravity. Some are very good furniture. Some aren't furniture. We'll leave that there.Where you start. Starter room retuned for pacing, biomes tied to progression, machine rooms and doors marking the way forward.The Mechanic Unlock System. A central spine for progression items, locks and machine rooms, so capabilities arr...
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• Announcements·28 Jul 2026Official

  From the Forge Volume 5 - Public Playtest #2

  Playtesting has been going great. There's a pretty sharp contrast between showing our game publicly for what is now the third time, and showing it for the first time. Certainly, the energy is different, and there was a much different pressure as we prepared for GDC. This latest playtest has felt less like we're showcasing or presenting to strangers, and more like we're growing with our community. While we're working hard, of course, having daily made changes to the build based on feedback, the energy this time has been more relaxed, and far more like we're playing our game with friends and improving it, as opposed to pitching our game, and hoping it goes well. Even the first playtest had this air of anticipation and perhaps even a little anxiety, hoping people would enjoy it, and hoping things wouldn't go terribly wrong. So far, it's been quite smooth, and a lot more stress-free than previous tests, and the majority of feedback has been focused on bugs, which we've been happily stomping left and right. So the last two weeks have been mainly two things - playtesting and migration. Feels like it's been that way for a while now, but as we move closer to Gamescom and TGS, Rinthine as it will be in Early Access is finally taking shape, and we couldn't be more excited. Here's a bit of our progress the last two weeks:World & Environmental DesignThe art department has been focused on two areas in the gameworld for the last two or three sprints - the bathhouse rooms, and a special new area that I don't wanna spoil too much, yet. The ways you can navigate between rooms have been slowly changing as well, with the recent introduction of swimming/wading, but we're hoping to have quite a few puzzles and novel mechanics that will affect the way you can move throughout each area, and these new ideas need quite a bit of art and time to cook! These aren't the only things that art has been building, but again, some of their newest work is going to be secret for a little while!Tuning &...
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• Announcements·15 Jul 2026Official

  From the Forge vol. 4 - Playtesting

  Biomes, Migrations, and Playtests, oh my!The last two weeks in Rinthine land have been completely consumed by three things:1. new content 2. preparing for playtests 3. migrationLets start with the brass tacks: New content and features.Art courtesy: Spider Archivist, in our DiscordHappy anniversary!One of the coolest things that happened this sprint is that Rinthine celebrated one year of development! To share our excitement and give you a lil' behind the scenes, we made this devlog - we hope you enjoy! Cleaning Up the HUD (UI & UX Reworks)We spent a lot of time tightening up the player interface to give you better screen real estate while keeping vital information clear.Tighter Player Vitals: The team has spent quite a lot of back-and-forth tweaking the various bars on the players' HUD - considering it's one of the elements you'll see and rely on most, it's important to get it right. Going by the Numbers: While seemingly-small, these conversations affect the entire game, and tweaking one thing usually affects another. As we get closer to the final build, details matter.Expanded Toolwheel: Art team built out mock-ups and fresh animations for the toolwheel.Crafting Book Upgrades: tech art revived some crafting book things with new QOL updates, including a recipe pinning system and a dedicated back button. Diving into the Water Biome & The BathhouseWe first mentioned our water zones a couple blogposts ago, but they're under continual construction, and are getting a massive visual and structural upgrade, complete with new flora, fauna, and interesting things to explore.That's not a water slide: I don't know what the heck that hole is, or where it leads.Water room Walls: They're not really called "water rooms" but that's what I'm calling them right now. Anyway, the 2D team has spent a lot of time and effort getting things looking right, which can get pretty hairy in a procedurally-generated game. It's still under wraps but we're getting there!Dynamic Vegetation: To make ...
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• Announcements·1 Jul 2026Official

  From the Forge Vol. 3

  Imagine having so much cool stuff to share, but you can't talk about 90% of it. This will have to suffice. Visuals an' ART We kicked off the week diving deep into UI animations and effects, including animated flourishes for various tools and UI elements. Let us know what ya think about that direction when you playtest!Throughout the week, there was a ton of polishing up the creepy, eldritch-looking, enemy-type thing straight outta a John Carpenter movie ... before drafts started on a brand new """creature"""... (Yes, triple quotes , that's how serious it is.) Call it a...creature feature. Ruins, Statues, and Community RequestsYes, we know half the fun in any game is runny runny choppy choppy, swinging weapons fro and to, but DARN IT, set-dressing is important, and makes the world feel real, and lived-in!Our art and world-design crew have been incredibly busy bringing some of that life to Rinthine, in the form of, well, death:The environment team paired up early in the week to map out a BUNCH of ruins that may or may not be creature-related...Work has been underway sculpting majestic statues that may or may not hold some significanceOur 3D team did a ton of work (as always) on seemingly-simple, but crucial vegetation/plantlife and even got to test drive a brand new in-house modeling tool built by our tech team! It was immediately used to kickstart a gorgeous new statue on Wednesday.\ and Internal Tech ToolsOur art lead has been working tirelessly on a pretty major enemy, the first of its kind, and behind the scenes, our programmers put in some serious heavy lifting:On Tuesday, the tech team undertook a massive build migration. It was a long, tedious, and grueling process, and will be ongoing for some timeBy Thursday, a brand-new enemy manager tool was completed to help us tweak, track, and balance enemy encounters on the fly.As we prepare for playtesting, it's super important that all our data is easily viewable and sortable, so we've been working on an internal tool...
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