Happy Halloween, Kinoko fans! 🦇

With lots of plates currently spinning as we continue to work towards our next demo release, I don’t actually have any specific piece of new development to write about this month. For my part, I’ve mainly been working on some new, complex enemy types (with more human-like behaviour than anything I’ve had to implement before!), and also a number of starsprite abilities to sling at them. It’s all been very fun and I’m excited to share more, but I’ll do that when there’s a bit more to show. In the meantime, Chel’s kindly stepping in with some of her own recent work, over on the art and design side of things!

Firstly, some very recent progress on the Fungaia world…

Specifically, this is some of Chel’s work on the ‘mushroom meadow’ zone of Fungaia. Each of the game’s worlds is split into several zones, each with their own visual styles, as well as enemies and other environmental challenges. The mushroom meadow shown here is a peaceful zone, designed to introduce the player to the game’s core mechanics before they enter the fungal forest beyond, where things will start getting trickier. (Eagle-eyed observers may also notice that it isn’t Kinoko that the player is controlling here, but we’ll have more to say about that in a future update! 🤐)

Next up, here’s a look at some of Chel’s progress on the planet Izelmyst…

Unlike Fungaia, the planet Izelmyst isn’t going to be one of the game’s major worlds. As we’ve always said, our intention is to release the game with five explorable worlds in the metroidvania style. Additionally, though, you’ll be able to explore Starlight City, an outer space hub world where you’ll find shops, services, and of course the Star Lounge, and also Izelmyst, the long-forgotten birthplace of the Order of the Galactic Halo, and the site of the mysterious Temple of the Chime.

Although Izelmyst won’t have much to see besides the Temple of the Chime and its small clearing within the Jungle of Whispers, Kinoko will be returning here many times on his travels throughout the galaxy. Chel’s focus has been on making it feel eerily atmospheric, and like Starlight City, you can expect its ambience and atmosphere to evolve in subtle ways as you progress in the game.

Next up, some of Chel’s work on the game’s interfaces…

Even though the entire purpose of a starsprite’s life is to fight and die alongside its master, it’s important to us as the game’s designers that the player forms meaningful bonds with the starsprites throughout the course of the game. That’s why we decided that starsprites will each have unique names assigned to them by Kinoko, and that’s also the rationale behind the implementation of the face sprites above, so that each starsprite on the UI can be uniquely represented in both name and visuals.

On that note, Chel’s been working on replacing some of our placeholder HUD elements with ones that fit her vision of how the final game should look!

Did you notice the addition of starsprite levels? That’s right! In addition to Kinoko’s overall friendship rank, which represents more broadly his bond with the starsprites and enables him to unlock a deeper understanding of their language and command more of their powers, starsprites now have individual levels too. These only go up to level 5 currently, as, at the end of the day, starsprites are still basically cannon fodder, and very happily so! But now, by taking care of your starsprite companions, doing your best to keep them alive despite their efforts, you’ll be rewarded with a party of stronger, more resilient companions!

That feature’s quite new though, having only entered development last week, so we’ll have more to say about that hopefully as it continues to take shape. In the meantime, much of our focus has continued to be on the starsprite’s abilities, which we mentioned in a previous post. As a reminder, each type of starsprite (yellow, blue, red, etc.) offers four upgradeable abilities which can be cast in exchange for Starlight, a resource gathered from fighting enemies or from caches found around the game’s worlds.

Here are Chel’s most recent concepts for how we might represent them on the HUD…

We can’t wait for you to play our next demo release later next year, which is when you’ll finally be able to try out the starsprites properly for yourself. By that time, we hope to have abilities implemented for at least the yellow, blue and red starsprites, which provide exploration, defence, and offence-oriented abilities respectively.

If you’ve liked what you’ve seen in this month’s blog post, please consider supporting the development of Star Heretic over on Patreon! Although I post most of my own updates here on the website, Chel posts the majority of her art and design updates either on Patreon or in our Patreon-exclusive Discord channels, both of which you can get access to from just one American dollar a month. For more information about that, please check out our Kinoko Fan Club page.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading!