Early Access Release Preview

First off, thanks to everyone for all your support, for wishlisting, reporting bugs and suggesting improvements for Striving for Light. We have been working with anticipation to prepare Striving for Light for the Early Access release, which will be on November 29th 2021. This is what the Early Access release will bring to you with patch version 0.3.

Major new Features:

• Story, Town & NPCs
• New and overhauled weapons
• Light shards & Progression System
• Localisation system
• New opening cinematic

Story, Town & NPCs

We have started to implement the story behind Striving for Light with the introduction of a town and NPCs. When you start your first game you will find yourself in an introductory area where you will be introduced to the story of Striving for Light by our fully voiced NPCs. Yes, we have committed to a fully voice acted storyline, so all NPCs and dialogs will be voice acted. There is so much a voice can express and this really helps pulling you into the dark and gloomy world of Striving for Light.

With the addition of a town, we really wanted to give players something consistent throughout the mostly randomised Striving for Light experience. A place to return, take a breath and prepare for your next dangerous adventure. The city was once bright and filled with light, but is dark and empty now. We did our best to capture this feeling and expression in our new soundtrack for the city. Take a listen while you read through this post and let immerge yourself.

With some players achieving very, very, very high levels in their runs we wanted to give players a way to save the progress and not lose everything when closing the game. You can now return to the town in-between of your runs by using the portal stones located on the different levels. Once you have returned to the town your current run will be saved and you can leave the game and return back later and then complete your run. We will continue to expand on the Story, the NPCs and Town system during the Early Access period.

Weapon design overhaul

It has been a while since our first alpha releases and so the time has come for some overhauled weapon designs. We have overhauled the oldest weapon designs of the short sword, the dagger, the great sword and the dark staff.

With the rework of our oldest weapons, we have also introduced 2 completely new weapon types to Striving for Light, the bow and the flail.

With each weapon type we want to introduce a new unique playing style to the game. Our vision behind the weapon types in Striving for Light is that all the weapons should have a similar base power. Each weapon should have advantages and disadvantages. The bigger the advantage the bigger the disadvantage that comes along with it. Therefore, it’s a matter on how you combine the weapons with the skill tree to craft unique and powerful builds.

Light Shards & Progression System

With the growing number of skills and weapons getting introduced to Striving for Light we have now implemented a first iteration of our progression system which has two main goals.
First of all, it shall limit the number of possibilities for new players to prevent getting overwhelmed on the first hours diving into Striving for Light. Since the skill tree is randomly generated and also infinite expanding it can be challenging to create “a working build” when everything changes to drastically from run to run. Therefore, new players will start with 4 unique skills and 4 weapons on the start. The skills and weapons are randomly chosen for each player.
Players can unlock new skills and weapons by collecting light shards during the runs.

We therefore also introduced a new bar on the UI indicating our current collected light shards. Once the bar is full you can bring those shards back to the NPCs in town to unlock new skills and weapons which can then be found during your next runs.

Secondly, the progress system has the goal to give players something consistent and persistent between the runs, a progress that carries through the perma-death structure of each run. This was something which was highly requested by the community and players and we therefore wanted to take this feedback into account and provide a fun system that gives you more and more possibilities and an increasing complexity for your build crafting the further you have progressed.

Localisation system

Following the feedback of players and our community we have implemented a localisation system for Striving for Light. Since we are a very small indie game dev studio, we do not have the resources to provide the localisations for every language. Therefore, this system shall serve as a foundation to make it possible that the community can engage and provide localisations for their preferred languages. For the Early Access release English and German will be available as localisation.

New opening cinematic

Building upon our voiced opening sequence, we now enhanced it with imagery to make it a full opening cinematic to Striving for Light.

Here is a preview of the full patch notes for version 0.3.

Game:

• Bow weapon has been added to the game
• Flail weapon has been added to the game
• New Portal system has been added to the game, making it possible to return to the town during runs
• A new save system has been implemented which allows saving your runs in the town and returning to them later
• A new progression system has been implemented which allows unlocking new skills and weapons
• First story snippets have been added to the game
• A dialog and NPC system was implemented
• A localisation system was implemented

Art:

• Added sideways animations to the player character when walking or attacking sideways
• Improved Player animations
• Redesigned main menu
• Redesigned dagger, shorts word, great sword and dark staff
• A light shard bar has been added to the player UI to indicate your current amount of light shards
• Town environment has been added
• 3 NPCs have been added to the game
• Added a new town portal has been added to the game
• Added new imaginary to the opening cinematic

Tech:

• The load system was completely overhauled which drastically reduces GPU memory usage and lead to significant performance improvements on lower end GPUs
• Background texture sizes have been reduced to decrease overall game size, loading times and to improve performance on lower end hardware

Sound:

• Added new soundtrack for the town
• Added voice acting for all NPC dialogs
• Added new SFX for bow and flail

Bugfixes:

• Fixed a bug which caused boss enemies to actually “freeze in the state” of spawning AoE effects permanently when freezing with a cold weapon
• Plenty of smaller bugfixes