Almost there...
Hey there! It’s Danny, working on Hollow Survivors.
The finish line… it’s so close! I can almost see it!
Few more weeks and it’ll be possible to play the game from start to finish.
There’s still stuff to be added, reworked, patched. Of course.
But the core of the game is almost there. And I couldn't be more happy.
So, what have I been up to in the past couple of weeks?
Adding dialogues took most of my time, to be honest. Dialogue lines needed to be written and hooked up to each of the characters. Making sure that each dialogue is played at an adequate moment required a bit of code-wrangling but I made it happen. Each character will have something to say at every player’s milestone.
![Dialogues.mov [video-to-gif output image]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zc97!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F43ca0168-8a33-4d0a-a3ba-e845c3cdd0b8_600x403.gif "Dialogues.mov [video-to-gif output image]")
I’ve also added a new boss: Krakos - the Monarch of the Void.
![Krakos 2.mov [video-to-gif output image]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Y4qf!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4d0e2ed-2020-4f48-b814-32f59a95f1a3_600x337.gif "Krakos 2.mov [video-to-gif output image]")
And tweaked an older one - the Beholder boss - to make it more fun. I especially like the lava terrain changing during the fight. It makes it much harder to dodge the lasers (with the added benefit of making the environment pretty 😍).
The Hollow Palace also had a facelifting: new tiles, pillars, crystals and other props were added. Soulbinders - the source of all evil in the Tower - were properly drawn too. Here’s how it looks like:
The final boss floor is only sketched out for now. Very much WIP:
On an unrelated note, a problem I had for a long time was that the flame-transition during the level-up was going behind the UI and the vignette post processing, like this:
I’ve wrestled with Unity for a long time trying to fix this - but no luck. The combination of Bloom on the flames, Vignette and UI set to “Screen Space - Overlay“ was just not going to let that happen. The solution I finally came up with was… drumroll please… baking the bloom into the flames sprite. This removed the need to apply post processing to the flames which in turn made it possible to render them on “Screen Space - Overlay“ canvas and put them on top of everything. I write about this because oftentimes I try to come up with some ultra-complex technical solution to a problem that could be solved with a simple non-technical one. KISS - keep it simple stupid.
Last but not least, Hollow Survivors was nominated for the Artistic Excellence Award at Indie Cup Europe’24!!! I’m really glad.
Okay, it’s almost 2am so I’m going to get some sleep now. Thank you so much for your support <3 Till the next one!