Hello everyone! It’s been a while. As some of you may know, I got sick a few weeks ago and have only recently started recovering. Unfortunately, this was a major setback, as I wasn’t able to work while I was ill. But I’m happy to say that I’m well enough to get back to development, and there’s plenty to update you on.

Gameplay Adjustments

First off, I’ve made some balance changes based on feedback. After seeing how many players considered the shotgun to be “the only good weapon” or “overpowered,” I decided to nerf it slightly while boosting the damage of the other guns. This should make more weapons viable without completely gutting the shotgun’s usefulness. I’ll continue tweaking these numbers as needed.

Another change is that enemies no longer collide with each other. This might seem minor, but it solves an issue where enemies would get stuck on doors—not because of bad pathing, but because they were blocking each other. With this change, navigation should be a bit smoother.

The Old House

Now onto the more exciting content: the newest dungeon, currently called The Old House. This dungeon is styled after a traditional Japanese house, featuring paper doors and wooden walls. I wanted to repurpose the sliding door functionality I originally made for the now-cut school area, and this setting fit perfectly.

In terms of layout, The Old House is a mix of the first two dungeons—combining claustrophobic spaces with open areas, but with an added hazard: floor traps. If you’re not paying attention, you might fall to your death. This, combined with new enemy types, makes for a more intense experience.

New Enemies

With a new dungeon comes new threats. These threats have been designed to make use of the trapped environment.

The Duchess Boss Fight

I’ve also started work on the Duchess boss fight for the second dungeon. This fight has been tricky to design, and I’m still tweaking it.

Initially, I wanted The Duchess to be a non-combative boss who only summoned minions to fight for her. However, in practice, this made the fight feel underwhelming. Right now, she follows this pattern:

Mechanically, this all works, but gameplay-wise, it’s a lot of running and chasing, which reminds me a bit too much of Micolash from Bloodborne—and that’s not exactly a great thing. Those who've played the game will know what I mean. If I have time before the next update, I’d like to make this fight more engaging.

What’s Next?

While I can't say that I'm back on track, I’m confident that the next update will be ready by the end of the month. Since I've been doing hotfixes and patches after the release of every update, I imagine the same will happen after 0.0.3.

The next few things I need to do before I can safely bank a build are the following:

An additional stretch goal is to implement more of Savina's lines as a lot of her dialogue was recorded not too long ago. I haven't been able to work more on the script since I was sick but now that I'm mostly better, at least enough to work, I plan on getting back to that soon.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!

Hello everyone! After receiving a lot of feedback following last week’s Dev Log, I’ve decided to adjust how I approach these updates. Writing Dev Logs every weekend has been quite involved and, at times, stressful. Many of you shared that you’d be fine with fewer, more substantial updates, so that's the plan.

I haven't finalized any decisions yet, but moving forward, I'll only be writing Dev Logs once I feel that substantial progress has been made. I’ll still aim for Sundays since that’s usually a free day for me, but I won’t stick to a rigid weekly schedule anymore.

With January coming to a close, I also wanted to let you know that Sin Spire’s next alpha build won’t be ready this month. I’m aiming for a February release, and I want to ensure the update is more polished than previously planned. While I’ll save most details for the next Dev Log, I can share that there will be new enemies and animations in the game. I hope the update will be worth the wait and that I can reduce the number of bugs needing immediate attention (there are quite a few at the moment).

Thank you all for your patience. Having a community like this is very new to me, and I'm still learning as I go. The fact that I've been met with as much kindness and support as I have has been very encouraging and I hope to reflect all that in February.

As always, stay tuned and I'll see you all next time.

Hello everyone! Today’s post might feel a bit reflective as my day has had a rocky start and, truthfully, this week has been a bit of a challenge. Burnout has been creeping up on me – perhaps because the Christmas season didn’t really offer the kind of break I needed. Still, I wanted to follow through on my commitment to weekly updates, at least for now, so I figured I’d discuss some of my current overall goals.

Game Completion

As I’ve mentioned before, my goal is to finish and release Sin Spire in the early half of this year. Initially, the timeline was much shorter, but the scope of the game has grown beyond what I originally planned. I underestimated how much time it would take due to this expanded scope, but I’ll do everything I can to meet the current goal. The next few months are going to be busy for sure. For the rest of this month, I’ll be focusing on the following:

Next month, I plan to speed through the next two dungeons and aim to complete them both within the month (if not, I’ll be sure to mention it).

My current focus is to get the game into beta as soon as possible. This means additional art, enemies, and sex animations will take a back seat until the game is completable. Once dungeon 5 is finished and the campaign is playable up until the End Game, I’ll circle back to these things.

What’s Left of the Campaign?

There are three dungeons left to fully complete. Two of them have usable art assets whilst one of them still needs to be redesigned. Then after that there’s still the End Game section which will conclude the game’s story.

The story itself is almost complete. The script needs one final draft and then I can begin casting for Ophelia’s voice (the last character that needs one). The Raven’s voice lines are fully recorded and Savina’s are about halfway done.

As I mentioned in the last Dev Log, you will be seeing a lot more placeholders in both Dev Log images and builds. There will also be fewer new enemies and sex animations, which I know may disappoint some of you who’ve been looking forward to more variety. However, rest assured these elements will get their time.

For now, the focus is on getting all the basics in place so that, no matter what, I can get to an MVP (minimum viable product) sometime in March.

Development Logs

I also want to briefly address Dev Logs. I believe they’re important for keeping you all in the loop and ensuring I don’t go silent. However, writing them every week takes time and energy that could be spent on development, resting, or practicing (something I’ve been neglecting).

I’m considering two approaches moving forward:

I’ll post a poll during the week to gather your feedback, but feel free to share your thoughts and comment here as well!

Practice Art

On a related note, if you’re interested, I could share some of my practice art. As a 3D artist primarily, I’ve been somewhat neglectful of my art practice lately. Normally, I’d do character sculpts here and there, but I feel like I’m getting a bit rusty. Practice art wouldn’t be related to Sin Spire in tone or style, but it might still be fun for some of you to see. Let me know if it’s something you’d enjoy – it’d be a new experience for me.

Next Up

Next week, I’ll be revealing the Stalker for the Trap Dungeon. She’s a fun character with some of my favorite voice lines. Despite the hiccups this week, I’m really looking forward to sharing more about her with you all.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading this long, wordy post. Your support, as always, means a lot to me and keeps me motivated even during times of burnout.

See you all next time!

Hello everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great week. This week, I revisited a previously showcased enemy, worked on animations for Savina and started development on the third dungeon, now called the Trap Dungeon.

Savina’s Animations

I kicked off the week by animating Savina’s reactions to player actions. For instance, if the player attacks her, she now expresses her frustration by yelling and stomping her foot. I also added several new animations to enhance her dialogue – simple nods and head shakes as well as gestures.

While I’d love for dialogue to be more fluid, similar to the animation test I posted a while back, it simply isn’t feasible. Instead, my goal for regular dialogue is to have enough animations to add additional flavor to the interactions without creating an unsustainable workload. Fully animated sequences with dialogue will happen but only at key moments, of which I want to save my energy for.

The Banshee

Some of you will remember an enemy I showcased a few dev logs ago; the Banshee. After finishing the animation updates to Savina, I revisited the enemy to finish her implementation. While I had already completed her design, I had yet to work on her AI and animations.

The Banshee is a fast, powerful enemy designed to be a challenge late-game. She has a large health pool and uses a mix of ranged and close-combat attacks. At a distance, she throws projectiles and then quickly closes the gap. Her up-close attacks are designed to keep up with player movement so players will need to parry her to reliably incapacitate her. Even then, she recovers quickly.

I want encounters with the Banshee to feel both fun and challenging, but we’ll see what happens once players get to experience the fight for themselves.

The Trap Dungeon

Lastly, I started work on the Trap Dungeon. As the name suggests, this dungeon’s main gimmick is its abundance of traps. The Stalker here also incorporates traps into her mechanics, changing the general approach to the dungeon’s design. Unlike previous dungeons, which use the roaming timer system, the intention for this dungeon’s Stalker is to only start actively stalking once the player triggers a specific type of trap (you’ll figure out which one fairly quick).

While I did have a visual design in mind for the dungeon, various factors have led to heavy revisions. This was a bit of a blocker for me as I was very fond of the original idea. Regardless, I can’t really procrastinate the whole dungeon for much longer so I’ve decided to, for the first time, greybox the entire dungeon instead of creating art assets first.

For the first two dungeons ( and potentially the last two), I designed the general art assets first, before creating tiles for procedural generation. While this approach has worked, it also forces me to focus heavily on visuals early on, which can be a distraction. Moving forward, I’ll use greyboxing to prioritize mechanics and leave the art for later. If I don’t finish everything this month, you might see some greyboxed assets in the next release, similar to other placeholders already in the game.

After this, I’m considering stepping away from adding any new gimmicks or layouts for each dungeon. It’s been surprisingly stressful from a time-management perspective. The dungeon after the Trap Dungeon will be similar to the first two, and the final dungeon will likely combine elements from all the previous ones. I also don’t plan to spend too much time on visual design for future dungeons, as I want to focus more on new enemies, animations, and so on.

Next Up

My next goals are to continue work on the Trap Dungeon and begin implementing the second main boss fight. Most of the assets and dialogue for this boss are ready, so I’ll be focusing on animations and logic.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and see you next time!

Hello everyone! Welcome to 2025! This marks the first full year I’ll be working as “Krasue,” having started this journey midway through 2024. While this is a dev log, there’s not a ton to share yet. After taking a couple of days off for New Year’s, I got back to work on the 3rd, so progress has been a bit limited so far. No visual aids this time.

I’ve managed to work on two things the past couple of days. Their importance isn’t very high but they’re still nice to have. The first thing I did was revisit the opening cutscene, focusing on redoing animations and polishing the environments. I haven’t shown off the cutscene as of yet but 0.0.3 should feature its rough debut. It currently runs a little over two minutes and is designed purely as a mood-setter – there’s no dialogue. Pacing it has been a challenge, and I’ll admit that cinematography is not my strongest skill. That said, I think it’s coming together.

I’ve also worked on cutting together and implementing Savina’s voice lines. Xeraphina, her voice actress, provided me with some miscellaneous lines, which I’ve been editing and assigning in-game logic to. For example, like the Raven, Savina will now react if the player attacks her. She will also comment on the player climbing around on various objects in the starting hall.

I also intend to work on some animations for her pretty soon. Currently, Savina has a simple idle animation, but I want to make her feel more dynamic by adding some subtle motions and more dialogue specific animations. While I haven’t started animating her voice lines specifically, that’s on the to-do list. Unfortunately, due to the lack of any good lip-syncing plugins (I’ve tried a couple) all the lip-syncing will have to be done by hand so that will take some time.

For the rest of this month, I plan to finish off what I’ve started with Savina’s lines and animations and then immediately dive into working on dungeon three. The third dungeon’s gimmick has been rolling around in my head for a while now. However, the timeline is tight, so it might not be as polished as I’d like once the 0.0.3 build drops.

The dungeon itself needs to be visually redesigned from scratch, which does give me a chance to incorporate some lessons learned from the second (manor) dungeon. Many players have mentioned that they appreciate the wider spaces in the manor compared to the claustrophobic catacombs. While the cramped design was intentional, I hear the feedback and plan to balance the approach to future dungeons.

So, for 0.0.3 I’ll need to work on:

Alongside that, I also need to keep writing the story and communicating with my voice cast. So, like I said, quite a lot to do.

Anyway, that’s all for now. This has been mostly a brief check-in after the Christmas/New Year’s break. Next week, I’m not sure how much I’ll have accomplished as I’m still easing in to the year, but, as always, I’ll keep you all updated. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you all next time!

Hello everyone! I hope the holiday season is treating you all well. I figured I’d put out a post as a bit of a year’s retrospective. It’s been quite an interesting one, that’s for sure.

Starting off the year on a high note (sarcasm), I lost my “dream job” and had to figure out what to do next after being laid off from the games industry. My job loss was part of the mass gaming layoffs that are still affecting companies today. The game I spent years working on? Shelved indefinitely, with most of the work never to see the light of day.

Years of wading through bureaucracy, slowly having the fight in me drained by upper management... all for nothing. But hey, let’s not get too bitter about it. Thanks to some severance pay, I decided to be brave (read: stupid) and return to something I’d tried pursuing years ago: indie development.

This started off strong, with a solid idea and plenty of know-how. I wanted to create a horror game (SFW) using the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a general template... but it never happened. Like many projects I’ve worked on, scope creep and indecisiveness got the better of me. What seemed like a manageable bite turned out to be more than I could chew. After a few months, I abandoned the project and fell into a development slump.

That’s when I had an idea for a different kind of game for a different kind of audience. Years ago, I had dabbled in adult projects – something I was particularly interested in. I enjoy making sandboxes and had created a few fun experiments in the past, though the content wasn’t very “marketable.” I tried to reformulate some old ideas and began work on a project called Velero. However, after a month or so, I realized the scope was, again, too large. I needed some security and assurance that I wasn’t working on something no one would play. So, I took a break and shifted focus to a quicker project.

Halls of the Pale Widow (Originally called SexyGhostOneshot) was a game I made earlier this year to gauge interest in my gameplay style and to test how quickly I could make something. The low-poly aesthetic, initially planned for Velero, was repurposed as a soft tribute to older horror games. After about three weeks (not including breaks), I released the game and was genuinely surprised by the positive response.

Initially, I planned to return to Velero, but I decided to stick with horror-themed games for the time being. I wanted to follow up HotPW with something that expanded its mechanics, especially the procedural dungeons. Enter Sin Spire – a dungeon crawler with action gameplay in a horror setting. Originally, Sin Spire was meant to be a quick, storyless project that I could finish in a slightly longer timeframe than HotPW. However, the scope grew to include both a story and multiple characters.

Much of my original design document for Sin Spire has been scrapped, with features being added and removed regularly. I’ll likely dive deeper into that in a future retrospective once the game is finished. Despite trimming many elements to avoid spending years on it, the game has still become much larger than I initially planned.

What started as a 3-month project turned into 6 months... and now I’ve decided not to impose a deadline. All I know is that when it’s done, I want to work on something much smaller and simpler.

Throughout this challenging development cycle, one thing has kept me going: you guys. I know it sounds sappy, but without an audience, I might’ve given up by now. I tend to be very secretive, and in the past, my projects often fell apart because I felt isolated and got tunnel vision. Having your support – whether financial or simply cheering me on – has made a huge difference.

This year has been full of tough decisions, but surprisingly, things seem to be working out. This might date the post in either direction, but I recently reached a massive milestone over on Patreon that has me wanting to pop open the champagne and celebrate immediately. I know life happens, and pledges come and go, but having an audience at all is something I’m deeply grateful for. Whether you’re contributing financially or cheering from the sidelines, thank you. Truly, thank you.

Here’s to 2025 – may it bring a smooth release for Sin Spire and even more games to follow. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

See you in 2025.