- Lifting the Veil: Starveil Postmortem - 13 January 2025
Hey everyone, Vildravn here, one of the devs of Starveil. I have posted this on my blog, but I think it's good to also post a variant of the postmortem here on Steam so without further ado, here goes. It’s been two years since I have started a very ambitious project with my friend, Sukkoy. We have set out to make an online game, a little MMORPG, just to see if we could. That project has turned into Starveil. In a way you could say we’ve succeeded, in small scale tests the game is quite playable, and in my humble and totally unbiased opinion, quite fun as well. But two years on, Starveil is nowhere near being playable by the public and the reasons for that are multiple. In this post, I want to take a look back at Starveil’s development. Please note that I am writing this only from my own perspective and am not speaking for Sukkoy or anyone else who has helped out with Starveil. The Begin…
- Chat with us on our Discord server - 17 October 2024
Want to talk to us directly, get peeks at some behind the scenes development and even get invited to some limited closed playtests? Join our Discord server! See you there!
- Where have we been and what about Starveil? - 14 August 2024
Hey everyone, long time no see! Let's jump directly into this announcement by addressing the first question. Life has been quite hectic for both of us, and that led to a lot less time we could spend on Starveil. While things are probably still going to be quite in the flux, we're really itching to get back to working on Starveil and get it out of the door, and we're figuring out the path forward. Development might be a bit slower coming forward, but hopefully not at a standstill like in the past few months. That brings us to the other half of the title. Starveil is not going anywhere yet, and we're looking at what needs to be done to release as early access and what the current pain points are. We found one really major pain point and that is our server host, it's cheap, it's good, but it's just simply not good enough to host a game server, and some of you have probably noticed a lot of…
- Patch 0.11.2.0 - 21 February 2024
Today, we say good-bye to our old home. The Hub's layout has been unchanged since the very beginnings of Starveil, since November 2022, when it was still called Project Ouroboros. Here's the earliest screenshot; while the art provided by asset pack is very different, the layout is very familiar :) This patch introduces a new layout and look to the Hub. It's very much in-progress still, but as we're making larger changes to how things work, we wanted to roll it out already now. Here's how it looks like now. 0.11.2.0 Patch Notes Changed the look and the layout of the Hub. This is still very much in-progress. Changed the way players rezone into the Mycotic Grove, Necroforge and the Hub. Instead of talking to an NPC, players can now walk out. In the Hub this is indicated by a change in the tileset. In Mycotic Grove and Necroforge, players need to walk back beyond where they spawned. Tweaked…
- Patch 0.11.1.1 - 16 February 2024
Hot on the heels of yesterday's updates, here's a small patch to fix some issues that popped up Fixed a bug with the item list not showing quantities of stackable items Fixed items with the same name being sorted randomly Fixed an issue with the Thorns effect
- Steam Next Fest and Patch 0.11.1.0 - 14 February 2024
Steam Next Fest The Steam Next Fest came and went, and it was actually quite good! The demo was downloaded a whooping 6960 times, out of that we've had 221 unique players check out the game and our wishlists jumped from 170 to 417! And the Godot Engine devs and community manager checking Starveil out on the last day of the next fest was certainly quite unexpected! You can check out the VoD here. Thank you all who gave Starveil a shot, we will continue working on it, improving it and getting the word out there, it is a marathon, not a sprint :) As Valve recommends, we will keep the Demo up for a while afterwards, and then we'll see what the next course of events is, we will definitely keep you up to date on that. Patch 0.11.1.0 Notes Now that we've recovered from the Next Fest and general life being a bit busy recently, we've also released a small patch. All windows that have a list of i…
- Starveil : Play with the developer! - 10 February 2024
Welcoming all viewers to come test our game Starveil on our live server! Sukkoy one of our 2 man developer team will be streaming, answering to all your questions and criticism live, come give us your feedback and help us make a better game.
- The Starveil Playtest is now underway! - 10 December 2023
We are excited and a little bit nervous to announce that the Starveil Playtest is now underway with the first handful of players being granted access to the game! As time goes on and as we test and adjust our server capacities, we will be expanding the playtest to more players, so if you did not get access in the first wave, your time is yet to come. And if you have not signed up yet, you can still do so our our Steam page! If you run into bugs and issues or have some feedback for us, you can either share it though a form in the game's Esc menu when you log in, or just come visit our Discord server and share and chat there. See you in game! ;) ~ Vildravn and Sukkoy
- Starveil Devlog #9 - November 2023 - 4 December 2023
December has brought snow, and also the latest Starveil devlog. November has been a busy and exciting month, let’s see what have we been up to. Novel November Early in the month, Vildravn has shown off Starveil to the local game dev community at an event hosted by Game Habitat. It was the first time ever that people outside of friends and family could play the game, and it was a very valuable and interesting experience. Speaking of playtests, we have also launched the signups for a Steam playtest, and we’re very happy that we got over 90 signups so far! We have been working hard all November to get the game in a shape good enough for people to play without a developer present, and we really want to launch the playtest soon. That brings us to a recap of what we’ve done in November, and it’s quite a list. Following up on last month when we talked about persisting characters, we now store…
- Signups for the Playtest are now live! - 31 October 2023
In the Devlog yesterday, we talked about setting up a test through Steam Playtests. We are happy to report that the signups are now open! If you go to our Steam page, you can request access to the Playtest. We are not ready to open the floodgates just yet, but once we do, Steam will let you know that the playtest is live and running.
- Starveil Devlog #8 - September and October 2023 - 30 October 2023
It's the end of October and that means the spooky season is upon us. And also a new Starveil devlog and it's yet another double month one. Lives have been far too busy, but we also got a lot done, so let's get into it! Busy Bee September and October Like mentioned above, life kept us busy, be it work or family related matters, or vacations. But we are not slowed down so easily and we got a lot of stuff done over the last two months! In Starveil, dungeons stay for a whole season and then get re-generated. It's a sort of middle ground between the typical MMO experience where dungeons always stay the same and a more Action RPG style where maps are random all the time. We want the best of both worlds and to achieve that, we have built some in-house tooling to help us generate dungeons we can then polish up, customize and add into the game ready for the next season. Over the course of Septem…
- Starveil Devlog #7 - July and August 2023 - 8 September 2023
It has been a while and the keen eyed among you might spot we skipped a month. The simple answer is that summer got in the way and we took a bit of a break. But we’ve also done a fair amount of reflecting, thinking and work on Starveil, let’s get to it! Sunny July & August Let’s start with the most recent news. We took a stock of the current state of the game, and with the Next Fest hurtling ever closer, we’ve made the decision to postpone. It was not easy decision to make, but the reality is that we were not ready for the Next Fest in October, and each game only gets to participate in a Next Fest once, we don’t want to blow our chance. Instead, we’re really putting our noses to the grindstone, and are now aiming to participate in the Next Fest in February 2024 instead. This also means that our release will happen after February. With that bit of heavy info out of the way, let’s take a…
- Starveil Devlog #6 - June 2023 - 1 July 2023
It's time to sit down, unwind and recap the development on Starveil for this past month and look ahead into the future. And wow, do we have quite the devlog for you this time! Older devlogs are available on our Ko-fi page. Steamy June To get the obvious thing out of the way, since this is also where you're reading this post, we're on Steam! This is a huge step for us. It will help us with getting Starveil seen a bit more, we'll also be able to use some nice features like the built-in Playtest feature. No more mailing out Steam keys manually! It also sets a bigger plan in motion, but more on that later. We will also keep updating the page so there's not just the bare minimum, definitely keep an eye on it. We'd like to thank our dear friend Hiz for his hard work on the store and library assets, logos, etc. They look amazing. Speaking of visibility, it really helps us a lot if you wishlist…
