- The Devil's in the Details : News from the Lair - August - 27 August 2026
David (Art) - This month has been a few changes and a couple of new cool things. The amount of assets currently in the game is really starting to pile up and look really cool now. First off this month I have been working on the portraits for the game. The old ones were really cool and I loved them but the resolution was too high and we had to scale them down resulting in mismatching pixel sizes. The new ones (currently still a WIP) are half the size and look a bit more pixely and take up a lot less real estate in game and are a lot less intrusive. Secondly I have been getting more enemies done for the game this month 3 new orc enemies (the classic non green skinned pig faced kind) I've also been working on some water assets for the larger version of the old river town. Oliver (programming)Hey guys, I swear I just finished writing last last month's update and yet here we are again. Every…
- *We have fireballs!* News from the Lair - July - 29 July 2026
David (Artist) Hey everyone! Yet another month has passed and we find ourselves heading into the second half through the year. This month has seen a lot of progress yet again on getting core systems finished and making the world feel more alive. Town ImprovementsThis has been the main thing I have been working on this month. We now have over 100 props for the towns, trees, stones, buildings, animals. All the kind of things that will make exploring towns and coming home more interesting.How it started How things currently look in game Oliver has also been working on getting the waypoint systems working really well. We can now do all kinds of cool stuff. NPCs can walk through town, we can set how rarely they spawn, the delay between them, whether they appear during the night or day, the paths they take, they can even walk together as a group or singularly. I have also started doing some e…
- Exploration at scale: News from the Lair - June - 23 June 2026
Greetings adventurers, Oliver (coding) here! This month's Lair of the Leviathan update will largely focus on art and design, so David's taking it from here - then I'll run through some of the new trap systems, editor improvements and (finally) save game systems. David (art) This month has seen some big changes as well as progress on some things I hadn't gotten around to yet. First off, after doing some testing with the various systems we decided that the separate town and exterior system wasn’t working well with the game overall. Going from the world map, into separate town/exterior maps, then into larger scale dungeon maps was all feeling very inconsistent and it also meant I was needing to draw up a whole heap of separate artwork for each of them. Like 3 games in one! Formerly you would explore towns in kind of a mid size of map that was in between the world and dungeon exploration si…
- The Battle Is Joined! - 26 May 2026
Greetings, adventurers! Of all the updates we've shared so far, this is probably the one you've probably been the most interested to see. I've been promising to show off combat for months and months. Even back as far as when I visited David in Japan, my plan was to get onto combat on my return. Game dev is nothing if not unpredictable of course, and I realised I had to get all the other systems up to scratch before starting on such a complicated new part of the game.In an old school RPG, combat is at the heart of everything and one of those things you really have to get right. So many hours of a game are made up in combat, whether its clearing trash mobs in a dungeon or the climactic battle against the final boss, and if combat doesn't feel right, the whole game can be a chore. I've been working on combat for the last 6-7 (six seven) weeks or so , but of course other systems that are ti…
- April Updates: Preparing for combat. - 24 April 2026
Greetings, adventurers! Time from another update from the Lair. After so much work on the editor tools, I'm excited to finally be working on combat itself. For all the exploration, conversation, quest giving and loot, our RPG is, at its heart, a game that will be defined by the battles. So, we need them to be engaging, tactical and most importantly they can't last for 20 minutes each!! ( Looking at you, 1980s epic Knights of Legend! ) With that in mind, I've been striving to make combat feel fast paced, despite it being turn based. Originally the plan was to have combat all be grid-based, but with monsters being of all different sizes, and with maps having obstacles of various shapes and sizes that can get in the way, I wanted a more flexible system. So, movement will still be technically on a grid, but each pathfinding tile size is only 8x8, so it will feel like your heroes can move ba…
- March Update : Taverns and forges, building a world one room at a time - 26 March 2026
Greetings adventurers! It's been a hectic and productive month of development on Lair of the Leviathan. Firstly, we just passed 30,000 wishlists on Steam. Considering we keep a pretty low profile, have no demo nor a release date in sight, this is super encouraging. People are interested in the game, you guys believe in us and we're super motivated to deliver the best retro RPG we can make.Secondly, it's been a big month of technical work on the engine, particularly around the editor tools.Probably the biggest breakthrough for us is now David ( co-creator and artist for the game ) is now able to use the editor tools I have been building , and is creating buildings with them.The Editor Tools are a massive suite of things ( as documented last update ), and are in various states of completion , but the most feature complete are the map building tools themselves. Now, David can fire up a bui…
- Checking out our POWERFUL RPG Editor Tools - 10 February 2026
Greetings, adventurers, another update from the Lair! Today I wanted to show off some of the powerful custom tools we've been building to help bring Lair of the Leviathan to life. As part of the game's development, we have developed a suite of editor tools that allow us to create everything from maps and props to characters, monsters and encounters. Almost everything needed to create a full game adventure is possible with these tools. We are hopeful that in the future we will be able to release them here on Steam Workshop so players can create their own mods for the game , everything from new character classes to full adventure modules. They're still kinda rough right now in that they have a lot of quirks and need a lot of refining before that would be possible, but if all goes well with the game this will happen! So, the first up, the Terrain Editor.The Terrain Editor allows us to assi…
- News from the Lair : Forging a World Engine - 18 December 2025
Greetings adventurers, Oliver Joyce from Whiskeybarrel Studios here - it's time for some News from the Lair! 2025 is almost complete and we now find ourselves nearly two years into the development of the game. Everyone always tells you this, but making RPGs are infinitely more complex than you think they're going to be. I was fully aware of this when I joined David to work on the game (about 18 months ago) and I figured building a decent set of editor tools would take a year or so , and yet here we are, I'm still working on them. Anders Lauridsen (of Skald fame) often told me in conversations how important building decent editor tools are. You're essentially front loading the work to make creating the actual gameworld/story later a lot smoother. When David and I met up in Japan in October (he's based there, I'm in Australia) , we sat down and took a long look at the game's editor tools…
- Game dev adventures in Japan - 5 November 2025
Greetings, adventurers! This is Oliver Joyce, the progammer for Lair of the Leviathan, updating you on what's been going on the last month or so. Late last week I returned from taking my family on a trip to Japan for a few weeks. One of the great highlights was visiting co-creator and artist David in his home prefecture of Yamanashi. We've been working on Lair for nearly the last 18 months. We talk online most days, but had yet to meet in person - so it was an awesome opportunity to get our families together, meet up , talk game dev and discuss the future.David's family were wonderful hosts, taking us on trips to the mountains, to beautiful lakes and caves in the foothills of Mt Fuji, and of course dinners served by robot waiters ( as only Japan can do!) . There's a real magic to Japan, in the quiet kindnesses, attention to detail and consideration everyone shows each other. From friend…
- Updates from the Lair : October '25 - 5 October 2025
Greetings, adventurers!Here's a little update from us about game progress. When last I posted I had just started on combat. Since then I've done ... almost nothing on combat! Because we've started gathering a fair bit of publisher interest in the game (and of course because we want to get a demo out when we can), we realised we needed to go back and polish what we'd done so far. Most systems have been at about 50% - 70% ready and I wanted to get those a lot closer to being fully functional.Same with towns - we have the first two towns designed, and there's a dungeon I'm using as my testbed for exploration but it's pretty rough right now. There's a band of goblins that leaps from the shadows and surprises you, that's where the game pauses and combat theoretically begins ... but not just yet :D So the last 4-6 weeks or so I (Oli) have been been working on the following: Towns - NPCs now a…
- A July update from the Lair - 18 July 2025
Hello everyone, I thought it might be time for another little update on things. It might not seem like much has been moving in this first half of the year but behind the scenes the wheels are turning. For me with the visuals I have been finishing up the sprite system as well as working on portraits, finishing up enemies and a few other secret things coming up in the near future. I thought I would update things here and I think it will give you a good idea of the type of game we are going for and how much of an extra step we are taking to make things feel special. At the moment there are 8 different archetypes to choose from, all of which can be equipped with a variety of weapons, hats, different armour sets: Polearm/spear, dual weapons, single handed/shield, two handed melee, crossbow, bow, single handed caster and staff based caster. It was really important for us to make sure each had…
- Updates from the Lair - 19 June 2025
Greetings, mighty dungeon crawlers! Been a while since our last update but David (from Nostaglic Realms) and I have been powering away hard at work on Lair of the Leviathan. It goes without saying that this is easily the biggest thing either of us have worked on ( and I've built over 10 games for Steam already!) , but honestly this is also the most fun I've ever had working on a project. The more we build the game, the more we realise it's shaping up to be basically our own version of the classic Gold Box D&D games from the 90s. We loved those games so much - but naturally they have aged, and have their own annoyances. We're basically trying to pay homage to them, but also remove a lot of the tedium ( all those random encounters and clunky 3D maps, gone !) , while keeping true to the spirit of the era. There's also hints of Darklands, Ultima, Knights of Legend in there. All the stuff we…
- Character creation - the visuals - 8 February 2025
Work over the past few months has been ongoing on a variety of systems we need for this years demo and one that is almost done is the visual part of character creation. When I first started working on Lair of the Leviathan I had originally planned for a main character with limited customisation and a party of premade npcs. Working solo I was really careful about overscoping and I felt that this system would be something easily achievable by myself. After teaming up with Oliver things however have changed. Oliver and I grew up playing the SSI DnD Goldbox games and being able to customise the way your party looked was a huge part of those games. I remember spending literally hours trying to get everyone looking exactly the way I wanted before even starting each of them. I guess most readers aren't old enough to remember those games but at the time they were groundbreaking, having open wor…
- What we did in 2024: the first year of dev on our retro RPG wraps up in style! - 18 December 2024
Greetings, adventurers! It's time for a wrap up on what's been going on in the development of Lair of the Leviathan this year. Firstly, thanks for all your feedback on the great "Top Down vs Side View" debate of 2024! The battle was fierce but in the end, you voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Top Down view. ( Someone actually pointed out to me this is actually a 90 degree isometric view, but that doesn't really roll off the tongue, so top view it is.) Reflecting on this, I think you guys are right. Both David and I love the visual look of the side-on view, but from a gameplay perspective, keeping things consistent with the world map and exteriors ( which are top down ) just makes way more sense. This also allows us to stage combats inside interiors, and allows me to just use the same code for regular buildings like armourers and taverns, as well as dungeons. Anything that saves me t…
- Top down or side view, which do you prefer? - 25 November 2024
Greetings, adventurers! This is Oliver Joyce from the Lair of the Leviathan team. Since our last update, David from Nostalgic Realms has been working hard on the game's location art. From dank, oppressive swamp towns to cozy taverns with crackling fireplaces, David is putting together a ton of art for the game, one pixel at a time. Meanwhile, I've been working on the game engine itself. I have created a pretty powerful in-game editor, where I can do everything from add lights, points of interest and set the weather for the realm, I can also create encounters, conversations, link locations and more. I've also got the character creator fully built too. Next up for me is most likely the 'skills creator' so I can prepare for building combat in the game. I've got party chatter conversations going in the game too. Although you custom create your own hero ( and you'll have to create up to 4 ot…
- Teaming up with Whiskeybarrel Studios - 11 July 2024
Teaming up! Well for this update there is some big news. Over the past month I have been in discussions with Whiskeybarrel Studios and we have decided to team up on making Lair of the Leviathan. I have always been happy working solo but the sheer scale of the project meant it was going to take far longer than I had anticipated and combining efforts we can get this done in a fraction of the time. If you have played the Swords and Sandals games you will also be familiar with all the great little synergies and stats in those games and I think this will bring a lot to Lair as well. Things should really pick up pace from now so stay tuned! Some game news In game preview news here's a little teaser of the bounty hall from the main city hub. You will be able to get all kinds of quests here from hunting outlaws, finding missing people and best of all, hunting down rare and dangerous monsters. A…
