- Community Update #12: Implementing Bosses and Finishing the Level Art - 14 September 2026
Welcome all, this is the 12th community update for Diviner, and a pretty important one at that! I have a relatively small amount of information to convey on the game's progress, but pretty big strides have been made this past month. The biggest task that has been staring at me for quite a while is the bosses, both their art and their gameplay implementation. Good old Tornes has been sitting there on his own for a while, so this month I started the process of giving him some boss buddies. I still have a ways to go with the bosses, as they take significantly more time to develop then a standard enemy due to their art complexity, and also that I prefer to keep the boss designs a bit more varied then the standard rigs/gameplay kits of the basic enemies, and that requires more time to add new features and new rigs. But it does result in some really cool and unique enemies, and I think you gu…
- Community Update #11: Game fully Mapped, All Enemies are added - 12 August 2026
Hello all! This is the 11th community update on Diviner, it contains some pretty huge milestones for the game's development and a continuing push towards completion. So first off, greyboxing. If you are not familiar with that term, its a common stage of game production that involves using very basic shapes, usually boxes, to figure out the placement of important paths, objectives, enemies, rewards, etc before finalizing your art and levels. I have been doing this process consistently while making Diviner, but if you've been following the development of this game for a while, you know that I've remade the 1st act twice already and am currently reworking a considerable amount of Act One to fit into my vision for the game. As such, I didn't have a lot of time to dedicate to fully greyboxing every area of the game, but now that development has opened up into finishing the game, I've created…
- Community Update #10: Adding Enemies to Act 3, and Refining Gameplay - 22 July 2026
Hello! Just dropping in with my monthly update on how things are going with Diviner. Work has been going well, I've been more focused recently on adding more enemy characters to the game, along with fleshing out combat scenarios a bit more. Its been fun to shrink my list of content for the game and add some characters I've been wanting to add for a while but was too preoccupied with level design and bug fixing. I feel like Acts 1 through 3 now have a good list of enemies to be fought, and I'm hoping I can turn my attention to the main bosses next month. I don't often delve into game design in these little updates, mainly because I feel that playing something good is better than hearing the theory about why something should be good. But I have been putting in some effort to help marry the combat experience with the environment, and I think the early results are really successful. One of…
- Community Update #9: Works continues on Act 2 and begins on Act 3 - 12 June 2026
Hey all, hope you guys are doing well, and looking forward to sharing more news on Diviner and how things are going! I've hunkered down a lot on the art for Act 2 and even started some initial exploration into Act 3. A lot of my work over the past month has been focused on finishing a lot of initial enemy exploration for Act 2 and the general Forest biome, along with building out the environment kits for Act 2 and starting new environment art for Act 3. I've also been making some adjustment to my art workflow and plus-ing up my main shaders a bit to add some fidelity to the environments, namely making it easier for me to paint in color to a scene after the fact, and also making the close up camera shots look much better with some detail mapping and adjusted camera settings. I've also been cutting out a lot of time to not only tackle some slight redesigns of smaller gameplay systems, tho…
- Community Update #8: Collecting feedback and Conventions - 11 May 2026
Hello folks, this is the 8th community update and while this one won't be focused on sharing news specifically about new content or game changes to Diviner, I will get to talk a bit about my experience bringing Diviner to a local expo. Its been a pretty busy month and a half for me. I've been finding time to continue to improve Diviner, and Diviner also was a part of Steam's Medieval Fest which was awesome to be included in. More recently I had to print a lot of items like merch, cards, a banner, and make preparations to bring Diviner to a live indie developer convention in California in the United States. It was a lot more work then I expected, but it was very much worth it. I got a ton of incredibly useful feedback to help improve the game, and also got to talk to a lot of other developers and get their thoughts on Diviner as well. Getting to see people play it in a live setting was a…
- Community Update #7: Patch 1.4 and what next - 21 March 2026
Hey all, it has been an incredibly busy week for me, its been great to see Diviner get exposed to a lot more people and also getting a ton of useful feedback. It can sometimes be a bit hard to keep track of every thread so I'm sorry if I wasn't able to reply to everyone about any comments/concerns on the game. First off, let's talk about the new patch, and what will probably be the last patch for the demo for a bit (barring any fixes for crashes or bugs of course). I originally had planned to move on directly to working on Act 2 only after the playtest was complete, but I think there is still some more work to be done to the game's general experience based of the feedback I've been receiving. But that work will take a bit of time, and I still need to do some prepping for Act 2. along with preparing for some more festivals/marketing events coming up, so I think this patch will leave the…
- Community Update #6: Demo is out now! - 11 February 2026
Hello! Hope you are all doing well. This update for Diviner will be a larger one as there is a good amount of news to share, and I'm excited to talk about how the work on Diviner has been going. I'd also like to be transparent about the development process of Diviner and what to expect in the Demo. So first off, the playtest is now finished, but good news! The Demo is now live and ready to be played! This should be and will be the definitive demo, for those of you who have been here since the beginning I'm sure you've seen Diviner's core gameplay shift quite a bit, and while this demo is making some larger adjustments which I will explain more later, I am fairly confident that this is the best version to date of Diviner, and what the rest of the game should look like. As a side note, your saves will "technically" work from the playtest to the Demo, though I would strongly recommend star…
- Community Update #5: Playtest continues, Demo coming Q1 of 2026 - 3 January 2026
Hey all! First off, just wanted to wish you all a happy new year and holiday season! I hope everything is going well for you, just wanted to update you guys on how the game is going and what to expect in the coming months of early 2026. The playtest has been live for 1 month now. Thanks to everyone who has played the playtest and provided feedback so far. A lot of bugs were found and quality of life features were added because of everyone's involvement, and I've also been given a lot to think about for the demo coming up.At this point in time there won't be a ton of content changes between the playtest and the demo, except the demo will contain the new opening cinematic that I've spent the holiday season finishing, some revamped dialogue/lore, rebalanced encounters, and a new task system to help the player progress in the right direction. I have been entertaining larger changes to Divin…
- Comunity Update #4: Diviner Playtest is live! - 3 December 2025
Hello! As you've probably guessed from the title, a playtest for Diviner is now live on Steam and can be accessed via the main steam page here: The playtest will be active until at least the 3rd of January. I've estimated that this playtest (and the upcoming Demo) are approximately 4 hours in length so there should be plenty to play through! Its important to note that while I have spent an exhaustive amount of time playing the game myself and shoring up bugs and hard locks, there may be issues present, so if you'd prefer to wait for the fully featured and more optimized/more tested Demo that will be coming in Q1 of next year, that is entirely fine too. But I am also excited for you guys to play now if you're interested, and to get your feedback! If you want to give feedback or report bugs or just talk about the game, you can join the discord here at: discord.gg/XqAHecRhDs Unfortunately…
- Diviner - Community Update #3: Work on Demo Continues, Playtests in December - 5 November 2025
Hello! Hope you are all doing well. This will be the fourth monthly community update. There isn't a ton of specific news so I will keep this one a bit on the shorter side. But work continues on the game and especially on the demo, which is now having builds tested and the game's content balanced around player experience. Some notable things I did add from this month's workload are an archaeology mini game for finding loot, a revamped level streaming system to heavily reduce Unreal's hitching, some fun environmental beats for the player to uncover while they explore, and polishing the game's in and out experience (main menu, "end of demo" segment at the end, the main boss fight, a bit of story in the tutorial, etc) The game's demo is still on track for early playtesting at the start of December which will be conducted through the game's discord which can be joined here: https://discord.g…
- Diviner - Community Update #2: New demo completed by end of October - 7 October 2025
Hello. Its been roughly 4 weeks since the last community update, it seems like a good amount of time between check in's so I am back with another update on how things are going. This one will be a bit shorter since there was a lot more work done on systems this month then new content. Progress on the game is still going at a great pace. I've put a temporary halt on new Act 2 content so that I can put all my effort into getting the new Demo complete so you all can start playing as quickly as possible. With all of the work that has been done, the demo is essentially complete. I am currently planning for private testing in early December (after I've had the chance to do my own testing pass to catch obvious bugs). The majority of work done this week is as follows: 1) Added a settings menu with full audio, graphical and control parameters 2) added key rebinding for keyboard and mouse, and co…
- Diviner: Community Update #1: Community Discord, Act 2, and more - 10 September 2025
Hello. Its been about a month since my last post here on the community hub, and I figured it was about time to gives you guys an update on how things are going. Progress is going very well, and Diviner is on a steady track to hit 50% content complete in the next few months. Most of this effort has been spent on adding Act 2 to the game, which includes 2 new biomes and a lot of new gear and enemies. I haven't been able to focus 100% of my attention on the new stuff since I am still working very hard on getting the new demo ready, but regardless I am happy with where the project is at. In some hopefully exciting news for the people on here, I am making a community discord. I'll post a link to the discord at the bottom of this post, but you can find links to it on my other social media as well. I put off making a discord for a while, but as I get closer to the new and improved demo being c…
- Diviner: Revival and starting anew - 12 August 2025
Hello! Its been a full year since the demo for Diviner was released. Since its the anniversary, I wanted to share some important news concerning Diviner and its development: I am now working full time on Diviner's development, and Diviner is roughly 30% complete in its current state. A little bit of backstory about what has been going on behind the scenes and what led me to start working again on this project, since my last update made it clear I would be dropping the project due to lack of funding/feasibility. I've been in the game's industry for roughly 6 years. and I've spent the past 5 years at a great Indie company working full time as a 3D generalist. If you are not familiar with the current state of the industry, things are not going well. Funding options are disappearing, publisher scopes are narrowing and budgets are shrinking, and I unfortunately was laid off back in April alo…
- Update on the future of Diviner - 30 November 2024
I've recorded a devlog that goes over the current status of Diviner and where the game is at. If you are interested, feel free to give it a watch.
- Patch 3: Enemy Range Overhaul and UI polish - 25 August 2024
Overhauled enemy range conditions when attacking. Enemies can no longer attack the player if there is a significant difference in height. Fixed Settings Tutorial button sometimes not opening correctly Added pulsing effect to Use button when dragging flasks to help convey their usage. Added pulsing effect to weapon swaps to help convey that you need to select a switch first, then a weapon to switch to. You can now right click items to move them instantly without dragging when the stash or a reward is being interacted with.
- Patch #2: Enemy Stamina System Overhaul - 18 August 2024
Overhauled Enemy stamina system. Enemy Stamina works as follows: For every 5 stamina, enemies get 1 action. Most enemies will have 5 - 10 stamina, though a few have 10 - 15. When enemies move to get in range of the player, they will spend stamina and may lose actions because of this based on how far they moved. If an enemy moves a large distance and has 0 stamina afterwards, the enemy will still always have a 50% chance to use a single action. Enemy moves are also weighted by how much stamina they have used, so enemies are less likely to use stronger attacks if they have used a large amount of stamina already. Removed R button for recall for clarification, Recall is now only done using the recall button in your focus menu. Skill descriptions now show both base cost and modified cost Added a tooltips toggle in the settings menu Added a status codex in the settings menu to describe the st…
- Critical Fix for Escape Menu Lock Out - 14 August 2024
I just updated the demo with a critical fix for a bug a few users have run into where opening the escape menu during combat locks the player out of the game unless they toggle any of their hotkeys. I also added a skip button to the intro text crawl. If you run into any further issues, please let me know and I will fix them as quickly as I can.
