Welcome to our first devlog! We debated whether to write devlog posts as we feel they might be a bit old fashioned, but we figured we’d give it a go anyway. And if you don’t feel like reading (I promise this won’t be a super long post), there’s plenty of pictures for you to look at instead!
Before we begin, let’s do a short introduction… We are Feeble Minds, an indie studio from Gothenburg working on Serpent’s Gaze, a four-player co-op soulslike roguelike! Today, we’re giving you a small glimpse into our process for building the tutorial of our game.
So, now that you’re acquainted, let’s dive in! Our process starts with a discussion about what is needed in the tutorial: what do we need to teach the player? How do we want to deliver this information? This usually entails a little drawing from Jannik, completely impossible to decipher without a verbal explanation, but we’ll share it here anyway, because why not 🙂
After that it’s time to dive into the engine and start blocking out the level. We wanted to keep the tutorial short and simple and really focus on avoiding too much handholding. Another thing we aimed for was to keep the onboarding area relatively straight, so it would naturally frame the large moon in the night sky and highlight the end goal: the fog door. (Does the drawing above make a bit more sense now?)
Once we were happy with the layout and the necessary logic was in place, it was time to move on to set dressing the area. We start out with adding terrain and large boulders, using them to define the edges of the playable space and replace the white boxes. While this process is underway, we continue to playtest the level to catch and fix any issues early on.
After completing a rough first pass of the set dressing, we moved on to more detailed work. This entails adding foliage (small boulders, rocks, vegetation, etc.) and replacing any remaining placeholder assets. This is also where we get started with a basic lighting pass to make sure everything that’s important is clearly visible.
Now, as all game developers know, the polish work is never truly done. So this level might still look a little different in the final version! But we hope you enjoyed this tiny glimpse into our workflow. See you in our next devblog! Feel free to drop us a message if you have any feedback or thoughts and if you’d like to see more of our progress be sure to give us a follow on Bluesky, Xitter or TikTok (or join our Discord server!).
Hadeee haaaaaj,
Feeble Minds
Feeble Minds 