Sin Spire – Dev Log 27

Hello everyone! Today marks a fairly large milestone for the project – though fair warning, this dev log will be pretty word-heavy with not a lot of pictures. I’ll mostly be chatting about various parts of development progress rather than showcasing new art assets. Still, a lot has happened over the past couple of weeks, so let’s dive in.

Next Version Progress

The 0.0.5 update is nearly complete. The main thing left on the checklist are the boss purification sequences. As I’ve mentioned before these can be quite involved: I need to create them for three different bosses, and each boss requires two sequences with six animations each – that’s 36 animations total before the end of the month. Needless to say, I can’t guarantee that all of them will be done to their best quality.

The reason I haven’t worked on these sooner is because I’ve been distracted with a lot of other things – some exciting and some fairly routine. One of those exciting things is:

Translations

One of the most frequently requested features has been multi-language support. Naturally, I want as many people as possible to experience the game. But there were a couple of roadblocks: the story needed to be locked in, and the mechanics finalized – especially for tutorials – before translations could begin.

Now that we’re approaching the final stretch of the game – the final area and ending of the campaign – I decided to announce in the last dev log that I was looking for translators. Soon enough, some incredibly generous community members reached out, and thanks to them, translations into Chinese and Russian have begun!

Setting this up on my end was no small task. I had to transcribe every bit of text in the game up to the current endpoint and organize it into documents so translators wouldn’t have to play through the entire game to translate. That process took a few days, but it made everything smoother going forward.

I’ve already received a good portion of the translations, so version 0.0.5 will include partial support for Chinese and Russian. Implementing the translations is fairly straightforward, but still time-consuming – we’ll see how much I can get in before the end of the month.

Boss Fights

The upcoming 0.0.5 boss fights are in varying degrees of completion right now. They’re all playable and beatable but the actual fights themselves aren’t quite done:

• The Slacker’s fight has been improved a bit, though I may still need to rebalance it later – I went a little too hard on the difficulty, and I’ll be watching to see how players respond.

• The Mangler’s fight is still solid and doesn’t need too much attention.

• The Girlfriend’s fight, however, still needs work. Right now, it’s a little too random and leans heavily on her just shooting at you like a turret. I want to revisit this after the next update and make it more dynamic and interesting.

Voice Acting

This was the large milestone that I hinted at. Translations are also a part of that milestone but this has been something that’s been a long time coming: All major dialogue for the main characters has now been recorded.

That includes the Stalker dialogue which has been complete for some time but, finally, Ophelia has a voice. Until now she’s basically been a text box with a name tag, but now with her voice added in, her personality really comes through.

And as mentioned in the previous dev log, Ophelia’s voice work being done means I can finally implement the Green Pendant and let players progress through her questline (though, as with Savina, some animations will still be missing for now).

Gameplay Tweaks and Bug Fixes

As always, there’s plenty to fix and plenty to tweak. The list is quite exhaustive but I figured I’d mention some key changes:

• Purification Interruptions: Enemies can now knock you out of sex sequences if they see you. This might sound brutal – and it kind of is – but to balance it out, you’re now invincible during the “ragdoll” knockdown phase, so you won’t get stun-locked or killed unfairly. This is technically a bug fix as enemies were always meant to do this but something in their AI was borked.

• Parrying Tweaks: Parrying isn’t changing in normal mode, but for players on easy mode, I’ve extended the parry window slightly to make it more accessible and befitting of the name “easy”.

• You won’t lose money to the abyss or die when grabbed by a Stalker anymore – you're now invincible during that animation.

• Fixed a bug where the Stalker timer kept running even after changing floors.

• Adjusted how TAA interacts with resolution scaling to prevent some visual glitches. Essentially, you can’t modify your resolution scaling if you’re using TAA or TSR.

Art Updates

Art-wise, I haven’t done a lot this month – but I did finally replace the last of the whitebox models in the starting hall. The front door to the Spire is now an actual door, and the statue at the center of the room has been updated to something that ties into the story more directly.

What’s next?

Here’s the short list of priorities leading up to the next update:

• Finish the purification animations for all boss fights

• Continue implementing translations as they come in

• Edit and implement voice lines for Savina and Ophelia (and cut the rest later in May)

I know some of you might be disappointed if your language isn’t represented yet, but this is just the beginning – I fully intend to bring more translators on board for different languages over time.

That’s all for now and as always, thank you for the support. I’ll catch you all next time. Until then, take care!