Sin Spire - Dev Log 07

Hello everyone! This week has been largely business as usual. As I hinted at last week, my focus has been primarily on art assets—specifically, environment art. While this isn't exactly my forte, it's an essential aspect of the game I needed to tackle. Everything seen in this post is heavily WIP.

To be honest, environment art has never been my favourite part of game development. If I ever bring someone on board or use purchased assets in future projects, it would probably be for environments. It's not that I'm terrible at it—at least I don't think so—but my passion has always been with character art. However, environments play a crucial part in showcasing the variety that Sin Spire is meant to offer, so I dedicated this week entirely to it.

As you know, Sin Spire will feature six different dungeons, each with its own unique theme. You've already seen a lot of the first dungeon, the Catacombs, but I'm happy to say that there are now three other dungeons currently in progress: The Manor, The Old School and the Slaughterhouse. With four out of six dungeons now at various stages of completion, I think I'm making good progress.

The Manor is where the Automaids originate. It's designed to be a grander, more imposing structure than the manor seen in HotPW. The Old School has a more contemporary setting, modelled after typical East Asian schools. It's a nod to certain Japanese and Korean horror games, complete with monsters dressed up as school-girls. The one seen above is a new addition. Lighting and mood for both the Manor and School are very WIP so they may end up looking drastically different in a future post.

The final dungeon I worked on is a bit of a tonal shift in comparison to the images I've shown so far: The Slaughterhouse. Up until now, I've mostly kept any gruesome imagery to a minimum, but with The Slaughterhouse it's unavoidable. This dungeon is meant to appear later in the game and is designed to ramp up certain horror elements. The imagery is quite grisly and I hope I'm not breaking any rules by posting it publicly. It's fairly non-descript in nature but you can clearly tell that those are bodies strung up.

The images you see here were taken from Test-Levels. So far, only the Manor and the Catacombs are playable to any degree. The Old School and The Slaughterhouse still need tilesets for the procedural dungeon generation. My plan for the next week is to focus on setting up those two dungeons in the generator before moving onto the final two dungeon designs. Once the base assets are done—walls, floors and mood—I'll shift my attention back to Stalkers and enemies.

On a side note, the status of the test build remains at a standstill since I haven't yet created anything for the Steam page. Among the things I need is a logo. I have a few ideas in mind but graphic design is not my strong suit, so I might commission someone to create or refine it. If that doesn't pan out, then you'll have to settle for my MS Paint-level logo when the Steam page goes live.

That's all for this week. I hope to have even more progress to share. Until then, than you so much for your support and have a great week!