The big feature in 0.13 is the addition of three new levels towards the start of the game. Look for "Tunnel Vision", "Run the Gauntlet", and "Virtual Velocity" in the level selection list, near the top.
These new levels extend the initial "Orientation Course" portion of the game, and are now included in the Demo. The Demo used to be a single level, taking maybe 5-10 minutes on average. The Demo now contains 4 levels, and is probably more like a 20-30 minute experience.
And as we promised, we delivered Andrew's Nightmare demo version. Face Andrew's deepest fears as you explore his darkest memories during his unsettling therapy sessions with Dr. Braun.
In this free demo, you'll get to play the first chapter of the game, where you'll explore Andy's house and witness the early stages of his DOWNFALL.
The full game is currently in development, and all reviews will be taken as constructive feedback for its improvement. So we would love to hear your thoughts after you've played it!
Shapes in the mist! Shrieks in the night! The demon Baalphazu, Marquis of Terror, and his horde of ghoulish Pumpkinites are spreading a living nightmare across Aeternum. Aid Salvatore the Mad in his quest to banish these foul terrors and collect a bounty of Nightveil Hallow rewards.
We spoke to the Design, Narrative, and AI Teams for insight into various aspects of the event. Let’s find out some of the tricks that brought you this Halloween treat. You’ll also get a glimpse at early Nightveil Hallow concept art from before Baalphazu could cast their first shadow over Aeternum.
Inspiration
The direction of Nightveil Hallow was greatly inspired by 80s horror movies, specifically the awesome creature-flicks and fun-spirited ‘schlocky’ tone of the era. As a Halloween and horror-fanatic, it was a blast to work with the team to mix all the pieces that make 80s horror so iconic, and present them within the realm of Aeternum. Baalphazu and his Pumpkinites convey a theme that should hopefully feel familiar to fans of the genre and season, while Salvatore is a classic throwback to the golden age of horror cinema icons.
Event Goals
The goal of every holiday event is to ensure it’s unmistakable to players that a special event is happening in Aeternum. With that, the playfully decorated settlements round out Nightveil Hallow. It is the team’s seal on our love letter to the spookiest time of year!
References in the Event Shop Rewards
The reverence Nightveil Hallow holds for the spooky season is most apparent in the Event Shop and incredible rewards players can earn during the event. I’m certain fans of the genre will pick up on the inspirations for a few of the items, but there’s one hidden-in-plain-sight reference I’m particularly curious if anyone will catch.
The Creation of Baalphazu
When conceiving the demon Baalphazu, we wanted to hint at the existence of other parallel worlds. The Netherworld is a mysterious realm of shadows and nightmares, where the dark figure of Lord Tenebrous rules over the Host, a collection of goblins, ghouls, and other terrors. Baalphazu is one of the Netherworld’s dread captains, eager to carry out the will of his twisted master by spreading fear throughout the island of immortals.
Naming Baalphazu
We tossed a few names around when conceiving this demon. When it comes to New World, our goal is to have creatures and NPCs that are familiar but still uniquely Aeternum. I was fond of the name ‘Belphegor’ while another developer favored ‘Pazuzu’ so it’s easy to see how we settled on Baalphazu.
Pumpkinites
Any new holiday event starts with establishing the "reason for the season," or the major shift that causes all of the associated festivities. The conceptualization of the Pumpkinites was that first step toward developing the overall framework of Nightveil Hallow.
The idea of monstrous pumpkin creatures running amok across Aeternum was too fun to pass on, and the Concept/AI Teams did a killer job developing each one to convey their own sense of personality and purpose. Of the bunch, the Pumpklin is the one I’d consider to be the mascot of the event, as it’s a direct homage to the “small creature” horror films of the 80s. I can totally see this little guy standing claw-to-claw against the Critters.
Pumpklins
Despite being the smallest and most fodder creature of the bunch, the Pumpklins were a deceivingly intricate mob to create, as they are vital to defeating Baalphazu. The concept of defeating an enemy and picking up its head to throw at others was as wild to pitch as it was to develop. A lot of new tech had to be created and there were many moving parts. It was a cross-departmental effort.
Everyone involved with the process did such an amazing job, it’s immensely satisfying mowing them down by the dozens and seeing their heads fly across the battlefield. I’m incredibly excited the Pumpklin is now a permanent fixture of Aeternum, and can’t wait to see what other shenanigans it can get itself into.
Baalphazu Boss Fight
Controlled chaos is how I’d best describe the primary creative design pillar of the fight. It’s fast and hectic, but includes a large boss space to create a more epic atmosphere in two ways — many players can participate without feeling too crowded, and Baalphazu and the Pumpkinites have a lot of room to move.
I love how Baalphazu's dialogue and taunts were worked so heavily into the flow of the fight to convey both narrative and phase transitions to players. If I had to pick one specific moment of the Baalphazu fight I’m particularly pleased with (aside from everything), the presentation and performance of the final death explosion completely nailed the goal of an 80s cult horror villain death. It is a perfect celebratory moment to close out the encounter.
Boss Design
Baalphazu was designed to make sure any player can succeed without having to play a specific role or weapon. Accessibility is key for a spooky good time.
A lot of effort went into making sure the boss and the supporting cast worked harmoniously with each other. For example, the monster attacks apply healing debuffs, but offer healing when defeated.
Vital values were pushed to the absurd as we explored what an open-world boss could look like in New World. This "more is better" approach includes the bonus damage players can deal when Baalphazu becomes staggered. There’s something so satisfying about seeing big numbers!
I even secretly snuck in a small health buff before we locked down the boss for release, but watching the boss melt before the might of the players indicates that I should have applied "more is better"... more.
Appearance
Since the Pumpkinites lean into the more schlocky, playful side of 80s horror, we created a darker and more sinister look for Baalphazu to add some levity to the event. They were meant to be a trickster figure with ties to mysterious ancient gods, so we drew a lot from folk horror. Their hooded, partially obscured face bears a terrifying grin, leaning into that trickster archetype.
We went through tons of iterations for different looks and body types, but ultimately settled on branch-like wings. Reminiscent of their pumpkin underlings, the wings give the impression of gnarled roots ripped out of the ground. For the rest of Baalphazu's design, we wanted them to look otherworldly — totally different than anything else we’ve seen in Aeternum so far. They look almost as if carved from clay, beautiful but disturbing at the same time. Ultimately their design captured exactly what we wanted for this event, dark and unsettling, with a hint of Halloween fun.
The New Throwable Object Mechanic
What’s more appropriate for the season than throwing fiery pumpkin heads? This mechanic creates an ebb and flow to the boss that allows players of a wide-range of skill and levels to participate in meaningful ways.
Developing the logistics of this mechanic and integrating it into the chaos of the fight presented an interesting challenge. We had to ensure the throwable pumpkins were visible and easily learnable. They also had to feel predictable in terms of trajectory and destination. It’s been immensely gratifying watching playthroughs and seeing the ‘aha’ moment when this mechanic clicks with players.
Concept Art
See how some of the Design Team’s concepts came to life:
Thanks for your support! We’ll see you in the shadows of Aeternum.
Accessibility settings are great, but you know what’s one step better? When accessibility is always on, baked into the design of a game from the start. Nobody wants to have to stop the tutorial during the first step to go frantically searching for accessibility features.
Since the flowers are the most important elements of the Primrows game board, our goal from the beginning was to come up with a set of flowers whose colors and shapes would remain distinct for as wide a range of vision accessibility needs as possible.
But I’ve already gotten ahead of myself here, because the choice to use flowers was in itself an accessibility choice.
Here’s a re-creation of the very first prototype for the game that would evolve into Primrows 2010, which leaned heavily on the game’s Sudoku roots:
A perfectly utilitarian option, but beyond just lacking character, it demands a certain level of literacy. And even though you aren’t doing any actual calculations with these numbers in Primrows (or in Sudoku, for that matter), a lot of people with discalculia or a general aversion to math find this style to be its own barrier to entry. Abandoning this design turned out to be the right call for several reasons.
(And for those people who do find numbers to be the best way to distinguish the different flowers, we incorporated the numbers one through five in the design of the flowers. Can you spot them?)
Since we knew relying on color alone to distinguish flowers wasn’t going to be an option, Susan made sure all the shapes of the flower had as much shape contrast as possible -- some tall, some wide, some round, some pointy. Among other things, the suits of a deck of playing cards served as a bit of inspiration.
During this phase, Cathy spent a good amount of time looking at her monitor with her glasses off at various distances — and once we had a final design, we made sure to seek out playtesters with low vision to check our work.
Choosing the colors took a lot of effort, and we spent a lot of time looking at different color options in color blindness simulators to try and find a set of colors that had contrast across a wide range of color vision deficiencies, while still maintaining stylistic consistency. On the left is an early color palette, and on the right is the revised version that made it into the final version.
Of course, simulators are no substitute for testing accessibility with real humans, so we made efforts to recruit playtesters with various types of colorblindness. These tests are what revealed to us that, while players were able to distinguish the different types of flower from each other, there were some issues distinguishing the flowers from the game board, and we needed at least a little bit of a shadow behind the flowers to help players out.
In addition to what we’ve done with the flowers, we’ve also been using tools to ensure our UI elements meet minimum contrast requirements -- and I haven’t even touched on the things we took into consideration for motor accessibility, or the way every sound in the game has a companion animation cue.
We do hope our efforts have contributed to a game that most people will be able to enjoy!
Winter is coming, and the weather is getting colder and colder, but don’t worry! We’ll try to warm you up with nice discounts up to 90%.
This sale will allow you to travel to the amazing world of Belosvet, try on the role of an operator armed to the teeth, and take part in the most important air battles of World War II.
The sale will take place from October 24 (6 PM UTC) to November 3.
☑ The Official servers in Europe, North America, Asia has been temporarily shut down for maintenance and update.
☑ Fixed the character rotation error when riding an animal in the riding state.
☑ Adjusted the animal taming method. When an animal is attacked, it only has 30 HP left, the dizzy icon will be displayed and the item can be tamed according to the prompt. Be careful not to kill the animal when you attack it at the end. You can switch to fists to do less damage.
☑ Fixed the problem that the female character's voice was not set to sound attenuation, which caused all clients to hear her attack, jump and death sound.
☑ Added a larger collision body for the death backpack to prevent it from falling to the ground below or rolling to other places.
☑ Set the death backpack icon to be displayed only on your own client and not let others see it.
☑ Some players reported that they occasionally encountered the problem of mouse Invert. Temporarily tested and did not encounter this bug. Temporarily remove the mouse Invert function.
☑ Fixed the excessive mouse rotation caused by sitting down and standing up. Now the standing up animation will be played when standing up. You can also press Z to sit down and stand up.
☑ Fixed the temperature display bug of the temperature component on the server, reduced the speed of HP drop caused by damage during the freezing event, changed to damage once every 5 seconds, and reduced the difficulty of the game. When a freezing event comes, remember to build a campfire to keep warm and wait for the temperature to rise.
Listen to the whistling wind in the cozy snow house, and hope you can find peace in the aurora on a cold night. We are a small studio with 2 people. Please give us some time and patience to update the game. We welcome your feedback in the community. We will record your feedback and suggestions to help us improve the game in the future, Thank you!
