I was told to come up with a striking blog topic name so there you go. I will touch on all these topics in this blog entry though.

First of all, let’s talk avatars and customization. In CD1 we didn’t have to think about what the player looks like, but here it’s different (naturally because of multiplayer). For our Early Access release we are aiming to have a diverse selection of heads, hair, hats and torsos – everything from a grizzly bearpunk miner to a slick dandy gentleman to a lethal gunslinger.

We are including both sexes so that doubles the selection as well. We were thinking of limiting the mixing of male and female parts but that would be silly and restricting. Let the players create the kind of characters they want! Also we are not initially limiting hat and hair selection – which will obviously cause clipping issues with some models. We might make an exclusion list for these cases, but I am not too worried. Isn’t one point of character customization to make as silly and memorable characters as possible?

So Cave Digger 2 will be rated PEGI16, meaning we’ll have some mature themes, violence and drugs. It does provide a liberating feel in which you don’t have to tiptoe around the things you want to say and include in the game. Our story (told in comic book form) has already been written by me and Ari-Matti and will be drawn by our esteemed comic book artist Jussi in the coming months. It’s a seriously insane telling of the Adventures of Clayton (the player’s predecessor) full of violence, gore and cosmic horror and I can’t wait for our players to get to experience it in the game.

We actually had magic mushrooms in Cave Digger 1, which, when consumed, caused the player to go on various kinds of trips. Every rating agency ignored these and gave us the 3+ rating but I think some parent complained to ESRB, which after some contemplation raised our rating to Teen for Use of Drugs. Hah! I think CD2 will surprise some of these people.

In other news, we’ve got the UI and also tool upgrade purchases in the game, so basically you can play the game from the beginning to the “end” of the Early Access release. Our EA will feature 2 biomes out of the 5 we are doing. We’ll be releasing those in major content patches as we go along the Early Access process.

The only major feature missing is the tutorial, which we are doing next sprint. Then it’s all iteration, bug fixing and polish as we are preparing for the summer. In just a few months the players will get to experience CD2 for the first time!

It is a scary and exhilarating thought at the same time.

To cap it off, here’s our team on a well deserved weekly meeting in a local park. Beers were had.

-Kharan (Jaakko Asikainen)

Random development quote: “Tekee itekin mieli maalatessa nuolasta sitä..“