Welcome everyone to my devlog series of my game cave. For everyone who is not aware: this is my first ever game I am creating with Godot Engine and the initial feedback has blown my mind. Cave has been one of the top 10 most popular web games on itch.io for over a week and I haven't even started implementing actual features yet. Over 3500 people downloaded and played my game and more than 75k people looked at the game page itself. When I first started building this game, I never expected this kind of anticipation and I am truly thankful for everyone providing feedback playing this very early prototype.

Many people have asked me in the comments about upcoming features and their priorities. In the past week I have been thinking a lot about what I kind of game cave actually should become. The next release will be a big one and will be the first update that brings actual features into the game. The game currently only consists of mining and smelting materials. That's it. A few people played the game a bit longer and seem to enjoy collecting materials, however, all their efforts will be gone after closing the game. Therefore, a big part of the first big update will be save games and persisting progress.

A few other features that are directly planned for the next big 0.1 Smithing Update:

• Crafting Tools - by default, you won't have the Iron Pickaxe any longer. Instead, players will start out with a far inferior pickaxe. You'll be able to craft the popular pickaxe by using the new Anvil component!
• Revamped World Generation - the upcoming patch will contain a completely new world generation, written from scratch. Instead of spawning "random" materials per block, materials will be spread across the world based on a world seed
  
• Improved Visuals - personally, I think that mining rock can feel even more rewarding. As a result, I want to improve the visuals when mining rock
• Save games - I want to implement the features of save games. However, future updates might break existing save games. I need to think about that a bit further.

Those changes will change the game look and feel a lot and hopefully make it a bit more engaging to play. While thinking about the next update, I also have been thinking about the overall future vision for the game's direction. Initially, I planned adding lore at a very late point into the game, however, some of the lore is required now already to lay the foundation of upcoming features I haven't announced/mentioned anywhere yet.

This game is playing within a mountain. A mountain full of mysteries and long forgotten kingdoms. According to legends, these mountains were once inhabited by dwarfs. Nobody ever discovered proof of their existence, until now. You as the player will uncover their story, you will discover ancient books about smithing best practices. Those documents will help you to learn how to smith tools and weapons. I never liked the idea of the player "just knowing how to craft" and being just good at everything. It does not feel... earned. Instead, I want to reward discovery. The player can discover ancient caves and long-abandoned structures that may (or may not) contain long forgotten knowledge. Some day, you may be even able to craft Legendary Artifacts.

I am still fleshing out the details of the underlying system. The idea is that you can obtain items predictably. So finding these tombs and scrolls of dwarfen knowledge will not be based on a random spawn chance. Rather, you can discover points of interest to promote exploration.

In order to make this world feel alive, I really want to bring a great audio and sound experience to the players. Currently, most sound effects are either recorded by myself or are free assets found on the internet. Especially the music is something that should make this game special on its own. Therefore, I am very happy to announce that Simon aka Laslo Jott will join me as an Audio Wizard on this project! We already built many games together in the past. One of my proudest creations yet is called The Legend of Studentenfutter that won a special spot on the RocketBeans Community gamejam 2006. I truly enjoy working with him and there is no one better for this job!

Soon I will be able to share with you a first peek into the audio journey of cave. In the upcoming weeks, I will also try to implement sound effects for all the items when moving them around or picking them up / dropping them.

If you want to learn more about the actual development, make sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel and join my Discord!