This week it was finally time to reboot. After jumping from deadline to deadline for weeks, we finally had the chance to step back and look at Pine from a distance.

We released the Mountain Demo, which you can try if you have signed up, and the feedback from that is still coming in. It's really cool to see that, even though it's a very early build, people are willing to engage and can see what it should be, versus what is there now and needs to obviously improve. We're getting some great feedback for all the effort we put in!

Meanwhile, we went LIVE on the Square Enix Collective this week! The votes have been coming in ever since and we're still at a very positive 98% now, with some great feedback on multiple channels. Check out the gameplay trailer if you haven't already.



So, in between dissecting and analyzing feedback from the demo and the Collective, we sat around a super large table for the bigger part of the week to continue our discussions on all the details of the game. We have had the bigger outline drawn out for a while now, but in these meetings we are coloring it all in. And there's some super cool ideas coming from that, which we'll obviously share over time.

Among other things, we are drawing a lot of new species concepts and thinking about interesting ways they could add to the combat. We have roughly five of them planned out already, but we're looking at smartly enlarging the roster with the limited resources we have.



On the environment side we've been busy with brushing up the cave in terms of detail and lighting. As for lighting, we're doing lots of tests in general to see what will work best for our open world.





Tech-wise, we're experimenting with that open world too: we started on streaming the world, removing the loading screens, testing how the fully immersive version of Albamare runs. We foresee a lot of work in this area still to be done.

Lastly, a quick shot of a species we're already quite far with: the Mannoth!



Until next time!