Devlog: September 2026

Hey!

So it's been a busy month (... isn't it always). The headline feature that I'm super excited about is a completely rewritten light system that also supports shadows. Until now, the lighting was mostly a colour wash overlaid on top of the world. It was simple and gave the world some mood, but lights never really felt like they interacted with the world.

I must say that I am very grateful for where this started: the original lighting implementation was inherited from Eldria's open-source origins. Without that we wouldn't have had a place to start. But we have very high ambitions for the look-and-feel of Eldria and want lights to make the world come alive. It's not done yet but I already think the hard work is REALLY paying off.

The 2D world is slowly becoming 2.5D

Eldria's 2D pixel art graphics are built using flat images (aka "sprites"). A sprite can show a tree but can't tell the game engine how wide the canopy is, how high the trunk is, or what parts of it cast shadows. The way that established 2.5D games handle this is to give each object an additional, hidden, shape (aka an "occluder") in addition to the graphical in-game representation that you actually see.

Does that sound complicated? I sure hope so, because it's been a struggle. Not only did this require a lot of rendering work - my least favorite part of building this game - but it also required building extensive authoring support in our asset editor. In order to be manageable at scale, we need an ergonomic way to author occluders for all the sprites we're adding. In practice that means a little 3D editor for building the shapes that represent things in the game. There's now a proper lighting and shadows workspace in the asset editor with presets for familiar shapes like trees, walls, tables or windows which we can then cut to size, or push the shape around, and check the shadow from different directions.

The funny part is all the little exceptions. A light shouldn't make the object it belongs to cast a giant black shadow over itself, unless the light is actually inside a hole or cavity. Raised ground shouldn't look like a pile of square shadows. These are details nobody notices when they work, and immediately notices when they don't.

The before and after pictures show it better than I can explain. The world just feels less flat. There's more sense of things having height and weight. We have already added occluders for the most common objects but many others still don't have a defined shape yet, and we will have to do that piece by piece over time.

Light needs to come from somewhere

The sun now moves through the day and the direction of the shadows changes with it. Dusk and dawn also affect the colour tint of the light. The exact settings here still require tweaking but the core system is really cool.

The goal isn't to cover Mirenroot in dramatic lighting all the time. Most of the time you shouldn't be thinking about the lighting system at all. A fire should make the area around it be brighter, feel cozy and help you understand where you are.

There's lots of tweaking left. But right now, we're busy with other things... i.e:

The first public playtest

We're super excited (and nervous) to announce that we're ready to let the first players into the game. This coming Sunday, September 20th, is the first time we open the realm to the public. This is a small dry-run, and NOT the full early access. View it as a pre-alpha experience and not a real release.

I'm massively nervous about it. We've never had more than two players online at once, so I'm half expecting crashes when more people show up. Maybe the server falls over. Maybe the login breaks. Maybe something completely ridiculous happens.

But if we can get a small group of players online, mess around in Mirenroot, and kill each other for a while, I'll be very happy. That is a successful test for me.

So, back to work. We're in crunch mode to prepare the first public playtest for Sunday.

If you are reading this and feel like you should have gotten an invite but haven't yet: reach out on Discord and I'll set you up.

See you in Mirenroot, very soon!