Kalia and the Fire Staff Chapter 3 is now available!

Hello everyone! I'm very happy to announce that the third chapter of the KatFS pre-alpha demo is now available for download!

Escaping the spider-infested mines after the battle with the spider queen, Kalia finds herself at the streets of a long-forgotten city. Debris blocks the alleys, vines cover the buildings, and no signs of life to be seen... That is, until she discovers that the ancient settlement is now home to a gang of ruthless goblins! Chapter 3 is focused on combat and exploration, with the different goblin classes proving to be quite a challenge, each eliciting a specific tactic to fight!

This major update to the demo also comes with many improvements to the previous chapters and the game as a whole. All destructible props have gotten an animation for when they break down (and all enemies have death animations as well). Many environmental sprites have gotten a shading pass, improving the look and feel of the areas in the game. New abilities have been made available to Kalia's arsenal, with each boss fight unlocking more. And additional improvements...

However, there were still a few shortcomings in developing this chapter. Unfortunately my soundtrack artist's gear has stopped working and as such chapter 3 is lacking its bespoke soundtrack. As a temporary measure, existing tracks have been repurposed for it. There are some known issues around save and load states, most notably enemies resetting when loading a save or checkpoint. I fully intend to address these issues in a minor patch after the holidays.

With the game now closing its second year of development, what comes ahead is the transition from an early demo to a fully fletched game. That means that the time to wrap up this demo version of Kalia is near. Chapter 3 will still get a couple of minor patches as have the previous ones, but in 2024 I plan to switch to full steam ahead on alpha development, which will mean no more updates to this demo after some point. Still, I hope to leave it up in the best state it could possibly be as an early sample of Kalia's full adventure!

With this update, I'm also enabling donations on the KatFS demo page! Any form of support is appreciated, be it trying the demo out, sharing it with others, providing feedback, etc; but if you feel like leaving a tip, the option's there now! :)

Thank you very much for being along for this journey, and Happy Holidays!