Author: Christina Lange

Between convention season and gameplay refinements, we’ve had a packed few months here working on Violet. From reworking tutorials to adding brand-new areas and features, our team has been pushing forward, all while upgrading to Windows 11 (which the in place upgrade was surprisingly good) and keeping development going smoothly.

Latest Demo Updates

With winning the “Best in Show” award at Cleveland Gaming Classic, we decided to add a few updates. While version 1.0.8 was originally planned as the final demo update, we couldn’t resist adding a few more improvements based on your feedback. These include:

• Having an option to Press B to exit inventory / map
• Fixing the gravity on precipitation when using dash / dodge
• Better visibility adjustments for night and cloudy scenes
• Clicking the R-Stick is easier for auto-merge
• Fixed Asteric’s dodge up side animation
• Fixed an issue with the manual merge algorithm that would incorrectly select the wrong item
• Updated character portraits and text

These refinements carry from the main game development and should make for a more polished playthrough. We hope you enjoy the smoother experience and quality-of-life tweaks.

Conventions

This fall, we had the chance to bring Violet on the road and got to meet players and fellow creators across several conventions. It’s always amazing to see people connect with the world we’ve been building and to hear your feedback firsthand.

A huge thank-you to everyone who stopped by our booths at the Cleveland Gaming Classic, GDEX 2025, and Williams County Fountain City Fandemonium. Meeting you all reminded us why we do what we do, and we’re already looking forward to seeing you again next year.

Expanding the World

A major focus this season has been expanding and refining Velare with new areas that connect our existing biomes in seamless, story-rich ways.

Border Regions

We tackled the transition between the grasslands and forest biomes, using creative design tricks to make the seams feel natural. We also restructured Claire’s barn side quest, splitting it into two parts, and temporarily removed the broken bridge into 2×3.

The North Swamp

Our latest environment, the North Swamp, brings murky new terrain to explore, complete with an eerie atmosphere and surprise enemies. Venture too close to the edge of the map, and the Forge Brothers might just appear out of nowhere to prevent you from reaching the world’s limits.

Forest Dungeon Exterior

You can now explore around the outside of the Forest Dungeon, adding more immersion and freedom to the dungeon approach.

Forest Province Edge

We’ve added a new area in the forest province, which is on the edge of the map. We introduced a natural cliff border between the Forest and Swamp provinces to make biome transitions more cohesive.

New Gameplay Features

Auto-Merge When Picking Up Weapons 

While merging remains Violet’s signature mechanic, we know repetition can wear players down. To help with that, we’ve introduced an optional auto-merge feature: hold the L-Trigger while picking up a weapon, and it’ll automatically merge into your inventory.

Bottles and Potion System

One of our longest-planned systems (bottles and potions) has finally arrived! Players can now collect bottles that automatically expand their food and resource inventory, eliminating the need to manually drop items.

You’ll find six bottles throughout your journey, and they can store potions used for healing or status effects (with more planned in future updates). This also ties into the new resource management features, giving players the freedom to choose between upgrading weapons or boosting their food supply.

Animations and Audio

We’ve been adding a ton of new animations to bring the game to life, as well as new music!

• The Violets now has full stun and death animations, complete with matching sound effects.

• Centaur enemies have new death and shield bash animations.

  

  

  

  

• Generic NPCs can now sit, bringing a little more realism to towns and camps.
  

  

• We’ve also updated character portraits throughout the game. Here are a few examples:
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

On the music side, we’ve composed new day and night themes for the woods to give each time of day a distinction.

Wood Day

Wood Night

Asteric Redesign 

After hearing community feedback that Asteric’s design could use a touch more personality, we revisited his look. We leaned into his courier roots by adding a satchel, adjusted his outfit for more depth, and found another visual to show his connection with the violets.

Tutorial Overhaul

The tutorial has been completely redone. It’s now mostly outdoors with a few caves and offers a better sense of pacing and immersion. The new version focuses on core controls first and adds combat encounters earlier to give new players a smoother start that feels closer to the full game experience.

Polish and Performance

Code Cleanup & Optimization

We spent some time clearing out old TODOs, reducing our task list from over 160 down to 80. With Optimized Loading nearly complete, we also moved our data decryption to a separate thread, cut down on load stutters, and improved overall performance.

Big thanks to Anthony for crushing countless bugs during QA and helping us smooth out the experience.

Boulder Physics

Players noticed they could hide behind boulders even though arrows passed right through. We restructured the system so that boulders now properly block projectiles, setting up for future mechanics like pickup-able rocks.

Marketing Updates

Outside of development, we’ve also been refining Violet’s visual identity. Our updated logo and refreshed branding are in the works, with more details to come soon. The goal is to capture the spirit of the game in every piece of design you see from us.

Stay tuned for the reveal!

Conclusion

We’re incredibly proud of how far Violet has come this season. With new features, expanded areas, and plenty of polish behind us, the game is steadily becoming the vision we’ve always imagined.

Thank you for following along on this journey! Your feedback and support keep us inspired as we continue building this world together.

This summer has been a busy season for The Violets of Amicus team, but we’ve made major strides in both art and functionality. From the murky swamps of Tenebris to tuning inventory controls, here’s everything we’ve been working on lately:

The Swamp Province – Tenebris

Our biggest highlight this season is the addition of Tenebris, a murky, mysterious swamp province in the upper left corner of the world map. This area introduces new enemy types, improved environmental logic, and lots of moody atmosphere.

• New Reflection Algorithm: Reflections now behave more naturally, appearing only on water and no longer showing on solid ground.

• Swamp Assets: From trees to ruins, we’ve fleshed out the entire biome with lush and eerie new sprites.

• Throwable Objects: We added swamp-themed throwables to make environmental interaction more immersive.

• New Enemy: Swamp Snake: This foe lurks within water and leaps toward the player when threatened.

Horse Combat Improvements

To prep for future mounted combat, we’ve updated our position tool so Asteric dynamically aligns with the horse’s motion, even while swinging weapons. This will allow smoother transitions and more responsive combat animations once the final horse-riding sprites are in.

Forest Maze, Trap Saps, and Palette Polish

• We’ve darkened the color of the grass to give the world a more-polished feel. In addition, we adjusted the color palettes for our new biomes.  The first image is the starting area grass lands. The second image shows the forest color palette. And lastly, we have the darker color palette in the swamp biome.

• New Forest Area (1×4): Features a bridge between cliffs and denser forest design.

• New Enemy – Trap Saps: A sneaky threat hiding among the foliage.

• Forest Maze Concept: Early layout work underway.

Centaur Combat Updates

These additions bring the Centaur enemies closer to their final forms, making encounters more varied and strategic:

Centaur Bow Pull Right

Feature Fixes & Gameplay Upgrades

We’ve been actively responding to player feedback. Here are some quality-of-life updates:

• Keyboard support: Basic keyboard functionality is now fully supported for smoother play and accessibility. (This applies to the demo as well!)
• Inventory Navigation Option: Players can now close inventory menus with the B button, aligning with common game conventions. This was a frequently requested tweak, so we’re happy to make this game more accessible to all gaming preferences.

Optimization, Lighting Tweaks & Deeper Polish

• Loading Optimization: We continued to refine the loading pipeline from last season. It’s smoother, faster, and more stable. We’re also diving into garbage collection research, which could become its own update.
• Ambient Lighting Adjustments: Alpha values were toned down in response to feedback that the lighting was too intense.

Swamp Music (And more!)

The swamp area now has its own custom track to help set the mood for adventures in Tenebris. We’re still working on polishing the themes, but we’re excited to give each region a distinctive signature.

Enemy Base

This area marks the origin of the Monster Scourge. Expect a mix of stealth and high-stakes combat:

• The first third is a required stealth mission.
• The final two-thirds are optional endgame gauntlets, designed to be among the hardest encounters in the game.

Path Updates (Goodbye Squares!!)

Path tiles got a long-overdue upgrade. After hearing that our paths looked a bit too “square,” we’ve reshaped and redrawn many of them for more organic trails and better flow.

Conventions & Our Team

Earlier this summer, we’ve been attending conventions here in our home base of Ohio. So far, we’ve attended TORG in Sandusky, Ohio and GameCon at Northwest State University. Our story artist, Kennedy, snapped these photos from both of them. Thank you to everyone who came out!

Dan also got to meet our pixel artist, Tony, in person for the first time, along with Tony’s brother. They had a blast playing video games and hanging out for the weekend.

And to all of you, thank you as always for your support and feedback. Each update, big or small, is helping The Violets of Amicus become the game we know it can be.

Until next time!

– The Violets of Amicus Team

It’s been a while since our last update, and we owe you a big thank you for sticking with us. February and March were intense, and after all the chaos, Dan needed a bit of a breather from the social side of things. But we’re back, and we’ve got a lot to share.

Dan has now shifted to working “mostly full-time” on the game, which has been a rollercoaster of its own. Balancing the creative freedom of solo dev life with the pressure of managing every tiny detail has been overwhelming at times, but it’s also been incredibly rewarding. He’s learning that owning your own project is a whole different beast, but he’s committed to making Violet the best it can be.

Art Updates

Centaur Animations

Tony has been hard at work bringing the Centaur to life. Given its larger size, the animations take a bit longer to complete, but the results are absolutely worth it. Here’s a sneak peek at what he’s been working on:

Balanced Swings (In Demo)

Dash Sprites (Going to Demo)

Dodge Sprites (Going to Demo)

 

Swamp Assets (WIP)

To avoid burnout, Tony has also been tackling some fresh ideas. Here’s a look at some work-in-progress Swamp assets that will help expand the game’s atmosphere:

Music Updates

Forest Dungeon Music (In Demo)

Eugene has been composing some fantastic tracks, including two pieces you can already hear in the demo:

Forest Dungeon Night

Forest Dungeon Enemy

Wild Enemy Theme (Going to Demo)

This track, which essentially serves as the Centaur’s battle theme, is set to make its way into the demo soon. It’s intense, primal, and fits the tone of the Centaur perfectly. (Note: Quality reduced slightly for demo size considerations.)

Marketing Insights

We’ve been doing some deep dives into how we present the game, and one takeaway is that some areas have felt a bit too empty. This is partly because we haven’t entered the polish phase yet, where those fine details come in. In response, we’ve made a big decision to “compress” the world a bit, which should help make each area feel more alive. We’ll share more on this below.

Grass Sprites (Going to Demo)

We’ve been refining our grass sprites to add more life to the environments. (We’ll include a few of our favorites below.)

Asteric Art Updates (On Hold)

We received some feedback on Asteric’s character design and have been throwing around some ideas on how to improve him. At the moment, there is not much to report here, but we’re not forgetting about it!

Some of Tony’s rework:

Optimized Loading

One of the major technical challenges Dan has been tackling is optimized loading. If you’ve played the demo, you’ve likely seen the loading screen:

Currently, the demo loads everything at once, which is fine for a small world, but as the game expands, this approach simply won’t cut it. Loading 81 sections at once would slow the game down significantly or even cause memory issues on lower-end devices.

The numbers on the left and right side of the HUD are debug info. The left side shows the total number of dynamic resources. The number on the right side shows what is being loaded / unloaded. The numbers in [] is the section the player is in. The section numbers above the === are the sections being loaded, the topmost currently being loaded and everything else being queued. The section numbers below the === are what is being unloaded, the topmost currently being unloaded and everything else being queued.

So, instead of loading everything up front, the game now loads sections as you approach them, keeping performance smooth and load times manageable.  This is trickier than it sounds, though. Game Maker is a single-threaded engine, meaning loading in the background without affecting gameplay required a lot of creative problem-solving. Dan even had to write a custom extension to handle file I/O on a separate thread to make this possible!  This is because for most of development, we were aware of the buffer_load_async function, that we assumed to load files asynchronously. Well, come to find out, this is not true whatsoever. Our ace up our sleeve was false! buffer_load_async is NOT spun off to another thread, it is just non-blocking.

The good news? After a lot of trial and error, this system is almost ready. It’s a huge step toward making Violet a seamless, sprawling world.  We even have a loading bar now!

7×7 Zone Rooms (Future)

As part of the effort to make the world feel more alive, we’re moving from an 8×8 to a 7×7 zone grid (the black squares in the image below). This decision not only makes combat more engaging but also reduces memory overhead, which will help the game run smoother on all devices.

Other Notable Updates

• Game Maker 2024.13 Update (Going to Demo)
  This was a surprisingly smooth update, with only a minor hiccup involving some function overrides.
• Move Audio Back Out From Game Maker (Future)
  We’re also finished shifting audio files back out of Game Maker to improve performance and encryption security.

Conclusion

Thank You for Your Support!

As always, we can’t thank you enough for following along with our journey. If you’d like to stay up to date with our progress, make sure to follow us on socials and share the game with your friends. Every bit of support helps!

Until next time,

The Violet Team