December Devblog - Making Strides
- Kailoulou
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
The Church of the Thousand Eyes in Schism has a specific phrase called “Lord be with you in stride.” It originates in their theology and belief that their god is with them every step of the way. Just as their god walks beside them, we’ve made several strides in the development of Schism this month! Welcome to the December edition of our development blog! I’m Kai, the director for Schism, and let’s get right into the gist of things:
In Summary:
If you are already excited by what we are doing and want an opportunity to get involved with our development, then join our Discord and become a playtester or offer your feedback!
And if you want to explore more about what we have been doing, then let me tell you about it!
Improving the User Interface
As we have improved the UI (User Interface) of the game, we knew that a readable and immersive user interface is critical to what makes our game great to play. You can take a look at it here:
We’ve been using player feedback within our Discord community while balancing our own desires to create the opulent world of Cervinae to craft this UI. While it may be a seemingly opulent, elegant, and easy-to-understand UI, there were actually quite a few hurdles that we had to overcome while creating this.
One of these hurdles was the use of space and not crowding the important gameplay information for you, all the while maintaining that “Cervinian aesthetic” that we have built. Of course, to best fulfill your role as a double agent, you need a good UI to manipulate and get information. Yet, at the same time, we wanted to preserve the grandeur that is found within The Holy City of Cervinae (we also, admittedly, couldn’t help ourselves).
This balancing act of making information readily accessible visually while maintaining the style made for a fantastic journey. But this journey is what we will be exploring later this month, when we release our Schism Behind The Scenes development blog. Plus! We’ve got plenty more wonderful things to talk about, such as…
Pitching the Game In Real Life!
We may be an entirely remote team all across the world, but I still gotta pitch the game and Far Owl Studios in person! We participated in the pitching competition at the Game Your Future Conference. We, unfortunately, did not win first place. Yet the feedback we received is being used to improve and influence how we position Schism for long-term support, including our crowdsourcing campaign we’re launching in 2026!
The feedback we’re receiving is also influencing our design philosophy! It made us define a MUCH CLEARER perspective to the espionage religious fantasy that we identified when we started making this game earlier this year. It’s already rippling through the second level that we are creating, the intelligence, and the dialogue.
I personally want to thank all of the panelists whom I’ve been talking to and everyone that I met while I was there. We’re already strategizing for the year ahead, and I will be telling you more about what is happening for Schism in 2026 as we enter the new year!
New Cinematic Direction for our Dialogue Sections
I know that Schism needs to be an emotionally tense and suspenseful game. I saw that the previous sprite system was not cutting it. While there are certainly points where the writing can do the heavy lifting, if you see a 2D image just move around on the screen, it just-- kills the mood***. Along with this realization, we also realized that with our other systems being so advanced and demanding of my time, I decided to remove the sprite system and replace it with backdrops like this Work In Progress (WIP):
Some of our playtesters on our Discord, have already seen some of the newest changes to the dialogue sections of the game. But throughout all of development, we’ve actually kept a log of contingencies for various features and items within the game, this was one of the preplanned contingencies if we deemed the sprite system wasn’t working. You can see the changes and improvements here:
These decisions are part of the process of creating an emotionally heavier game while also balancing project realities, and it's an improvement so far. But you can tell us what you think in the comments or down below!
***Yes, I used a double dash because I actually know how to write, unlike the Large Language Models.
Conclusion
Well, that wraps it up for this development blog. The month ahead is going to be one of the busiest as we wrap up 2025 and enter the new year. Our next development blog is going to be after the new year, talking and reflecting upon this year and what we have learned in our journey of creating Schism. But, we will still be posting on our social media pages and releasing our behind-the-scenes on the 18th of December!
Otherwise, thank you very much! If Schism’s world, themes, and our journey resonate with you, then join our Discord to ask us questions, engage in our lore, and play an early version before the public!