Happy holiday season everyone! 
I can’t believe it already has been again more than two years since my last update! I am going to just write a quick retrospective on what I have been working on.
The Tower (2022 MadeWithDefold Jam project)
This side-area was initially a little project for the event, and it is now part of the game. It consists on a bunch of small areas that can be repeated many time to get extra XP. I wanted for players to be able to join and leave the same instance so that players don’t do it solo.
Players teleporting to the Tower joins the current active area (where there is at least one player in). The players count requirement to be able to “climb” to the next floor just dynamically changes. It is a nice area to grind a few character levels as it is accessible relatively early!
New raid: Prairie
As I started to focus on adding more content, I have added another raid that is playable on the latest difficulty of the game, on a more hallowen-themed area where the boss is a jumping pumpkin. Here’s a snapshot of the map creation.
As raids must be joined during a short timeframe where the invitation is triggered at various times of the day, I have added a tracker on the game website so that players can log-in at the right time on their server of choice, for example if they are willing to get the related Steam achievement for killing the boss.
Character progression and damage scaling
One of the biggest concerns I had about character progression and damage scaling was the fact that characters had a fixed 100 health points pool from level 1 to 100. Also, monsters of the same type were doing the exact same damage amount across all areas of one difficulty. That was some legacy logic that prevented reusability of the monsters in various areas of the game, and also could make the players feel like their character never levels up.
Areas in the game now have a Monster Level that ranges from 1 to 50. Melee and projectiles damage done by monsters is now scaled from that value and calculated with a custom multiplier by monster type. As monsters are stronger as you progress in the game, weapons dropped by monsters now also have their damage scaled both by the area monster level and a multiplier based on the current difficulty mode.
In order to make the characters health pool more meaningful and, its value is no longer fixed to 100HP, but ranges from 1000 to 10000HP depending on the player level. Monsters now have a chance to drop health potions that, if consumed, recovers a % of HP based on the area level. Passive health regeneration also had to be tweaked.
Quality-Of-Life improvements
A lot of QOL improvements have been made, mostly on UI and gameplay mechanics. Here’s a quick summary of what I thought was really needed:
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Animated quests dialogs → I have been using a library, dtypewriter made by @WhiteBoxDev to show the quests description. Gotta say I really like it!
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Fog of war → The mini map screen now has an overlay that hides it, and players have to progress into the area to reveal the map. It is a state saved server-side so it only has to be discovered once per character.
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Low life overlay → If a character’s life goes under 20% of its value, a red blinking overlay appears (can be disabled).
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Money auto loot → Walking in a close radius of money dropped by monsters is now automatically grabbed.
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Looted items DPS indicator → Weapons looted by monsters on the ground now have a green or red arrow that indicates how their average damage value is compared to the current equipped weapon.
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Remember credentials → Players can check a box to memorize their login and password and don’t have to type it every time they launch the game.
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Idle detection → As I already had some people playing on the beta and trying to get Steam achievements by using bots, I started to implement idle detection based on the area where the player is.
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Fullscreen mode → The game is now in fullscreen mode by default, and improves a lot the immersion for this type of game. While the resolution can not be changed yet, there is still a possibility to revert to the windowed mode.
Softcore & Hardcore servers
I have always been a fan of those hardcore games where you have only one life. I initially thought of making The Unnamed Game an hardcore-only game. However, gathering feedback from players, some are discouraged to play if they are too scared to progress. I have then decided to allow playing softcore (with an experience malus upon your character death), but separating the game servers.
There has been a lot of code refactoring and database changes to make sure softcore and hardcore characters are playing in two different realms. As most of the player state synchronization between regions across the world uses MQTT messaging, I also had to review all that server logic to route messages to the correct instances.
There are some other mechanics that still doesn’t take the game mode into account (such as Steam achievements), but it is not a priority for now. I am planning to improve that in the future.
Seasonal ladder
Taking inspiration from the good ol’ Diablo games, and following the separation of Softcore and Hardcore servers, I have also added more leaderboards. Seasonal ladders have been created and would be reset on short timeframes in the future.
Fandom Wiki
As the game complexity increases and more content gets added, I thought it would be nice to gather information about the game mechanics. While it may be a bit overkill, I got too excited about it and started a Fandom wiki here.
Q1 2025
I realize this project has grown more than it should have, still feels like a technical demo, and is probably too much work for one indie developer. It has been many years since I have started it, and I have long time thought about if I would ever call it done in my lifetime.
What is the best way to put it in everyone’s hands, in its current state?
Right now, is it fully available for free on Steam through the Playtest feature. Making a choice about releasing it on Early Access, or just do a full release and keep making regular content updates is still difficult. Yet, I have now put a pin on my calendar around March 2025 so that around that period I take a decision. Anyway, I am still thinking of adding more content until then. Let’s see…