Cursebreaker Dev Blog 2 - Playtest is now live

Welcome!

I’m Pura, the writer and a developer for our newly formed, Helsinki-based studio Olipa Games and I’m excited to introduce you to our upcoming game, The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker. It’s an indie adventure RPG taking a lot of inspiration from the slow-paced, strategic adventure RPGs of few decades past. I won’t overtly go into its features in this post though – we’ve already tried our best on our website and store page with that – but instead I’d like to announce that we’re releasing a completely open test / demo version of the game on Steam.

Playtest is now live!

So if the materials we’ve put out so far have piqued your interest in any way at all, please feel free to play the demo-version right now. You can do so simply on our Steam-store page by clicking “Request access” for the Cursebreaker playtest. We feel it’s the best way to get an idea for what our game is all about. You can also join our discord channel for any feedback you’d like to give us directly – the links can be found on our web-pages as well as within the game itself.

Feedback from early testers

Something we’ve noticed regarding the framerates in the game at the moment, we know they aren’t great and it’s something we’ve already received feedback on. We were initially working on a more top-down camera angle but later wanted to allow for a wider field of vision. That brought with itself the performance issues the game’s currently struggling with and despite our best efforts to optimise, we sadly haven’t been able to bring the performance up to a good level with the assets we’ve been using.

Ideas for the future

We’ve been testing ideas for how to fix this and it’s currently looking like the game will have to undergo some radical changes in terms of its looks and visual style. We’re obviously pretty bummed about this, as we’re really quite fond of the environment we’ve created thus far that you’re able to now play on the demo, but there it is.

We’re still experimenting with a different art-style and we’ll share our progress and screenshots in a future dev-post. At the same time we’re looking at fleshing out content and the skills-system by adding in meaningful unlocks as you progress. But for now, if you made it this far, we sincerely hope you’ll enjoy the open test-version of our game for what it is and let us know what you think on our discord channel!