Demo

The First Earth Sub-Boss is Playable — Demo #1 is Live

After a lot of late nights, here's the first real, playable slice of Shadowthorne: the Earth region's overworld and its first sub-boss dungeon.

What's in this build

You start Shadow Thorne's journey moving through a corrupted forest, with two different paths through the region — a crystal cave route that's more about tight platforming and hazard navigation, and a treetop canopy route that leans harder into combat. Both funnel into the first of Earth's four sub-boss dungeons: three gauntlet rooms of traps and enemies, leading into a fight against an evil knight who transforms into a werewolf at half health, complete with a telegraphed howl-and-dash attack in the second phase. Beat him, and you walk away with the first of the four fragments needed to unlock Earth's elemental boss.

The other three Earth sub-bosses, and the elemental boss arena itself, are still ahead — this demo is a taste of the structure, not the whole region.

A few things I'm proud of

The atmosphere work took longer than I expec the treetop rooms gradually darken into areal night sky the deeper you go, complete with twinkling stars and drifting fireflies, and the caves have their own

limited-visibility "light radius around the es pre-made assets — it's all built fromscratch as reusable effect objects, which means I can drop the same atmosphere into future areas without starting

over.

The boss fight was its own project. Getting ormation to feel like a real turning point(not just a stat swap) meant building a whole cutscene transition mid-fight, and getting the werewolf's dash attack to feel dangerous without being cheap took a fe fairness window I stole from an earlierenemy design (a brief telegraph before it commits).                                                                 

A bug playtesting caught                                                                                            

Small thing, but worth sharing: someone in early feedback said enemy hitboxes felt "off," especially on the bats.   Turned out their collision mask was frozen tthey spawned, so a flying bat's actual hitbox never updated to match its animation. Fixed it — and while testing the fix I found a second, funnier bug where grounenemies started jittering in place mid-attacracted with their own movement collision.Both are sorted now. This is exactly the kind of thing I need more eyes on, so — thank you if you were part of that feedback.

What's next

                                                                                                                    Three more Earth sub-bosses to build, then tall four key fragments are in hand — followed by three more elemental regions (Wind, Fire, Water) after that. This first dungeon was the proof of concept for the whole structure, so if it's landing, the rese.

If you play it, I'd genuinely love to hear wcombat feel, difficulty, anything that feltunfair or unclear. Thanks for checking it out.