I post these on our main site first, find this one here and the rest of them here, as it will be updated more frequently.

Hello everybody, and welcome to the first ever (written) Devlog of Kult Rising. I’ve made a few devlogs on the YouTube channel that are focused around what I’m actively creating at the moment, and so I wanted to create this written version, to sort of retrospectively look at the development process of the game, how the game has grown and evolved, the things I’ve learned throughout the process and just generally more information about the game.

Sxlaris

I’ll keep the background short because I feel like I explain this a lot but Kult Rising is our main vehicle for what we call the “Sxlaris Universe.” Sxlaris is a world building project that me and Rinzlxrd began to create a few years ago that aimed to combine our collective 10+ years of Dungeons and Dragons homebrew into one cohesive world.

SCP: Convergence

We always planned on making a game set in this universe, and so in 2024 I began working on the first version of Kult Rising, known as SCP: Convergence, in gamemaker studio. However, pretty quickly I ran into the issue of just not being motivated to work on the project and I just couldn’t figure out why. Whenever I’d work on the world building or lore side of things I’d be super hyper fixated, and could come up with ideas for hours. But the second I tried to work on the game I lost all of that motivation.

And you might think that was due to the unfamiliarity of gamemaker and becoming frustrated with their scripting language, but I ran out of steam before I even hit any major hiccups in the coding process. I had a working character, with a working sprite, a few functioning rooms and a functional clicker game. But I would go days if not weeks without ever touching the code and I couldn’t figure out why.

Around the same time, there were 2 letsplays I was doing on my YouTube channel, Blasphemous and Fear & Hunger, and when I started having issues finding the motivation to record more parts in those series, I was able to zero in on the problem: I don’t enjoy playing 2D games. Now this is a little bit disingenuous, because there are quite a few exceptions to this rule, but for me to be really engaged with a 2D game, it needs to have some sort of mechanic to keep things engaging for me. A great example of this is Endoparasitic 2. I’m usually pretty critical of gunplay in indie games, I feel like guns in video games are one of the last areas where AAA still has a bit of a hold out over the indie market. But Endoparasitic 2 was the first 2D game that had gun gameplay that I really enjoyed.

And since SCP: Convergence was just being developed as a pixel art RPG, there was nothing in my own game that was keeping me engaged. By this point in time, we did have plans for Kult Rising however, it was its own completely separate IP. The plan, was that we would make SCP: Convergence in game maker, creating the story, the world, and some of the more basic mechanics. Then once convergence was finished the plan was to begin work on Kult Rising; which would functionally be the same game, but built in Unreal Engine with more robust mechanics, realistic graphics, and with everything being reskinned to our own IP.

The Move to CC BY-SA

However, between my issues with motivation, and learning how the CC BY-SA License surrounding the SCP Foundatjon worked, we decided to skip straight to step 2, and forgo the idea of creating our own IP separate from the SCP Foundation.

I’ve never been a fan of copyright, and the thought process behind creating our own separate IP revolved more around our ability to collaborate, than our ability to maintain total control over our world. So once I learned that the CC BY-SA license applies to the lore of SCP specifically, it made more sense to keep Kult Rising in the SCP Universe.

This lead to the creation of our “Canon Filter” a system that toggles on and off any items, materials, text, etc. that is not actually there in the universe but instead is simply there to make the game more enjoyable. This serves 2 purposes, 1 it essentially created an immersion mode, where any gamified systems were hidden (similar to how some people play games without the HUD for realism), and also allowed us to completely separate cosmetic items from the lore of the universe. This way, we’re able to run collaboration events with other indie devs or artists, without them needing to give up the license to their work.

The other benefit of converting Kult Rising to officially be part of SCP, is that every character, creature, location, world, or weapon we create for Kult Rising will be available for anyone else to use in their own games/stories/content so long as they abide by the CC BY-SA license.

The move to Unreal Engine

And so, I began developing KR in Unreal Engine 5.4, and immediately I was hooked. It got to the point and it’s still at the point where I’m so fixated on working on the game that it’s hard for me to record or edit my YouTube videos. A quick look at my GitHub activity graph shows exactly when the project was moved to Unreal.

But with that, I think we’re gonna end this first blog here; I’ll start getting into the more technical details in the next blog, but I wanted this one to be a sort of comprehensive background on our general thoughts and plans for the game.

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