Development Update - July 2025

Today marks an exciting milestone for the development of Cortesia Rising: the conclusion of our first month of full-time development. Thanks to your generous support, we were able to make a lot of important progress on the game in a very short amount of time. Below are just a few of the most exciting accomplishments this month:

Steam Partnership

Our game has been approved for the Steam Partnership Program. This allows us to sell and digitally distribute our game through the Steam Platform once we are ready for release. This is a huge accomplishment for us, as the Steam Platform accounts for 80% of global PC gaming sales market share. This approval was critical to our commercial success and go-to-market strategy. Our top priority now is fleshing out our online store page as quickly as possible so that customers can begin wishlisting the game and be notified when it is ready for purchase.

Character Art

We are very excited to announce that we will be partnering with MLC Studio to supply many of our art asset needs, freeing our team to focus on programming, testing, and game design. MLC is a veteran studio with experience working on hundreds of successful game projects, including most recently the Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. MLC will be helping us replace our placeholder 3D character models and 2D UI artwork with release-ready assets, as well as helping us flesh out our Steam store page and marketing materials. Work has already begun on base character models as well as concepts for various outfits characters in the game can wear.

Base Female and Male Character Model/Concept Crew Jumpsuit Concept on Male Model

Spaceship Art

We’re also excited to announce that we have contracted the renowned spaceship artist Mark Zhang to produce custom-made Spaceship assets for our game. Since our game revolves heavily around captaining a starship, getting the ships to look amazing is vitally important to capturing the imagination of our audience and making our marketing materials stand out against other projects. Mark is a freelance artist who has worked on multiple projects within the entertainment and video games industry, perhaps most notably the 2023 video game Dragonheir: Silent Gods. Mark has already completed the first of these concepts for one of our game's starting ships, the Cutter. An agile, general-purpose ship that sacrifices cargo capacity and armor for unmatched speed and maneuverability, while maintaining decent firepower. The perfect choice for aspiring captains trying to make a name for themselves in the Cortesia system.

Cutter Concept

Programming

July has seen our Ground Combat gameplay loop expanded by leaps and bounds. All aspects of ground combat have been improved, including functionality, user experience, and balance. Highlights include implementation of a cover system and flanking, a huge expansion of melee combat, and the initial implementation of more advanced RPG mechanics.

Units engaged in ground combat are now able to take cover behind walls and objects, making it harder for enemies to target them with ranged attacks, adding a new level of tactical depth to fights. Positioning and maneuvering to flank enemies is more important than ever.

Melee combat has been completely overhauled. Characters equipped with melee weapons can now parry attacks and perform attacks of opportunity against opponents who attempt to bypass them, allowing them to exert zones of control over the battlefield. They can also charge distant opponents, prevent adjacent enemies from bringing heavy weapons to bear, or cleave multiple enemies when wielding larger, two-handed weapons.

Movement pathfinding calculations have undergone major improvements to reduce processing time by over 77% (4.5x faster) and improve AI behavior. Units will now automatically attempt to route around danger, and these improvements carry forward to other actions like melee charging, making them easier to implement. The performance improvements are especially important for our eventual console release, as gaming consoles (Playstation, Xbox, Switch) generally have less powerful hardware than gaming PC’s.

Once again, I'd like to thank you all for your support in making this project possible. I can't wait to share our next update!

Best Regards,

Vincent De Tommaso

Game Director