A Handful of Dust
A Handful of Dust is a 2d side-scrolling, metroidvania, action-adventure game with a touch of RPG systems, that is focused around combat and exploration and is heavily inspired and influenced by games like Castlevania and Salt and Sanctuary, The game is currently in active development.

Gameplay
Gameplay is classic modern 2d metroidvania action/adventure with a light touch of soulslike. Explore a vast, open, interconnected, immersive landscape with 19 distinct and varied regions, combating hordes of enemies, engaging in tough boss battles, acquiring, upgrading and mastering new equipment, items and abilities to open up new combat and traversal options and discovering the various shortcuts and secrets hidden in this dark world.

Story
The main focus of this game is combat and exploration focused gameplay and a strong linear narrative is not a design goal. However taking queues from games like Dark Souls, the world is dark, mysterious and filled with rich lore.

Little of this lore is discoverable in the demo, but is planned to be included in a full release.

Development & Progress
The game is currently in active development as hobby project and is my first attempt at designing and developing a game. The coding and design of the game is the work of a single person (me) using the FNA framework as the base technology layer. The main character is custom and mostly animated by myself, with a few outsource animations, but most of the other artwork and assets have been sourced from various other creators. The engine, tooling, systems and processes are all complete, or very nearly complete, and about 75% of the game's planned content exists in various stages of polish and iteration.

Upcoming additions:

• Story - There is virtually no story present in the demo, NPC interactions, cutscenes and dialog and story need to be added
• Map Improvements - I currently have a temporary, but functional dynamic map system in place that simply renders a scaled down version of the level "on the fly", which results in some very badly scaled map imaging. Once I've finalized level layouts I will revamp the map system using actual mini-map art.
• Content Generation - The demo content represents slightly more than 25% of the content planned for the full and is in a reasonably polished and playable state. A good deal of additional content exists, but in an unpolished state. The majority of the remaining development time will be spent adding and polishing content.
  
• Optimization - Performance improvements, removal of cut assets, better asset organization, etc..

About the Demo
The demo showcases 4 full areas from the game, includes 6 bosses, represents about half of what I have in a fully playable state so far and roughly 25% of the planned content for the final game and is 2-4 hours of playtime depending on player speed and skill.

The demo is an in progress "alpha" build and should be considered as "early access". There are some bugs and additional polish and balance passes are needed, but it is in a fully playable state. The primary motivation for packaging and releasing this demo is to solicit feedback on the current state of the game that I can use as I apply additional polish to the systems and content as well as build out the remaining content for the game. So constructive feedback, thoughts and impressions are extremely welcome.

Note that the demo/game is (currently) only available in English. Basic configurations for screen size and sound volume exist, but no accessibility options are present.

You can learn more, and download the game demo, by visiting the game's itch.io page at: https://cls33.itch.io/a-handful-of-dust