THE SERPENT LIES STILL
A one-boss souls-like action RPG for PC, built in Unreal Engine 5
About
THE SERPENT LIES STILL is a souls-like action RPG for PC, built in Unreal Engine 5 as a compact slice of the genre: one church and its grounds, a few enemy types, and a two-phase boss at the end of it. The aim is a small space where combat and character building can be tested properly.
You begin by choosing one of ten classes, each with its own attributes, armour weight and starting weapons, and you level up with Tithes, the game's currency. Combat covers light and heavy attacks, guarding, parrying, rolling and lock-on, with poise, ripostes and backstabs behind it. Weapons have their own mastery levels that unlock new moves, and a Resonance gauge fills as you fight aggressively and fuels special powers. Chance-based critical hits can sever an arm or split a torso.
Almost everything on screen is generated from code: textures, materials, meshes and animation. The game is being built to run on modest hardware, including integrated graphics.
What is in it
- Ten starting classes, from Knight and Ninja to Arcanist and Hexborn
- Weapon mastery: each weapon family levels up and unlocks new moves
- Light and heavy attacks, guard, parry, riposte, roll and lock-on
- A Resonance gauge that builds with aggression and fuels special powers
- A two-phase boss fight at the end of a single church level
- Keyboard and mouse or gamepad, with Xbox or PlayStation prompts
Screenshots
How far along
Vertical slice, 47 out of 100, ranked 13 of 17 on the progress ranking.
A two-level vertical slice with two boss fights, ten classes and character creation plays through in test runs, and the latest round added remappable controls, room audio and a 10 ft Serpent, but none of it has been played yet and the generated character bodies were rejected.
- Playable4/10
A test run has played the Crypt opening and the Church on a loop, and an unattended run of more than 3 hours held about 29 fps in a window, but the packaged 1.07 GB build predates the Crypt and a packaged build of the newest work has not been made.
- Core gameplay6/10
The combat layer has an input buffer, poise, parry, riposte and critical hits, the Controls page now remaps keyboard and gamepad, and the gamepad dead zone fell from about 0.34 to 0.20, though none of the newer work has been played and fight-length balance is still listed as open.
- Content6/10
The slice has two levels, a Crypt plus the Church (now 43 of 43 interactables reachable after six geometry fixes), two boss fights, ten classes and a character creation screen, and nine enemies were moved to cheaper models.
- Art and audio4/10
All art and animation is still generated from code, with 141 audio cues and per-room reverb and ambient sounds in 22 rooms, but the five generated body models were rejected for distorted wrists and hands, and none of the new sound has been heard.
- Stability4/10
Windowless Low frame times were 16.8 to 22.5 ms in the Crypt and 31.6 ms in the Church nave against a 33 ms budget, and the editor target builds with 0 errors, but the newest work has not been run and windowed runs on the Intel UHD 630 have hung on the GPU.
- Release readiness3/10
Only an internal packaged Windows build of 1.07 GB exists and the site data has no build or play link.
Assessed Oct 16, 2026. Based on detailed, recent logs. This is the studio’s own assessment and it changes as the game does.
Updates
A ten foot Serpent, remappable controls, and a sound for every room
The Serpent grows to about 10 ft with his reach scaled to match and his stats untouched. Controls became remappable, gamepad dead zones shrank, and every room in the Church and the Crypt got its own reverb and ambient sounds. All of it compiles and none of it has been played.
A Church that failed its own reach check, and body models that were rejected
A full regeneration showed that 23 of the Church's 43 interactables could not be reached, and every cause was real geometry. Elsewhere, the generated body models were imported and honestly rejected for stretched arms and hands.
Five body types, proportion controls, and gear that fits the body it was made for
Character creation now supports five named body and head pairs and a width and depth adjustment, and five textured base bodies were generated to fill them. The screenshots still show the old mannequin, and the post says why.
A crypt opening, and the checks that caught what the eye missed
A new game now starts in an unlocked prison cell and works its way out through a key gate, a lever and a boss door. The interesting work was in the checks that found broken geometry, a bot that could not see its enemy, and a boss that hit too hard.
Character creation, and a correction on clothed models
The player now starts from a bare body and builds a face and look on a new character creation screen. This also corrects an earlier direction the same day: clothed character models are for NPCs and enemies, not the player.
Tuning the Low tier, and a bot that plays overnight
A character level-of-detail bug that made every character draw at full detail is fixed, the Low tier is retuned from measurements, and an unattended overnight run of the AI Watch mode found a crash pattern tied to reloading the Church level.
Show 4 earlier updates
Measuring frames without a window
A small tool now measures the church's frame time with no window open, averaged over 150 steady-state frames per shot. Its first baseline was repeatable, and its first batch of experiments could not be trusted because of how console commands were being passed.
Criticals that cut
Weapons now make a sound when they hit armour, wood and stone. Chance-based critical hits can sever an arm or split a torso, a greatsword critical can run an enemy through, and the bugs along the way were a floating gauntlet, a test fixture that rejected its own mesh, and blood that smoke settings were hiding.
Where the church frame time was going
A frame of the church went from 4 to 5 fps to about 14 to 16 on an integrated GPU, and almost none of the gain came from where the first guesses pointed. Also a title screen with no text that tests could not see, a soft-lock in the fog walk, and test runs that were writing High quality into the player's settings.
Everything from code, and what it broke first
The first full day on The Serpent Lies Still went into a pipeline that generates its own textures, meshes, animation and sound. It produced two crashes with one shape, a material that never compiled, a lint that was wrong, and a balance simulator whose first answer was that the boss fight is far too short.