Otherside Entertainment have published a content-heavy news update about Underworld Ascendant, which — among other things — give us a look at how the Lizardmen will appear in-game:

In terms of actual development progress on the game, game director Joe Fielder had this to share:

We’ve been focusing…on upping our visual bar and proving out our core gameplay — for combat, stealth, magic, and combining them with seemingly mundane objects in the environment to craft creative solutions.

In recent weeks, we’ve been adding additional interactive elements like sticky glue and fire, randomized caches of objects (some clearly useful from the start, some requiring… experimentation), and working out exactly how to reward the player for creativity.

Back during the start of development, we said that we wanted you to come up with ways of solving challenges that we hadn’t even thought of yet and that the game would reward you for it. We’ve made solid strides in this area, which we believe to be essential in unlocking the player’s creativity so they experiment and explore the deep interactive possibilities in the game. We’ll share more about this in the future when this feature is more complete.

The Challenge of Ishtass will be featured in the Pre-Alpha Backer Demo, which we appreciate all of you (who pledged at the ADVENTURER reward tier and above) waiting for so patiently.

We’re finally reaching a critical mass about what’s great about this game — what makes it the next step in Looking Glass-style, player-authored gameplay. So, that’s positive news. We’re holding back the Pre-Alpha Backer Demo and our next video footage a little longer so we can implement additional elements to further round out the core gameplay and get more meaningful feedback from backers on refining it further.

The main portion of the update, however, concerns voice actor Stephen Russell, who will be voicing Sir Cabirus in Underworld Ascendant. There’s a lengthy interview with him, as well as samples of the voice work he has contributed for the character of Cabirus; click on through to have a listen.

And also click on through if you’re curious about the state of backer rewards; those are also discussed briefly as well.