Hey everyone! It's been a week since DINO MERCS exited early access. It's been an exciting time and there's still more to come! If you've played the game, thank you so much! It means a lot to me (Tim, the dev) that you would spend your time playing my game.
In this post, I'd like to give everyone an update about what's upcoming:
Balancing the Game
This is my first game, so I will be the first one to admit that I have a lot to learn about game design and balance. I'm continually working on tweaking variables and adjusting how the game plays and feels.
You can expect to see regular patches that improve the game's balance (I've already released a few updates this past week). Whenever a larger patch/update is released, I'll do a formal post here on Steam.
Have you noticed something in the game that doesn't feel balanced? Is a card too weak or too powerful? Is an enemy seemingly impossible to beat or too easy to defeat? Let me know! The best way to communicate with me is via the Discord server. You can also post in the Steam forums for the game, I check those too.
Improving Events
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of how events (firefights, scavenge, hot zones, etc.) work in the game. So, I'm working on doing a slight overhauling of how they work, look, and feel. Specifically, I'm looking to improve a few different things:
Player Choice / Streamlining
Right now, each "turn" of a run, you can pick between three events. It's a little cumbersome to figure out what each event does, and picking between three different events can feel like too much.
In order to improve the user experience and still keep player choice, I'm reducing the three events down into just one event. BUT, you'll get two options for how the event plays out. For example, when you come across a potential Firefight, you can choose to dive right into combat, or you can avoid the fight if you prefer that. Or maybe you'll have the option to choose between an easy fight or a hard fight (for greater rewards).
Overall, I feel like this streamlined approach will be a major improvement over the current implementation.
Better Integration With Your Run
There will also be new events that provide additional options for increasing stats, healing your HP, and more. On the other hand, there will also be danger - chances of losing supplies, HP, and more.
Overall, I hope that this change makes events feel more dynamic. Things will be less predictable and events will influence the course of your run more so than they do right now in the game.
New Cards
I have some ideas for new cards. To be up front: I won't be adding a ton of new content right now (but I might in the very near future, if the game sells lots of copies and gets lots of positive reviews, hint hint ;) ) but I do want to keep adding new cards where there are "gaps".
First up, I plan to add some more defense cards. Right now, the options for defense seem a little lacking, like no rare defense cards (?!). Next, I'd like to get some more info on what play styles don't feel very viable and introduce new cards that make those play styles more playable (and tweak existing cards!). Again, if you have any ideas or opinions on this, please let me know! I'd love to chat with players in the Discord server about this kind of thing.
Okay, that's it for now. If I seem to be missing anything that really needs improvement or attention, be sure to let me know. Keep an eye out here and on Discord for more updates soon!
Thank you,
-Tim, the dev
