Hey everyone and welcome to the 13th development update. It has been a while since our last devlog! In the last 6 months, most of our work has been going into the multiplayer port and we are finally at a level where we can give some more info on estimated timelines. We have also been working on porting the game over to PSVR2 and are almost done with this step as well. You can expect a PSVR2 related announcement in the coming weeks.
Current estimates on multiplayer
Giving estimates on any update for Ancient Dungeon has always been very difficult, even more so with multiplayer. There is still a good amount of content unfinished and not ported over, but the core gameplay loop (beating a run) is now working as expected. Collecting journal pages, buying insight upgrades and hunting achievements are already working as well. In theory, you can play through the whole game (collecting all journal pages, unlocking all milestones, collecting all items) with your friends without having to play in singleplayer at all. The only content that will remain exclusively singleplayer is the sealed soul delves and ghost fights, since these challenges are built more around a single adventurer overcoming a difficult task.
We are currently focusing on balancing the game for multiple players, fixing minor issues that arise during gameplay, and implementing the remaining missing content.
Here's a list of things that are still missing until we have a "full" multiplayer experience that we can release to the public:
- Crossbow weapon combo
- Hard mode
- Roughly 30 relics haven't been ported over yet
- Trap rooms
- Save run feature
- Handling disconnects / host migration
- Different character customization options
- Abberrant enemies
- The singleplayer mode needs to work again (right now the multiplayer version does not work in singleplayer)
- Some special enemies, like possessed armor
- Sacrifice rooms
- Adjust boss fights to work with multiple players without making them too easy or difficult
- Public lobbies or matchmaking options
While we don't know how long it will take us to finish and polish everything to make multiplayer "release 1.0-ready", the public beta does not need to be as polished and can still be released with missing content and some bugs. Our current plan is to launch the multiplayer public beta in late October/early November. This hopefully gives us enough time to add some of the missing features and polish the general experience a bit more so that all players can get a good first impression of how multiplayer will play in the final version.
During the multiplayer open beta, we will open new feedback forums on discord and steam discussions to collect feedback and to improve the experience until it is deemed good enough to release.
Thank you everyone for the patience! I know it has been a long time without updates. Porting the game over to multiplayer was the biggest undertaking we ever did, and we think it was worth it. Even if you are not into multiplayer, the improvements we did for the game under the hood will allow us to build new content a lot faster in the future.
Future Updates
Once multiplayer is out, we'll start with regular content updates again. For more info on that you can also check our previous devlog.