Hello, community!
DragonClash will be unlocking for Early Access on September 4th, but you can wishlist the game right now! Thanks to all you awesome early-adopters. DragonClash has been a passion project of mine for years and your support and feedback will help me refine the game, develop new features, and continue to add content for everyone to enjoy.
I'll be streaming some DragonClash on release day, starting at around 9:30am ET (UTC -4), September 4th. Come join me on Twitch.
HATCHING
As you begin your own Early Access journey into the world of DragonClash, I'd like to highlight some of the game's current features:
- Quick Match: Currently DragonClash features two decks, the Red Breather and Blue Adept. You can jump into the game by selecting either for your first match. Your standard opponent will either be Corlock (a Red Breather) or Sheen (a Blue Adept), chosen at random. You can start learning about the game, honing your strategies, and accumulating those wins simply by playing.
- The Crone: The DragonClash Early Access releases with a repeatable boss fight. The Crone will challenge you after every 3 wins (across all decks). Can you withstand her ruthless barrage and unnatural taint?
- Milestones: DragonClash currently features 55 milestone badges (in addition to 15 Steam achievements). You'll earn milestone badges simply by playing and trying different strategies. I'll be adding new milestones and tweaking existing ones (some are VERY hard to achieve) throughout Early Access. How many can you collect?
- Lairs: The red and blue dragons each come with their own lair with 12 levels of improvements. Every 5 wins with a deck earns you a new level for that lair!
However, before mashing that Start button, I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to scan over the rulebook available in-game. I know...rules...BORING! However, DragonClash is a deep card game with many strategic mechanics that interlock. Before diving in, it may be wise to understand why you can't Claw Attack from Distant range, what your Tactics value is all about, or what the heck a Battle Value is used for.
The game does include tutorial slides that will pop-up during play to give you a very broad overview of the concepts (you can turn those off in the Options menu), but the rulebook will offer a deeper dive into the game mechanics. The new player experience is something I will be continuing to look at and your feedback will help me develop a richer tutorial experience (more on that below).
THE ROAD FORWARD
I will be continuing to polish, refine and add new content to DragonClash throughout Early Access. Upon the game's release, my first priority will be ensuring a stable, bug-free experience. I've worked hard to polish the game, but bugs can/will probably pop up. I encourage you to use the Steam forums to report any issues you encounter so that I can properly track and address them.
However, once things settle, here are some of the short-term "next steps" I'll be looking at:
- More Dragons: The Silver Channeler and Brown Mauler decks will be two of the first big content updates.
- More Bosses: The Crone isn't the only major threat for your dragons to overcome.
- Lair Improvements: The lair leveling system is just a beginning. I'll be looking at improving the customization experience to make lairs a real hub for your dragons.
- UI/Art Polish: As with bug fixes, this will be an ongoing goal during development as I combine your feedback with my own observations to continue to refine, polish, and expand the game's user interface and overall look/feel.
- Full Tutorial: I mentioned it above, but let's have a more candid chat...
TUTORIAL DEVELOPMENT
Tutorials are a huge time and resource sinkhole, and they're often ignored or skipped by players. That's not an ideal combination. While it's obviously important to have some kind of new player experience, implementing a full-on tutorial match takes a large amount of custom graphical assets and scripting, because (by its nature) it needs to be a controlled experience that can introduce key mechanics at planned intervals.
The tutorial slides currenly in Early Access will offer a quick overview, but they are not the final solution. They, along with the full rulebook, are meant as a bridge while I collect feedback to focus resources on creating a more detailed experience. So, yes, please use the Steam forums to let me know what you'd like from a tutorial and, more importantly, what concepts and mechanics tripped you up initially! This will help me better formulate a development plan for tackling this.
GROWING DRAGONCLASH
This is not the end, it's a beginning. While the Road Forward highlighted some of the short to mid-term items I'll be working on following the Early Access release, I also have much more I'd like to add as I expand the game offerings and the game world itself. Keep an eye here for more on those in the future and, once again, thank you and happy hunting!