Hello Wizards!
I want to give everyone an update on where Rift Wizard development is, and where it will be going.
Over the past few months I've released two big patches. These patches contained huge changes to game structure and game balance.
Overall I'm quite happy with the changes. I have however, sometimes felt like I've gone too fast, and not been able to give enough attention to certain details.
So the next patch is going to be smaller. It will focus on bug fixes, stability, balance, and content. I'll be trying to spend more time playtesting, iterating, balancing and processing player feedback and less time implementing.
There are *lots* of interesting things going on with the new shrine interactions. Some are a bit over the top, some are way over the top. I am ok with players learning that some shrines are very effective on some skills, but I do not want it to be possible to absolutely crush the game using only 1 random drop plus the right spell. I'm thinking it should take atleast 2 random drops, or a random drop plus 20 skillpoints, or 40 skillpoints to get something that really feels overpowered- and the overpoweredness should not be relevant in 100% of situations.
I'll be adjusting some of the more powerful shrines, and some of the less powerful ones as well. I may also look into making some more powerful shrines not appear until later in the game, or appear less frequently.
Right now there are 61 shrines in the game. This is alot, but, I think the game could use 20 or 30 more to make each shrine feel a bit more rare and special. I'll be adding a few more this update.
I think skills and spells are mostly in a good place. Here I would just like to try adding a small number of spells and/or skills which enable build ideas that don't really exist right now. Expect 3-5 new spells and passive skills with this update, with a focus on enabling new build styles.
Lastly, there are a few monsters that got thrown together quickly and never got the love they deserved. Some of the obscure rare wizards fall into this category (though others are awesome and will stay just the way they are- looking at you raven mage!).
My goal is to release this patch on December 20th. That's way faster than my release usual cadence, and the above items should be more than enough to occupy my time until then. I'll be uploading a new build to the beta branch momentarily, with some of the new skills, shrines, bugfixes, and balance changes already available to test.
After this patch, there are two big things I want to tackle before I am willing to remove the 'early access' label from Rift Wizard.
First: the spell upgrades system could be better. A few spells have really awesome upgrades right now- but most do not. Examples of spells with awesome upgrade options: Slimeform, Arc Lightning, Spider Queen, Fae Court, Shrapnel Blast. Examples of spells that do not: Magic Missile, Fireball, Wheel of Death, Pyrostatic Pulse, Poison Sting, and many more. One thing I would like to experiment with further, are incompatible upgrades- upgrades similar to what Spider Queen has where choosing one will preclude choosing another. The game does however, need better UI support for this.
Second: I want to develop more features that allow the community to play the same run. This means first of all, making seeded levelgen work. On top of that, I would like to add some ways to add variance to the run- optional challenge modifiers that could be turned on or off. Examples could include 'every level has 1 fire fiend', 'you take double damage', 'you can only take spells that have the Holy or Dark tag', and 'you cannot move left'. My current thinking is that the game would have some kind of daily run where the date was used as a seed both for level generation and for selecting a random set of challenges, and players could compare their various attempts at overcoming the daily run- which would generally be a more difficult run than the normal game what with the challenges. Lastly, I would add a bunch of achievements focused on beating the game with various challenge modifiers enabled. My hope is that this system will allow the game to challenge experienced players, while still remaining atleast somewhat approachable for new players (who are often totally, absolutely terrified of the game).
Anyways as always these things may change, especially in response to player feedback, which I collect primarily from the game's official discord. feel free to hop on and contribute, ideas from there regularly make it into the game.
-Dylan