Good afternoon Wizards!
We are very close to the full release of Rift Wizard. Full launch is a very exciting event for me. It is the culmination of many years of work, and an opportunity to showcase the game to a much broader audience.
This will not be the final release- I intend to keep making balance updates and adding new content, and perhaps someday even a DLC or expansion if I can generate enough interest.
The significance of this launch:
1) I'll be calling the game 'released' instead of 'in development'. Early Access will no longer be an acceptable excuse for bugs, polish problems, ect.
2) Many people wait for games to enter full release to play them.
3) Steam visibility of released games is higher than that of early access games. Their visbility algorithms are not public, but the anecdotal evidence I've heard from other devs, is that they got big increases in store traffic at launch.
Meaning, many people's first experience with Rift Wizard will be this next build.
So lets take a look at the updated road map:
Bad news before good: two things I will no be doing for launch, which I have in the past talked about doing before launch:
Not happening change number 1: localization. Before I had looked into this, I had really wanted to do it. It seemed like a no-brainer back when I wrote the first roadmap.
But the more I prepared for this, the more obstacles I saw.
First of all, this is a very big technical undertaking. All of the pieces of the game which display text have to be touched- there are alot of these. Places where the text is generated rather than static require individual attention and thought to become language agnostic. I would guess that 1-2 months of development time would be required for this, and it might drag out longer.
I can envision a world where I spend weeks or months fixing UI bugs that only appear in Chinese, doing a generally poor job arranging text whose meaning is completely opaque to me. Or a world where there are players asking for tech support, or giving important gameplay feedback... in languages I do not speak. Or a world where I break things in embarrassing and obvious ways in the versions of the game that I do not play and understand. The common thread here is, I do not want to maintain versions of the game different from the one I normally play- there are too many ways to get into trouble here.
Not happening change number 2: spell acquisition. I recently tried an experiment with making spell acquisition more strict- specifically, in the beta branch, a circle is required for buying spells/skills/upgrades.
This has some cool features, and it was interesting (for me at-least) to play this version of the game and see some very new builds.
But it also has many drawbacks, and conflicts with various design choices made around the game being the way it is currently.
Equally importantly, the feedback around this change was almost universally negative.
So I won't be pursuing this change any further- full launch RW will involve the same spell acquisition system the game uses now, that is, buying any spell at any time with potential discounts on circles. This is difficult for new players, and also difficult for me to balance. Despite this difficulty, the game is good.
Keeping the game good while removing this flaw *might not be possible*. No design is perfect, and stepping back for a minute, I'm pretty happy with the quality of RW's current design.
My one request to the community is this: please make build guides and post them on steam. This is a game where guides can be very helpful to new players. I remember trying to learn Dominions 4- a game of similar, or perhaps even greater complexity than RW- and the moment it clicked for me was the moment I read a really in depth guide to playing EA Kailasa.
Anyways, onto what I *will* be doing:
1) Bugs, UI issues.
In the past, I've been willing to accept a large degree of unpolishedness, as the game was in a much higher state of mechanical flux. Now that the games mechanics are largely nailed down, and now that I would like to move the game out of early access, fixing these becomes important. In fact, its the most important thing- I suspect that clicking the 'final release' button in steamworks will result in a large influx of new eyes on the game, and these new eyes will notice bugs and UI weirdness before anything else.
Some potential examples:
- Making potions different from other consumables and preventing them from changing hotkeys
- Making player stun more obvious
- Targeting UI changes
- Displaying a better error message when trying to load incompatible saves
- In game Bestiary for viewing known monsters
2) Shrine Variety and Balance
Shrines are awesome. Right now though, I do feel like the number of useful shrines is a bit lower than what I would like. We all know that slimeform + boon shrine is amazing- but does anyone care about Otherworldly shrine?
I've been putting off making shrine changes since the high number of interactions between shrines and spells makes balancing and debugging them pretty hard- but it would be cool if at launch all the shrines were useful on at least one spell, and players continued to encounter new and interesting shrines for many of their playthroughs.
3) Lategame boss Variety and Balance
Many of the lategame bosses- Ygdrassil and Fallen Angel for example- were thrown into the game 12 months ago and have not been touched since. I've learned a great deal about what makes a good enemy since then, and its worth revisiting some of this stuff a bit.
4) Consumable Variety and Balance
Again, consumables have been untouched for a long time.
There are some consumables that I love- the weird power spike and decision making of dragon horn, the 2nd chance defense of golden stopwatch and teleporter.
There are some that aren't so useful- the shields in particular, could be revisited.
There are also some ideas I have for consumables that I would like to explore. I would like to make weird rare consumables a thing. An orb that does a Mordred style corruption on a 5 tile radius for example, would be pretty cool.
5) Overall Game Balance
I don't want to make too many changes to spells and upgrades, or add too many new ones this patch. There is plenty of content in the game for full launch already, in fact, the amount is overwhelming.
What I *would* like to do, is make sure each spell/upgrade has a reason for existing, and adjust spells/upgrades which are so generally useful and powerful that they prevent other spells/upgrades from being interesting.
Mostly this will just be about adjusting SP costs, damage numbers, ect- but this may involve some more basic reworks of how spells work, or new upgrades to make them scale better lategame.
Additionally, there is one more big mechanical change I am currently testing on the beta branch: the removal of 2-level scouting. This mechanic is fun and interesting, but also makes it easy for the player to avoid hard content and grab all the optimal loot. This has, obviously, a big impact on game balance.
How long will all of this take? This is more bullet points that usual, but they are all a bit smaller than usual.
I am guessing 2-3 months, but the objective is more important than the schedule here.
If there is anything else you think the game sorely needs before it is released to a wider audience, feel free to let me know, either in comments here (which I read every so often) or better yet on the discord (which I read daily).
-Dylan