What a Week!
Folks, another Sunday morning spent on patching the game. Had my morning coffee, good breakfast, just a little bit of chess, and started working. Last night I went to bed just after patching the beta branch. But you know what? I feel fresh, rejuvenated. Excited even. Because quite honestly, it's been an amazing week!
The release of Fabled Lands was fantastic. The game popped on Steam's Popular New Releases for four days! Wishlists rose to new heights, hitting 37 000! Sales are great! I sure have hoped for the game to sell well but was thinking that realistically it won't do that great due to over analyzing and comparing with other games' releases, etc. Well, you know what? It did better than expected. I am very thankful to ALL OF YOU who have supported me in this endeavor and made it happen.
Lots of love from the community too. Nookrium streamed the game for me on release day. Splattercat made a video over the weekend. Shout-outs from other devs. Not to mention the wonderful community that's been gathering around #turnbasedthursday! Amazing coverage for a niche game that helps its way to its audience.
I am happy to say that I can continue to live the indie dream as a full time game dev whilst sustaining my family.
Development Update
I am happy to finally implement Quick save and Quick load in the game. A heavily requested feature and one on my to-do list for ages. However, I couldn't do it due to some performance issues I wasn't able to figure out. Finally, during the beta before the release, fixing another bug helped me shape the idea I had to do in order to achieve a smooth saving and loading experience.
Another important area I had to focus on was some people struggling with the difficulty of Classic mode and not picking Explorer mode. Classic is a tribute to the 80s mind set of how gamebooks worked, how old text games as Might and Magic 2 worked. It was brutal and new players not familiar with the game could overcome it by trial and error or through saving and loading. Explorer mode on the other side helped a lot of new players to enjoy the game; to have a great early experience and dive deep in the story and exploration of a fabulous fantasy world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMHzsngYZ7Y&ab_channel=BigSimple
A pleasure to watch this youtuber's analysis on how the game was able to convert him from disliking to loving it due to the change of difficulty. Hence I knew I had to work on balance asap thus introducing Adventurer mode while renaming Classic to Champion. Explorer mode is now easier from before, while Adventurer is a tad harder and more challenging than what Explorer used to be hitting a middle ground. I'll be collecting feedback in the following weeks to see how they'll perform!
But enough chit-chat, here's the full changelog:
Incremented version to 1.0.2
- Added new difficulty mode: Adventurer.
- Renamed Classic mode to Champion.
- Rebalanced Explorer mode.
- Implemented Quick Save/Quick Load!
- Added explanatory meta text when being attacked by invisible creatures.
- Added missing entry when resurrected in Wheatfields.
- Updated Set Sail button in Harbours to pop out more.
- Fixed a rare occasion when the camera could render the female mage's rod in front of her instead of behind her.
- Fixed a combat log entry that displays a negative roll when an enemy is Dazed and misses an attack.
- Fixed invisible creatures encounter typo.
- Fixed Oliphard cipher dialogue typo.