YOUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN HEARD (No pun intended).
First of all, thank you to all of you who are currently playing GRAVEN.
Supporting us and believing in the game we're trying to make, truly means the world to us.
Over the past 20 hours, we've been looking at Live Streams, comments, discussion threads, and reviews, and done a deep-dive into how we can improve GRAVEN going forward.
Going into Early Access was a decision we made, as we want your feedback and guidance. We have a solid plan for where we want to take the game, however, getting the game in YOUR hands, is the best possible feedback we can get. Even if you love the game or hate it - IT'S ALL VALID FEEDBACK!
So - What's next? We want to let you all know that we read everything, and we want to be as transparent as possible. We have created this Google Doc, where we keep track of the things we plan on implementing in the next patch, and future updates. This document will also reveal a few things, which we hadn't planned on revealing yet, but we strongly believe that full transparency is important here!
You can find the list here, and feel free to add comments!
So what are we planning on going in the next patch, you might ask?
We have already fixed a range of things, but here are some of the highlights (Our internal notes on some of the things):
- Blacksmith should be unavailable for now, as he serves little purpose without the Upgrades for weapons being available. Let’s add a message saying “I’ll be available to upgrade your gear later this year!”
- Re-Enable Bug Report Tool (“HOME” button)
- We need to think about re-balancing weapons and damage. A lot of people don’t understand that spells are not weapons. Personally, the “Old” way with the Fire and Discharge spell was much more fun, and we get complaints because of this. I understand that it’s “not supposed” to be like it was in the demo, however, we also have to realize that using spells in combination with weapons is a ton of fun, alongside still being able to use spells for puzzle solving and environments. We need to discuss this. There’s a fine balance between what we want to do, and what people playing the game are actually finding fun to do.
- Add a Popup with text, once you talk to the Ferryman after opening the library door, so the players know that this is the end of EA. The suggestive dialogue is not enough.
- Discharge - I think we should add discharge back to the EA. Preferably at the start of Quarantine, and set up areas with water so you can stun groups of enemies and use the environment this way.
- More usage for Inflame - I suggest we add 2 things for the next update. Doorlock which you can Heat up and destroy using inflame, and “gunpowder” trails, which we can link to explosive barrels, so you can light up a black trail. This way we can set up many strategic combat areas, to use the inflame and blow up groups of enemies.
- Environmental damage as a result of kicking. Let’s add enemy damage to the palisades, and place some of them so you can easily kick an enemy, and see them getting killed when they hit the palisades. This way we have both kicking off ledges, and kicking enemies into palisades for killing. Furthermore, adding a “BP_FireHazard” version (essentially a small fire we can place around the world), which also causes the enemy to take fire damage if you kick them into it, would be a great way to make the kicking much more fun and effective.
- Some complaints have come from the fact that breakables just drop too much. Previously (demo) you felt like you needed to be careful about using ammo, mana, health etc. Now you get so much from all of the barrels and crates. Let's tweak this.
- Enemy “Stunlock” should be tweaked. Right now, every time you hit an enemy, they play their “Stunlock” animation (Hurt animation). Keep hitting them, and you can constantly stunlock, so they don’t have a chance of hitting you back. Let’s tweak this, so each enemy has a certain chance of stunlocking (for instance, 50% would play the “hurt” animation, at every second hit).
- Small tweak to the first page of the Turtle sequence. Let’s add the “Full” symbol for the top left corner of the first lorenote for this puzzle. People seem to have a very hard time with this, and doing this should at least make it a little easier.
- Make it so Skeleton Shields can be broken (like barrels) if you use the inflame spell on them)
- Turtle key door underwater is not hinted at all. Agreed. This feels more like a secret. We should do something to guide the player a bit here.
- Add ultrawide support. Greg already implemented the feature. We just need a slider to be added to the main menu.
Today we already implemented a range of these things.
You can check out the new "Kicking enemies into Hazards" feature in the video, below (Hazards have been added to all the levels).
Last but not least, I want to personally thank you for supporting GRAVEN.
This game has been a dream to make, and with your feedback, we can turn this into the game YOU dreamt of as well!
Peace!