Hello everyone!
Today marks one year since the release of Across the Obelisk on Steam Early Access.
We want to celebrate and thank you all! So, we'll do a little recap of this year and then we'll talk about what we're working on and what's to come!
The first days
We released the game on April 8 2021. The first few days were moderately quiet... but the next week, weekend and month, it was crazy for us.
Making and releasing a game by itself is not an easy task, but if the game has multiplayer... the problems multiply a thousand times. With only two of us (plus friends and family) testing the game online, it was difficult to find all the possible problems that could come up. So, as more and more players started to join the game, bugs started popping up all the time. We were practically releasing one patch a day for a few weeks (sometimes even two patches on the same day), as soon as people reported something to us on discord and we could reproduce/fix it we preferred to release a patch without waiting, so they could keep playing.
The truth is that it is something that we will always remember, for the bad, but also for the good. It was a pleasure to see you play and enjoy the game we had created.
Content added in one year.
During this year we have worked hard to improve all aspects of the game. We have recently added Act 4 and we are still in the process of balancing it. These are some of the things we have added during the year:
- As mentioned, Act 4 has been added with 2 floors, many new events, enemies, bosses and items.
- 2 New heroes, Wilbur and Nezglekt.
- 2 new game modes, Obelisk Challenge and Weekly challenge.
- Obelisk Challenge has been evolving and improving during the year, with content, features and more variety of events / enemies.
- Madness levels, expanding the game with 16 levels of difficulty.
- Redone nearly all the art of the game, including a pass on the first heroes, all backgrounds, UI, card design, etc.
- Improved and redone the Trait system.
- Different Skins and Cardbacks for each hero.
- Improved the Tome of Knowledge with lots of new features, f.e. run history and scoreboards.
- And we've added as many quality of life and player-requested features as possible.
The community
We have said it over and over again, and we will not be tired of repeating it. We are very grateful to our community, especially to all those who help us and give us feedback day after day in our Discord and forums.
This game wouldn't be the same without you, so again, thank you very much!
What's next?
Our goal is to continue working on the game and improve it even more. Specifically, we are starting to make a new biome/map (with all that it entails: nodes, paths, events, enemies, bosses, etc). This biome is cold based and will be one more option to choose after finishing Act 1 and 2 (with Velkarath and Aquarfall).
We have started designing and implementing the remaining four heroes. They are still works in progress, but here they are.
A big shout out to Juan José Nicolás, our magnificent artist. Just with the sketches alone we can't wait to have the final version of the heroes! These heroes are still a few months away from being live.
In the meantime here are some other things we want to work on:
- We want to implement a Heropedia in the Tome, with a small story unlock feature for each hero.
- The Monsterpedia is also on the way, although it's more complicated than it seems :)
- We have pending a rework to the Weekly Challenge, the idea is to make them different and have a couple of features that change the gameplay a bit (with some cosmetic rewards).
- Rework of the perks system. We want to try to improve it and not add more power than the heroes already have, but give them more options to specialize, even in damage types or curses that are uncommon in their class.
- As we said before, the game will be translated to some languages for 1.0, and that includes an english proof reading. As you may have noticed, English is not our main language, so forgive us for the usual spelling mistakes in the game (that we try to fix everyday thanks to the players that report those mistakes) that will soon be a thing from the past.
- And some more things that we will keep secret ;)
To conclude
It has been a very good year, and we are very excited to continue working on the game.
The basic idea is that we can release the game when we have the ice biome and the 4 remaining heroes ready. We hope it will be around late summer but you never know.
Of course, releasing the game doesn't mean that we will stop working on it, the idea is to continue as we have been doing and make many more biomes / cards / heroes / events / enemies and bosses!
Remember to leave a review on steam, if you like the game, it helps us a lot.
Who knows where we will be next year! We hope you will stay with us to find out.
Adam and Javier.