Hello everyone, it's been a month since the game was released in Early Access and it seems like a good time to talk about what we're working on and update the Road Map.
Next content patch (June probably)
In the next patch we will try to include 3 things mainly:
- Madness Lvls -
These will be the difficulty levels of the game, the Madness levels will be made up of two parts, the first is eight progressive levels of difficulty, each level will increase the difficulty quite a bit from the previous level with things like health increases on enemies, speed increases, disabling chests and giving specific money to start the run, or disabling certain perks specifically those that give starting energy or extra charges of high level auras, among other things.
The second part are optional difficulty options that will also increase the Madness lvl, make the game harder and give more score at the end of a run. These optional modifiers range from more resistance to enemies, less healing for heroes to things like random combats(the composition of enemies in a fight will be random and you won't know who you are going to face) and various other modifiers.
In this way we intend that the last level of Madness, let's say Madness 20, is someone who takes the last progressive level (8 at the moment) and all the optional modifiers, in the same way that a Madness 10 can be someone who takes difficulty 2 + 8 modifiers or difficulty 6 + 4 modifiers.
In this patch we will rebalance the monsters and their damage cards (lowering the damage or charges) in their current ng+ versions, to update them and prepare them for the new system.
- Tome of Knowledge Improvements -
With the entry of the Madness levels we would like to make it possible to see the scores from the game in the tome, and we would also like to try to include a log of your last runs in the tome.
- Event Improvements -
We want to review all events as some events give an injury card a bit arbitrarily, and while we're at it we want to make it so that some event rolls(especially group rolls) can have a critical success or/and critical failure. With this we will have that in some events a roll can come out as success, failure, critical success and critical failure, so if a roll comes out as failure it won't be as bad/punishing as it is now and probably won't give an injury, and the injury will be moved in the case that the roll comes out as critical failure. Also to make it clear in the rolls we will include the number that appears on the tooltip in the roll, so instead of higer than 3, it will be 3 or higher with the 3 included.
To make a quick example: the burning house event right now is 3> to take the chest, if you fail you get burned and receive an itchy burn, with the new system it would be 4 or higher, with 4+ you take the chest, 2 3 you leave the chest and go (no injury), with a 0 1 roll, you get burned and receive an itchy burn and with a 7+ you also find gold and a old rope inside the burning house before leaving with the chest.
Also to increase the roleplay of the events, we want to make some specific Heroes rolls instead of asking for a specific number it will ask you to draw a specific type of card, for example a healer to heal a wounded merchant or a stomach ache may require a "Healing spell" card, when Heiner tries to make an option to block some rocks or a falling wall he will need to draw a "Defence" card, Thuls when he tries to assessinate someone will require an "Attack" card or Cornelius if he wants to burn something he will have to draw a "Fire spell" card.
In addition to these 3 things we will also try to put more minor QoL, more save slots for mp and more filters for crafting cards, etc.
Obelisk Challenge
Once we finish the next content patch the next thing we will do is the Obelisk challenge mode, in this mode the nodes and combats will be more random and a game will last a little less between 1-2h, also in this mode there will be no starting town and at the beginning of the game you will be able to draft cards for each hero.
Also with the Obelisk Challenge we will introduce the Daily challenges.
For the map of this mode we want to use parts of what will be the map of Act 4, that's why Act 4 and Obelisk Challenge will be done in parallel, but as Act 4 requires extra enemies, specific events and many other things Obelisk Challenge will come first. We can't give specific dates and summer is coming, but as soon as we get it fairly good we'll add it to the game, and then we'll update this mode with Act 4 enemies when we put it in the game.
Act 4
During the summer we will try to make Act 4, this takes time as we have to make the enemies, animate them, think about their cards, put effects, etc. There is also the map and backgrounds and all the events it will have, plus the final boss of the game.
Here you have a couple of enemy concepts from Act 4.
More characters
The missing characters is something we are really looking forward to do, but we can't say when. We hope that with Act 4 we will be able to include a couple of them and then the rest will come with the release.
Here is an early concept of the minstrel frog.
English proof reading & Translations
This is something very important that we are not forgetting and that we want to do as soon as possible, the release will certainly come out with translations, but for example just in this post we are announcing that we are going to modify all the events and that is one of the main reasons why the translations are not done yet because we can't modify the game freely if we have to think that something can't be touched because it is already translated. We hope that in the summer we will be able to do a good English revision and start translating the game at least for Act 1, 2 and 3.
Mods & Workshop
Before the official release, we want to support the possibility to make custom mods and enable the steam workshop.
Besides all these main points we have more ideas of things to improve the game, but better not to promise too much for the moment and focus on the important points.
As always with every little hotfix (we are still in our fight to make the MP flawless and we are getting closer) or patch we will try to add new things, new cards/items and the more QoL the better.
Thanks to all of you for your feeback, support and understanding.