Greetings,
It has been a busy couple of months in the world of Dark Sky. We launched a brand new demo full of meaningful changes such as redesigning and overhauling the combat, updating the deck building and card crafting menus, adding new in-battle indicators and information, updating the HUD and UI, and adding some new content! You can still download the demo for free right now, and be sure to check out our build guide that can give you some unique and powerful builds to tackle the demo with.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1454960/Dark_Sky/
To everyone that downloaded and played the most recent demo and or provided any feedback - we wanted to give a very sincere “Thank you!”. The feedback was overall really positive but there were many suggestions that gave us a lot to think about and consider. We’ll try to summarize the most common feedback and issues here, but if there is something you noticed that is not mentioned in this article please let us know either in our Discord or in the Discussions section over on Steam.
Gameplay Feedback:
- Visibility of targeting and ranges in combat - We’re looking to improve targeting hitboxes, to make targeting more consistent and allow players to select units by clicking on the field and the character sprite. Also, we’re exploring ways to improve feedback on field states, with the goal of better communication for the actions in battle. "Where can I move?” “what can I target?” etc.
- Ability to respec - Because experimenting with new builds is fun, we want to give you more freedom and options to adjust your build as you unlock new cards and knowledge about the game systems.
- Ability to rewatch tutorials - Right now you only see the tutorials once, so we’re going to add a menu to rewatch past tutorials.
- Improve overworld interactions - This is a big one, but we are trying to improve the overworld loot interaction and the loot system overall. More on this coming soon.
- Lack of enemy intent information - We’ll be adding 'intent descriptions' with attack details for enemies.
- Combat status feedback - We’ll be adding status information when statues are applied to a unit, i.e. Poison, etc. Also, we want to show feedback when cards cannot be played (i.e. Cards should display why they cannot be played “OUT OF RANGE”, “STUNNED”, “NO ENERGY”)
Gameplay Balance and Features:
- Character Balance - Currently, our favorite Crucean engineer is being upstaged by Agama. We're looking into better balancing their power levels so that Norton feels more relevant.
- Defensive Cards are imbalanced - Defensive and Healing effects across all cards are super powerful and we're working on rebalancing them. I'm talking especially to you, Mending Mesh
- Buff second tier upgrades - We plan to make second tier upgrades more meaningful and powerful.
- Review Difficulty - We’ll be continuously reviewing the combat difficulty. We want Dark Sky to feel like a challenge, while also being approachable to more story-oriented players.
- Controller Support - Our plan is to have full controller support at launch!
Once again, a huge thanks to everyone who has played and tested the demo and provided their feedback. If we are missing any thoughts that you had or want to share, please let us know, either in our Discord, or the Steam Discussions section, and we’ll make sure to relay it back to the team.
Stay tuned for more updates on Dark Sky as we build towards launch later this year.
- Ganymede Games and Midwest Games Teams