💛 First of all, big thanks for your awesome support! 💛
The last few days have been completely overwhelming for us and despite all our hopes, we didn't think there would be so many of you playing and enjoying Dorfromantik. We have spent the last few days mainly collecting your feedback to give us an better overview and working on the first new patches.
As we already stated in our FAQ we are still planning to come out of Early Access with Dorfromantik in the middle / end of this year and to release it as a full version for PC.
The core mechanics of Dorfromantik are complete for us and we would now like to build on them with more complexity and variety. Next to a creative mode, we envision more biomes, more unlockable tiles (some with special behavior), more options to collect points and more supported languages. But we also want to communicate quite openly and transparently where we don't want to go with Dorfromantik, namely: 4X strategy, trading & resource management, combat and multiplayer.
The way we envision it is that we want to release 2 major content updates during Early Access containing the creative mode, more challenges, more biomes, more tiles, quests and rewards. But before tackling these, we want to work on the games performance and accessibility.
Phase 1 - Bug fixing / Accessibility / Usability / Performance
- similar to the first patch, for the time being there will follow some similar updates that address the most necessary existing problems
- some features and game mechanics are not clearly enough communicated or can be further extended by additional information such as a tooltip system
- the current balancing will be changed only very minimally, because we are already quite happy with the current state and are tweaking minor changes
- We would like to improve and expand already existing systems. Here we think for example of the settings menu and the possibility to assign certain controls themselves.
Phase 2 - Content updates
- We would like to add additional game modes to serve different preferences on how to play Dorfromantik. First, we would like to serve all those who want to be more absorbed in the creative building of small worlds in the form of a creative mode. We can also imagine trying out a smaller quick mode by establishing a more limited rule set to crack the high score. We'll definitely tackle the creative mode, but for everything else, we'll be happy to get feedback from you on what you'd like to see in the game.
- We have planned to expand Dorfromantik with more content, such as additional biomes, new tiles and challenges to explore.
As you already noticed, we want to be very careful not to inflate Dorfromantik with too many features. Rather, we want to focus on refining the existing game mechanics and ironing out any inconsistencies. This is very important to us, because we don't want to create false expectations within the community. We have to stay realistic in our scope as a team of 4 students and do our very best to make Dorfromantik a well-rounded game.
💛 Screenshots by Pianfensi & cajumjoe via Discord