💛 To start off, we’d like to thank all of you for your awesome support, patience, and insights! 💛
We have updated our Roadmap with the release of Patch 0.2.0 on August 25th.
What has happened so far?
The last couple of months had us learning a lot. So many of you have been playing and enjoying
Dorfromantik, offering your suggestions and feedback. We are very grateful for the feedback and also were quite a bit overwhelmed by the large amount of good and constructive feedback from you. So, we decided to bring in a dedicated Community Manager to help us out so that we can better respond to your feedback and address the topics that are important to you. We mark implemented suggestions or new solutions for reported issues accordingly in our patch notes 🌻.
- 🧪 Join our Beta: If you also want to test new features earlier and help with your feedback the development of Dorfromantik, then find out here how you can participate in the public beta.
As we mentioned in our previous Early Access Outlook announcement, we have been working mainly on the promised Accessibility / Balancing Patches features over the past weeks. With the help of your input, we have released multiple Accessibility patches, adding frequently requested quality of live features and improving the overall performance.
We also committed to open and transparent communications, which were not quite as easy to juggle
with all of our other responsibilities and tasks at first, so we hope we can live up to that with our new efforts.
What is still to come?
We now enter the Phase 2 of the original Early Access Outlook announcement and turn our focus on the two mentioned content updates.
After the extended evaluation of all the community feedback of the first months, we have decided to include additional wishes in our roadmap for Dorfromantik and postpone the planned release from mid/late 2021 to spring 2022.
This decision intentionally will not affect the already announced features and their release order, starting with the Creative Mode being the next upcoming major update for Dorfromantik. Rather, there will be additional content in the form of a 3rd major update with an additional new game mode that we're adding on top of the game itself for everybody supporting us during Early Access.
For each planned chapter, we go over our plans and intentions again in detail below.
🌱 Patch 0.1 - Spring 2021
This is our current patch cycle, dubbed Quality Of Life because this cycle is focused on making the initial experience of playing Dorfromantik better. We have added multiple localizations with your help, squashed a small mountain of bugs, made a bunch of balancing changes including the reduction of sharp train track and river curves, making some Challenges less of a hassle to complete, and keeping Preview Tiles (these are the pre-placed ones that unlock new challenges) around, even if you have unlocked everything.
We also added a bunch of accessibility options, most notably Keyboard Controls Rebinding and the ability to disable the changing background colors, which a lot of you weren’t fans of. We also added a bunch of tooltips to various elements in the hopes of reducing confusion.
☀️ Patch 0.2 - Summer 2021
The upcoming patch cycle, creatively dubbed the Creative Update. The big-ticket item in this cycle is going to be the long-awaited Creative Mode! Our plans are to allow you to continue your Classic games in the Creative Mode after you run out of tiles, if you so wish or you just start a new game directly in the Creative Mode. We want to give you some control of your (infinite) stack, by allowing you to play around with the probability of element types on the fly so you are able to build the landscapes in shape and form that you desire.
Of course, you don’t want to lose that neat Creative Dorf you spent hours building, so we also plan to introduce save games to allow you to, well, save your games! Currently, this is only confirmed for Creative Mode, but we are exploring whether we want to allow for multiple Classic save games as well.
Furthermore, we have a lot more Performance and Balancing upgrades and changes planned, that might continue to be worked on during the next patch cycle as well, to ensure a proper Creative Mode. We are of course, also always looking for more potential Quality Of Life and accessibility changes that would make sense to implement, so feel free to share your feedback in our Community Hub.
🍂 Patch 0.3 - Fall / Winter 2021
Our third patch cycle will bring more already promised content paired with new ideas we are looking forward to share with you. This cycle is a little lighter on big additions because in this window, we actually also have to work on our final exam to finish University.
That is why we want to focus on new Special Tiles with accompanying Challenges and a host of new Biomes. We know we have said there won’t be Themes to choose from yet, but if none of you end up on Santa’s naughty list, we might be able to stretch our definition of “Biome” a little bit further, if our Tech allows!
🌼 Release 1.0 - Spring 2022
Our fourth, and last, patch cycle before release is all about you, and as such we decided to tentatively call this one the Community Update! For this very special part, we want to leave some flexibility open to our possibilities, as we want to firmly build the great benefits of new community feedback into what we can do. This means that we would like to share our current ideas with you as transparently as possible, but we leave ourselves the freedom to change or adapt features in the course of development during this last cycle.
Our current ideas include another new Game Mode all about allowing you to shape your game as you want. You will get to customize rules, use custom Seeds (Which means you and your friends can potentially all play with an identical tile stack and see who’s the high scorer or most creative mind!) and have changing Community Challenges.
This one is also what will likely be our preparation for our Full Release taking place in Spring 2022. There might lie more beyond the horizon, like ports to that one platform or the other one but as we have mentioned before in regards to this, it depends in part on how well received the game will be and we cannot make any promises at this point in time.
Additional Features
In addition to all the features we've already put into patch cycles, there are also other ideas we'd like to implement and sprinkle in between when we get a chance.
A lot of you mentioned you’d like our Original Soundtrack to be beefier, and that is definitely an opinion we share, Controller Support will likewise also come some time down the road, as there is still a lot of discussing to be had internally how to best implement moving and such – as a stopgap, you can make use of Steam’s custom controller mapping feature.
Having an Undo function is regularly requested by the community and we’d love to add this to the game at some point but there are a lot of implications and even more changes to our code base that are required to make this a reality, so please bear with us for a while longer for this one!
We are looking forward to share the upcoming new content with you! Thank you very much without your feedback we could not have taken these steps to the current extent.
💛 Screenshots by hazey & Tyrant via Discord