Greetings, Tacticians!
It’s been about 4 weeks since the Lost Eidolons demo was playable during Steam Next Fest last month. Since then we’ve been preparing plans to polish several areas of the game! Our team was excited and grateful for the quality and quantity of feedback we got from everyone.
As an indie game studio, our mission that we set out to achieve was to work on games together with our community as our peers. Thanks to the demo’s great success towards that mission, we’re aiming to create more opportunities for folks to try out future builds of the game so that we continue to keep integrating you all into the creative process.
As for today, we’re writing this blog to share two things: 1) A list of feedback that we've collected and our plans on how to incorporate some of them into the game, and 2) the new status of the game’s current roadmap, and how we must make some adjustments in order to produce the best game that we can.
Leveraging Feedback
During the demo, we received a lot of feedback from fans, friends, and backers about the game as a whole. The brunt of that feedback came from our after-demo survey (a huge thank you to all 72 participants who submitted theirs's).
From the survey and the feedback from external community sites, we've identified a total of 52 topics for us to review, and we decided to take action on 45 of them. We'd like to share some of what we've reviewed thus far and what kind of actions we’re in the process of taking in order to implement them!
Status of Development
Over the course of the month of June, our team made great strides towards the development of the game. This includes:
- Building a demo build for Steam Next Fest
- Cut Scene Improvements
- New Skill Animations
- New Outfits, and Armors
- Basic Foundation for the Camp Outgame
- Additional Scenario Developments for Future Episodes
After reviewing the feedback from the demo, we worked on planning future improvements, including:
- New UI/UX Design
- Control Improvements
- Addition of Language Options
However, as a consequence of the time and resources needed to undertake all these important changes, our team made a vital decision to adjust the game development roadmap we had previously provided.
However, as a consequence of the time and resources needed to undertake all these important changes, we have made the careful decision to delay the release of Early Access.
It’s not the happiest news, but we all agreed that delivering a quality game should always be the top priority. Some fans may be disappointed we couldn’t meet the original deadline for Early Access, so we’ll do our damned best to ensure this extra time is well spent to create a solid playthrough experience.
The main reason for the delay is as follow:
- Major revision on UI, UX (including controls)
- More resource, and the time investment into story elements
- Additional graphical and animation polishing
Based on internal review, we are making changes to the development roadmap as follows:
- Beta: Early Q4, 2021
- Early Access: Q1, 2022
As for the beta, instead of a single beta test we'll be taking 2-3 rounds of testing to ensure the game is definitely ready for Early Access. We'll treat the beta as an additional opportunity to acquire more feedback accordingly.
We’re confident that this decision to delay will lead to a better overall game experience, and we’ll continue to regularly keep our community channels updated on the current state of development as it progresses. Please continue to provide your feedback to us on anything that you see! You can check out what we’re working on each month through our milestone livestreams (we just had one yesterday) and join in the discussions or ask questions on our Discord!