Our journey continues with two new chapters! Featuring various new mechanics that will feel both familiar, and may just take you by surprise!
All new content has been balanced and tuned for a "first playthrough"
I'd advise playing it without New Game plus benefits for the intended first experience. If you have finished the game after the June 2022 QoL update, a save-backup of your completion should have been automatically created in: [installFolder/saves/backups/completion]. But I realize that a fair amount of you completed the previous chapters earlier than that, so this solution doesn't fully work until after this update. Alternatively, you can find a save at the end of chapter 9 here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/841043627705892902/1065641149936705556/chapter-nine-finished.txt . Obviously this is not advised if you haven't completed the game yet. Although I'd personally advise playing through the new content as intended the first time, the game doesn't force you to. If you prefer to use a New Game plus save or over-grinded save instead, I'm not stopping you either.
If you were playing new game plus and want to try the new content without perks, make sure to backup your new game plus save so you can continue after seeing the new content!
Other changes
- Jobs that deal damage on completion now include off-cooldown food in their combat-safety computation, to be more accurate at low maximum health values
- Food cooldowns in the inventory tab now display as rounded up, rather than rounded down. To tackle a common confusion when dying when it displayed 0.0s, when that could just mean "below 0.1s" internally. Internal cooldowns still work on the same millisecond precision, this change is purely visual
- Chapters 6-8 now record their chapter completion stats upon finishing their last exploration for the first time, rather than reaching the next chapter. To better account for pathing options
- New game plus perk tooltips now display the previous perk price, as well as the total dna allocated on said perk. To be more informative in helping you determine how you may reallocate dna between playthroughs, would you want to
- The game client now detects when the Steam client isn't running on launch, and requests the steam client to relaunch the game automatically
- The prevent auto-refill setting should no longer fire when no manual actions are shown. To prevent unexpected halts of automation in edge-cases
- Fixed a rare case where run-once jobs could run twice, if automation triggered in a specific way behind the scenes
- Fixed a display bug that could prevent the reincarnation screen from showing if death occurred during the hiding transition. This could occur to some self-assigned challenge-run players when combined with offline time
- Fixed a bug that could cause the chapter 8 meta-progression mechanic to not have it's downside applied, if the chapter 6 meta-progression mechanic wasn't ever completed
- Fixed a minor rounding-error in the fifth new game plus perk, causing it to occasionally display a slightly better value than it would actually be (last digit)
- Fixed a minor display bug in the story timediff seconds notation that could cause it to format as 1Ks instead of 1,000s when between 999.5s and 1000s
- Fixed a bug that could cause opening and closing (cancel) the NG+ screen during a run to unpause the game
- Reworked exploration completion accuracy at high numbers, mainly to support new content. But it should also make speedrun levels of optimization a tad more accurate
- Removed an internal cap to offline progress that was still there by mistake, causing offline progress to be capped to 5% of the total playthrough time when it shouldn't be
- Reworked various internal calculation-functions to support new scaling factors, allowing for new and future meta-progression mechanics
- Reworked how the NG+ passive jobs perk affects the action queue, to be more easily maintainable for future job-types
- Expanded various internal data management aspects, further reducing creative constraints for future content
- The game will now notify you when it detects that an update was installed (after this one)
Announcing the first price raise
Since launching into Early Access a little over a year ago, this update marks the point where content has reached over twice the original launch-size (about 100 unpaused hours to roughly 225). It was always the idea to slightly raise the price as the game expanded, even though I'm not entirely sure where the final price will end up. This raise will be $3 USD > $4 USD. Steam has updated their currency conversions since, and the world has seen turbulent times, so the new price may see a bigger or smaller change in your local currency. This price raise will probably happen sometime in February.
What does a price-change mean if you already own the game?
Nothing. You already own the game and the price only applies to new purchases. Consider it an early-adapter discount. After all, it's players like yourself that allowed me to spent as much time on the game as I did, and any other approach would simply feel unfair to me (especially during Early Access). If any "additional purchases" ever happen, it would be a full fledged DLC side-story, but I have no plans for that at this time.
Why did this update take 7 months?
In terms of development, it didn't. I'd say it took somewhere between 4 and 5 months to flesh out in full. It has seen a record number of "back to the drawing board" moments throughout development. But ultimately I just wouldn't feel comfortable launching any content/mechanic until I was confident in the result. Any other approach would just create a long-term "bad stage" in the game. Aside from the development time it took, personal life added a significant additional delay due to an unfortunate family event. Sadly that's simply a down-side of a solo-developer project, and sometimes life gets in the way in ways that are out of our control. But I hope I'll be able to keep future updates to a more frequent release rate (although multiple months for content updates will probably remain a thing for creative freedom).
Early Access development roadmap
Short term roadmap (approximately 2-4 months)
At first I want to monitor the release going smoothly, and quickly tackle any bugs, would they arise. After that has proven to go smoothly, I want to shift the focus back to a couple of quality-of-life/player-feedback updates again. I fell notably behind on responding to your feedback over the past half year. But your feedback has been the cherry on top when it comes to polish throughout all development stages, and I certainly want to make sure that I've read it all and work with the ideas that feel fitting! After some feedback related updates, I hope to start working on new content some time before the summer. But the exact timing tends to go with "whenever inspiration takes control", and is all about allowing the creative process to do its thing.
Long term roadmap (definitely over a year, quite likely more than 2 years)
The original plan was to aim for roughly 700 hours of unpaused content. And while that's a very practical way to illustrate the size of a game, it's a rather poor metric to steer development to. I don't want to stretch content just to make it take longer. I want to tune content to "feel right". That being said, my current estimation is still somewhere between 20 and 25 total chapters (11 of which are now in Early Access). That ambition falls or stands with "as long as the game doesn't overstay its welcome", which I hope to continue to achieve by staying creative and innovative with mechanics between chapters. Much like chapters 6-8 were before, and chapter 11 aims to be today!
In any case, enough reading. Go play the new content! I look forward to hear what you think about it!
Enjoy!
Gniller