Welcome Wanderers! We want to share our updated roadmap with you all so that you get some insight on what we have planed in our upcoming content updates until the full 1.0 release.
Lets start with a recap of the last 6 months of Striving for Light development.
Game development is a very dynamic process as we are constantly listening to player feedback and also schedule our updates according to how the game evolves over time. Some features might not bring as much value to players like others so we reschedule planed features to a later or earlied date. This not only affects the announced features but also features we only had in mind and not even announced yet.
So looking back at our last posted Roadmap from October last year we implemented most of the announced features along many further features we did not even have on the road map like adding legendary weapons, adding rare/epic weapons with random generated weapon stats or adding 6 new unique playable characters, map tiers, game difficulty settings, twitch& youtube integration, leaderboard build viewer and much more...
We specifically tried to re-schedule features to release as early as possible so that they will get as much testing-time as possible so that we can nail those core features like itemisation, weapon stats, characters and map tiers for endgame balancing for the 1.0 release. That said we did not forget about lore notes and more story content and the steam deck verification.
October 2022- February 2023
From the last posted roadmap until early this year we released 5 major content updates and over 30 patches and updates featuring plenty of new content including 5 new skills and 4 new weapons.
Survival Release and lessons learned for Striving for Light
We had some great ideas for a fun spin off and released an arena roguelite bullet-heaven game on the end of February 2023. This has proven as a great testing ground for performance optimisation and further QoL improvements like player effect transparency settings, new dynamic enemy health bars, player hit overlay effect, a completely new +20 minute rhythmic and intense alternative soundtrack, new colour coded damage numbers, and so much more. Those features are now all available in Striving for Light. If you haven't checked out the alternate Soundtrack option its available from the options menu.
This not even includes the countless new ideas we had because we were looking at Striving for Light from a complete different angle while designing a new & fun resource system that lets you directly jump into the action. We applied many of the lessons learned and rolled new variations into Striving for Light with a massive 0.8.1 update which was the biggest change we ever did to the codebase of a game ever. As announced this came with some more introduced bugs than on our usual content updates.
February - Present
After the release of Survival (in the last 50 days) we already released 2 major content updates and over 14 updates and patches which include 7 new added skills and 2 new weapons, playable characters, in game achievements, map tiers, game difficulty tiers, rare/epic weapon system with weapon stats and many more improvements.
New Roadmap --> 1.0 release
Just a few days ago we have released the hideout content update, adding 6 unique playable characters, new main menu, character selection, 3 new secret bosses with a new boss arena, UI overhauls, rare/epic weapons new crafting options and more and are already setting sails for the next content udpates.
That being said we want to ensure that all present content is in good shape and that remaining bugs are hunt down before we go full force onto the next content update. So we will take some time for bugfixes and improvements for especially those areas that could need some long awaited improvements and fixes.
A good example for this is the Shard of Refund algorithm which just now has received a complete rewrite to make refunding possible even on the most complex and difficult tree-shapes. Game development is not always straight forward and some implemented features turned out to simply be more complex than initially expected and just need more time to implement. As we focus on spending our development time on features that serve the majority of the playerbase first, improvements like this are split up along the regular updates to not have weeks without updates and then only an updated respec algorithm that only a few players deeply care about.
So whats on the horizon for next Striving for Light updates until the full 1.0 release:
Next to the pushed back features of the previous roadmaps we will start working on the new parallel secret dungeons that will let you aquire new set items that can be combined to grant you new & never seen before powers in the world of Striving for Light. These powers will be active abilities that are granted by the new set item types that require to actively trigger those abilities. Some of them might as well carry some passive abilities. These new dungeons will impose new challenges with great rewards.
We will further implement new skills & weapons as we have always done. We plan to add at least one new map with new enemies and bosses and a new gatekeeper. Along the new map we are working on additional map and environment decorations to make the environments feel more alive and diverse. There will be more story content and more / new voice acting and we will implement steam achievements for the full 1.0 release.
As always this is just the bare bone planed features until the full 1.0 release of Striving for Light. Most likely there will be more features added as the game evolves and grows of the next updates. If you have suggestions always feel free to drop them on our Discord or the steam forums.
We hope that this gave you some insight into the past and future Striving for Light development.
You are invited to join the community on discord and discuss the future of Striving for Light with other players and participate in the ongoing development of Striving for Light.