We launched less than a week ago and already thousands of players have their names on the leaderboard, and we've been sitting on the Steam store front page almost the entire time (what?!? 😱) - totally unreal!
In this time many players have joined our Discord, or voiced their opinions and suggestions in reviews or forum threads, and it's clear that there's an appetite for more things FrankenStorm, and that there are many ways to do what the game's already doing a lot better.
Being honest, it's all been a lot for us to take in, and we've taken some time to figure out how to proceed from here. Finally, here are our plans which we think will best address the current state of the game, and the way forward to something bigger and better:
FrankenStorm TD: Prologue
The current game will change to the prologue version of FrankenStorm, remaining 100% free and continuing to deliver the tight, focused experience it was initially intended to:
- one base tower
- one base enemy
- one choice per wave
We know there's an appetite for more tower options, bosses and such, but from the outset the three points above were what we planned for this game to be, so everything's been engineered and designed around that. For the prologue we're going to keep it that way, but we'll be dropping some of those restrictions and expanding on the game design in the full version that'll be described below.
This doesn't mean that nothing's going to change in the prologue. There were still things we wanted to get into the initial launch that we didn't, and there's been excellent feedback and suggestions that'll significantly improve the current version of the game:
- daily challenges with leaderboard integration
- seasonal leaderboards, synchronised with balance changes and introduction of new stats / strategies / mechanics
- friends-only leaderboard views
- a way to see the stats people had on their leaderboard runs
- achievements
- dozens of planned UX/UI improvements
- CHAIN LIGHTNING
- more enemy types
- more QOL improvements, Steam integrations, etc
- more, list too long lol
There's clearly a lot to do, so we wish you'll keep playing the prologue, revisiting it through the seasons, and sharing your suggestions and feedback as it continues to grow as its own game.
FrankenStorm TD
The full version of FrankenStorm will lean on the core features of the prologue, but relax some of the themes and constraints so the game can have access to more features and mechanics. This will be a premium game with a larger scope and quality target. Some planned additions:
- a branching campaign that tightly integrates with the salvage system
- more tower, mazing and map variety, strategy and progression
- devastating bosses
- real-time gameplay elements (e.g. mid-wave: trigger one-time or temporary effects, control directional towers, etc)
- many more mechanics, stats and strategies
- a more advanced reward system that adds extra dimensions to the quality of rewards (so you can find more amazing stuff!)
- some kind of reward or re-rolling / augmentation / crafting system
- multi-language support
- probably more, but we can't confirm yet
Some things may be added or removed later, but the above represents what we currently think are the most important features for a premium version of FrankenStorm.
We realise that, even already, there are feature requests that didn't make it into this list. Unfortunately we've still got day jobs and must be careful with what we commit to - we're doing our best and don't want to take unreasonably long working on this game, in case the energy of our current community is lost. Even with the above list, we're not sure how long it'll realistically take when all the different aspects of life get in our way, but we're committing to delivering it so we wish you would join us in this journey.
What next?
We've tried to synthesise the energy we've felt in the reviews, the Discord and the community hub as best we can into this plan so hearing your thoughts on it is very important. On that note, we have some questions for you, and would love to hear your thoughts, suggestions or concerns:
- Do you think this is a good idea? What would you do differently?
- Would you be interested in following dev logs or some other form of regular development update?
- Anything else at all you'd like to share?
Comment below, or discuss in Discord - we'd really love to hear from you.
Also do continue enjoying what's now the FrankenStorm prologue (pending a rename from Steam support 😅) - this'll continue to be our immediate focus. And note that although it's the basis for the full version, even after that's released the prologue will remain a standalone, tight experience in keeping with what it currently is. It's not a game we're planning on abandoning, but continuing to improve in its own right - just like the classic WC3 maps that we were inspired by so many years ago.
Enough talk now, it's time to complete that experiment - tonight's the night, I can feel it ⚡