We're about 6 weeks into Prologue's launch now, which is about half way to the game's second season. Let's talk about what these seasons mean, what to look forward to in the new season, and how things are going in the current (1st) season 🙂
Seasons the what now?
FrankenStorm TD: Prologue will release with a new "season" about every 3 months, for two main reasons:
1. To add a new, blank leaderboard for a refreshed competition
2. To roll out significant balance changes, largely in response to what turned out to be over or underpowered in the previous season, without unfairly affecting the current season's leaderboard
Old salvaged doodads cannot be used to compete in a new season's leaderboard - you'll need to start a fresh new set. But you can keep old ones and still play for the All Time leaderboard if you want to.
Unspent Salvage Points will be retained and usable when a new season begins. Also, we'll be allowing players to scrap salvaged doodads (including ones from previous seasons) to recover a percentage of the Salvage Points spent on them. Hopefully this means playing before a new season begins shouldn't feel "useless".
Season 2 starts on February 23/24. What's there to look forward to?
The salvage section of the menu screen will be revamped to enable some of the things just described, making it easier to browse and manage growing sets of salvaged doodads.
Otherwise, some major balance changes are planned in response to patterns that emerged from players in season 1. Here are the key gameplay problems that we aim to address:
- Focus Distributor is practically never used
- Lightning Rod, Snow Day and Tinkerer stacking feel "required" for achieving very high scores
- It's still easier than it was intended to be to achieve consistent, massive area novas or explosions
- Stacking negative enemy chance frequency lets you pick far too many Brute / Hound penalties before they stop showing up, removing more penalty variance than was intended
- Overall, the highest scores are much higher than the game was initially designed for, leading to excessively long, slow and very laggy matches
We're also going to kick off the big update and season release with a dev livestream, where you can play along and compete with us developers on a fresh leaderboard! This unintentionally happened when the game was first launched and it was really such a thrill, so we're looking forward to doing it again.
How's season 1 going?
We're about 6 weeks into the game and thus season 1's launch, and there's about 7 weeks to go until season 2. Here are some highlights and interesting facts:
- KyrosQF, the game's all-round world record holder, made a Christmas tree based maze when we challenged them, showing how easily they could crush even wave 120+
- There are over 18,500 entries on the Normal leaderboard
- There are over 5,000 entries on the Nightmare leaderboard
- We have 300+ reviews which are 90% positive
- Over 300 people have joined our Discord server to get involved in discussion
- It's been delightful to see people exercise pretty much every strategy that was consciously designed 😀 But nobody (as far as we know) has managed to reach the -90% Enemy Max Life limit yet
- The community has put together some awesome resources for the game so far, e.g. this document by Esoteric which describes all doodad affixes, their min/max ranges etc., and contains a detailed FAQ; and this great guide by LotusBlade with tips on strategies and tricks that even taught the developers something
Meanwhile...
Development on the full version of FrankenStorm is going ahead, slow and steady given these trying times. Hopefully 2022 will be easier on you and us all.
The game's "framework" is being remade from the ground up to enable greater performance for more extreme levels, much more variety in terms of game design features and mechanics, and a visual overhaul (including a switch to 3D) that'll allow us to raise our bar on quality in that regard.
That also means we're not devoting all of our effort to the Prologue, so some new features and implementations of suggestions from the community will be spread over further seasons to come.
Nonetheless, we hope you'll stay tuned and join us on the new leaderboards when season 2 begins! There'll be another announcement closer to the date with the exact timing of things so you can play during the live stream and compete on the fresh leaderboards with the developers 🙂
Anyway, you need to get to the graveyard now don't you? A corpse won't appear on that altar by itself! ⚡ Game on