WINGS 2024 Women's Day Event
D20Studios is proud to participate in the WINGS 2024 Women's Day Event on Steam, featuring over 400 games created by women-led studios. Looking back on our dev journey for Abalon, which began in 2016, we have a lot to celebrate thanks to the accomplishments of the women on our team.
Kelly Przybylski
Kelly and Ross Przybylski
Kelly Przybylski is my wife and studio co-leader. She heads up our marketing and creative. Her efforts were instrumental in growing our community and successfully funding our Kickstarter in 2017. Engagements she's crafted over the years have included community voting on artwork direction, newsletter updates, and my personal favorite "Kelly Comics" some examples of which you can find below:
Kelly has a strange yet delightful sense of gaming humor
Kelly is also responsible for our most innovative character designs, such as the Celestial Steampunk Timekeeper Rats. My best idea was something akin to the traditional sewer rat mutant, to which Kelly replied "Boring!!" and instead pitched a race of sophisticated and dapper rats dressed in steampunk who had the uncanny ability to control time. It's amazing ideas like this that I'm so grateful to work with Kelly. She brings so many totally original and refreshing ideas that allow our game to go where no other game has gone before.
In game character models for the Celestial Steampunk Timekeeper Rats. These character have abilities that manipulate time, such as slowing enemy movement and teleporting allies to the future.
Key Art of the Timekeepers illustrated by our concept artist Marvin Blattert.
Kelly enjoys many tabletop games including Hero Quest, Magic the Gatheirng and Warhammer (for which she has painted a spectacular Tyranid army) - and of course Abalon. For the duration of the event, we're streaming a throwback video on our store page from our initial early access launch (when Abalon was still called Summoners Fate) with Kelly herself playing and discussing the game. Hope you enjoy!
Laura Palavecino
Another woman we'd like to recognize today is Laura Palavecino who hails from Argentina. Laura is an exceptionally talented artist who made a significant contribution to the game by redesigning the look and feel of our UI.
Laura named the signature textured stone look of the HUD "Blue Fate". The UI is more than just buttons and HUDs, though. Laura also helped improve the character movement and interactive flow and aesthetics.
Coming Soon
We'd planned to launch our next major update in conjunction with this event, but after some initial testing, we realized there's still a few bugs we need to work out with the procedural generation algorithm before it's ready to roll out - so we're rescheduling the launch for later this month.
Among other player requested feedback and QoL improvements, our next update will include the new "Fast Adventure" featured that was inspired by content creators like Retromation and Wanderbot.
Here's what I can tell you about it so far:
- Single large world with multiple biomes
- Three bosses to hunt - No Boss Keys - you'll have the location of each boss identified on your map from the start
- Targeted average completion time 80 minutes
- Simplified resource HUD - (Gold, Marshmallow, Dice, Keys) only
- Elites will drop soul gems, but they will be consumable satchel cards instead
- You'll be able to play satchel cards during battle
- No lore for fast adventure (because... well reading is not very fast)
- You'll start with a full party and at your health max
The goal of fast adventures is to fuel faster, more diverse runs that encourage players to explore the different summoners and experiment with creating different teams. So far in testing, the diversity in biomes gives exploring vibes reminiscent of top down Legend of Zelda, with deserts or swamps adjoining forests and staircases leading to underground dungeons.
We're also aiming to address the player feedback around our signature "cards as stamina" mechanic by providing alternative play modes with different advantages/disadvantages. For those that have enjoyed this mechanic, you'll be able to double-down on it with a more "survival" path. For those coming from traditional deckbuilders and expect card cycling, there will be an alternate path that lets you recover your entire deck each battle (but with some attached disadvantages so as not to break the overall balance).
Share Your Feedback
As always, I invite you to share your feedback with us so we can continue to improve the game. For bugs or improvements you observe while playing, it's best to report in game using Menu -> Share Feedback (as this captures a reproducable bug state to make fixes faster).
For overall ideas/suggestions, use our Steam community forum or come chat with us directly on Discord.
And, of course, the best kind of feedback is a Steam review. This helps us understand our strengths/weaknesses and gives our community a boost so more players like you can discover and enjoy the game.
Thanks for reading!
~Ross