Steam Next Fest in Review
Hi Everyone!
Now that the rush of the Steam-Next Fest is behind us, I figured it would be a good time to both look back at the event and the exciting times ahead!
First of all, thank you to everyone who played the game and participated in the Fest! We’ve been overwhelmed with all the amazing feedback and excitement of you all! Sincerely it means so much that so many of you are interested in this lil game of ours. <3
Throughout the week alone we saw over 4000 players jump in and try the game. And around 1200 of you took the time to answer our in-game survey. The first act is now sitting at more than 170 reviews! In fact Dice Gambit was the 156 most followed game during Steam Next Fest amongst over 2500 participating games. Which is a huge win for a small team the size of ours.
Feedback, Changes and Additions
Obviously with all of these new eyes on the game, we’ve received a ton of feedback, concerns and general ideas from you. So I'd like to discuss some of the most prominent pieces of feedback we have received, and what we are doing to address them!
"Lack of combat and enemy variety"
Many have raised the concern that the combat would be too repetitive in the long run without additional enemies and different challenges to overcome, and we agree!
Chromatic Mutations
So to spice up the gameplay starting from Act 2 we are introducing Chromatic Mutations!
Mutations add additional powers and effects to all enemies within their given expedition. These mutations force you to adapt, both your approach to combat and who you might choose to send for that given expedition.
These range from the more terrifying variety like Elusive, which causes all enemies to dodge the first attack against them each round. Which can be a huge hurdle for characters and build relying on single large instances of damage. (Like the Scorcher and the upcoming Sniper class) 
To the more wacky variety like Risky Rain, which causes primed Explosive Barrels to drop at your feet at the start of each of your character's turns. These force you to keep moving or use displacement abilities to push the barrels into enemies around you.
More Enemies
Beyond Mutations we have also been prioritizing creating a whole slew of new enemies. In fact we are on schedule to double the enemy roster before launch. The first of which i’d like to share today: Splatters
Splatters are a swarm type enemy which comes in large flocks attacking and dashing through everything on their way. All splatters take their turn simultaneously and acting twice each round.
This neatly ties into the second piece of feedback we’ve seen repeated:
"Enemy Turns are too slow."
Splatters are one part of the solution to this. They will replace the Stain as the go-to little guy enemy. Meaning abilities like the Daubers summons will now be Splatters instead of Stains. This should avoid some of the most egregious bottlenecks when many enemies are on the screen. While still giving you encounters with some Juicy AOE opportunities.
Combat Fast Forward
We are also introducing a Fast Forward button in combat, similar to dialogues. This button appears whenever it isn’t your turn in combat. Holding it down or its corresponding key (F) will speed up the combat until released or your turn starts. This gives you full control to speed up the pace as you want, while still allowing you to slow down whenever an impactful or new enemy turn is about to play out.
Stamina Tweaks
Another commonly sited piece of feedback I’d like to address today is:
"Stamina Management is rough in the early game."
Stamina plays a somewhat integral role in the game, as it ensures and encourages you to engage with more than just the one squad of characters. This helps the game become more varied, giving you an excuse to explore more of the game's classes, while also granting your family more resiliency in case your main squad falls in combat.
That said, stamina can be quite rough in the early game, before your family grows big enough to handle multiple rotating squads, some players are also eagerly attached to their main character, wanting more opportunities to play with their best Inquisitor.
Our changes are two-fold. On one hand we have been tweaking Stamina significantly, reducing the amount of different exhaustion tiers from 7 to 5, we are also changing how potently stamina affects stats from between 50% and 150% to 75% to 125%. This means that it will matter less when a character is on low stamina and it will take less time to recuperate up to better tiers.
Recovery Facility
We are also introducing a Recovery Facility similar to the Combat Training Facility, unlocked early in Act 1 by Stecchi. This facility allows you to trade gold to regain a character's stamina. This opens up more strategy as you can now choose to recharge your key Inquisitors ahead of important battles, or just in general.
Character Stories
Last piece of feedback I want to address for today is:
"We want to hangout and learn more about the characters! "
In truth, this one we already discovered some day before Next Fest went live, so we managed to squeeze in some Story Beats for Silvia and Victorin. Rest assured in the full game there will be many opportunities to hangout with the various characters and explore some of the less violent places in Neo-Talis.
Here you will embark on epic adventures such as:
Playing Aurelia at her favourite Board game!
Meeting Silvia’s new Pet!
Getting introduced to your new personal assistant Steve - courtesy of Alexi Nova!
Discovering what Stecchi is doing in your cellar, and why does it smell like burning!?
And much more!
Outro
Obviously we are doing a ton more behind the scenes, there will be new missions types, levels and of course classes and abilities for you to explore in the full game. Along with many other minor and major tweaks based solely on your feedback. But this blog post is already long enough as it is!
Launch is also growing closer, while we are not quite ready to reveal the date (in case any hiccups occur), it is probably closer than you think. ;) We’ve already had several amazing testers play through the full game from start to finish!
Is there something important we missed? Please leave a comment and let us know!
And If you want to chat, see more about what’s going on day-to-day or just share your cool character. I can highly recommend joining our Discord Community where we are active daily.
Thanks again for your amazing support! See you soon in Neo-Talis
Nicos, Nina & Joshua - The Dice Gambit Team.
