Hello,
today I will keep the update brief as most of this month's work was testing, patching and re-balancing.
Upcoming Beta update
This week I am going to update the Experimental beta branch with another patch. Except this time a few functional changes are coming along the usual set of bugfixes.
This is therefore something like the final feature update of 1.0 before going live. I expect there will be a couple more bugfix patches for sure but I am freezing all feature development to minimize regression risks on launch date.
Notable changes
Reduced Difficulty
Reduced some late-game cheesing
Updated most old unique heroes (added 1 new)
Added a few sounds and ability visual effects.
Added Final Scenario
Specific details will be listed on the patch day (I hope within next two days once testing is finished).
Leaving Early Access
As hinted in the title, the game will soon be leaving early access stage. Everything is going within expectations so I decided the date to be:
January 22nd
Like I mentioned in previous updates, leaving EA doesn't mean that much for you as players. It is mostly just a message indicating that the game is no longer missing any feature. There will be future changes and more features, but those can be better described as Extensions & Improvements.
Post-1.0 features
I will continue working on the game past 1.0 with pretty much the same process. There is a number of features in the backlog for months of work, so there's not much rest in the view (though I do plan to take a few days off at some point :) ).
I also plan to shift focus to some long-due 'technical' things after 1.0 (things which don't really bring new stuff to the game). Optimization of late-game gameplay is one good example. These things can take tremendous amount of time and I'll have to somehow come up with a stir-fry mix of these boring techy-things and interesting new features for each 1.X major update.
I will create a more specific roadmap once we're past the launch day.
What's next?
In the two weeks I will focus on beta-testing and stabilization. In spare time I'll be working on presentational stuff like store-page update and hopefully resuming my work on soundtrack composing (I gave up my wish to include full soundtrack in 1.0 - but would like to have it semi-complete in 1.1 or 1.2).
Once we're out of Early access my intention is to start on The Endless mode - which will be probably the biggest feature after 1.0 (possibly stretching to more than one major update). If all goes well I would like to have something mocked-up to share in the update after the next one (so in 2 months time)
That's all for today,
Have a nice day!
Ondrej