Hi all,
at the start of today's update let me first thank to all who have tried the demo in the past two weeks (6403 players) and also to those of you who deemed the gameplay worthy of streaming online (I estimate total of about 300k views of different YT videos from different content creators over the last two weeks). It's been a massive help to gain visibility through your audiences. Many thanks for that!
Besides this I basically have just two news, one bad, one good. Let's start with the bad one.
Beta cancelled postponed indefinitely
I have decided it is best to cancel the planned open beta on 10th for multiple reasons. Among which are these:
- Ascension mechanisms are not very practical to put into a beta - the gameplay length will be rather long and not very good for broad testing as public beta where time and player count would likely be limited.
- The same ascension mechanisms can be safely tested in demo provided they're 'minified' versions (balancing can be totally different for demo).
- The new features like Idle play and World map are not yet properly extrapolated to all technological eras and tier levels - that's a huge amount of work still planned.
- Plenty of functionality is not on the same level of quality in full game yet as compared to Demo.
- My recent plan to limit the Beta scope to only a few Tech Eras would basically make it something between full game and Demo.
The above reasoning leads me to the second news.
All new features will be released to Demo
That's right. Everything that will be done between now and Early Access will be released into demo. Not saying the Demo will have the same size as the full game - it will remain the same length 1-2 hours. Just that every new major feature will have its 'demo-version'.
This seems to be far better approach than exposing the 'full' game for a few days as Demo can be played by anyone forever.
World-map upgrade coming to next Demo update
The upcoming release (date to be confirmed) will include the overall update of Quest system. While current system is merely a list of infinitely repeatable quests that produce resources at the cost of potential combat, the new system will focus more on progressive rewards, evolution of the map and a more strategic approach to the Quest choices.
Each quest will have limited stages, so you will no longer be able to infinitely grind resources from the same tile. Instead after completing all stages (each being more difficult) you will gain a permanent upgrade to your economy by 'improving' the tile the quest was on. Your choice is which of the two quests you will use - each quest will upgrade the tile to another type potentially with a resource bonus.
For instance, completing Dilemmas for Foreign tribe village will integrate them into a proper Village tile, increasing your Worker count. If however you choose to Extort the Tribal village for gold, they will turn into a Barbarians tile.
The map will no longer evolve by Technological Eras, instead you will be expanding through the map as you complete the quests.
Yeah and the map is also bigger now.
Oh no! My saves are lost
Since we're now approaching a major update to the Demo that potentially breaks your save, I think it would make sense to state what is the expected Save compatibility between individual Demo versions (between updates) and between Demo, Early access, Demo after early access release and Full Game etc.
Demo Save used in Early Acess/Full Game
This is relatively simple. The current approach with Demo is implying a different balancing between full game and Demo. It would not make sense to therefore transfer heroes and ascension lotuses gained easily to the Early Access where they are far harder to get.
Therefore Demo will always have separate save from Early access/Full game. While it is a nice feature to allow 'seamless' transition from demo to full game, I have to admit that is too difficult problem design-wise at this moment. If this seamless save transition comes, it will be for Full Game (i.e. after Early Access - so very distant future).
Demo Save version 0.1.0 after Upgrade to 0.2.0 (or 0.3.0 etc.)
With a few major builds still unfinished there are parts of data that simply cannot avoid breaking changes. Meaning no matter how well the save code is written (spoiler: it's not very well written) when new data is introduced in code changes (and thus missing from every player's save) the new version saves will not work. Data migrations can fix that in some cases but the eventual day when your save is broken is theoretically unavoidable. However...
Currently the saves are broken down to essentially two sets.
- The Game save - state of your population, workshops, research, quests, gold, wood - and basically everything you lose when you Ascend.
- The Meta-Game save - Heroes, lotuses, score - and everything else you don't lose when you ascend.
With upcoming updates the Game Save (1) can be broken rather frequently. So you might lose progress of the current run you're in if you update the game. I understand this might be a bit of pain for some Demo players, but I hope it won't be a showstopper for most players since the demo is relatively short. As we find the most common root causes, the save system can be improved to minimize them.
The Meta-Game save (2) however is designed differently and should be far more resilient to updates and easier to migrate. That said, you should never expect to lose your Heroes and Ascensions due to an update (unless there is a bug involved).
Same behavior can be expected between early access versions, but hopefully with far less actual breaking changes happening (as most game features should be relatively stable by then).
Early access saves to Full version
Since Full version (after Early Access) is not coming sooner than mid 2024 it is a very vague reality of the future world. But I will probably let players have an a say whether to force reset progress on full release or allow seamless transition instead (or perhaps something in between). Both cases seem to have some benefit in my head, so I am undecided yet.
Upcoming work
In the next two weeks I plan on stabilizing the world map update for demo release, fixing defects, improving UI but mainly work on improvement of late demo gameplay. Since many players seem to be playing for longer than 2 hours it makes sense to include some of the full game features to it (in the Ascension area). I will share more in the next log.
Thanks for reading, see you in two weeks,
Ondrej