Hi everyone,
yesterday the Demo has been officially released to Steam. This means you can play the same game you could have played until now, except now it isn't called playtest, but demo instead!
Well, not exactly the same, there are a few new improvements in the demo. Namely the things I mentioned in the previous update. Let's take a closer look.
Idle play
As promised, the Idle play aspects of the game were made (yaay). But let's not fill our jacuzzis with bourbon yet, the current version is a mere initial step. Or let's call it a fundamental scope (the buzziest term I can think of meaning 'it doesn't do much yet'). This is for two reasons.
- Demo being a short (1 hour) early start, any but simple idle features are hard to include while not breaking the UX flow of the demo.
- There's only so much that could have been done in two weeks time considered it had to be 'release-stable' at the end.
But worry not. More idle features are coming. In this first step we introduce the Autonomy resource.
Autonomy
THE resource to govern your idle play. Provided you have appropriate Heroes in your build, each little green bug is worth a single automated click. Also autonomy is used for other (normally manual) activities like research selection. So, if you generate autonomy quickly, you can leave your economy running for quite a long period of time. If you're extremely rich in autonomy, you will even be able to sort out the Crises, but there's a long journey before that reality.
In terms of the game world, autonomy resource represents your civilization's skills to act on their own, their education, sense of responsibility, conscience and experience to manage themselves without babysitting. So eventually autonomy will not just drive your auto-clicking automation engine, but also tie to other mechanisms of the game. To some government systems it will even be unfavorable to have autonomous people (totally unrealistic, i know).
Autonomy doesn't work just like a resource to spend, but also has a static value just in possessing high amounts of it. Right now a stockpile of autonomy gives you a boost to research (the more free and educated your people are, the faster you advance), but in the future autonomy role will be expanded to affect most aspects of your economy and culture in some way. Even negatively.
User experience upgrades
With this version i have added a number of tweaks, mostly in UI. There's a new hero screen, merging, research tree changes, a number of added tutorials. Initial difficulty of crises has been lowered and a few decent heroes are added as bonus rewards for the tech tree challenges to make early crisis combat a little smoother. Unique heroes added in previous update are now also droppable in demo.
I believe the top 70% of suggestions from players after playtest have been addressed to some degree. Some difficult suggestions (e.g. rebalance of buyable boosts, bonuses/era changes) were postponed mainly because those feature will be influenced by the next upcoming build (and also because they were too scary to do days before publishing).
Transition from Demo to Beta
As much as I believe the current demo to be stable for general population of players to play, there's still a number of things to build and fix. A backlog of bug still exists, although most of them are currently cosmetic. There's a 4 weeks plan of both new features and bugs that need to be done for Beta. There's also a very likely risk that demo will need patching during that time. But unless there are some new problems on the way, open beta should still be doable on the planned July 10th. What features exactly beta will include is still undecided, but for certain I intend to add the next update of the core Quest mechanic.
Upcoming World Map Update
Current world map is merely a fancy skin for a list of repeatable quests. In its first version months ago it was just a plain list in fact, with no map. While useful as a proof-of-concept for the Quest system it supports, it doesn't serve the original purpose intended. That purpose was to mimic the Exploration and Expansion aspects of 4x grand strategies in a small simplified package (in active, idle and semi-idle play styles). This will need a bit of invasive touch to the code and a lot of artwork to make, so it's likely to be done in a few steps. Hopefully in the next update I will have the first version to share.
Part of this will be a necessary update of the Dilemma Card collection (more/better cards), Crises variability (new attacks and enemies) and introduction of new Heroes and hero abilities.
Early access Q4 2023
I have decided to postpone the Early access release from the 'guesstimated' late August to second half of autumn this year for two reasons:
- There is a number of game festivals including October Next fest that are planned relatively close to my original release date. But focusing to get to these festivals is going to consume time and shift priorities a little.
- I would like to create at least a decent soundtrack for early access - a work that I was not very well able to estimate until recently. Not having any music education the amount of time learning is absurdly high - and that 'learning overhead' obscures the actual work effort needed to make a track. So having some extra 'contingency' time to get this right felt like a preferable option.
The exact date will be announced as soon as possible.
Thanks everyone for their support, I'll be looking forward to your feedback and bug reports from the demo on Discord
Cheers,
Ondrej