Hello everyone,
let's take a look what happened in the past two weeks since our first quick dev update.
Heroes upgrade
Considering some of the feedback being lack of clarity and usefulness of hero merging and minor flaws in the hero 'inventory' screen, I have rebuilt the hero screen and introduced a 'Merge recipes' menu. Since there was no easy way to get rid of trash heroes, I've also introduced a few core recipes to handle that. This is merely a first iteration with just a few recipes, but it should now be clear where to look for the merge guidelines as the new recipes come up. Along this, the hero screen received a proper background image and there are also 4 new Unique heroes in the 'loot drops'. This unique set is also going to expand in semi-regular basis.
In addition to this, most of this month work was workshop and housing artwork for all 6 eras which are generally completed and should cover everything we will need for Beta (except for some ever-present polishing work).
Playtest Results
After roughly 5 weeks of the playtest being open about 2500 of you have played the game and it seems that plenty of you (let's not be afraid to use the term median) have played for 47+ minutes, with average being 1hour 10minutes (thanks to 99 players who spent over 3 hours in the game). Less than 7% players have closed the game before 10m.
For a ~60m demo this seems to be a very good playtest result, and with all your comments and ideas it allowed me to properly adjust priorities for the upcoming months. While a number of people struggled with game's unrefined combat difficulties I believe that we're within the bounds of 'this needs more balancing and quality of life improvements' rather than 'this needs complete rethinking'.
Which leads me to the next steps - adding improvements and fixing flaws. In the next two weeks, two major areas of improvements will be addressed. Idle play and Tutorials.
Upcoming: Idle Play
Idle play feature will be added both into the main game as well as to the demo. My intention is to introduce idle mechanics from the very start to allow people play without relying on clicking. Originally I did find it too difficult to fit in 1h demo, but reconsidering after your feedback I changed my mind to give it a shot anyway. So ... Blue Hero faction comes to the rescue.
As you have noticed there are currently only two out of four factions in the demo. One of the missing factions - Blue - will be specialized (not exclusively) to provide Idle play features. Thus by switching to blue faction heroes, you can trade efficiency advantages provied by the other 3 factions for hands-off automation capability. This is not limited to passive resource generation however. Instead all game's core features will be automatable to a certain degree.
Key features of blue faction is suppression of risk, autonomous research, housing balancing, automatic workshop ability usage and ultimately - smart combat. 'Stability' is the play style of blue hero build.
Naturally not all of idle features will be easy to get early on and some might be found only with rare unique heroes or unlocked further after reaching prestige tiers. Also blue faction is not a silver bullet to stable gameplay on its own. While being fully automated, with entirely blue build, you might end up being too weak in facing crises, too unadaptable to changing environment or too underdeveloped for your technological progress.
Ultimately you will have to combine Blue 'Stability' Heroes with other factions, thereby choosing what strengths you sacrifice in the name of autonomy. More on this on the next dev update.
Upcoming: Tutorial improvements
For next demo update I will address missing informative UI features where possible. Ideally if a problem can be solved by making existing game element more self-descriptive I will prefer that to adding tutorial guidelines. There were a few areas where explicit tutorial messages will be needed - mostly around first-time risk actions like starting a Crisis Quest or selecting a Revolutionary Technology for research. Where guidelines prove insufficient, difficulty will also be toned down so player has enough time to react (mainly in the first low-level crises). Hopefully I'll also include bugfixes for all severe defects we have in the backlog.
Demo update Jun 5th - Jun 11th
If all goes well, all the above changes will be released during next week. The current demo playtest would be upgraded to a proper steam Demo and the playtest closed. This doesn't change much for you (since the playtest already had unlimited player count) except for having to download the game separately, but it's an important step-up in the game's store presence mainly for reaching new players. This will also free up Playtest to reappear when Open Beta test is ready.
Open Beta July 10th
Based on the demo feedback I have included two major feature builds into the beta scope (more on those later) and so had to shuffle the original plan (basically moving features I wanted to do between Beta and Early Access to be included in Beta already). So instead of having a smaller beta sooner (with less features) we will have a bigger beta later (with more features).
That's all for my bi-weekly dev log. Thanks to all of you for your support. I'll be looking forward to our next update.
Ondrej