Good day to you all,
I am here again to share some news of my game.
The Game Is Finished
Isnt that a great header? If only it was completely true. Fact is, all the 'minor' functional features have been done last week and so I can announce the mighty 'feature freeze' until launch now.
What does that mean? Can we release tomorrow?
No.
It means that all tricky, risky, difficult and sizeable pieces of code have been finished but nobody really knows how much of the game is OK.
For instance the Hero System has suffered some changes last week. Mainly the recipe system was changed (as was very often requested by you the players).
A few things were added and some have broken - can you spot the differences?
After much living-room pacing I have decided to introduce salvage currency (as you can see on the above screenshot) instead of using the Gold for hero 'selling' and crafting. The recipe system has also been made into a more deterministic crafting system and has a meta-progress (meaning you will have to unlock some recipes). Hero abilities have also been expanded - just a little bit.
The game was also optimized for speed. It turns out that the game's core (leaving graphics out) can now run at over 9000 times speed (on intel i7-6700HQ CPU). This means it can take 10 seconds to process an entire day's playtime. This leads to a lot faster offline time calculation when you come back from 2 weeks holiday.
With these and a number of other features done, there is an invisible pile of defects out there waiting to be found. So here comes the acceptance testing phase.
Circus of Defects coming to town
Within next 'what-feels-like-eternity' weeks it is time to look at quality assurance. If I were a corporation I would now 'declare war on bugs' and go for 'the final push'.
That said the final push will still take a minimum of 8 weeks of 'no netflix today' before launch. (but that's an estimate not a commitment :) ). With some luck a beta branch will be stabilized within two weeks and will allow a little public sneak and peek of the game.
Stunlock Cheese Nerf coming this week
As promised I've done a few demo tweaks and bug fixes. It's not tremedously big update - to be honest I still need demo stable for the upcoming NEXT fest so I'm afraid to cut very deep - but it should address some of the commonly reported issues. The update will be released at some point this week (I'll share a complete changelist at the time).
What happens to Demo after Launch?
It seems that different game developers treat demo differently. Some keep the same demo up after launch. Some disable it forever to maximize sales. Some create a Prologue game version they manage separately. In the past days I have made a decision about my approach to the Demo after launch.
It will be a combined approach. Demo will be temporarily disabled shortly before launch - main reason is the demo being too different from main game would provide a misaligned player experience. There are hero features not in demo, there are UI changes that might be confusing etc. Before those two versions can be brought together to the same experience I don't want to have this discrepancy for people who decide to buy the game.
At some point after Early access launch I will do a major update of the demo with all the features from the main game (most of them locked obviously) and turn it back on. The purpose of the post-launch demo will therefore slightly change. Instead of providing a 'concentrated' teaser experience it will instead become the first part of the actual game and - provided you bought the game - let you seamlessly continue through. (I fell in love with this concept myself in Starcraft 2 demo and I believe it is the best approach.)
Early access Release Date
Not much has changed since previous statements on release dates, but since a few people have asked, I'll briefly restate it here.
The official release is (as stated on Store page) Q4 this year - meaning between October and December.
I can already make this a little more accurate now - there are only two release opportunity windows (due to clashing steam festivals) which is mid November and early December.
While there is still the majority of testing in front of us and user feedback can change the situation I am staying optimistic. If everything goes with the same amount of unexpected problems as in the past year, both of those release windows are realistic.
Next weeks
As said above, I'll be going through defects and balancing. There's also a few content things to be added like Crises and Unique Heroes. But overall there's no bigger objective than making a stable game.
That's all for today. Thanks for reading.
See you next time,
Ondrej