It all started one rainy day back in August 2021 (it might not have been raining, but this is England so the chances are pretty high). I’d been prototyping what feels like 1000 different ideas but none of them felt particularly inspiring until I started making a kind of Tetris island thing:
There wasn’t much to it, just a fun toy to fiddle around with until I started adding rabbits into the mix!
Oh, and cards too 🙂
And so it really just kind of spiraled from there until here we are, 3 years later, 1 day away from 1.0.
1.0 is a scary thing. Even after the 100s of bugs I’ve fixed over the past year, there’s always that underlying worry that something’s slipped through the net. The problem with bugs when you have a game with this many systems and modes is that, when you fix one thing, there’s always the chance that it breaks something else.
Aside from the bugs, there’s been some pretty big changes to the structure of the game.
Challenge Mode
You now select from 4 base difficulty levels. After the introductory difficulty level you can choose to add specific challenges to that run, which increase the amount of MC you will earn if you are victorious.
What is this MC that I speak of? Well, that’s another of the changes! Instead of being awarded new cards after hitting arbitrary thresholds, you now earn the currency known as MC from your runs in the Challenge mode. These can then be spent to unlock cards to be added to your future runs for that God:
You can also spend MC on starting modifiers to make your run a little more suited to one playstyle or another:
The idea here was to give more agency to players in order to make the whole experience more satisfying and to give you more of a feeling of progression. The harder the run, the more MC you earn and the better cards that you can unlock.
Researching Cards
Another thing that was holding back the game was the RNG of the Harvest, particularly as you unlocked more and more cards. Getting the card that you really wanted proved more and more difficult as you played the game more, having the weird effect of making the game more random the more you played it.
We tried to solve this with the Research Library but it didn’t really work as well as I’d hoped, so we redesigned it from scratch.
Now you start each run with only a very small amount of the cards available in the Harvest (cards that you kind of need for every run). When you build a Research Library and play a Discovery card, you are able to choose up to 3 cards to be added to the pool of Harvest cards.
These cards will now show up in future Harvests. They’re also heavily weighted so that they are more likely to appear in the Harvest after they have been discovered - they even have a big flashing “NEW!” sign over them so you can’t miss them!
There’s also a slightly randomised tech-tree of sorts that’s working behind the scenes to decide which cards to offer, so you shouldn’t be offered a card that won’t work with cards you’ve already discovered or built (like a Windmill when you haven’t already discovered Farms for example).
This changes the feel of the game quite significantly, but gives you a lot more control over what cards you will have available - just be sure to build a Research Library early so that you don’t miss out!
Campaign Mode
The final change I wanted to talk about is the Campaign Mode.
We added tutorial missions in the previous update, and these worked out a lot better than I’d expected. Even though they were just a set of objectives designed to teach you the game, it still felt a lot more fun than I’d anticipated - so I designed some more!
Initially I’d started out simply adding similar ‘learning’ levels for each of the Gods, but then I continued adding more levels that challenge you in a specific way.
It was also a chance to feature the game’s antagonist a little more, so really it was a win/win scenario!
So, from the 5 ‘missions’ that we had in the last update, there is now a 34 mission campaign that’s spread over the 4 different Gods. You don’t earn MC from these and some of the missions have a constrained card pool, but you should get a nice unique experience from each of them. I hope you enjoy them!
Thank you!
I just wanted to finish up to say thank you to all of you who have been playing the game and providing feedback, as well as all of the people that worked on the game to help get it here to 1.0. I always think of myself as a solo dev but, not only are there 90+ different names in the credits (not even including the “Special Thanks” section), there’s also all of you that have made this possible.
So, thank you for your support and your help and I hope you enjoy my game!