Hello everyone!
It's been two weeks since our Early Access release and before we get into things, we'd really like to thank you all for your constant and crucial feedback , it's been really helping us put things into perspective and analyze the parts that we can improve in the game!
We're extremely happy that many of you have found the game very fun to play, and we'd like to tell you that a lot more content is coming to Desert Revenant.
Overview
We have gathered an immense amount of feedback, and have been hard at work addressing it. The most pressing matters that we are going to tackle first during these few weeks are the following:
- Improve the performance (Mostly GPU) of the game on lower-end PCs and reduce the overall patching size.
- Bug fixing.
- Improve the general quality of life of the game by undergoing some balance changes, and maybe giving the players a little bit more leeway to customize the decks and/or reduce the amount of time needed to unlock the new cards and curses.
- General UI and UX improvements (In and outside battle). We felt that it might have been a bit complex to keep up with all of the different elements in the game, and improving the UI will generally fix this situation.
Current Content
Desert Revenant offers quite a bit of content at the moment and our goal of course, is to keep adding to it.
So far, there are 2 Revenants to choose from, and there are 2 completely different playable areas. Each area has its unique Boss, Mini Boss, special enemies, storylines and encounters. The game greatly changes once hopping from one area to another.
Each Revenant has a Deck of 70 cards with 61 cards already unlocked when starting the game for the first time. There are 9 very good cards to unlock for each Revenant. The way to unlock the rest of the cards is by amassing points (Score) during runs, thus eventually, making all cards usable.
Curses are also a very interesting part of the game that some players have started to recently experience. Each curse basically adds a negative modifier to your run (Tied to a save slot) to make it even harder. Adding a curse will also increase the Score that you can get at the end of your run (By adding a multiplier to the Score for each chosen curse.)
The curses add a totally different dimension to the game, to the extent that a curse like the Realm Rippers for example, adds an enemy that cannot be unlocked unless the curse is active.
The rest of the content is not gated behind score, and everything is available for players immediately by playing their first ever run.
As you may all have noticed, the game relies heavily on decision making by offering multiple rewards paths such as the Wish Jinn, Merchant, Talents, Gold Coins, Dialogues and Reputation.
Building your Deck from the wide array of available cards, coupled with different talents and blessing from Wish Jinn (Powerful buffs that remain on your character for the remainder of the run) and gathering different perks from the Reputation tree is what really create a sense of uniqueness in each run.
The Reputation is unique in a way is that it is a form Meta progression in your run (Per save slot). They are basically trees where you can pick perks that will stick with you even after death and onto your subsequent run!
We will be working on adding even more rewards during the run to add further uniqueness to each run.
Another element that is prominent in Desert Revenant right now is the presence of various affixes which are environmental modifiers that take place during certain battles. They will usually be presented on the map in between 2 nodes and they can usually tip the scales in any fight. They can either affect the player's faction (Allies), or the enemy faction or even both at the same time. Some of these include Infectious Toxins for example where healing will be rendered almost impossible during battle, or inversely, Soothing currents, where all characters in the battlefield which actually heal in the beginning of their turn.
We're already working on increase the variety of affixes present in the game to make for some more interesting player choices when it comes to pathing.
Challenges
The main complexity of Desert Revenant stems from the huge variety of status effects (250+ and counting!) which is quite uncommon in turn based games. This creates for much more dynamic gameplay than the usual turn based or CCG games, because traditionally, the prevalence of buffs and debuffs isn't really highlighted in such games.
Introducing this comes with its own set of design challenges because it opens up much more doors to a plethora of different combinations. However, we found that it adds a lot of dynamism that players who invest time in the game tend to enjoy!
Another very important side of the general gameplay in battles is using minions. We're big fans of characters in RPGs having their own minions. Summoner classes are always an intriguing part of many RPGs (Video games and tabletop) but minions are for the most part not given a lot importance in traditional RPGs as they're mostly niche spells with long cooldowns.
We decided to take a little bit of a risk there and have them become an integral part of the game, and by doing so, we had to make sure that they synergize properly with each character, and also it has lead us to draw out a more complex approach to enemy AI. All enemies have different and unique ways of thinking, and they choose their spells and targets based on the state of who they are facing at the time.
Having multiple minions also lead us to adopt our intent system where we only inform the players about who's being targeted. We preferred to go with a method without showing the exact damage that enemies will deal since there are multiple ways to mitigate damage (Healing, permanent armor, absorption shields, minions for example) and let the players decide for themselves how to counter each enemy depending on the situation they find themselves in (There are multiple factors that come into play).
Our goal is to go even deeper when it comes to combat mechanics, make sure they're not frustrating to play around and of course add more and more variety and interesting mechanics (We're always looking to add more fun minions to play with and fun status effects to play around).
To achieve this goal, we're already designing new fun battles to play and of course new cards!
What's coming next
We previously mentioned in this update the most pressing issues that we are working on at the moment. However, we've already started for a while working on the new upcoming content for the game.
We are happy to introduce the King of Vengeance ! The third Jinn King that is coming to Desert Revenant in December! Without spoiling much, we're going to add a little bit of information about this enemy along the way. Check out the small visual hint of this character in the header of this Dev update!
Adding a new Jinn King means adding an entirely new map, with new enemy encounters and a new Mini Boss fight, new NPCs (With every NPC having their own NPC card), new Storylines, and much more. Some of the new enemies will have their own unique mechanics will which will make the fights also extremely interesting.
This will be our first major patch since our Early Access release with tons of new content added for you to enjoy.
We've also been getting some questions about the third playable Revenant and we're happy to tell you that the development of this character has already started. We will not spoil it right now, but we can safely tell you that the playstyle of this Revenant will be massively different from the two existing ones. We're going for some extremely unique mechanics as well that are quite unusual for Deckbuilders!
We hope that you have enjoyed this update, and be sure that we will keep posting more of these regularly to inform you about the state of the game.
Also, keep an eye on our Developer streams that are going to do regularly when time permits. (We're also going to upload some excerpts of the Streams on our official Kreationware Youtube channel)
Thanks again for your feedback, do not ever hesitate to send us even more, we're happy to address all of it and keep on improving the game to offer you the best possible experience.
Thank you,
The Kreationware team