Hi again Reptorian Hunters,
It's been an eventful few months! We've had our heads firmly down.
New team member and redesign
And I say HEADS because Gibbonfiend Studios has expanded! One of our playtesters, Haybie, was so excited about the game, and had so many fantastic ideas, that he has joined the studio! He's been driving a whole new design and art direction, and it's been genuinely exciting to see. It's also been a wonderful experience to share the journey with someone. He even lives in my little village in the UK so we have real, in-person catchups!
There are loads of new things we're excited to show you and I'll leave a lot of this for future updates. However, some of the main changes are:
More detailed ships
The ships have real interiors now that crew can move around freely and you can zoom in nice and close. They feel a lot bigger and homely now (until a Reptorian boarding party starts pulling people's guts out, at least).
Build your ship, build your deck
One core design direction we're going down is that your ship (and therefore deck) is composed of multiple parts, all working together seamlessly.
Your turrets, shields, point defense, and other special turrets add cards to your deck. It's up to you to place them in the positions that make most sense for your strategy
Your crew increase in experience and also gain cards - generally to buff and improve how the ship operates
You can install modules into the ship. Similar to something like relics in Slay the Spire, these will provide passive or situational bonuses that define your run
Real time simulated projectiles and damage
We had some of this before, but we're really leaning into it now. The game is fundamentally turn based. But as projectiles approach in real time, they can be affected by point defense (shooty shooty), shields (pzz pzz) or grav turrets (swervy swervy).
Multiple enemy ships
One key thing we did is make the player ship front and center. This actually means we can support multiple enemies, so you will be battling whole fleets of Reptorian ships in all sorts of sizes.
Frikkin' laser beams at last!
No words needed for this one!
Deckbuilder Festival
For the Deckbuilder Festival, we've put together a teaser trailer and updated Steam page to show the new direction and hopefully get you excited too. There's still plenty of placeholder art, but hopefully it gives a sense of where we're headed.
If this looks good, a wishlist would be greatly appreciated!
See you next time,
James