Hello, Merchants!
Welcome to our first State of the Game post! We want to ensure we are keeping all of you, our earliest supporters, up to date on the progress we are making behind the scenes, as well as the short and potentially long term goals that we are working on.
First, we want to extend our most sincere thank you to our community that has come together so far. We launched The Merchant’s Guide to the Kingdom with very little expectation, and you have all blown it out of the water! This is a surreal time for us, as we never expected our first ever game launch to bring so many helpful community members forward who see what we are aiming to do with the game. Our ambition was very high from the start, but seeing the passion and enjoyment that we have so far been able to bring to some of you, we are more motivated than ever to push out fun and unique content!
Now, let’s talk about some of the major bugs we currently have our sights set on.
Stuck at Loading
We had to face this bug down immediately on launch, and the pesky thing seems to not want to die. We have received reports of several players finding themselves stuck at loading again following our last patch. We believe we have nailed down the issue, but in this case it is taking a little longer to patch in as there are several other things coming with our next patch which require some extra testing, especially alongside this stuck at loading bug.
Quest Cache Duplication
We are currently investigating an issue when players try to transfer items from the Quest Cache into their Merchant Inventory, some items are being left behind, and instead of transferring, they are duplicating themselves. We have some ideas on how this might be solved and are giving them some testing, so hoping that is coming in the next patch as well.
Crashes & Performance
We have been receiving reports of crashes, and are well aware of some of the performance issues players are experiencing at later points in the game, especially when gear stacks up. For a quick solution, if you are experiencing severe frame drops, saving and restarting your game may help. However, this coming patch is focused on many of the more major performance issues, as well as memory leaks which are causing these problems to occur. We have several features which are being rebuilt from the ground up, and expect to see quite impactful improvements overall with performance and game crashes.
We are also sneaking in a few features with this next patch.
DPS Meters
This is our first iteration of DPS meters. It includes the ability to see a short history of damage that heroes did in a dungeon. It also adds the ability to track the highest damage hero that has gone through the dungeon, and the fastest overall dungeon clear. We plan to add more of this sort of information tracking as time goes on.
Shopkeeping
We have been receiving a lot of feedback from players who want some help keeping the shop under control while you may want to go fishing, crafting, or just on an adventure. We have many plans for Officer Jobs in the future, but figure this is a good time to introduce the first one, Shopkeeping! You will be able to set your Officer to tend to your shop while you are away. They are not as skilled as you in the ways of being a Merchant, so they will simply accept all purchases and sales, as well as every quest pick-up and turn-in. While Shopkeeping, your Officers will receive small amounts of XP for each transaction, and there is an associated Energy cost for each transaction as well.
Salvaging
More than anything, we have heard the demand players have for a system which allows them to get rid of unneeded items, or items that won’t sell. For this, we are putting in our first version of salvaging. This will be a way to repurpose items and materials. Initially, the salvage system will be simple, and will not have a very strong yield per item salvaged. However, before long we will add ways for you to enhance your salvaging to result in greater returns when breaking down items. More on that to come!
We expect this patch to release this week.
What's next?
Following this upcoming patch, we plan for our next patch to include a fully reworked tutorial, improved crafting recipes, new crafting materials, new recipes to unlock, and a somewhat major rework on Researching, plus much more!
Details coming soon!
In the meantime, for the most up to date information, notifications and discussions we encourage you to join the community on Discord and follow our Twitter!
Thank you all for your continued feedback, reports and discussions around The Merchant’s Guide to the Kingdom! Every bit of communication from each of you is contributing in major ways to the future of this game, and we cannot wait until you see what we have in store!
-Devs