Hello everyone!
It's been now 8 days since our last update, which for us feels like a lot of time, so we thought it would be a good idea to take a moment and share a little bit about our future plans and the content we are working on for the next major update. We want to be as transparent with you as we can (while trying to not spoil too much the content that is coming =P), and while this is a bit of a wall of text haha I hope it brings some clarity into what is coming in the future.
Release schedule
First, while we like to do frequent and small updates to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible, now that we are working on new content, it makes more sense to have a longer release schedule so we can work on more expressive features to make more of an impact in the game.
Our current plan is to release the next major update around the second week of December, and from that point on, release content updates monthly, which gives us enough time to work on cool stuff, make sure it all works well, and release quality content frequently. In between those major updates, we will continue making hotfixes, balance and smaller improvement patches whenever necessary.
General improvements in our radar
With the last patch, we addressed a lot of the most pressing issues with the game, including hundreds of bugs large and small, refactoring game modes, making sure the game is more resilient and that the initial Early Access experience was as smooth as we could make it. However, there are still quite a few quality of life and fixes pending for the next version.
We are still evaluating which fixes and improvements we will be able to get done in time, but very high in our priority list are some controller navigation improvements, accessibility options which include mouse-only control schemes and color-blind options, more UI improvements, and of course quite a few bugs reported by the community are in our radar as well. I don't think we will be able to finish all of these in time, but know that these are important issues to fix for us and they are definitely coming sooner rather than later.
Balance changes
For the beginning of Early Access, our focus was on making sure that all classes and play styles were fun to experiment with and were viable to play with. The game offers quite a few tools that make it so certain builds will always be superior or even broken depending a bit on your luck, however, we are well aware that certain classes and play styles have a hard time in the more challenging content in the game, such as high Curse levels.
For next update, we want to take a close look at skills and play styles that are struggling to keep up. We will never be able to make all builds of all characters with all runes be equally strong, but that is not the intention really. Some classes will always be more challenging in certain scenarios, and we believe that this variety is good for the game, given this is a single player experience (so far, who knows =P), however, we want as much variety as possible, and for that, we need to make sure that ALL skills can be viable one way or another. This will be a constant effort, and we will make sure to take it one step at a time with each update coming in the future.
New weapons and skills
Probably the part of the game that has received the least attention so far, are the weapons. We currently have a total of 20 weapons including the basic ones, but that is only a fraction of our goal. Our plan is to continuously add new weapons until each character has at least 5 weapons to choose from, and we are very far from that goal at the moment.
With that said, we are already working on a lot of new skills and weapons, and while I still won't reveal what those look like just now, rest assured you will get quite a few new ones with the next update!
Map differentiation
Another big shortcoming of the current version of the game for us is that all maps play pretty much the same. The resources offer some incentive to play on different maps, but, our goal is to have enough enemy diversity and different challenges per map that it actually feels different to play on different scenarios.
This is a big endeavour and will likely take multiple updates to get where we want it to be, as it will involve creating lots of new enemies, new skills for those enemies and making sure that they lead to interesting gameplay scenarios that actually feel different from each other (we don't want to just make green goblins in the Whispering Grove and blue goblins in the Frozen Wasteland), but it is something that is already in the works in the background. It will take some testing, but its a very high priority for us.
New challenges
In addition to the above, one of the areas we want to continue expanding the game for a long time still, is in creating new challenges. Those will come in multiple shapes and forms, with new bosses, new game modes, and quite a few... secret encounters to find along the way. I wont go into too much detail at this time, but what I will say is that we have one of those planned for the next update, and we are developing these in a way that will make future content easier and faster to develop as well.
Interesting ways to spend your resources
While new weapons and characters will require materials and soulstones to be crafted, those are finite and we don't want them to feel grindy or to take too long to unlock. We have other features planned such as expanding the skill tree, giving more meaning to prestige levels and so on, so there is still a lot coming that will consume resources, however, we are currently planning another major feature that should offer nearly endless ways to spend resources, in exchange for cool bonuses and variations to your gameplay and classes.
This is a major feature that will not come with the next update which is still in the drawing board, and it is a challenging feature to design because we want it to feel rewarding and impactful, but not mandatory and grindy, which is a hard balance to strike. However, we thought it was important to communicate that we recognise this as yet another big shortcoming with the current version of the game, and it will definitely be addressed in the updates to come.
Future content and goals
Our number one goal with Soulstone Survivors, is to make sure that there were hundreds, thousands of ways you could play the game and have fun with. We feel like we currently have a really good start, but there are still many more features coming that will expand your choices and overall power level in different ways moving forward.
Our next goal, is to offer enough variety of challenges, and activities to do in the game, to give you incentives to explore all of those ways to play the game. We believe we have a good basis right now, but there is still A LOT we can do in this sense, with enemy variety, unlockable challenges and so on.
And our third and final goal with every feature we think for the game, is to create content that feels well connected with the rest of the game, and that offers very high replay value. Once again I think we are going in the right direction, and this is a pillar for all of the features that are still to come.
Conclusion
With this announcement, we wanted to shed some light into our vision for the game moving forward. As mentioned many times before, we see the Early Access as just the beginning of this journey, and with all of the above, we hope it shows you a little glimpse of the ideas we have in mind. Even when all of the above is implemented, there are still loads of different types of content we can explore in the game, and we have no intention of slowing down.
We continue hard at work on our side, we continue reading feedback everywhere we can, we really appreciate all of the amazing ideas that you guys have shared with us and I'm sure many of them will find their way into the game at some point in time, and we are also looking into different ways we can interact with the community.
Thank you very much for the amazing support, and we hope to have you along with us for the journey!
Best wishes,
- The dev team