Hey everyone,
hope you're all having a great Summer. We've been awfully quiet lately, due to a number of factors (Summer being one of them :D), but important work is being done, and it's time for an update on what's going on behind the scenes.
First, some team updates:
We parted ways with one of our team members due to them wanting to explore other opportunities.
This in combination with the rest of the team taking a prolonged summer break to put some healthy distance between themselves and the game, has slowed things down.
Good news is that everyone is looking forward to pick the pace back up and get into it.
As for me, being mainly responsible for content and balancing, I took this quiet time to read any and all reviews (talk about an emotional roller-coaster), and figure out where the game needs improvement.
The work being done:
After reflecting on player feedback and just playing the game a whole lot, I identified some core areas that just don't work as intended, and need a refactor.
Enemies, sector maps, and the faction relation system are the areas that need the most work, and I started with focusing on enemy complexity.
The enemies:
Enemies got a complete revamp, and I mean every single enemy.
First of all, enemies were mostly playing the same cards the player has access to. This made them too complex, and it was difficult to follow along with all the interactions of their cards.
It's fine if the player has to set up combos and have to play chain of cards to achieve a major effect, but having the enemies do the same, often results in outcomes that are difficult to predict by starting players, leading to confusion and frustration.
Second, because they were limited to player cards and actions, they were also very limited in what they could do.
Breachway's combat is asymmetrical, the things you can do to your enemy, are mostly not the things it can do to you, and there was very little overlap in cards the enemies could play that made sense.
For instance a big part of player actions is about disabling and destroying enemy equipment, but enemies can't do that to the player.
They can however mess with player card cooldowns, with their economy, card slots, add cards to the player's draw and discard piles, and so on. Enemies can just play big, impactful cards without any of the setup players go through.
This basic realization alone opens up a lot more interesting enemy effects and a higher enemy variety, which is what I'm currently exploring..
Enemies also gradually go up in complexity from the first sector onwards, to ease new players in more with how the game works, before throwing them in the deep end of the pool.
The Faction relation system:
The Faction relation system in a roguelike deck-builder is a pretty unexplored feature, and the first implementation wasn't as impactful as we imagined it would be.
We're currently in the middle of looking at what doesn't work, and looking at what we can do to make it feel more impactful. We're also looking to have the relation system be more fluid, in response to your actions
We're currently also testing out having most combat and waypoint nodes not belong to any particular faction. This gives us more options when deciding what enemy to pick, or what event to present, and allows us more freedom to shape some mini-narratives within a sector.
This also allows us to make faction related nodes be more special and really impactful when you encounter them.
We still have to do some exploration on this feature, but it's great to finally have some time to really dedicate to it.
Sector and run length:
Sector length is being worked on and tested, and it's difficult to get a feel for it without the other elements being in place. So while there is some exploration going on in that area, I'm not confident enough to speak on it in anything more than broad terms.
What we're testing at the moment is 4 shorter sectors, each around 70% the length of a current sector.
The plans going forward:
The current enemy rework is giving some good results, and we have 4 new bosses for the first system. We can't wait to share this with you and get some feedback.
The current plan is to keep working and trying things out until we have the first two systems up and running with new enemies and a larger variety of bosses (the plan is to have 4 bosses per system, one for each faction).
At that point we'll release the update on the experimental branch, get your feedback and start tweaking things.
Once the first two systems are done, my estimation is that we'll be able to add a new system every 6 weeks.
This redesign gives us a lot more room to add new content and makes creating new enemies and bosses faster, In some ways it's similar to the equipment redesign, that gave us more room to scale equipment variety and power levels.
We also have other things we're working on in parallel that we'll share once we are far enough along to see how they fit in the game.
Taking a good hard look at the game has proven to be very fruitful, it made me realize how little I knew of proper game design going in, and how much room there is for improvement.
One thing is for sure, we're committed to keep working on Breachway and launching it into 1.0 in a state that we feel proud of. There may be ups and downs, but our core commitment doesn't change, we're still learning, and we're sincerely grateful to have your feedback and support.
Victor