DOLOS: Your Best Future is exhibited for AG French Direct 2025, an annual event celebrating French video games organized by ActuGaming. We're thrilled to be back since our first appearance in 2023.
To discover:
- May 28 at 6pm (CEST) on Youtube: a live showcase of trailers, interviews and mashups on the ActuGaming channel. VOD will be available later.
- From May 28 to June 2 on Steam: a Steam page featuring some fifty games, including 25 exclusive demos!
What about DOLOS? :o
What better way to mark the occasion than with a major patch to the second DOLOS: Your Best Future demo!
Card game: new look and difficulty
Among the fixes and modifications:
- New look for the 2 central gauges: the bonus gauge and the external gauge.
- The segments of the 2 gauges are called bonus points (BP) and external points (EP).
- Assign an applicant gives 5 possible results:
- perfect (+2 BP)
- good (+1 BP)
- mediocre (+1 BP and +1 EP)
- bad (+1 EP)
- worse (+2 EP)
- Time bonuses and maluses become a gauge completion reward.
- Picking applicants becomes a gauge completion reward.
- Receiving external applicants becomes a gauge completion reward.
- Gauge level is displayed all the time.
- All gauge completion rewards are displayed all the time.
- The good assignment combo becomes the perfect assignment streak. It yields +1 BP.
Even a good assignment ends the streak. - The number of all remaining places is displayed at the top of the universities.
- Many visual improvements in colors, feedbacks and animations.
In general, it should be harder for your turn to last longer.
You start with less time, times bonuses are rarer, less “exponential”.
The goal is the players faces the turn ends more often, and so the external applicants.
In-between turns: a strategic break
Between the turns you can breathe a little bit!
But that's not all: you can think about what to do next.
- The in-between turns displays the total number of places remaining.
- The in-between turns displays more clearly the turn modifiers, i.e. unique perk for the next turn.
- Modifiers are currently scripted. There's the Preparation modifier only for the first turn and 3 other modifiers for the Sold-Out Turn. Other modifiers are of course planned.
- The deck view is only available during in the in-between turns.
- The deck view displays the draw order of the applicants in the deck. In other words, you can see which applicants you're going to draw first.
- The deck view also displays all the applicants' wishes and all the DOLOS recommendations.
- All the time spent in the in-between turns doesn't cost EXP.
Two difficulty modes
Finally, the demo's notorious problem of starting the adventure on level 3 gave us the idea of creating two difficulty modes, one specifically for the first playthrough of the game.
Discovery mode will simulate the difficulty of the first level on the DOLOS application.
Specifically
- in PHASE 1, you'll only have to deal with 4 different complementary files,
- in PHASE 2, there are +30% more university places,
- in PHASE 2, a game turn starts at 60 seconds.
Note: the difficulty is still high, as you'll still be confronted with more dilemmas via the EXODOLOS application (which won't be the case in the “real” Level 1).
Normal mode is aligned with level 3 difficulty.
So
- in PHASE 1, you'll deal with 9 different complementary files, including the 3 “new” ones on level 3, which are more heavily represented than the others.
- in PHASE 2, there are +15% university places,
- in PHASE 2, a game turn starts at 30 seconds.
This is the first version of these difficulty modes, changes are to be expected.
A third difficulty mode is planned for the final game.
Discord and playtest
We'd like to end this big post by reminding you of the existence of our Discord!
This is the place to join it if you'd like to chat with us, give us your feedback, preview announcements and take part in exclusive playtests!
Speaking of playtesting, a big public session has been postponed for quite some time now.
This is linked to all the balancing work on the card game, which we felt was more important.
Nevertheless, a playtest session is still planned. Once all the additions to the card game have been integrated (we're almost there), we'll keep you posted all over our networks.
Thank you all for following us and giving us your feedback, it gives us a lot of strength in everyday life! <3 <3 <3
See you soon!
The Playing Paradigms team