Hey folks!
We’re super excited to announce we’re continuing our partnership with Freedom Games for Dark Deity 2!
Working with them for Dark Deity, Freedom really impressed us with their dedication to our vision. With them taking care of the business-side, this takes an immense amount of pressure off our backs so we can focus on doing what we do best - working on Dark Deity 2 and making it the best game possible.
Freedom will continue helping us with a slew of important things, like managing our store pages and any console release process, as well as marketing, PR, and advertising the game, just like they did for Dark Deity, so we feel confident in moving forward with our partnership.
I want to assure you that we were extremely careful when considering publishing partners, and part of what makes Freedom such a good fit is that they aren’t looking to change our vision at all. We retain full creative control, which is obviously a big part of their identity as a publisher. They’ve already been incredibly helpful, and they’re dedicated to helping us bring Dark Deity 2 to its full potential, which I think is something we can all get excited about. We want to keep making games for a long time, and this is a huge step towards realizing that future.
As for our plans for Dark Deity 2, we’d like to talk about some different mechanics and improvements we’d love to make.
Terrain and Level Design
This is, in my eyes, probably the most important change from DD1 to DD2. It’s well established that level designs could have been better in DD1, and the lack of a terrain mechanic really pushed the issue further. In Dark Deity 2, we’re taking many steps to make sure the gameplay is superb. To start, Terrain is in, with a solid but not overwhelming variety of types and effects. Additionally, deploy count and enemy count are both down across the board - we’re aiming for shorter, tightly designed levels with more tailored difficulty and gameplay.
Performance and Bugs
Dark Deity 2 is completely rebuilt from the ground up, with none of the DD1 codebase returning. Making this decision added more than a year to our timeline, but I strongly feel it was the right move. Most people don’t know this, but Dark Deity was the first thing I ever coded, and thus patching and fixing it over time has become extremely difficult. Of the many lessons we’ve taken from DD1’s release, the importance of constant testing through the entire development process is near the top. It’s not going to be perfect - no game ever is, but we are working extremely hard to make sure it is as good as it can be.
Strategy and Readability
Trying to figure out ahead of time what will happen in combat in DD1 can be a nightmare, most prominently due to dozens of percentage-based effects and the advantage system - both of which will not be returning to DD2. All skills and abilities that scale off of percentage will tell you the flat value in menuing, and the advantage system has been reworked into an archetype system that has very clear delineated bonuses. The systems, by virtue of being much clearer, give you a lot more agency in your strategic choices.
Gameplay Balance
DD1 has a variety of balance issues, from the ease of low-manning or soloing to a huge gap in capability between characters and classes. With smaller levels, more potent enemies, and significantly lower stat aptitudes across the board, this is an area that we feel very strongly we’ve improved upon in DD2. The gameplay systems all lead to a more cohesive vision that allows us better control over pretty much every aspect of balance. We’re keeping a close eye on it, and have been testing all the player classes and characters from early on in development to make sure the balance feels great.
Story and Characters
Early on in DD1’s development, we committed to the idea of 30 characters and 400+ bond conversations, something that bogged down our writing process extensively. We’re a really small team, and the sheer volume ended up allowing less focus for key moments in favor of getting it all done. We’re reigning back a lot of the quantity in favor of quality this go around, looking to deliver a more engaging story with a smaller cast.
Thank you
Finally, there’s no other way to end this statement than with a huge thank you to everyone who helped make Dark Deity 2 possible. Thank you for all the feedback, all the support, and for putting us in a position to make a better game 2. We’re proud of the work we did with Dark Deity as our very first title, but we know just how much better we can do.
As always, thank you all for supporting us. You make every hour we spend developing this game immeasurably better. We really do appreciate having you stand with us on this journey!
If you loved Dark Deity and are excited for a Dark Deity 2, make sure to check us out and wishlist us! If you want to be kept up to date with progress on the game's development and connect with our community, you can check out our Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or Discord!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2446600/Dark_Deity_2/