Early Access Feedback So Far
For starters, thanks to everyone who has engaged with MycoRelic over the past couple weeks. Launching into Early Access has been a fun, but stressful, ride for us and we are thrilled to see you playing our game. In spite of some frustrating bugs, crashes, and the like, it has been encouraging for us to see just how many of you are having fun. Of course we continue to monitor all of your feedback and have a backlog of issues to fix. Every critique, positive or negative, gives us more data on how we can improve the game.
We will be squashing bugs and making the game more stable throughout Early Access and beyond, but today we want to focus on how we plan to grow the world of MycoRelic over the next year.
Into the Protochasm
The first item on our roadmap is to refine and expand on the Protochasm, which is the procedural dungeon found under the central main island village. We have two main goals for this activity. First, we want the Protochasm to lean into the gameplay of being repeatable with a large variety of rewards to equip players for later areas of the game. Additionally, we want it to act as a controlled environment for us to test bite-sized pieces of content that we can extend and refine over the course of Early Access. Each module takes us very little time to build and test, so the procedural nature of the activity helps us meet that goal.
To start, The Golem is a pushover fight for certain builds and we have recorded several bugs. We want to expand the mechanics of this fight and match the difficulty and detail of The Inheritor. Many players elect to skip as much of the dungeon as possible and rush towards the boss, to try to maximize rewards and minimize downtime. We are aiming to slow this behavior and incentivize exploration and full clears of the dungeon.
The loot system in the current version also needs to be improved. Without going into too much detail, there are currently 5 total reward chests that you may receive at the end of the dungeon. After successful extraction from the dungeon, all of the Osseous Shards in every player's inventory are tallied up and combined to determine the reward chests that will spawn depending on the depth extracted at. We feel that this system is hard for players to grasp and we want to fix that before delving too deep into development.
Here is a rough plan for Protochasm improvements in this update:
Golem boss mechanics, difficulty refinement, and visual polish
Encounters and dungeon layout improvements
Revise the reward system to be easier to understand and to encourage exploration
And a few of the planned Protochasm features we plan on testing before 1.0:
In-dungeon vendors
Buff shrines that have a cost
Debuff shrines that improve rewards
Minibosses and challenge rooms
We plan to fix some of the major issues with The Protochasm as soon as possible, and keep in mind that we aim to release content for this area with every major update, so that it can grow and evolve alongside the rest of the game.
Steam Cloud Save API
This one is high on our list so that players have access to several backups in the event of some kind of major failure or crash. Additionally, we are tracking a few issues that cause deleted characters, items, or inventory issues as well. Our hope is that the Steam Cloud implementation mitigates the bulk of these problems.
The Flaming Wind
This update will reinstate a boss that some of you have fought before, and we aim to expand the playable space surrounding the village on Polestar Island. These expansions will explore the conflict between the Mangrove and Lava tribes which will be part of future updates. We also plan to add gear and abilities that improve and add variety to certain builds.
As we develop more bosses for MycoRelic, we are initially going to reduce the loot pool for the boss drops so that we can have time to balance and improve the boss mechanics before adding the full loot table. You will see this with The Golem and you will see this with the boss introduced in the flaming wind update.
The Anuran Curse & Tyranny of the Mountain
These updates are further in the future and will consist of large additions to the game. We plan for both to be roughly the same amount of content, with new bosses to defeat as well as new abilities and items to collect. These updates will feature their own unique environments and each have a larger hand crafted dungeon which culminates in a boss. The additional playable space in each update should be comparable to the size of crab island and the lighthouse.
Keep in mind these updates will also have room for Protochasm improvements and Polestar Island expansions where possible.
MycoRelic 1.0
Our goal is for the content included in the 1.0 release to be roughly the same size and scope as the spring and summer updates. We aren't committed to a single idea for this yet, and we want to leave room for player feedback to influence how we wrap up Early Access.
Flexible Updates:
These are items that we haven’t planned for any specific update, but that we plan on doing over the next year.
Steam Achievements
We’d like to add Steam achievements once the balance and stability of MycoRelic is reasonably settled. This will likely mean that achievements will be implemented closer to the 1.0 release of the game.
Steam Input API (Better Controller Support)
We plan to implement the Steam Input API sooner rather than later during Early Access development. Doing this will alleviate many of the issues that have been reported of controllers failing to be recognized or defaulting to incorrect mappings.
Consumable & Backpack Improvements
We are aware that the consumable and ammo economy are limited with only one slot available, especially on controllers, and we aim to fix this. We have several ideas on how we would like to approach this and look forward to working with players to settle on a system that provides flexibility and ease of use.
Hardcore Mode
Some of you may recall that we previously had a hardcore mode in our older demo. We’ve always found that playing the game in this way is really fun for how intense every moment becomes. We would like to re-add this mode at some point during Early Access after fixing some of the exploits and bugs that compromised the experience.
Localization
We are considering localization but it would likely wait until the 1.0 release. If there is a specific language that you would like to see the game localized to, feel free to let us know. While we aren’t able to make promises about this today, we want to better understand what languages the community would like to play MycoRelic in.