Hi everyone! Here’s a look at what we’ve been working on and where we’re headed.
This Month’s Progress
We’ve added our second gameplay mode: Free Play (name TBD). As we worked on feedback to build a stronger story progression, we realized we wanted a second way to play the game. Once you defeat the first story boss, Free Play unlocks. Free Play runs have larger star maps, multiple bosses, etc. You’ll also still earn Flux for metagame discoveries when you do those runs, too.
We have been cranking through a bunch of required-for-ship tasks in the last month. Things like Cloud Save, Steam achievements, and reviewing our UI to ensure everything is sized appropriately for the Steam Deck. Admittedly, we probably should have done a few of those earlier, but it’s nice to finally get them knocked out!
Looking Ahead
Finishing touches on story Chapters 4 and 5. We already have all the bits and pieces we need. This is swizzling placement and balance to align the story and gameplay for those chapters. For example, each chapter boss has a favored set of units it uses, boss meter techs that it selects from, and custom minions on the starmap. Our data setup makes something like setting up the favored units trivial to execute, but then comes all the playtesting and balance after that. We realized we were going ‘too fast’ with Chapter 3, so we pulled some of that content out for Chapter 4. That ripples into changing the ship preferences for Chapter 4, which changes how the boss needs to work, and so on.
Final content push for our first official localization run. This is always a simultaneously scary and exciting moment. Once we hit localization, it becomes harder/more-costly to change text, but it’s also a great indication that we really are closer to the EA launch.
It’s cool to finally be able to talk specifically about our progress to Early Access. It’s not that far away. And, to be honest, we wanted to get here a LOT sooner. But games don’t always come together as quickly as you want. We’re excited to be in this final stretch!
As always, please share any feedback or thoughts with us. Keep the conversation going on Discord.
- The LK Team