Greetings, everyone! Gather around, and let's talk about the past, the present, and the future of NET.CRAWL.
Actually, I don't want to talk much about the past. In that past, I was more than sure the game would hit Early Access in 2025. Instead, we only recently announced the official Early Access release date: January 30, 2026. That's at the end of the month, and hitting that date will require some good old voluntary crunching. Always fun.
Mistakes were made in the past. Plans were, perhaps, too naive. Assumptions were based on outdated data. Less relevant, but still true: in the past, I had fewer grey hairs and more hair overall. It's hard to talk about all those things while maintaining a positive tone.
I will mention one thing about the past, though. It has made our small team much closer together. And if it's true that the only thing that matters is "the friends you've made along the way," then this project is already a massive success.
And it looks like we're going to need more alternative definitions of success because throughout 2025, I had to lower my expectations for the project's financial results multiple times. And they weren't crazy high to begin with.
The past was filled with rewarding creative battles, but the cost in time and resources was high. With little marketing success to show for it just one month before release, talking about the past now feels more bitter than sweet.
Present
From a gameplay standpoint, I'd say NET.CRAWL is already good enough for EA, but it still lacks structure. To help with that, we are adding a reworked Gallery (Compendium) screen, which will track the nodes you've already seen and won runs with.
Then we'll add a very thin unlocks layer to hide the most complicated content from new players and guarantee rotation of the bosses.
We are also adding difficulty levels. The game is the most fun on Hard for me, but I can see how less experienced players might need help beating it. I don't want to lock them out of winning or getting achievements just because they haven't been obsessed with card games for the past 10+ years or have trouble rewiring their brains to the new spatial thinking the game requires.
Alex also made a pass at extending the game's lore through short cutscenes. That work helped us find answers to some lingering lore and world-building questions.
All in all, even if you've played the demo a bunch, beat SPLIT-5, and think you're good, there should be enough in the EA release to both humble and entertain you. For a completely fresh player, the game should be nothing less than engrossing.
The second "Deeper" Run experiment turned out to be pretty fun, too. I don't want to spoil much by talking about it now. The short pitch is: after you complete a Deep Run multiple times, you can enter a deeper "Deep Run" - a special, more challenging run that builds on the results of the previous one. It's a part of the game that will require a lot more work during the Early Access period, but it's important to mention now because its existence sets a clear path to the true ending, which is a crucial step in finalizing the game's structure.
There are still some grey areas within the game's design space, but I'd say 97% of the important design decisions have already been made. Not all are implemented, but it's a good setup for Early Access. We have a stable core, and we can add a lot more content without disturbing it.
Future
This would be the logical place to present a roadmap and make commitments, although I don't think we are in a stable enough position to make "solid" plans. I have already misjudged way too many things throughout the project's dev cycle, so I don't trust my own estimates anymore. I do trust in our ability to keep working on the game throughout 2026; though our capacity and output will have some natural variability.
So, the average spherical roadmap in a vacuum would look like this: an Early Access period consisting of roughly 10 updates. Each update would contain 1-2 new features, 2-4 new Cores, and at least 10 new nodes/items/aspects. By the end, the game should be ~30% bigger than it is now, although this number is very much up in the air. I have more than 500 cards in the idea and backlog columns in the task tracker. Not all 500 need to be in the game, for sure, but we need to implement at least a hundred little and not-so-little things to make the game feel "complete" for 1.0.
Let's talk about some of that stuff.
Features & Systems to Build Upon
Logging Window: We already have an in-game console that's been very helpful for testing, but it's not pretty and thus is hidden from the players. The game is quite complex, and sometimes too many things happen at once. Without proper logging, players can get lost in the chain of events. This is a necessary feature which we will implement as soon as possible.
The Map: The game is still in desperate need of more locations. The current map is functional but not really exciting. We need more location types and, maybe someday, event-like rare locations. I've also made a crucial design mistake: segments on our map are always connected through a single "reward" node. That greatly reduces the map's "width" and variability. Reworking map generation and adding a light event system would make the game feel much better. It's hard to call this rework necessary, but it will improve the game's flow by a lot.
Then, there are two gameplay subsystems which I thought we'd be able to ship in 2025, but they were sacrificed to the altar of polishing and early-game content.
Non-Consumable Items/Scripts: Similar to Hero abilities in Hearthstone, only activated by spending Data.
Examples (WIP names):
- Blink (Cost 1 Data): Move to an adjacent node without activating it.
- Drain (Cost 2 Data): Exhaust the target node.
- Recharge (Cost 3 Data): Gain 1 Action.
- Swap (Cost 4 Data): Swap the positions of two target nodes.
If we make them once-per-turn, they shouldn't break or dominate the game too much. A variant where these abilities have unlimited uses but higher Data costs is also plausible, although I'm concerned they will be too game-warping.
This feature is very easy to implement. It's not strictly necessary to have, but it should provide a good way to "sink" Data (which is often needed) and it will make the decision tree slightly wider, which is always nice.
Bits: Resources (Data, Credits, Trace) hosted on exhausted nodes, available to pick up on a revisit. We actually tested this in the prototype, and they are fun and don't add much complexity or visual clutter. Bits are unnecessary for the game's core, which is why they aren't in the game yet, but they enable some very fun node and aspect designs.
(screenshot from the old prototype showing "bits")
Content(Cores)
For content, our main focus should be on the Cores because it takes much longer to design and balance a Core compared to nodes and aspects.
Only recently has it become clear what types of Cores work better at which parts of the game.
Some Cores are perfect for the early game because they can be beaten by any general "deck."
Midgame Cores are a good way to test the player; we can make them hard. Ideally, a player should lose at least one Heart somewhere in the midgame.
The gimmicky stuff works better at stages 9-10 when your build is mostly complete, and just throwing a "general-purpose" Core at a player wouldn't be interesting.
For the final bosses, they have to be strong but still beatable by wide range of builds. We can't allow one-turn-kills and too many hard counters.
Up until now, my main focus was on the early-to-mid game Cores. In 2026, I want to focus more on late-game Cores.
Content (Other)
The game has ~200 non-Core nodes currently (60 Data, 90 System). I wish we could grow this number to 250+ eventually. That would make the game comparable in size to a large MTG set. (For context, Slay the Spire has 75 cards per character.)
We have around 75 Aspects right now. I want to get this number to 100, or better yet, to 125. Remember that the entire Aspects Matrix is only 25 aspects, and you can only acquire <10 of them during a run, so even at 100, the variability should feel great.
True ending
At some point in 2026, we need to release the final final boss. I envision something like the Heart from Slay the Spire, but ideally, even less "mandatory."
My goal is to keep the normal 1-hour run as the default, satisfying way to play NET.CRAWL. The issue with a Heart-like boss is that its immense difficulty often dictates the entire run. If a strategy or combo won't work against it, that strategy effectively becomes invalid. This can render large portions of the game's content irrelevant.
That's acceptable as a one-time, ultimate challenge, but I want the core experience of NET.CRAWL to remain open to a wide variety of strategies, not funnel players toward a single, optimized build.
Conclusion
Speaking of endings, it's time to wrap up this post - which, once again, took more hours to write than the number of people who will read it. I'm not bothered by that. In fact, in a strange way that only makes the experience more special.
If you're still here, and especially if you've ever reached out to us during development, you have my deepest thanks. I would have lost my mind without your voices.
I look forward to meeting more of you after January 30th.
Denis
(ObsoleteOne)