Hello,
Alex 13 here.
THANK YOU!
We're happy with the results of the first 2 days. In no way the sales are close to cover the expenses but that was not the goal. The goal was to make a good game for people who like to play Dungeon Crawlers and theorycraft builds. We... mostly succeeded here.
The overall reception is good, enough for us to want to continue working on the game. I felt the happiest human being when a streamer, View game page, streamed the game for 15 hours the first day. And for more than 10 hours the second day. And he's playing as I write this post.
Thank you from the depth of our hearts! That's why we're making games! And we're able to continue doing so while we have our main jobs and while there is interest, whatever the sales. So we're happy to proceed :)
Mostly succeeded?
Our main design choices paid off but i made a few major design mistakes that led to the following problems. Let's discuss.
Issue 1: Lack of early game build variety
It's a party-building RPG, and it needs build variety from the very beginning. The game lacks it now.
The first thought to fix it is' just give players more unlocked classes from the start'. Thing is, it's easier said than done - but gamedev is never easy. So we'll do it one way or another.
Issue 2: Lack of enemy debuff resistance
Every status effect now has a 100% chance to be applied to both player characters and mobs. Which leads to control-heavy parties just stunlocking everything. Possible solutions:
Give mobs a chance to resist debuffs based on their 'role' - a term we use to divide mobs between weak, regular, elite, and mini-boss types;
Give mobs a chance to resist debuffs based on their resistance to the base 'damage' type of a debuff - for example a stun from Shield Bash will be based on Physical Res, Freeze - on Water Res etc.;
Make some debuffs go offline when a mob takes damage.
This is a tricky one, and we'll think on the best way to implement this, but we'll definitely close this balance gap, and with high priority. Brainstorming sessions inbound!
Issue 3: Lack of endgame challenge
I thought it will be interesting to beat Level 40 Adventures with new parties for quite a long time - maybe hundreds of hours (if you like the core gameplay for sure). I was wrong. It's not interesting even for me ^_^
So we'll need a reason for players to try out new parties. And one of the main ideas here is to introduce a 'Corruption' system - quite similar to what Last Epoch (gosh I love this game) did.
After beating Lvl 40, you unlock a new difficulty where you can't control the Adventure level, unlike in the other difficulties. It just grows by +1 once you beat your current level.
Mobs already scale with level. Their debuff resistances could scale as well if we go the corresponding route from Issue 3. So you'll have an infinitely-scaling difficulty and be able to brag about the 'depth' that your best guys could beat.
I think this will drive the long-term interest for quite a long time. What do you guys think?
Issue 4: Stupid scaling of some class abilities
That one is on me even more than everything else. I just thought that some class abilities could do with the same formulas on all Masteries. That was plain stupid. I'll just fix it. Will require to tweak the localizations as well probably, but a day of work will suffice.
The plan
So, we have issues. How and when will we solve them?
Balance Tune-up - v1.0.2
Will bring you the Debuff Resistances (Issue 2) and updated class abilities scaling (Issue 4).
ETA - about 2 weeks from now. I'll be honest with you, some of the team members need a rest because they pushed hard, and the war is draining as well.
We'll most likely be able to put something else balance-related into this small update.
Update 1 - v1.0.3
This one will solve Issues 1 and 3 - lack of early game character creation options and lack of endgame challenge.
This requires more work and - even more importantly - playtesting. Also, we'll likely to introduce a new map - based on one of the biomes from Diablo 2. Yes, we're that old. By 'most likely' I mean in this update. The map will be released for sure, I just don't know when exactly atm.
We aim to release this update mid to late January.
Then we will see.
Thank you!
13, out
P.S.
Btw, does anybody have a clue why Difficulty 6 is called 'C3DWONS' in our game?
I'll send a key to the first person who give the correct answer here in the comments section!
P.S. 2
We're thinking on starting a closed beta-testing program, so if you're interested - please let me know in the comments section as well.