Hello everyone! About a week ago I mentioned that I'd be taking a short break and getting back to work around New Year's, starting with putting up a nice roadmap for DASHPUNCH's life as an Early Access Indie Roguelike™ on Steam. While the whole "break" plan only had some limited success (as some of you may have noticed by the continuous bugfixing), the roadmap is here! And as a little bonus, the name of the first major update: Mezztik's Marvels.
As you can see, Early Access is planned to have three major updates before launching into full release. The exact timing of when these will happen is only a loose prediction; as a single dev it's hard to pin down exactly how long future content will take to make, so take them with a healthy grain of salt. That said, let's dive in!
Mezztik's Marvels, the first on the list, is an update all about bones. Not literally though; I'm taking about the systemic bones that hold the game together! It's a combination of content that didn't quite make it into the initial Early Access release, content and polish based on the amazing feedback I've gotten since then, back-end fixes and reworks that'll make future content easier to make, and of course some entirely new things to play with as well. Expect big changes targeting current pain points, elevated dungeon variety and more freedom to strategize with items and legacies. This update is intended to lay down the last of the "groundwork"; and as such the additional story content will be somewhat limited in scope compared to the next major updates, and more focused on mechanics.
The next two major updates after that will each be focused on adding a new chapter to the story, and this includes everything that comes with that; new tilesets, new enemies, new bosses, new rooms, etc, along with a chunk of new items, legacies and other interactable things. More information on these will be revealed later down the line.
Lastly, I should also mention that there will likely be some smaller updates between these as well, to fix things or add in smaller features mostly unrelated to the big three. Depending on the timing and when they get done, some of the planned content might end up being added early in smaller updates instead, particularly things like QoL features. So look forward to that maybe!
That's all from me for today, thanks for all the continued support!
(And just as a reminder, there's only a couple days left to pick up DASHPUNCH for just $5! Tell your friends!)