First of all - Thank You for an amazing EA launch week. The community response has been everything I'd hoped for and more, and I'm so looking forward to continuing to develop the game with and for our growing menagerie of MoteMancers.
I want to be up front with what to expect in the coming weeks and months - MoteMancer still has tons of polish and features and quality of life to implement, but the game is largely stable, and that changes our development posture a little bit. Where patches were coming in almost daily leading up to launch and through last week, that cadence is likely to drop to about once a week. My current plan is to keep doing Monday Musings and then push a more robust patch every Thursday.
One of the immediate things I'm going to tackle is doing a large Localization QA pass - I think the translation itself is great (please continue to give feedback where you find ways to improve it) - but there are definitely areas where there are awkward line breaks and some UI's that got missed, and I want to shore all of that up as a priority.
After that there will be a big push for additional Quality of Life and UX, in addition to getting many of the fractured researches available that didn't quite make it in time for Automation Fest. Finding a balance is definitely going to be part of the challenge - as with all game development, the more consistently a feature or fix is requested, the higher priority it will be. I'm confident that we can keep a good clip of updates, and the main challenge is going to be where to channel our focus.
But I don't want to end there. I want to end with one of my favorite story arcs that happened last week for those that missed it - proving for always and eternity that players will find ways to surprise you.
This is the tale of Ellensiel, the MoteMancer who stayed behind.
Refusing to surrender, Ellensiel chose to remain in the Library, determined to fight the encroaching threat of Entropy from within. The resources for apprenticeship after-all remained within the great hall. As instructed, Salt and Aether foundations were swiftly established, giving way to the Element of Life revealing itself.
In spite of the valiant effort, resources were running shallow, and the Elemental Orbs would require significantly more coalesced elemental essence to be reformed. Undeterred, Ellensiel found more and more nuanced tactics to leverage the tools available, cleverly threading Shifting Slabs beneath the ominous Rifts.
Such masterful order created a stronger counterbalance from the nearby Rifts, seeking to nullify the local pocket of complexity. Ellensiel, having learned much while remaining in the library, narrowly slipped through the portal to the Life Plane - seeking a way to restore the Elemental Orbs, and preserve the fragile middle, where creation renews itself against the flattening calm of Entropy.
Thank you Ellensiel for the joy of crawling around the rough edges of MoteMancer, I look forward to continually being surprised :)
~Cyanavatar