Rest in peace, my keyboard!
The other day, I realized how long I’ve been working on the game when a key broke on my keyboard. It completely snapped off, leaving a piece of plastic inside the switch that I still didn't manage to get out. It doesn’t matter too much, because my beloved white-colored Logitech G915 TKL keyboard is so well used at this point that it’s barely white anymore. Despite regularly cleaning the keyboard, it builds up dirt so fast that it switches color from white to white-ish in a week's time. It served me well over the years, but it’s time to retire this amazing keyboard (and get the same model in black).
A picture of a new keyboard. Sorry, I won't show the state of my current keyboard. Just trust me, it's beyond repair at this point...
Version 2.0
We're about to launch version 2.0 of the game and figured it would be interesting to make a post about the history (and the future) of the game! Some of the players have been here a really long time and seen earlier versions of the game, but very few know the story behind the game and the reason behind some of the design choices we made, so this post is made to tell some of the stories behind Trials of Valor (TOV).
How it all started
The development for Trials of Valor started 2 almost exactly years ago (August 2024). Back then, it was a solo project in my free time while working full time. I had learned how to make games in my free time for almost 3 years at that point and had been working professionally with software development for about 5 years in total. I usually spent all my free time, including time after my day job, learning game development and really enjoyed it. I never came close to finishing a game, it was just a way of learning and exploring ideas.
The first prototype
TOV started as an auto-battler where you set up a behavior for your character and watch them fight battles. Just two characters standing there, beating each other to death. If you got defeated, the idea was that you alter the behavior of your character and watch them fight again until they succeed.
Set up your abilities with conditions for when they are supposed to be executed
Watch the characters fight each other until the other one falls
Manual ability execution
I realized pretty quickly that it felt boring to not be in control of your character during a fight, so I made the abilities / moves clickable so you could choose the order of execution. This was a lot more fun, but it still felt pretty dull to just see the characters standing still.
The melee attacks felt a bit off too, since the distance between the characters was too far for melee and at the same time, too close for ranged attacks.
Movement
That's when I decided to add movement to the characters. The player could freely control their character with left/right movement. This also unlocked the possibility to make abilities influence the movement of the characters when executed, to perform moves like dashes, evades and jumps. This change alone introduced a lot more complexity to the code, but also allowed to game to transition into a fighting game where Perfect Blocks and Evades started becoming a thing.
Full time development
In October 2024, I decided to quit my software development job and focus 200% of my time at game development. Working professionally had its moments and was a good, secure source of income, but it never felt as rewarding completing projects for someone else compared to working on your own projects.
It also got really exhausting to work for 8-10 hours and then do game development afterwards. which I did for years with various project.
I was used to working very long hours, quitting my job meant I suddenly had 14+ hours per day to focus all my attention on game development instead. Since TOV was my ongoing project at this point, it felt natural to continue the development of this game to see where I could take it. The game looked and felt far from what it ended up being at launch at this point and there was lots of work to be done, but as you know, I kept pushing on!
No character classes
The initial idea of the game was to make your character able to equip any weapon "on the fly" with no concrete classes. If you wanted your character to have dual daggers and a staff, that would work! If you later decided to switch up your loadout, you would be able to equip completely new weapons and gain different abilities too.
The idea was that each ability you learned got saved in a spellbook and you had a loadout saved for each weapon type. However, this meant that whenever you got to learn an ability, you could sometimes end up with a selection of abilities you couldn't use right now, which felt.... weird.
Start off "naked" and build your character into whatever you happen to find?? Weird right?
Character classes
I decided to add some constraints to make some sense of the gameplay. Going for the traditional Warrior / Rogue / Wizard-classes seemed like the better idea, because that gave each character an identity with different strengths and weaknesses. It would also reduce the scenarios where you end up with choices of armor / abilities you didn't want to use right now.
The Warrior can take a beating while still dishing out a decent amount of damage in melee range.
The Rogue is flexible at all ranges and uses dirty tricks to defeat enemies.
The Wizard is fragile but makes up for it by having the most powerful spells in the game and also the most mana.
We kept the idea of building into a subclass-theme, like how the Warrior can become a Templar, and so on.
Some pictures of the early prototypes of the Warrior / Rogue, very true to how they look today.
Inventory system
The game had an inventory containing all the items you picked up during your run. Many games have this feature, so it felt natural that we’d have it too. Overall, having the inventory added a lot of complexity to the gameplay which meant the UI had to include a lot of options for the user, like "inspect", "equip", "sell item", "destroy item", etc.
The inventory feature simply introduced a lot of extra clicks and choices for the user for very little reason, so we decided to completely remove the inventory system. This meant that equipping an item from a reward or shop automatically destroys the old item, which is how the game works today.
I think the most common feedback we've got for the game is that players want to sell items they collect in the shops, so who knows, maybe we made a bad choice by removing this feature?
Overall, we still believe that adding the ability to sell items in the store, means that you would probably need the inventory back, meaning all the complexity gets added back which ends up disrupting the gameplay more than it helps improving it.
The overview map is the battlefield
One thing you might notice in our original trailer, is that starting a fight from the overview map zooms in on the board and the fight takes place right there. I thought it was a cool feature at first, but it came with many problems. Grass and other tiny objects looks weird from above and the "huge" open worlds served very little purpose for what the was was trying to acheive.
This is no longer a part of the game. We implemented smaller scenes where the fighting is done instead. This makes the game more performant on all machines, especially the Steam Deck or lower end laptops. It also allows us to have indoor areas like dungeons without having seperate conditions for different parts of the map.
A second developer joins!
My girlfriend is also a software developer with a similar skillset to me. We had previously worked on several game development projects together during vacations and weekends. It was natural that she jumped into the project to help out in different areas and over time, it was so frequent that it was no longer fair to call it a solo project.
She's responsible for many of the features of the game and has been there for every major decision in the project. I'd like to give a shoutout to my wonderful girlfriend, the project simply wouldn't be possible without her! 💖
A quality assurance (QA) joins!
Eventually, we got a volunteer QA in the team! A guy living in the same city as me found out about the game and played it for hours and hours. He was part of a program where the goal was to learn some new skills within software development and he had recently caught an interest in a QA-role. We got asked if we could consider letting him onto the team for a few hours per week, which we happily did.
This helped us discover many bugs and solve balance / performance issues. Thank you for all the hard work, Alex! We wish you all the best with future endeavours and will keep you in the loop for our future projects too! ;)
The future of TOV
We launched the game on the 5th of March 2026. Since then, we've released numerous free updates, version 2.0 arriving soon will of course be free too! Without spoiling too much about the contents of the update, it's fair to say that it will contain a lot of new stuff, including a new game mode.
We’re frequently asked if we are considering some form of expansion or DLC? The answer is maybe. We still have a huge wall of ideas we’ve gathered from players during the years and we wish we could implement many of the ideas.
We’re really interested in exploring more playable character classes for instance, but it also takes a considerable amount of work to add them into the game. The biggest hurdle is the many unique class abilities needed. It’s not uncommon for one single ability to take several hours up to a full day's work to implement (!).
In most cases, an ability involves a mix of animation work, custom code logic, sound effects, visual effects and extensive testing for balancing and “beauty tweaks”. Many of our abilities have required areas of the code to change to enable all the custom behaviors we wanted to add. A new class would ideally need as many abilities as possible, but for the sake of it, let’s call it a minimum of 20 abilities which means a lot of work.
On top of that, the new character also needs several new armor sets with unique effects which also requires a lot of work and thought put into them.
Well enough complaining - long story short. We always planned for the main game to have 3 playable main classes (each with some subclass options), so adding another main class is not something we’re necessarily going to do, but we think it would be fitting to potentially add it as a DLC in the future depending on if we think there's a decent interest in it.
Regular updates that belongs to the core of the game, like new features or bug fixes will naturally be free forever. We'll only consider DLC for stuff what will cause us a decent amount of headache over several weeks for a feature that isn't part of the "core game", hopefully that makes sense? :)
An alternative version of our main capsule art with the Rogue.
How long will you keep updating the game?
The interest for a single game naturally declines over time. This game is our first commercial release and we’ve already had a few scares here and there where the active player count is low, but we’re overall extremely happy with the interest for the game!
We see new players coming in and old players returning all the time. There are so many cool games to play and we’re honored when we see players choosing to spend time in our game compared to other games 💖 We know we have something special because we see players collect hundreds of hours in the game in a short amount of time and it’s so cool to see!
Our thought has always been to support the game for as long as it makes sense and that’s still the best answer we can give. We’ve had a lot of luck with awesome content creators making videos about the game, sparking new interest for it. We also have some awesome people in the Discord who helped us in various ways. Again, it's so awesome to see stuff like this and I want to thank everyone who helped us!
Will you work on new games in the future?
Absolutely! We've had several discussions of what the next project will be, but nothing is set in stone at this moment.
The main question we’ve asked ourselves is, will the next game simply be “Trials of Valor 2” or will it be something different? The answer is that it will most likely be a part of the same universe, but involve very different gameplay and mechanics. There's no point in making a game if it's not fun to play, so naturally we want to take out time to figure out an idea that works and feels good to play.
We’re massively excited to start working on a new project eventually, but we’re still open for more improvements to TOV for as long as it makes sense.
We're also very excited to hear what you would like to see in the future, so feel free to write a comment about what you'd want to see in the future!
Thanks for reading!
- Bermrad