Book of Demons Early Access is now live! Oh, boy! To celebrate the launch the game is also 25% off until the end of the weekend.
Looking forward to hearing what you think. Make sure to leave us feedback in the Steam forums or using the in-game widget.
We would like to communicate our progress and goals often. For that we will use our Dev Blog – there we will be posting updates on development. We aim at posting a larger summary of current state of affairs at least once a week.
Of course, the second important place will be Steam’s Book of Demons Community Hub – this one is pretty important, as it will probably be our main place of discussion with you, the players. Here we will also be publishing detailed changelogs.
Besides that, you can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter
So, without further ado, our Early Access Roadmap:
Phase 1
The first thing we need to do is make sure that everyone has a good gaming experience. The game hasn’t been tested by a large group of gamers, so we are expecting to face a number of problems, be it technical or gameplay related. Gathering feedback and fixing bugs will be our first priority. We’re hoping this won’t take too long, but it’s really hard to predict.
Phase 2
Once we are happy with game stability and general experience, we will move on to phase 2. Of course, bug-fixing and balancing the game will not end yet, but we should be able to start working on the next features of the game. Here is what we'd like to include in the first big update of the game:
- Enable the 2 additional character classes (they are more or less complete by now, but we have disabled them as, unlike the Warrior character class, they are not balanced or polished) and balance them
- Enable quest mastering (currently you can only fight each quest boss once on the normal difficulty setting)
If everything goes smoothly, this should take about a month of our team’s work.
Phase 3
Hopefully, by now most of the game will be bug-free and we’ll be able to focus on polishing the experience. We’d like to:
- Add many more sounds and enable spatial sound effects
- Add more variety to catacombs and hell tilesets (currently the first of the 3 tilesets has much more props and color schemes than the other two)
- We can never have enough time to polish everything, as we always have more and more ideas what could be made better, but we will try to get it done in another month.
Phase 4+
After that, our plans are vaguer. Theoretically, we could exit early access, as the game would be feature complete, balanced, polished and bug-free. But this will depend on the community. If there is enough interest we’d love to add more features to the game, be it a level-editor or maybe advanced modding tools. We have the technology to do so, so it would only be a matter of time.
But for now, we must focus on Phase 1 :-)
Please note, that Early Access will be heavily influenced by the community, so plans might change a bit, new ideas might come up, but the main points should stay valid.
So keep your fingers crossed (as we are currently doing) for both Book of Demons and for us! :)