We thought it would be a nice idea to keep you all up to date with the development. Usually, I sneak information about what we are working on into patch notes. However, since this update is shaping up to be quite big and takes more time I will dedicate a separate post to it.
Card system changes
During the last few months of early access, it became obvious that Book of Demons could use more variety when it comes to cards. Initially, we were planning on adding more cards close to the launch date but a neater and broader solution came up.
We are working on introducing card variants. Every card that is in the game right now will become a common card. Once you find a card, there will be a chance a rarer variant of that card might drop later on. A variant will add an extra mechanic to the card. It might reduce mana cost or it can have an effect on cards in the slot to the left. There are many possibilities. And, of course, every card is rumored to have a legendary variant that introduces twists on existing mechanics.
Because each variant will have to be upgraded separately we are also adding the option to downgrade cards (also often asked for feature, that now is properly justified).
As always we are not planning character wipes, the transition to the new system will be seamless.
Other changes
Many other systems will be influenced by the card system update:
- The cauldron - good news everyone, it will give way more rewards than before :goldpile:!
- Mana burn mechanic will change as well. After the update demons on hell tileset will be able to drain hero's mana with successful attacks.
- During their downtime guys are working on fancy atmospheric effects in the town (right now we have falling autumn leaves :D)
- Since we had some trouble with antivirus software raiding save files we are adding smart backup features and we will also rework save system to be more power-failure resistant
The Roadmap
“No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy”
Helmuth von Moltke
So how does all that affects the schedule? As I mentioned before card system changes were not planned when we prepared the initial production plan for early access. That means that the plan has to be updated. We also now have a better feel of overhead related to early access, bugfixes and efforts required by the marketing. We are in the process of preparing a detailed plan, which will take some time since only one person can work on it full time while the rest of us works on cards and other stuff.
I will post details once it's ready but it's safe to say that there are going to be some delays. The rogue will be delayed by a month or two since the cards are getting a major overhaul. The launch will be delayed by some time as well. We initially aimed at Q1 2017 but not we can see that we will need more time to polish the game to the quality levels we find acceptable. We will also have to intensify marketing (gah :paperdeath:) efforts before the launch and this will take time and resources.
Rest assured that we will work as hard as possible to get all the features in the game as soon as possible and only then we will focus on polishing stuff. We are also recruiting a programmer to speed up the efforts.
Less frequent but bigger updates
You also probably noticed that recently updates were mostly focusing on stability and backend. We made a concentrated effort to address all known bugs and enable features that will allow for easier debugging in the future.
Thanks to that, right now the game is pretty stable we have the lowest crash rate since launch and we are gathering info on the few remaining bugs. For that we have to stop issuing updates for a few days, so we can get more feedback from the same build (it's the only way to get reliable data from Steam).
This will also let us save some time on preparing builds and we will be able to focus on new features.
So, unless something urgent comes up, the next update should be the one with cards.
As always,
Stay safe in the dungeons :paperheart: