This is the last update of 2023. Thanks for adventuring with us. It has been an adventure!
Quick Recap of 2023
What a year! From getting a demo (sorta) ready for Next Fest in Feb, to Splattercat becoming a fan and posting some great videos, to launching into Early Access in April, to two major content updates across the summer. The game has grown. So has our following. We started the year with < 5,000 wishlists and now have 37,316. We’re near the top of Steam in a couple of metrics that matter to us:
- Top 15% lifetime units sold
- Top 13% in positive reviews
- Top 9% lifetime gross revenue
This all says to me: I’m not the only one who wants a real open world mage simulator!
NEW Combat
It's all hands on deck on combat! We have an internal milestone to hit this Friday in order to keep Jan 19 on schedule. Lots of systems are coming online:
- Items, weapons, and armor
- Spell XP gains and progression system
- Monster AI to pick optimal battlefield locations and avoid harmful things like fire
- Storm school spells and debuffs
Dynamic Quests & NPCs
In a recent discussion about the Rivals feature, people raised how ‘dumb’ the rivals are with not recognizing the player or speaking to you appropriately. We have all the data, we just need to connect it up. Given that there isn’t a lot of narrative work to do on Combat, Nolan took a stab at utilizing the new Dynamic Quest tech to solve this problem. And it’s working! He’s able to get far more sophisticated greeting for each relationship level and how long it's been since your last visit (very long time, long, medium, recent, very, recent, moments ago, and first visit ever).
Having NPCs recognize you, react to you, and talk to you based on relationship will come just after Combat ships Jan 19. Getting this working and out will really help get Dynamic Quests out in Update #3 Exploration.
Game Design: Spell Use In World
I want to bring your attention to an important shift in the game design. Until recently, I’ve had the design objective to make each spell functional in combat AND the world. While it sounds cool, there are serious ramifications to doing this and I see now we need to pivot away from it. You can read more on why and what this means in this post:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/506480/discussions/0/4030222834124307825/
Christmas Time!
Die Hard is a Christmas Movie. Just like Elf.
The office will be closed next week and hopefully none of us working so as to enjoy Christmas with our families. This means we won’t be answering forum posts or Discord until the following week. Lots of new people are buying the game each day, so it would really help us if some of you veteran adventurers can help out the new ones in our absence.
We appreciate you all! See you in the new year with some new combat!