Hello to our wonderful community! We are smack dab in the middle of working on our November update and we wanted to catch you up with all that's happening over here at Hyperkinetic. In particular, we wanted to catch up with Memige, Hyperkinetic's Tech Director and Epic Tavern's programming lead.
Let's try an experiment and do this Q&A style!
Richie: Hey, Memige! What are you the most excited to be working on in our November update?
Memige: The two most interesting things for me are that we are adding in the ability for encounters to reward specific skill points. The randomization of the encounters that characters go on will impact the way that those characters' skillsets will grow.
Additionally, we are taking a first pass at implementing stances for characters on the quests. This will give you some choice in how the characters tackle the challenges with which they are presented.
Richie: So, it looks like we are laying the groundwork for giving the players more choice during questing. Is that a fair assumption? What can we expect in the future?
Memige: Well, we have gotten a lot of feedback from the community about interacting with the adventurers when they are out questing, and because we are serious about the Early Access process, we are committed to exploring ways to make that happen. We are not settled on ways to do that, yet, but we wanted to try things out and make it easier to expand upon what is already there.
Richie: What about choose your own adventure-style choices during quests?
Memige: This is definitely something that is being actively addressed in design discussions. There are some pretty significant ramifications to the way we process the data that need to be adjusted to handle meaningful interactions from the player, so I am spending time talking with Shawn [ET's Lead Writer], Tomo [ET's Creative Director], and Eric [ET's Lead Designer] about the best way to handle these adjustments. Some of the structural underpinnings of this will be going into the November update, but the first significant per-encounter interaction will probably land in January... I hope.
Richie: Well, I personally am looking forward to how that develops and probably making all the wrong choices so my party dies, like usual. So, what are you looking forward to, in future updates?
Memige: Shit... Tavern editing?! *laughs* Tavern editing is really high on my list, in terms of desire. There is a lot of design work that needs to go into it to ensure that it ties into all the current systems of the game and highlights the strengths of Epic Tavern, so it probably will not be a "soon" feature. But man, I'm looking forward to it.
Richie: Anything else that might be coming sooner?
Memige: In terms of what's on the short list for the next couple of updates, we have a bit of an overhaul to the loot system, to give you more rewards that are directly useful to your heroes. I think that'll be interesting, because it'll give the player a more active interest in the specific results of stages. It gives them better feedback on how effective their party selection was. And, to be honest, with the UI overhaul that will come with it, it will make the process of gaining loot a much more exciting event.
Richie: Awesome, thanks for the info! Anything else you want to say to our community before you stop being lazy and get the hell back to work?
Memige: It's an exciting time, right now. There is a lot of good feedback coming in, a lot of constructive criticism. Thankfully, we are in a position to leverage all that to make Epic Tavern a much better game. Thank you to all of our community members for your active participation in our Early Access!!