For the last few weeks our team has been away on a triple event showcase tour. We made an appearance at Xanadu here in Maryland, hoofed it over to Combo Breaker in Chicago, then immediately flew out to Dallas for Dreamhack. The overwhelmingly positive response we received from players, other developers, and event coordinators was truly moving. Everyone took great care of us. We got to meet some of our top players, connect with tons of new folks, and have drinks with other super-cool indie devs. It’s been quite a month, and now that we’re getting back into the swing of things, I wanted to share our upcoming plans.
Our next patch will be releasing towards the end of this month. As always, you can expect items in the usual areas:
- Quality of life improvements, especially issues reported to us over the course of our event tour.
- Filling out placeholder effects and animations.
- Balance changes and bug fixes.
Interspersed in the next few patches, we’ll be releasing three major features we’re actively working on that must be completed before we’re ready to move out of Early Access into 1.0:
- Level 3 Supers
- Salt Mines 2.0
- Chapter 1 of Story Mode (featuring Arizona)
We still want to do an update to our AI system, but we’re scaling it back from an “overhaul” to an “adjustment” for now. That means focusing on the main goals: bring the medium and lower difficulty levels in line with players’ expectations, and add new battle tactics to certain bots for higher levels.
Next on the list: we’re changing the types of streams we do. Previously we promised a “patch preview” work stream every month, but after doing a few, we learned that this type of content requires too much focus for a team this size. Now we’re experimenting, to capture something of similar value but with less drain on the devs. We’re keeping Monday post-patch streams a regular thing, though. They're fun to do, and the community seems to get a lot from them.
To kick off our new stream campaign, we’re broadcasting three separate shows each day this weekend. Here’s the schedule:
- Friday the 14th, 3pm PT: “ManeCast” is a podcast-style roundtable. Join Oreo, Cam, MPK, myself, and lead designer Nappy with community members Amaron and Candel to chat about the state of the game and play some casual matches.
- Saturday the 15th, 3pm PT: “Lindsay’s Work Stream”. Our infinitely talented background artist Lindsay will be streaming her work on a new cave stage for the salt mines. Come hang out and ask questions!
- Sunday the 16th, 3pm PT: “Sunday Stompin’” is where hitsparks fly and the salt flows. Community members Bubbleboots and Linkster play first-to-10 scrimmage matches with commentary from the dev team, and likely some screaming.
And there you have it. But before we leave the subject of streams, I have some unfortunate news. The VODs from weekend of Combo Breaker, including the Sunday tournament, are no longer available. I did not archive the streams on Twitch in time; I missed the auto-deletion date by 1 day. It was entirely my fault, and I’m deeply ashamed. While it’s unfortunate that the video evidence is lost, the stories remain, and we will make new memories together, starting this weekend.
So concludes my report. We’re hard at work on Early Access Patch #17, dropping in only a couple weeks. For more juicy bits on the specific things we’re working towards, hop in the stream this Friday. Hope to see you there.
Aaron Stavely
Mane6 Production Manager