Long delayed hello, everyone!
As you might have noticed, TFH hasn’t hit the expected 1.0 milestone yet.
Due to the same row of heavy "RL" reasons mentioned before, (the details of which you don't really want to hear, but include some really heavy RL issues for some of our Devs), we continue to be down three people in our development team for long periods of time.
We've attempted to patch part of these holes by putting out a call for a pixel artist to cover the major delay on story mode (art placeholders), but we've yet to hire one. We've got a couple of people who applied to us whose stuff we've really liked, but which haven't yet replied to our e-mails. Applicants, if you're reading this, please check your inbox and spam folders! We might be trying to contact you. All of this is putting the story mode on hold for far longer than we expected and far more than what we’d have liked. Hopefully we can steer that particular situation back on track soon, as the hiring of said artist would help us finish the remaining elements needed AND free other people to work on additional things we’ve been holding down the priority list for some time.
That said, the remainder of the team has still been working hard these past few weeks, as we strive to get those features which do not require our MIA developers to get completed working and out of the gate.
You might have already seen a couple of glimpses of the upcoming features here and there in Beta and Anu's worklogs in the official forums, but here's a slightly more detailed breakdown of what’s coming to TFH in the near-immediate future.
Tutorials
We've been working hard to supply Oleander with the time and the crayons to teach you how to fight, and building the framework that’ll allow us to create and easily iterate on lessons across many fighting game concepts, with some light target practice and obstacle courses to reinforce all you have learned.
Ranked Matchmaking
Soon, we will have standard matchmaking features to pair up similarly skilled players with a more ‘competitive’ scoring system. In addition, a casual levelling system that is always active as you play online (ranked or not) will provide unlockable hats and palettes at certain milestones. Performance within each match, fighting against tougher opponents and other challenges provide xp bonuses to push you even further!
Pixel Dungeon 2.0
Salt mines. Now even saltier.
We wish to keep most of this stuff a surprise, but we're pretty excited for this release. In addition to the PvE element, we've added more cooperative play to unlock hats and intercept predators. We're also putting in some interesting little items to make dungeon fights more stylish and silly.
Character Intros/Outros
Characters will no longer stand still while the fightin’ starts happenin’ - New animations for Intros/Outros are coming to the game.
...And an apology
In addition to the things mentioned above, we’d like to apologize for the breakdown in general communications; we’ve been active and communicating with the playerbase through a couple of the discord community channels, as well as pulling some of the most active people in the game for gathering feedback on these new features and on the already existing ones. Discord has been really helpful for quick, direct feedback and feature implementation, but has given off a perception of silence to the general public. As things are now closer to their initial public iteration, we’re going to be posting more often to the general community via our official forums, the social media places and the Steam community forums.
As always, we’d like to thank you guys for continuing to stick with us through the rough patches.