Happy Monday, Rangers!
There’s a lot of activity in the studio this week! Almost everybody in the studio is involved with design and implementation for new features right now, and some exciting additions to Shardbound are on the horizon.
We’ll be digging into the upcoming changes on our usual livestream this Thursday the 11th at 4pm PDT. https://www.twitch.tv/spiritwalkgames.
This Week: Veil Shrieker, Tuning, Fixes
Here’s what to expect in this week’s patch!
- Full art for the Veil Shrieker, ready to chase down your foes and make your Hero suffer!
- Adjustments to Pylons, including a sweep to adjust deckbuilding challenges to be less dependant on winning to trigger. Pylons requiring players to Play X of a type of Minion now simply require players to build decks containing them, making triggering the pylons less draw-dependent.
- Small balance changes on some over (and under) tuned cards.
- Spirit Binder moves to the Fatekeeper faction, and Mind Melter moves to Neutral.
We look forward to your feedback on all of the adjustments in this patch. Keep sending us feedback and we’ll keep listening!
Ranked Play is Coming Soon!
While not dropping in this Tuesday’s patch, we’ll be introducing Ranked Play very soon - in the next few weeks, in fact! You’ll be able to hit our ladder and measure your skill against players around the world, so start training and get ready to show that you’re one of the top Rangers in the Shardveil!
We will want a lot of your feedback on our ranking system, and we will certainly be making changes to it as we navigate a “Preseason” of sorts while we’re in Early Access. We’ll discuss all the details on our weekly stream!
Big Packrunner Content Drop is Coming Soon!
A huge batch of Packrunner cards and playstyle changes should be dropping in the next few weeks. We’ve been fleshing out content that triggers off of injured enemy minions and are testing a few more experimental pieces of content that may or may not make the cut. All in all, the Packrunner faction is becoming much more cohesive with greater flexibility in your deckbuilding options. We’ll preview some of this content on our Thursday stream!
Continuing to Improve the Game Client
Work to improve stability and low-end performance is ongoing. On the stability front, we have been investigating Device Hung crashes. Epic, the company that develops Unreal Engine, has also been looking into this issue and has released a tool in conjunction with NVidia to help us narrow down the cause. We are working this week to integrate the changes needed to use this tool and hope to release it next week.
For low-end performance, we have reduced the GPU load for Broken Mesa on Potato settings to get those machines up to a playable framerate. This has made a notable difference, as our minspec machine in the office has improved from 15 to 20 FPS. If this proves useful in the wild, we will make similar changes to Embassy Gardens and Reavers Mire as well. Of course, these changes come with a quality reduction, so we are looking at adding a new Low setting to provide players with more choice.
Fan Art Fridays!
A reminder that we’re holding “Fan Art Fridays” every week, and awarding boxes to the talented artist whose work we feature on our social media channels. We’ll sign off this week with last friday’s winning piece, this adorable Lightdancer from RabbitKun!
Shine on!