Hello Rangers! Welcome to another Weekly Dev Update.
Spotlight on Balance
In the recent weeks, we’ve been putting a lot of attention on game balance - it’s a complex topic with a lot of interconnected factors, and your feedback is always extremely valuable. Even though Shardbound is in Early Access, it’s a highly competitive game and we’d like to ensure the most balanced experience we can.
Player 1 vs Player 2 Win Rates
The Mana Crystal system has been an great solution for balancing the win rates of Player 1 and Player 2, bringing them almost to 50/50. We’ve collected a lot of valuable feedback on the system and will continue to watch it as we make adjustments.
For example, in this week’s patch you’ll no longer see Mana Crystals spawn within 1 movement (3 tiles) of an enemy deploy hex, ensuring your opponent can’t threaten them immediately with basic movement. We’ll also be ensuring your Crystals don’t spawn within 1 or 2 tiles of your Hero spawn location, which was slowing down aggressive decks.
Individual Card Power
We have a lot more power to evaluate data from all the games you guys are playing and are able to make much more targeted balance fixes to cards than ever before.
Faction Balance
We’re continuing to make good progress bringing the relative power of factions together, but work still remains to be done. We will be continuing to make adjustments carefully to ensure we keep the factions feeling fun and powerful in their own unique ways.
For More Information
Please take a look at the VOD from our most recent weekly Dev Stream, where Zalgus and Gasty take a deep dive into some of the current balance initiatives and answer community questions!
House Gameplay
The design team has completed the early design stages for the (re)introduction of social House Gameplay. We hope our solution will introduce fun new cooperation between House Members, and bring new forms of competition and rewards into the game. The team will be working hard this week to digest the design and start the first stages of implementation. We can’t wait to share the details with all of you.
New Artists!
There’s a lot of excitement around the studio as we staff up with new artists in service of dramatically speeding up our unit production pipelines. We’re looking forward to sharing their incredible work with you, and are just as eager as all of you to see more units with finished art in the game. Thanks for your patience - it’s all a byproduct of getting that gameplay in your hands as early as possible!
Fan Art Friday Winner
We’ll leave you this week with our Fan Art Friday winner!
RandomBox Comics put together this adorable scene of the often-surly MedFrame Tech helping a Trauma Guard resolve some pesky technical difficulties. A Legendary Box is coming their way! We’ll be giving another one away this friday - we can’t wait to see your submissions!
Join us in our Discord, Subreddit, or Forums!
Catch you next time,
- Your Friends at Spiritwalk