Future Development Plans

06 Sep 2017Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Hello All,

We just want to share with you our development plans for the next six weeks, as there is a lot of new things planned. In addition to working on Book Two, we will focus on the following things:

Combat Modes

This will be a major area for our development. We plan to implement new combat modes, few examples include:

True Ambush - where one or more of your champions are trapped in a destructible trap. Decide - take the time to free your champion or focus on the incoming enemies.

Split - where your party will be positioned on the opposing sides of the combat map. Decide - join the forces quickly or slowly move your party, dealing with threats on the way, so they come together and can strengthen each other.

Defend the Object - Enemies will target the object, focusing mostly on it. Defend it as best as you can, since if it will be destroyed, enemies will get a major buff to stats.

Seek and destroy - reverse of the combat mechanics. Here, you do not defend your party, your goal is to seek the enemies and destroy their spawning points, else they overwhelm you later. Decide - go as a team to each place one by one, or split your forces and harass the enemy.

Dark Events - deal with a variety of global effects, such as low or no mana regeneration or enemies regenerating health.

The main objective is to introduce the variety to combat and offer different tactical challenges.

Combat A.I.

Dumb A.I. is the major bane of most RPGs, in our honest opinion. For a long time now, we have been developing our own system to counter that. There are some basic behavior algorithms already implemented - the core of the system - but it is nothing spectacular yet. We plan to continuously expand this system with new algorithms and algorithm trees, that will increase tactical difficulty of combat encounters. It is a long process, for this system to work as intended - needs to be quite complicated, but we are committed to that. We will share some more details on the way towards a final release.

New Skills / New skill tree:

Here we plan to revamp the skills and make them more distinct for each champion. Some examples of the planned changes:

Increase number of skills for each champion to 8.
Introduce a real skill-tree, where leveling skills will also be dependent on champion level.
Introduce "movement" skills - especially for melee champions, such as Dash, Jump, Teleport.
Split the skills into Magic-based, Attribute-based and Item-based. Today, Mastery is the only attribute influencing skill power. We plan to diversify it, e.g. give Maeve some skills where damage/effect will depend on Weapon Damage or tying some of Kane's skills to his Armor.
Introduce new skills with different mechanics.

Other

Some other plans include:

Redoing Character UI and Inventory - combining them together in a new, cleaner and more useful way.
Changing "party selection" - where you will be able to select party leader as well as assign characters to different slots (1-4).
Item Constructor - a new option in Blacksmith, where you will be able to "construct" an item by upgrading it multiple times and in multiple ways, for an increasing crystal cost. If you don't really like random loot only, here will be the choice of building an item of your choice for your favorite character.
Unique boss encounters. ------------ If you have a good idea for a new skill (for a particular champion) or perhaps for a different and unique combat mode. If you would like to help us with development in more active way - or perhaps just chat with other players and developers - please stop by on our discord channel. https://discord.gg/swuxMSV Thanks for playing Tower of Time Cheers, KM