Hello Elders!
I'm happy to announce that dotAGE is part of this week's Turn Based Carnival 2024 festival, and with a discount of 25% to boot! If you have been waiting for a chance to get the game, or to tell friends how cool it is, now it's the time! The game will be also on discount during the coming Steam sales, so it's going to be a very merry period!
Now, where were we? I'd like to update you on what I'm doing these days! Let's see what is going on in the world of dotAGE!
Work on the DLC has started!
If you have been reading my updates, you might know that I've been quite busy lately as I am working on an expansion for dotAGE! I decided to work on that as I have so many ideas saved up and having an expansion is a good opportunity to add all that without overcomplicating the base game, and for me to finally add all the stuff I've been itching to add while taking the time to do it correctly!
I am working on adding... new mechanics, new memories, new buildings, new terrains, new resources, new actions, new boons, new events, new ailments, new VIPs, new creatures, and of course new elders! The goal is to increase even more the variation you find in your games, but to counterbalance that I am also prototyping a new mechanic (which will come to the base game) that lets you reroll some buildings. This should give players that do not wish to embrace dotAGE's randomness some more choice (at a cost!). I also plan to make some of the new buildings available for the base game if they make more sense there (for example, I know many people have requested alternate Altars, so I am prototyping that too!)
I am currently doing various prototypes and estimating the amount of work and, given my solo-dev efforts and the amount of content, it will take some time for me to wrap up the development, so I'll keep you updated as more things are defined, and also give you some teasers once I have stuff set in stone!
Balance & Design tools
With the game exploding in complexity, I've been very busy lately re-organizing all my notes and improving my tools for design and balance. Things like tools that allow me to analyze the research tree and produce the efficiency of each resource given the current buildings, or compare multiple buildings with all their costs (hidden or otherwise), or measure the chance for a specific resource to appear throughout a run, or measure what changes in the whole game if I add a new resource. It's not flashy stuff, but it can be quite fun to make and is giving me a lot of insights (such as realizing in a sleep-deprived flash of insight that the game has a lot of ties to quantum physics...), and it will be very useful in managing the added complexity! I am taking the chance to also cleanup the code and the design of various parts that concern gameplay, so you can expect some more changes and balance coming to the base game alongside the DLC. The only issue is that I need to contain myself from rewriting everything!
Switch release is going great!
Last update I announced that the game was out on the Switch, and I'm very happy with the reception! Thank you for the feedback! I've been working a bit more on touch controls (as you might have seen in the latest patch), and those improvements are now on the Switch version too.
Now, back to work, I need to complete my inference tool to analyze the chance for a resource to be produced in the whole game based on rolled buildings. Fun.
So, in the meantime, you too have fun!
- Michele