Hey, folks!
As you know, we released a reworked demo version of The Way a month and a half ago, and I reckon it is time to sum everything up, to discuss your feedback, to share what we are doing with it right now and to tell you more about the game overall.
First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who has played the game and shared their thoughts with us. To be frank, sometimes developers spend so much time in their games, and it is hard to recognize an issue or a flaw even if you face it every day. And that's where the community steps in, reviewing your ideas with a fresh eye and providing a clear message about what works alright and what doesn't. You are a really big part of the development process, and we are very grateful for your time and consideration. You are making our game way better than we could do that alone. Thank you so much for that.
So, what do we do with your feedback?
Well, I believe it is worth mentioning that there was a vertical slice of The Way in the beginning of this year, a completely different game focused on gameplay with a simple generic story to follow. It was all about regular fights against different opponents with different decks. The reviews were very positive, and The Way even won 'Best PC Game' award on IndieCup but we also knew that some of you weren't that happy about the game.
We do understand that a great deal of players want us to make a sequel to the original Redemption game while we are making a completely different game of a different genre in the Ash of Gods universe. Your feedback changed that. You want us to create interesting characters, to tell stories with moral choices and dire consequences—and we decided to answer that call. We have spent a lot of time reworking the game to make it more complex and more interesting in terms of gameplay and story. And the last demo we published is the result of that hard work.
This extra work is a huge risk for us, to be honest—we never planned those changes, the budget of the game is very limited and we definitely need more money to complete the game. But we wanted to make something you guys will love, and if the game succeeds there's a chance we can make you happy with Ash of Gods 2.
So, what's the difference between the vertical slice and the new demo?
First of all, we've managed to make almost every battle unique adding new mechanics and scripts. We wanted to challenge players, constantly changing rules to create a kind of a puzzle. No more simple fights on the same battlefield with 3 lines. You should be flexible and inventive to end up victorious.
These battles are also justified with the main story. It is not as big and as complex as Redemption's, of course, due to obvious limitations of our budget and time and the game's genre, but we did our best to make it fun both for the fans of the original game and the new players. There are a few familiar characters in the game, some lore, references to Redemption events and more.
We also created a story for every tournament with moral choices and different outcomes. The first tournament is pretty simple though and mostly focused on exposition and explanation of rules and mechanics, so there are only 3 different and rather simple endings. The second one has 6 possible endings based both on the player's skill and choices, the third one has around 8 and I believe it is safe to say that the game itself has a minimum of 7 different finales at the moment but I guess the true number is somewhat like 14-ish. Of course, there are side quests—and some of them can affect the main story.
Another thing worth mentioning is art. In the vertical slice most of the visuals were placeholders from Redemption with a few roughly drawn characters.
We've completely reworked all characters and animated them even better than we did in Redemption (added more movements and breathing).
We've also created about 60 battlefields...
3 tournament backgrounds...
and 4 places for camp where you can talk to NPCs.
We wanted to create new battle characters as well but a studio and actors are required to do that, and it was impossible due to COVID-19, so we are stuck with Redemption's units. It is also a certainly costly venture which requires a lot of time, and we desperately need this time and money to rework the game.
Now, back to the demo. Of course, we didn't manage to do everything we wanted in time, there are obvious flaws like the lack of balance and some important features are missing but the goal of the release was to learn more about your experience—what you did and didn't like, is there any big issues we overlooked or some ideas which work different than we expected. That was really useful for us. We gathered enough feedback to make the game better, and now it is time to share what we are doing with it.
Changes we did due to your feedback
The very first reported issue of the demo was expectedly rough UX. We were aware about the problem, and we are doing our best to make the UX curve as smooth as possible. The qualification round is expected to be pretty simple and enjoyable now but challenging enough to be interesting at this point.
Challenger battles are way more complex. We do not like the idea of simple hard mode fights where you are playing the same battles but against a stronger deck. The idea was to make them unique but understandable, adding additional mechanics, scripts and rules to the original fights, changing the size and the shape of battlefields to make a new challenge. Thus, the qualification round is the place where you can test your strategies and experiment as long as you want, a sneak peek of the real battles, while the challenger battles are the real test.
Since we are talking about challenger battles, another issue is attempts. The idea was to make an additional challenge for a player and also to add more tension and drama to the narrative, to make a difference between an okay-ish and truly outstanding performance which will impact the result of the tournament. I would like to thank fluxit, vladimir.msg and volvovics for the thorough feedback on that matter. We realized that this feature is not just a limitation but also a punishment—you are feeling uncomfortable and pressured and won't get the reward if you didn't manage to win the fight for a limited number of attempts.
Yet, we needed this feature to determine how good a player was performing. That's why we've changed the original idea. Attempts now are actually the best result of the battle of other tournament challengers. If you beat or repeat it, you get a small bonus in gold and more glory. If you don't, you are still getting the main reward when you finally win the fight. Also, we increased the amount of attempts for every fight to make this challenge a bit more fair.
Another problem is a bit of randomness which affects the experience in some fights which could be much easier if you had the right characters to do the job. Of course, we can't completely fix that because it will totally kill the replayability and challenge of the game but we decided to allow changing one of your cards in the beginning of the fight. Also, at some fights you have a bigger starting hand compared to the standard of three cards for each deck.
We also reworked some of the battles to make them more understandable and less random. Thus, we removed 'an unpleasant surprise' thing where you lose all your characters once you placed someone on the battlefield, and changed the mechanics of 'the duels' fight (thanks, alpasy).
We updated the descriptions of battles to give more information for a player about the fight, thanks to DeadlyDan's feedback. We also added an option to discuss the fight with your mentors to get valuable advice and ability to quickly choose one of your saved decks.
Speaking of changes in UI, we are completely reworking deck management at the moment as well as some other important parts, and also adding new things we need like, for example, a merchant UI.
There are a great deal of other changes: we added drag-n-drop mechanics to the deck manager, changed the map, added an option to remove the card's animation to play faster (thanks to devxx), and reverted the scroll for zooming out the battlefield. Also, we are reworking the tutorials and changing the flow of the game to make the experience even better, to show a player some tips he can use later, reworking card upgrades to make them more interesting, reworking in-game cinematics and more.
Of course, some of these things are a work in progress yet. But once we finish this, make sure we will update the demo to learn more about your experience once again.
Meanwhile, I'd like to thank you once again for being such a great community. My special thanks to the folks from Discord (найк, Ratnik_RUS, KoPLLIyH, res7less) who provided a lot of feedback. You can also join our Discord to share your opinion there or to talk to us, we are always happy to do that.
Please, follow us on Steam, add the game to your wishlist—and we will do our best to make something you guys will enjoy.
Cheers,
A.