Hey everyone!
We've been very busy since the Beta and I can finally talk about what we've been up to and what we learned from it. Let's start with lessons learned, in no particular order.
- The game was very hard for some of you and very easy for others. That's why we have difficulty levels but we will definitely have to make the difficulty selection more visible and introduce it when you start the game.
- Pacing is annoying, even for those of you who didn't have a problem with difficulty. Spawning enemies all the time apparently isn't fun!
- It was great to see all sorts of people playing. We had all kinds of players from all over the globe, from the US and Germany to China and Romania, from parents playing with their kids and friends playing together to solo warriors. This was really what we were hoping to see!
- Most of you really liked the skins! We heard you loud and clear, more skins coming up. :)
- More testing of the Beta build would have helped. We had some serious online connectivity issues which we didn't see at all in our in-house tests so we clearly need to update our testing process.
Now, on to what we've been doing!
In The Works
If you're on our Discord (and if you're not, what are you waiting for?! https://discord.gg/5cfetHm) you may have noticed this funny picture making the rounds.
Well, rest assured that's NOT what we've been up to.
The main focus in the last 3 weeks has been on difficulty and pacing. We made "Normal" difficulty a little easier, tweaked some parameters for the other ones but generally tried to keep the same level of challenge. We did however make bigger changes to pacing, in order to get rid of that feeling that enemies are constantly spawning no matter what you do. It's still the same pace when you're fighting to complete an objective but a ltitle less hectic while you walk from place to place.
The other part that we're now getting into is the revenge system. That's the star system and bar that you see during a mission. We know lots of you had trouble progressing because there was a huge penalty for dying and that just eliminated your star count. We're changing the way it works, and tuning it so that it's more fair and allows you to progress if you're doing a reasonably good job.
Finally, we've added lots of new hideout and part skins and kept plugging on the levels that were not in the beta build. Here's a sneak preview of some of the new skins.
Coming Up Next
There's lots more to tell but only so much space. We are polishing up all the levels, fixing problems large and small, adding more satisfying visuals for the level endings and finally started localizing the game!
More about that in the next update. For now I'll just leave you with a little teaser: we're close to finalizing our release plans and will make an announcement about that some time in April. Stay tuned!
-Team Rikodu