Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding during our hiatus! We are resuming our normal update schedule. We will do our best to be very active with development in the coming weeks. We’d like to address a few things with this community update, as we haven’t been quite as transparent with our plans as we had wanted, and we’d like to share what our goals are with this game.
Here we’ll discuss our roadmap and planned features with Gambit Heart. We had previously planned on getting the roadmap out earlier and updating it as we go; this did not happen, as focus has been solely on development. This is probably something to expect to a degree with us and Gambit Heart. We’re developers before we’re publishers, and our focus has always been on making the best game possible. That being said, we love our community, you may be a small group at this point, but you’ve been here with Gambit Heart since the beginning. Thank you so much for your support and patience! We’ll try to be more timely with responses in the forums moving forward, so don’t be afraid to ask us questions! There’s a lot of design work that hasn’t been talked about, features unsaid that should arrive eventually, and mechanics in place that aren’t showcased properly at this point. On that note, we’re going to continue with weekly updates for the foreseeable future; we are actively working on Gambit Heart full time and aren’t slowing down any time soon, and getting weekly builds out has been a great way to keep a good pace while everyone gets to see the game improve every week. We want to see Gambit Heart improve quickly and drastically, so there is no current plan to transition to two weeks between updates any time soon.
Moving roadmap. It’s rough and will change over time, we may move it to our website as well, but this is a good starting point. We hope to revisit the roadmap at least once a month to keep everyone up to date on where we’re heading.
The Roadmap
-The first dungeon.
We stated that we were going to have that ready for this update today, this was wrong, and we definitely bit off more than we could chew with that promise. We’re sorry for making promises we couldn’t keep, as we also weren’t able to fit in the next two features either. We’re going to be pushing these out before August rolls around, which means there may be a second update beyond the 27th to make sure that these are all on time. As for the dungeon itself it will receive some additions and changes throughout August; especially in the items and equipment department, as well as quests.
-Skill System (version 1)
This has been on paper for a long time, and the current system of a single skill per class that is automatically unlocked has been a placeholder. The system moving forward will be new combat skills unlock every five levels, and that these are class-based skills. There will be a hard limit of 3 skills that you can equip to take into battle with you at a time and outside of combat you will be able to adjust which skills you have equipped. In the future, we’re considering some skills that can be gained from equipment, items, and learned permanently, outside of classes, but this will be placed on hold while we get the essential skills completed for each of the classes.
-Class Changing
We want to introduce class changing, as it’ll be a primary attribute to building up your characters just the way you wish. Currently, the plan is to have characters you meet train you how to become a class, but it will require that the desired class be in the same branch as your starting class. In the future this will probably be expanded upon, and specific NPCs may be put in place over hireable characters. (At this point all there is are hireable characters and enemies, which leads us into August.)
-Towns revised
Currently town maps are very barren and do very little outside of containing Quest Machines and hireable characters. Moving forward we will be implementing proper town-based NPCs, including merchants and profession-based NPCs, as well as buildings you can actually enter, which will be replacing our currently ineffective placeholders.
-Professions
There’s more on the plate than just combat when it comes to Gambit Heart, and that requires cooking. But to cook you’ll need ingredients and to make a campfire, and to make a campfire you’ll need to gather wood… We’ve been looking forward to professions for many months, and we’re excited to introduce them into Gambit Heart. We’ll start with simple professions that can be swapped similarly to class, and will be building out the profession system further over time. We’ll most likely start with cooking, smithing, and resource gathering professions, but may move into more going forward; we don’t want to make professions a superfluous addition, though, so all professions will have strong utility in-game.
-Biomes
The current game world is going to get much more varied moving forward, and as the first region becomes more detailed and polished, we’ll be moving into adding a lot more content and diversity to the world around you; currently everything is just a repetition of the first environment, and that will be changing.
-Loot
There’s not much in the realm of equipment or items, currently, but that is only on the production side. Internally, we have an enormous amount of equipment planned, and a fair amount of items as well. Along with all this loot will come a currency as well. Equipment will start to first appear in July, most likely, but the focus on itemization won’t really roll out until we’re starting to polish up towns and biomes. (There’s not much point loading up your inventory if you can’t sell your old gear!)
-Quests
Currently, all there is to find in the realm of questing is the Quest Machine, which only cares about shiny stones. Moving forward NPCs will help pick up the slack, as will other unique objects. And not all quests will simply be collections, nor will all quests be direct; puzzles and hidden objects will be finding their way into the world of Gambit Heart, and we want to see these added in early, as they will continue to crop up in dungeons, towns, fields and forests moving forward.
Going into the fall/winter we will see the world take a lot more shape, as there are so many dungeons on paper just waiting to be implemented, towns to shape out, and more. We’ll be coming back to the roadmap with more detail sometime in late August.
Curators, Twitch streamers, and Youtubers
We are excited to take advantage of Steam Curation in the near future, as well as work with twitch/youtube content creators. Our plan is to wait until we have a more fun and complete build which will be announced as our first big milestone, hopefully towards the end of August. At this point we feel it is too early in development to fully experience the game as we intend it. We do plan on sharing keys with selected curators/content creators in hopes of receiving honest reviews and feedback. If you would like to be considered, please drop us an email with your curator page link.
Here is the list of updates for the newest build 0.291:
Updated save system which includes:
-World Map
-Inventory
-Equipment
Adjusted Quest Machine turn-in to 3 shiny stones instead of 10
Fixed stackable inventory objects to now work correctly
Known bugs: Quest Machine turn-ins do not save progress.