Hey friends!
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another weekly dev digest. This week, we have some exciting news about the release of the next update, and an update on the status of our new permanent progression system: skill trees.
We’re excited to announce that our next update will be released near the end of this month! This update brings a lot of exciting improvement to Swords n’ Magic and Stuff, including combat classes, an overhauled loot system, updated player stats (goodbye Luck!), a new secret and a TON of bug fixes. Many of these changes have been planned for quite some time, and we’re excited to finally have them implemented to help keep polishing the gameplay experience.
This next update will be available no later than June 20th and we're going to be releasing it a couple days early for our wonderful Patreon supporters in the Super Secret Bonus Stuff tier to show how much we appreciate all the support they give us during development. Head over to Patreon if you're interested in supporting us as well.
This overhaul of our combat and stats systems will be the major focus of this update. Players will now be able to level classes instead of individual weapon skills, which will help with the pacing of player progression and enable players to wield a larger variety of weapons in combat. Six new classes will be included in this update: Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, Mage, Mystic and Druid. All currently available weapon types will be sorted into one of these classes, and we’re very interested to see which classes our players will choose! Of course, players can level, play and change their favored class at any time.
Stats have also been rebalanced to help strengthen and clarify their importance in combat. This new update will introduce a new stats panel in the player inventory, which will track player stats and even provide information on what each stat does! This feature has been requested for a long time and we’re excited for players to be able to more strategically plan which food, drinks and potions they take with them on their journey. In addition to rebalancing player stats (all stats now start at a new baseline of 10), we’ve also taken this opportunity to rebalance the luck stat… by removing it completely. Luck was broken in that it provided far too many benefits and often left players feeling like they needed to always play with max luck and sacrifice other stats in the process. Now, luck has been replaced on most food and drink consumables with Crit Chance, which will boost your chances of landing critical hits on enemies while using physical weapons. To balance this change, critical chance has been removed from all weapons and players will start with a base crit chance of 5%. Luck potions (and some secret food and drink consumables) have been changed to provide players with a new “Lucky” buff which, simply put, allows a second chance to get rare loot whenever loot is dropped for the player. This redesign of how the lucky status is available to players should result in a wider adoption of other buffs to support combat and exploration in the game.
With these important system overhauls out of the way, our next focus for future updates will be to finalize the implementation of skill trees. While we had originally hoped to have skill trees all cleaned up and ready for this next update, it has become clear they need a little bit more time before they are ready to be released. If you’re interested in seeing some of the progress currently made on our skill tree system, feel free to watch some recent development stream on Twitch.
The trees likely have another month of development to get them completely finished. But I'd like to hear your thoughts on releasing a few skills at a time with each update instead of the entire tree at once. We could start with 3 skills for each class which unlock at levels 10, 20 and 30, then we'll rebalance the tree and add new skills with each consecutive update (or whenever they're ready). Each update to do with skills will refund you all your skill points for free so you can redistribute them and try out new skills and builds that release. Let me know what you think in our Discord Swords 'n Magic Chat channel so I can gauge interest in this approach.
And finally, Janna and I want to thank you for your continued support. We know how much this game means to some of you and we're doing everything we can to keep faithful to the original vision of the game with every update and uphold the promises we've made. <3