Hello everyone. As we mentioned last time, we took a break from Ruinarch for the entire month of February. Aside from rest, we also spent some time working on a new game to get our creativity flowing. We'll give a short preview of that at the end of this post.
We are all now back again developing new content for Ruinarch for all of March and April and will do testing, tweaks and balancing on May. We plan to have the next update released around the 3rd week of May.
Here's what to expect from it:
Reworked Archetypes
This is a significant rework. Essentially, choosing an Archetype will still provide the player with a different starting loadout, but each time they upgrade their Portal, they will learn a couple of fixed Powers but will also now be given a few choices from both their Archetype's pool, as well as from other Archetypes (but from a lower Portal level). This is intended to make each Archetype more well-rounded as well as to make repeat plays more interesting. Even the same Archetype could feel vastly different depending on the choices made per Portal level.
The next step which will be added on a different update, is to separate the Victory Condition from the Portal Upgrades. There are a lot of exploits to produce Chaos Orbs easily which right now makes winning the game sometimes a matter of tediousness. We are still discussing how best to approach Victory Condition but we are currently leaning towards providing the player Archetype-based goals or challenges.
New Powers
With the reworked Archetypes System, we also needed to introduce more Powers to round out all Archetype's Upgrade Path options. There will be 8 new ones available. We also intend to improve some existing ones to make them more useful and interesting.
Grudges
Villagers may now develop Grudges towards other Villagers. A Grudge affects a Villager's behavior, they may quit a Party if they have a Grudge on its Party Leader, they won't assist a Restrained or Unconscious Factionmate they have a Grudge on and they will harshly punish a Criminal they have a Grudge on. The player can also eventually consume a Villager's Grudge using Trigger Grudge (one of the new Powers) to make them perform a deadly action against the Grudge target.
Improved Emotions
We're taken a second pass look at Share Intel and Emotions. We want Share Intel to have more useful effects when used by the player. Since it gives the target various Emotions, our approach is on making the effects of these Emotions a bit more intense.
Manipulating Mood
There will be more ways for Players to exploit a Villager in Critical Mood. One new approach for players will be to turn a Villager's Mood to Critical and then activate Exploit Mood on it. This will provide the player with a few choices randomly available based on the situation. They can make the Villager go berserk, murder a Rival, leave a Faction, etc.
Sound Effects
Finally got to add more of these to the game!
Nona's Game
Nona's Game will be the second game coming out of Maccima Games! During the height of the pandemic, one thing that kept us entertained are streamers playing multiplayer games like GTA RP, Raft, and most significantly: Among Us. Now that the Among Us craze has died down, we wanted to develop something that could potentially take its place without being another clone of it. This is a complete departure from Ruinarch's genre so we do think there may not be a lot of overlap in terms of audience but it is refreshing to work on something very different for a change. We'll discuss more details about the game soon!
So that it will not distract from development of Ruinarch, we've hired a full second team to work on Nona's Game concurrently. Aside from me who also works as the game designer, there is a tiny but complete team working on it separately.
It's quite risky taking on multiple projects at the same time but we do feel that there is a void left by Among Us for Streamers that we want to possibly occupy as soon as possible. We're hoping revenue from Ruinarch could continue funding both teams but we do expect there will be months (like March) where we go into negative and draw from savings instead. Something that players may not be aware of regarding revenue for games is that the dev team gets only around 30-50% of the base price due to tax, chargebacks, discounts, cheaper price on other countries, revenue sharing with Steam and publisher (even though our Publisher has already closed, we still have revenue sharing ongoing with them). The good news is that we do get some sales bump whenever we go on sale and usually that should be enough to sustain us for that month. We hope our sales continue as they are now at least for the entire year and we should be able to develop the two games in parallel without too many financial worries.
We'll leave you with a Promo Art for Nona's Game:
