This last week was hectic but also extremely gamechanging for Ruinarch. We've been included in Yogscast's TinyTeams event and several popular youtubers have uploaded positive playthroughs of the game. This sudden increase in visibility has increased our Wishlists to over 16k and propelled the game from near unknown to Steam's Popular Upcoming! Thank you everyone! Wishlists actually secretly tell Steam's Algo about how popular a game is, and in return they will show it to even more people. So please tell more of your friends to Wishlist us :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTZTnhvh3m0
We are happy with the reception so far but are also aware that a large part of it is because of the game's perceived potential in the future. We know that there is still a long way to go before it becomes what we can personally consider a great game. For now, our ideal goal for the Early Access Launch is for you to have your money's worth already even if the game is still a work in progress. We want players to get enough hours of entertaining playthroughs right from the start. And then when you go back to the game a few milestones later, we want you to get many more new and equally entertaining experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JV26WYkoxg
Difficulty
We have noted player concern regarding the game's difficulty. We will be tweaking what we can prior to launch, and future features related to villager AI and options will improve on this further. Your input during Early Access will also help us further tweak Villager behavior.
Crimes
The way crime works at this point is a bit off. Someone can just be accused of a crime and people will apprehend them with no questions asked. It's also a bit hard to track which crimes a Villager has committed.
To fix this, a Crime status will now go through phases - from accused to wanted to judged. A witness must report a crime to an authority first (typically a Faction Leader or Settlement Ruler) and that authority will decide whether to apprehend the Criminal or let it go. Technically, a criminal can eliminate witnesses and his crime can go unreported.
The "Criminal" on-hover tooltip will also give further details about the Crimes.
Logs
We know the Logs can get cluttered and hard to sift through so we are working on ways to improve its usability. Here is a rough draft of our progress:
Save/Load System
Early on, we decided not to include playthrough Saving available immediately during the Early Access launch as we know we are starting with smaller worlds with sessions that should go by rather quickly (usually less than an hour, and very rarely over two hours). We would then introduce it later on once the worlds get bigger, and the playthroughs are expected to last way longer. The time-savings we then spent on putting more features into the game.
We have noticed from player behavior during the Steam Summer Festival and also TinyTeams that players may already have longer playthroughs than we originally anticipated. We now feel it's important to have playthrough Saving asap and we tried squeezing it in during these last two weeks but there is just a lot of data to serialize and it's cutting through other fixes and improvements we feel we really need to include.
We've made the hard decision to stop working on it for now to focus on making the game more stable by launch time. We will be working extra hard after launch to complete it. I hope you guys can be patient and we'll make it available asap right after launch.
*this is an embarrassing tiny team problem and we apologize for the lack of manpower*
Random World Generator
I'd also like to set expectations regarding the random world generator. It is already working but may feel undercooked. There's not enough variety yet in terms of content and that can only be addressed over time. This is why we refocused some of our efforts on 5 custom scenarios with unique and entertaining setups that fully utilizes all content we have available. This way, we can assure that you have enjoyable experiences while the random world generator is still developing. More scenarios will be added continually during Early Access. We will also occasionally add tweaks and changes to existing ones to keep them fresh.
Scenarios
Here's a quick overview of the scenarios we are currently working on (details subject to change):
Oona
A single desert region with a burgeoning human town. Unknown to these residents, the surrounding caves are filled with danger. There is a hibernating dragon in one of the nearby caves. And dangerous trolls lurk in some of the others. Rumors also abound of women seeing doppelgangers of themselves, and wolves can sometimes be seen hunting. Finally, there is a strange artifact of unknown origin somewhere nearby - is it connected to the dozens of various crystals scattered around the place?
Icalawa
A single snow region home to a small but powerful elven tribe. Somehow, most of them are Blessed. Those who are not are unfortunately Robust. There is however one lone Evil elf among them that can be the key to shattering the peace.
A legendary sword can be found in the middle of the place but it is stuck in stone and it doesn't look like it can be taken out easily. And on the other side of the map are ruined structures housing various creatures. An abandoned zoo, perhaps?
Pangat Loo
This is a 2 region scenario for our undead loving overlords. There is a huge human town on one region, while the other region is a haunted desert full of elven tombstones, skeletons and ghosts. The Necronomicon makes a repeat appearance here.
Affatt
A 3 region scenario. All three regions are claimed by a sprawling elven kingdom. There is also a small human town on one region and they are fighting for survival. For some strange reason, there are no monsters in this world but there are plenty of various artifacts to work with.
Zenko
Four regions, each one a different biome and home to a different faction. The snow region is the residence of 10 Cold Blooded elves. The grassland region is home to 10 Electric humans. The forest region is where 10 Venomous elves reside. The desert region houses 10 Fireproof humans. They are all at peace with each other... for now.
Based on how much replayability some players got for the demo tutorial scenario, we expect that many of you could spend plenty of enjoyable hours comparable to that of similarly priced games. And the good news is that for Ruinarch, this is only just the beginning. More interesting features and improvements are coming later!
If you are interested in supporting the game's development, we hope you consider purchasing the game during our Early Access Launch on August 25. It will have a 10% discount. If we have a successful launch week, we can use the funds to expand the team soon and ramp up development. Thank you for reading!