Devlog #48 - Dekamara Roadmap

Hello everyone! After the release of v0.4, we decided to focus on finishing the Guide for the upcoming update, and finish this Dekarama game. But before diving into our plans, I want to talk about what happened since we changed our Itch page pricing. 

 I modified our Itch page from free to priced on May 10. You can see how our views and downloads nose-dived instantly. 

 And that showed me how competitive the market is and also how hard it is to sell a project on any store without any marketing. We were doing quite fine when the project was in the ‘free’ category, so I’m going to add our free demo separately and direct people to the full project from there and pray for its success. For reference, Itch alone earned us more than Patreon+DLSite income before going into the ‘priced’ category.

 With that said, v0.5 is going to introduce the last character, Guide. I couldn’t add new maps to this version since new mechanics were going to be introduced in those maps, and we decided to not to rush Guide and finish Pets instead. We are going to finish the Guide, add new maps and consider this game done. I don’t plan on any increase to the price on Itch, since I believe 4$ is okay for this game. After its full release, we want to release the game on Steam as well, but since preparing store assets is going to take a while, it might be hard on us financially so this might have to wait for a while. We decided to make this a separate game because we are going to change it a lot. I still haven't decided on a name yet so let’s just call it Dekamara 2 for now. Here is what we’ve decided about Dekamara 2 so far:

 We are going to add a Town, where all the NPCs will gather. Players will go through different stages from there, rescue town NPCs and complete their quests afterwards. Quest rewards will vary, players are going to be able to unlock new abilities for Dekamara by completing quests for example. Some quests will just unlock new scenes. With each NPCs rescued, new buildings will be available with their own NPC and you can visit them in their own private room inside.

 We are planning on 4 different biomes, each with 4 levels and 4 unique enemies.Each level is going to have some metroidvania elements, with permanently unlockable shortcuts. Players will have to revisit these levels as they get stronger to proceed further with each attempt. Each girl will drop special collectables, which will act as materials when trading with town NPCs. Some NPCs will offer permanent upgrades, some will offer temporary ones. There will be a ‘training’ room where a cult member servant can collect material from a girl of your choice while you are on a quest.

Nothing is set in stone yet, we might still decide to do thing differently and we want to hear your ideas too! I'll keep you updated, take care!