Balance Patch & Future Plans!

It’s been two weeks! We are now back from our break and are here to deliver the promised devlog along with a small balance patch.

Overall, we are pretty happy with the current difficulty level of the game. It may feel a lot easier than the original prototype. That’s intended, as we are leaving space for challenge modifiers with reliquaries (which we’ll talk about later). As we start to work on our first real content update, hopefully this patch will make things slightly more balanced:

• Cord Segment (+1 capacity) is now significantly rarer and cost 10 faith (was 6)
• Faith rewards after successful hunts now gives +10 faith (was +6)
• Prismatic followers will now deal double damage instead of double their stats on start, Hopefully this change will make it synergize with more builds
• Barrier will now give new recruits +3 health (was +2)
• Undying followers will now revive at 6 health (was 5)
• Refiner and sacrificial followers will now only deal 1 friendly damage (was 2)
• Incubator will now lock faith at 12 (was 15)
• Vanguard aspects will now cost 10 faith (was 6), and aspiring aspects will now cost 6 (was 10)
• Some followers’ stats are adjusted: injector (+1 health), paladin (+1 health), lightkeeper (+1 health), familiar (-1/-1), reaper (-2 health), dancer (-2 health)
• Some enemies are now stronger: black knight (+15 health), witch’s golem (+1 health), cinder flies (+1 health)
• Fixed some weird interactions between hound, adaptive aspect and fractured aspect
• Fisher also secretly receives a buff…(can you find out what it is?)

Future Plans

The original plan for the first content update was to focus on adding more content into existing frameworks (more cards, more events, more hunts) and quality of life features; the update after that would be reliquaries, and the third update would include the second faction. However, it turns out that our players are chewing through the game a lot faster than we anticipated: so fast that it’ll probably be a disappointment if the next update doesn't include any sort of “end game content”. With that, it’s super likely that the next update will also include either a prototype version of the reliquary system or the highly requested endless mode.

But what exactly is the reliquary system? The concept is that before each run, the player will be presented with three randomly chosen challenge modifiers, and they may choose one to make their run more interesting and spicy. Some examples for modifiers are “lose x faith after each combat”, “each follower’s stats is capped at x/x”, “replace random events with some sort of detrimental effects”, “replace hobgoblin/dragon with a specific hunt boss”, and the classic “start the run with only 1 core health”. Eventually, when the game has meta-progression unlocks, we want to make some unlocks exclusive to different reliquary modifiers, so that it’s not only about additional challenges, but also having a risk & reward aspect to it.

At first, we didn’t want to implement an endless mode due to the concern that if the end goal of each run doesn’t have a fixed power level, one build will inevitably out-perform the rest, and the game will devolve into trying to assemble that one perfect build. However, with how many people explicitly ask for an endless mode or give us feedback saying that the run is too short, it’s probably worthwhile to try to make an endless mode work. Some design challenges we’ll have to overcome include:

• To keep the run interesting after the player has finalized their build.
• To keep other archetypes at the same level as permanent stats build beyond depth 50.
• To not force the player into playing endless mode - a standard, dragon-slaying run should still be a complete and satisfying experience.

Finally, here’s some of the quality of life features we are working on:

• 2x speed & pause buttons
• Combat log improvements: entries will make more sense and the player will be able to scroll up
• Hunt preview: before choosing to accept or concede a hunt, you can preview all the enemies and their mechanics.

Hopefully, we can finish this update within a month. {Please look forward to it!}