The Slormancer News

Hello everyone!
Welcome to Slormite Chronicles #48!

[h2]New Banner and Key Arts![/h2]
Did you see the new banners? Aren’t they gorgeous? It took half of the team’s effort (so, one person) over the course of a few weeks to achieve this result. HyonD set aside their usual PixelArt to rework and improve our old banner, which—let’s be honest—had run its course!

We went for an image with more contrasted colors and chose an orange logo to make it stand out from the rest of the image—and from the rest of the Steam store (so as many potential players as possible click on it! ;) ).



[h2]New Steam Page![/h2]
We have also revamped our Steam page with a modern update, featuring beautiful GIFs that complement the screenshots and trailers available at the top of the page.





You can check out the full page by following this link, but if you're reading this Chronicles, you most likely already own the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1104280/The_Slormancer/

[h2]Release Date, when?![/h2]
We have a release date that’s almost finalized. In fact, we’ve already scheduled a slot with Steam, but we want to be absolutely sure that everything is perfectly ready for the big day before making an official announcement.

What I can say: We are currently working on a release date announcement video, which will be out by the end of April. We will post a news update on The Slormancer’s page, and we’re counting on you and our entire player community to share and spread the word to as many people as possible!

What I can also say is that the game’s release won’t be too far off from the announcement. You won’t have to wait two months between the reveal and the actual launch. But enough teasing—more news is coming soon!

[h2]Supporter Pack[/h2]

With the game’s release, we will also be offering a DLC called the "Supporter Pack," which will be sold alongside the game and will include a cosmetic change for Bryan.

Say goodbye to spectral blue—Bryan is reincarnating as a glowing yellow orb, adorned with ethereal wings. More celestial than ever, he now floats with divine (or almost divine) grace.

But that’s not all! When Bryan transforms into a door, he no longer becomes just any door… he becomes a golden door. With Wings!



The main goal of the Supporter Pack is to offer an additional option for players who wish to support the game's development. We don’t have an exact price in mind yet, but it should be around the same price as the OST—approximately $6.

[h2]Clarifications regarding before and after the release[/h2]
We've seen a few discussions and comments about what we plan to do for the release and beyond, so I’d like to clarify a few points:

Before the release: Experimental Branch
There will be an open beta on the game's Experimental branch before release, shortly after the release date announcement. This branch will mainly help us identify any major issues that might still be present in the game and ensure we’re fully prepared for the full-scale launch.

After the release: Ongoing support
What we’ve referred to several times as "The Final Update" is called that because it marks the final update for Early Access. It is absolutely not the final update for the game.

First, we plan to continue fixing any potential bugs and adding quality-of-life features to the game. Then, we’ll likely keep updating the game with both free and possibly paid updates for a period of time that is yet to be defined.

We had previously mentioned that the game might or might not receive updates depending on sales, but that’s no longer true. In fact, even if the game doesn’t sell very well after the Early Access release, it would still make sense for us to keep adding content and new features to attract more players. These days, it’s possible to extend the lifespan of a game and keep it alive for many years with proper support, so we are likely to opt for long-term support.

[h2]Changes to The Netherworld[/h2]
But that's not all! We've also made some changes to how certain game mechanics work, which will be included in version 1.0, thanks to feedback from a few players who had access to the latest version of the game.

The Cataclysm Runs, which previously only served to unlock the associated Warlords, now have an added functionality that increases replayability for these modes.

Each Cataclysm Run now allows you to target a Pure Stat, which will have a higher chance of loot and a better score. The Pure Stats assigned to a Cataclysm change randomly at the end of each run.

Additionally, we’ve changed how Nether items are obtained. You’ll now need to fill a Nether Charge bar by completing Cataclysm Runs in order to maximize the chances of looting a Nether item when facing a Warlord.

We still have a number of changes and adjustments planned for release, but we’re making progress!



That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to Slormite Chronicles #47!

For those who haven't been following the latest Slormite Chronicles, we're in the final stretch before release. We are currently preparing the last update of the Early Access phase, leading to the official launch.

This is the most crucial stage for The Slormancer, so we’re doing everything we can to ensure the best possible release and that as many players as possible are there for launch. This is one of the reasons why we had to postpone the opening of the Experimental Branch, which was originally planned for the end of February.

[h2]Experimental Branch[/h2]
In the last Slormite Chronicles, we announced that the game's Experimental Branch would open around the end of February, allowing players to test the 1.0 version before its final release.

Unfortunately, we’ve decided to go back on that decision and postpone the opening of the Experimental Branch so that it is closer to the game's actual release date. The planned release date for The Slormancer hasn't changed, but the Experimental Branch will open a bit later to ensure that the game works perfectly for everyone.

We sincerely apologize for making an announcement and then changing course. We took the time to weigh the pros and cons of opening the Experimental Branch too early, and we believe that to maintain the momentum and hype we hope to build around the launch in the coming weeks, it would be much more effective not to start distributing the final version of the game via an Experimental Branch.

To go into more detail, the way Steam works—and how players decide whether a game is worth buying—is directly linked to the number of sales, the number of reviews, and the number of active players at any given time.

If players buy the game following the launch of the 1.0 version on the Experimental Branch, play it, and don’t return for the official release, we lose out on the snowball effect.

We also believe that opening an Experimental Branch to everyone isn’t necessary. Instead, a closed beta with a few dozen players, which will begin soon, should be sufficient.

I believe we made the right decision for the game, but not necessarily the best one for players eager to try this version. Once again, we’re sorry for this change—we should have thought everything through before announcing the Experimental Branch.

[h2]Work in Progress[/h2]
The last Slormite Chronicles have been relatively difficult to write. We understand the anticipation for a release date that we still can’t share, as well as the desire for new information. Unfortunately, we've already revealed all the new features of the game in previous Slormite Chronicles.

Not much seems to be happening on the surface, but we’re still making progress toward the release!

We’re currently waiting for translations to be finalized. The translation teams have given us a deadline, and everything is in progress and should be ready soon.

On our end, we’re working on the game’s marketing. We’re revamping the Steam page, which will be updated soon. We want a more eye-catching banner, an updated trailer showcasing the new features, as well as the addition of GIFs and decorations to enhance the page overall. After all, it’s the game's main storefront.

We’ve neglected marketing throughout Early Access, so it’s time to make up for lost ground. The Steam page hasn’t been updated since the start of Early Access, despite the many things we’ve added to the game.

From a development standpoint, the game is ready—or at least, it will be once we’ve integrated the feedback from the beta—but the release itself isn’t quite there yet.

I’ll wrap up this section with two quotes that perfectly apply to game development:

"The first 90% of development accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

"Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

[h2]The Warlords Update[/h2]
We’ve already talked about these mechanics in previous Slormite Chronicles, but I’d like to share some additional teasers from my own playthrough.

The final gameplay loop takes place in The Netherworld. There are 45 Cataclysm Expeditions, where the goal is to close enough breaches to complete the Expedition.



The Cataclysms used are in their "Warlord" version and at their highest difficulty level, meaning players regularly need to add or adjust stats in our build to mitigate their effects.

Additionally, all Breaches in The Netherworld are in their Cataclysmic version, progressively adding new Cataclysms throughout the Expedition.

Once a Cataclysm is completed, it unlocks higher-difficulty Cataclysms. And once all necessary Cataclysms for facing a Warlord have been completed, it becomes possible to challenge them.



During the Expedition against Cinderolis The Fireborn, five Warlord Cataclysms will be active at all times: Fire Strike, Fire Rage, Floor is Lava, Endless Fire, and Equilibrium.



Once defeated, the player will be able to choose from three Legendary and/or Nether-rarity items.



We’ve done a lot of internal playtesting for this update. And even after all these years of development, I’m still having as much fun—if not more—than before. I hope you have as much fun as we do when the 1.0 update is available.

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to this month' Slormite Chronicles!
As we get closer to the release, it gets harder to talk about new and exciting content because we've already covered what The Final Update (1.0) will be about in previous Slormite Chronicles (#41, #42, #43 and #44). The development of The Slormancer is almost over. We're making a few tweaks, adding a few assets here and there and that's about it. We've shifted toward marketing the game and catching as much attention as we can until the release.

We have a release window in mind but we won't be able to talk about it right now. So except from that, I'll try to be as transparent as possible with how things are going:

[h2]Playtesting The Final Update[/h2]
With 120+ new Legendary Items, Nether Equipment, a new Endgame mode and new Cataclysms coming up, we have to make sure that The Final Update is as good and as bugfree as it can be.
For this reason, we will be opening up The Experimental Branch by the end of February for everyone to try this update. Stay tuned!

-Edited February 28-
For everyone waiting for the experimental branch to open in order to try the latest update—we promised it would be available by the end of February.
Unfortunately, we've decided not to proceed with it.

After careful consideration and internal discussions, we realized that splitting the player base across multiple small releases could hurt the momentum of the official 1.0 update. We may be overthinking it, but we truly believe this is the right decision for the game in the long run.

We're really sorry about this. We were eager to share our progress with the community but didn’t fully consider the bigger picture.

We’ll take the time to explain our reasoning and detail our release plans in the next Slormite Chronicles.
An experimental branch will still open before the full release—just with better timing.

[h2]Changes and Fixes[/h2]
Let's start with the game itself. We've been making a small balance pass regarding the biggest complaints from the community that resulted in the following changes:

The Great Forge !
Being defeated in The Great Forge will now cause you to lose all multipliers and War Chests bonuses but you will get to loot your War Chest anyway.

This is a big change, but we can definitely agree that losing in The Great Forge can be really painful so we feel like it's for the best.

Achievements
Some of the initial values on Achievements were too damn high!
So we're adjusting those.

• Elite Slayer Rank 5 has been reduced from 100 000 to 10 000.
  
• Equipment Finder Rank 5 has been reduced from 100 000 to 2 500.
  
• Achievements requiring you to complete X Floors in a specific Environment have been reduced at rank 5 from 1 000 to 250.
  

Potential
Potential gets increasingly harder when an Item reaches high levels of Reinforcement to a point that it farming to get Potential is no longer a viable option. For this reason, players often bypass Potential by using currencies.

This is fine but we would like for the farming option to be much more viable. As much we've made a few adjustments to the Potential curve resulting in a reduction of about 85% for an Item with a Reinforcement Level of 15.


We've been making other changes and will probably make a few more before the release. These have been the changes we've been working on this month.

[h2]Advertising The Slormancer[/h2]
This is something that we haven't been doing a lot during Early Access but that is necessary to spread the word. We've started publishing content on various platforms. If you wish to, you can follow us on:

• TikTok
• YouTube
• X / Twitter
• Bluesky
• Facebook
• Instagram

We're also working on various materials to give our Steam Page a fresh look, such as an updated Trailer or a new Thumbnail Image.

[h2]Localization[/h2]
We're currently working with a publisher to translate the game in various languages. We've stated this before, The Slormancer is pretty heavy when it comes to word count, so translations can get quite expensive so we have to carefully pick the languages we want.

Right now, we've been using the number of Wishlists we have in every language to determine the highest demands. The Slormancer will be availabe at launch in the following languages:

• English
  
• French
  
• Chinese
  
• Traditional Chinese
  
• Japanese
  
• German
  
• Spanish
  
• Russian
  

Depending on how the release goes and how our sales and wishlists evolve, we will try to progressively add new languages to The Slormancer. If you would like to help us translate the game in a language that is not in the list above, please contact us and we will try to work something together.

[h2]Console Release[/h2]
On top of that, we're working to get The Slormancer on consoles (PS5, Switch and X-Box X for now). We're not looking for a simultaneaous release for PC and consoles, but it's on the way!

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Happy New Year everyone!

Same as last year (and the year before that), this Chronicle will be a recap of the past year. We actually really wanted for 2024 to be the year of our release in 1.0 but as always, everything took more time than anticipated and we knew early on that we weren't going to make it.

If the Final Update wasn't leading to the 1.0 Release, we could have managed to sneak it in 2024 since it is mostly done, but preparing for our release requires much more than just being done with development, so we had to delay it.

[h2]A Year of Chronicles: 2024 Edition[/h2]
Fun fact: You may not know this but we publish the Slormite Chronicles devlog every 6th of the month, which is the day The Slormancer was released (on April 6, 2021). Everytime we publish a Slormite Chronicles, the game gets one month older, and it is currently 3 years and 9 months old.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/3991945238789013200
We started the year with The Slorm Reapers Update, introducing 68 new Slorm Reapers, and getting the number of available Slorm Reapers to our target of 120. This was definitely no easy task.

Fun fact 2: 6 or 7 years ago, a friend of us (the composer, actually) was playtesting an early version of the game, that had about 10 to 15 Slorm Reapers (in a very rough form), and he told us that Slorm Reapers were super fun to find, collect and upgrade and that we should have more. And for some reason, I said "Ok cool, let's go with 120" without giving it a second thought.
Considering how big of a task creating a single one often, and how small our team is, it was slightly too much. No regrets though, it's actually one of the aspects of the game we're the most proud of.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4031353167277495724
Then, we introduced our 2024 Roadmap, leading to The Final Update. We anticipated 3 Updates to get to The Final Update, and it turned out to be accurate (still missing that last Update though).

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4127057033609582819
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4111295701206975069

The Slormite Chronicles #35 led to The Encyclopedia Update (0.8), introducing a few key elements: Achievements, a Codex and proper tutorials, and MASSIVE Performance enhancements.

During this Update, we've also prepared a few things that are still not available: Steam Cards, Profile Frames and Steam Achievements. Everything will be available for the 1.0 launch though.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4174347995207375133
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4201372129457513908
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4154087504281943121

Slormite Chronicles #36, #37 and #38 mostly talk about Balance since it was a very important focus of the year 2024. We actually started brainstorming around March and quickly started talking about upcoming changes in Slormite Chronicles. The feedback we got has helped us getting in the right direction tremendously.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4170974735564951689

We eventually published a Patch Notes a month before the actual Update, and made a bunch of changes based on the feedback we again got.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4264427597934140423
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4264427597952925408

We then published The Balance Update on The Experimental Branch to further polish it.
I've said it then, and I'll say it again here: Going through Experimental was a great experience, it involves much less stress than going straight to the Live Branch.

Everything gets to be properly tested, and if something is not working properly, players can always go back to Live Branch so I'm never in a stressful emergency situation, having to quickly debug and patch something preventing most players to play.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4354502761456383826
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4592070813181408319

The Balance Update was released a couple of months later on the Live Branch and everything went smoothly!

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4592070813170478317
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4686648941185573051
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4463723296443073307
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1104280/announcements/detail/4480614335784159155

Finally, the last 4 Slormite Chronicles of the year were about me talking about our work on The Final Update: creating a new endgame mode called The Warlords, Legendary Items, Nether Items, an epic Boss Fight, among other things. You should read them if you haven't.

Next month, we should be able to talk about our Roadmap for 2025 and beyond the release. There's unfortunately not much more to announce today since there are still a few blurry things to figure out.

That's about it for now!
Cheers!

Welcome to The Slormite Chronicles #44!

If you've missed the last Slormite Chronicles, here's a brief recap of where we're at: We're almost done with the development part of The Slormancer. Last month, we had the missing 120 Legendary Effects to deal with, along with the final boss fight. As of last week, we're done with Legendary Effects and we are about a week away from being done with the final fight.

So we're making solid progress.

Once we're done with this, we'll have a bunch of testing and debugging to do until everything feels good enough to go into 1.0. At the same time, we're working on verifying texts and get going on the various translations we want for The Slormancer, along with reworking the Chinese translation whose flaws are no longer in doubt.

"Ok kewl, release date wen ?"

Releasing The Slormancer and making sure that it catches as much attention as we think it deserves will be a real challenge, and it will require time and preparation. This is something that we cannot afford to rush.

On top of that, we're working with various partners to release the game on different platforms and in as many languages as we can, so we have to get a green light from everyone.

If everything goes our way, and given what needs to be done, we should be able to release the game around late-Q1 2025.

[h2]New Legendary Items[/h2]
Back to what we've been working on: Legendary Effects!
We've added 120 Effects to get to a total of 200.

We now have about 20 Legendary Effects for each slot so it should introduce more options to some of the weakest slots. And as you may have read in a previous Slormite Chronicles, the new Nether rarity will allow you to Graft Effects from a slot to another, so you can get that sweet Indomitable Mountain effect on Boots if you want to.

There is now at least one Legendary Effect for each Class Skill, Support Skill and Class Mechanic, so that's about 15 Legendary Items that are specific to a class. Then about 27 Legendary Effects for the Ancestral Legacy tree. And finally, we've added 12 Legendary Effects for Slorm Reapers.

Without further ado, here are some teasers!
(Right-Click to enlarge, otherwise it's unreadable sorry)



[h2]Ohm Agad, The Slormancer[/h2]
I can't share a lot right now. But let's just say that he too is waiting for the final release.




That's about it for today!
Merry Christmas everyone and see you in 2025!

Cheers!