Spire of Sorcery (Limited Early Access) News

Version 174 is now available on Steam. It brings a lot of changes, including new creatures, new items, a new token and a new event, plus new algorithm for generating the map.

Release notes are available here, as well as below.

ゲームの日本語版はまだ完全に翻訳されていません。 ご不便をおかけして申し訳ございません。

游戏的简体中文版本尚未完全翻译。 很抱歉给您带来不便。

And here's a short (10 min) video that highlights the changes in this version:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

--- release notes v174 ---

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

This update is focused on giving players more control over encounters, while making encounters more diverse.

[h3]SAVES FROM EARLIER VERSIONS[/h3]

Please do not use saved games from the earlier versions, because of the changes in content this is bound to result in glitches.

[h3]A DIFFERENT MAP[/h3]

The rules of generating the world have been changed, you will find the new map to be quite different.

With one of the future updates, we're looking to give you more control over the parameters of how this chapter is built (e.g. min/max number of specific objects) so that you can customise the difficulty of your experience. We don't have a specific date for this feature at this time.



[h3]RUINS ARE NOW A PROPER BIOME[/h3]

It's been bothering us for some time that Ruins were a mix between an object and a biome. They are now, finally, a proper biome.

You will see the new visuals, and will encounter new multi-hex regions, related to Ruins.

Spitters are now no longer limited with just 1 hex for their moves.



[h3]ABANDONED PALACE IS IN[/h3]

The map now has a new object, Abandoned palace, that has its own encounter design (and its own loot). This is the spawning point of Spitters: destroy it to stop their spawning.



[h3]A NEW TOKEN: RESTORATION[/h3]

Related to Abandoned palace is the new token: Restoration.

In the coming updates, you will see it in another new event.

The token creates specific outcomes (such as in the event with the Palace) and as a general rule, absorbs token of Damage at the end of each encounter (i.e. Restoration + Damage won't click during the event, but will offset each other at the end of the event).



[h3]THREE NEW SPELLS[/h3]

Related to the Restoration token are 3 new spells in the Spellbook, yours to use.

Speaking of the Spellbook, we continue to work on its design, and in one of the upcoming updates will add filtering by element as well as easier navigation by specific sections.



[h3]HOTKEYS![/h3]

By the popular request:

• "SPACE" in encounters now results in "NEXT ROUND"
  
• "1", "2" and "3" in encounters open the corresponding Spellbooks of party members
  

[h3]FORMULA HIGHLIGHTS[/h3]

Speaking about spellcasting interface, now when you click (or hover over) a specific element in the hand of a character, it will highlight the places in the currently open spell formulas where it may go – and dim down the rest of the formulas.



[h3]SPITTERS RECEIVED ANIMATIONS[/h3]

They lost their flame (which we haven't animated yet), but they got some moves. We continue working on the animations of all the creatures, it just takes some time to get things right.

[h3]NEW CREATURES[/h3]

A big (huge) change for this week is the introduction of creature subtypes.

Where version 173 had 1 type of gigglers, version 174 now has 3 different creatures.

Where version 173 had 1 type of shadows, version 174 now has 3 different creatures.

Where version 173 had 1 type of spitters, version 174 now has 2 different creatures.

The goal of this is to add variety to the encounters.

Each subtype has their specific loot, and their special action (the other actions are taken with a certain probability, and the % of probability for each action is different for different sub-types).

Out of 8 creatures, 3 retain the visuals from the earlier version and the other 5 will get proper visuals over the course of the coming weeks. In the current build, you will see sketches that we've made as the first step on this path.

The discovery cards for groups are coming either with the hotfix or next week.



[h3]MIXED CREATURE PARTIES[/h3]

All creature parties are now generated and spawned as mixed parties, within their own type.



[h3]CHESTS AND CORPSES NOW VISIBLE ON THE MAP[/h3]

Chests and corpses are now visible on the map, so you no longer have to guess what's inside of a specific event.

This is made possible because Ruins are now a proper biome.

In the future, we'll fix passive/active event triggers so that if you step over a chest, or skip turn there, you don't have to engage in an encounter – you will have a choice.

[h3]MAGIC NODE EVENT IS UPDATED[/h3]

It required 4 Frost to activate, now it needs 12. Just to make it a tad more challenging.

[h3]FIVE NEW ALCHEMIC ITEMS[/h3]

There are 5 new alchemic items in the game now. They already work, and will receive their proper visuals with one of the upcoming updates.

[h3]ALCHEMIC ITEMS ARE ALL RE-BALANCED[/h3]

Almost every item has been re-balanced, and some changed recipes.

Overall the goal is to simplify and allow more intuitive understanding of their usability (esp. in regard to the IMMUNE effect).

[h3]UPDATED DISEASE[/h3]

One disease was issuing Flash tokens, which caused splash Blindness when combined with Frost. We felt it was too much. This disease now is structured as having a chance to issue Blindness, not Flash.

[h3]FOG OF WAR HAS 3 LEVELS (SORT OF)[/h3]

We're moving towards a fog of war that will have 3 different levels.

In the current build, you will see that this is the case already – visually.

In the next build, the information displayed in level 2 will also change – you will no longer have full visibility into what's happening there, you will only know the landscape in that area.

[h3]INCREASED SPEED IN ENCOUNTERS[/h3]

Dealing elements and other actions in encounters are now a bit faster, to make the encounter more dynamic.

[h3]A FEW NEW INFO WINDOWS[/h3]

The conversion of Fear into stress and Damage into Injuries is now better communicated at the end of encounters.

We also added an info window showing the loot lost when retreating.

There's still a few more info windows that are in the works. Our goal is to clearly communicate every change in character stats and effects, so that nothing goes unnoticed. It will take a couple more updates for this to happen.



[h3]UPCOMING BUILD SCHEDULE[/h3]

January 08 – version 174 + 174.hotfix
January 14 – version 175
January 21 – version 176

[h3]THE FOCUS OF THE UPCOMING UPDATES[/h3]

There's a few things that we'll be working on, next:

• We'll introduce "Alert" state of opposing parties, so that they won't jump into pursuit in the same day when they spot player party.
  
• We'll add animations and visuals where these are currently lacking, and we'll bring more Discovery cards.
  
• We'll update the Spellbook with filters and sections.
  
• We'll work on additional notifications related to changes in characters, as this needs more feedback.
  
• We'll work on making the flow of the encounter easier to understand: WHO does WHAT, which is currently in complex encounters can be hard to follow (Spitter issues Acid, another issues Acid with splash, then environment effect deals Fire, and Fire converts all that Acid – it can look like your character just got 5 Fire out of the blue, unless you followed the steps closely).
  

---

See you next week!

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

• Hotsprings added Fatigue instead of removing it; this is now fixed
  
• "Cleansing" spell added Fear instead of removing it; this is now fixed
  
• "Refreshing brew" alchemic potion added Fatigue instead of removing it; this is now fixed
  
• The game threw a NullRef bug when certain creatures retreated after conversion of tokens; this is now fixed
  

Thanks to everyone who reported the issues, and had the patience to wait for Monday to have it fixed =).

As a reminder, the regular update is scheduled for January 7, Thursday this week (and will bring new creatures).

Have a great 2021!

Version 173 is now available on Steam. The Spellbook has been completely re-written, there's a few new mechanics for how different tokens combine, and a bunch of events have been edited accordingly (the in-game encyclopaedia now works, too!).

Release notes are available here, as well as below.

ゲームの日本語版はまだ完全に翻訳されていません。 ご不便をおかけして申し訳ございません。

游戏的简体中文版本尚未完全翻译。 很抱歉给您带来不便。

We also recorded a short video to go along with this update –

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

--- release notes v173 ---

[h3]CHANGES[/h3]

We shipped the previous build just before the Christmas Day last week, and had 3 days during this week to do something meaningful – then test and ship the new build. We did our best. You will discover that version 173 provides quite a different playing experience.

[h3]SPELLBOOK IS NOW FULLY OPEN AT THE START OF THE CHAPTER[/h3]

In versions 150-170, we played with the Spellbook fully open from day one of the campaign. It was enjoyable, but maybe a bit too easy (the deck composition was different back then). In 171 and 172, we transitioned to Spellbook that offered progression via finding "Books of Arcane Knowledge" in the Chests in Ruins. After playing like that, we feel like such progression created more hassle than fun, and so in this version we revert to having the Spellbook fully open from the beginning of the chapter.

We invite you to explore the whole Spellbook at the start of the game.

[h3]ALL SPELL FORMULAS HAVE CHANGED[/h3]

The overall concept of how encounters are played is that you build spells from two angles: "what I want" and "what I can". In versions 171 and 172, the second part was lacking, since most spells were rather complex and "instant opportunities" presented themselves not as often as we wanted them to be available. We re-worked every spell in the Spellbook towards offering more combinations, and more immediate opportunities, depending on what's dealt in your characters's hands.

You will see that the hands of your mages now immediately present several opportunities of what kind of spell to assemble.

(!) KNOWN ISSUE: the spell that is suppose to remove Fear, is bugged a little. We’ll fix this with the next update

[h3]DESIGN AND LAYOUT OF SPELLBOOK[/h3]

We didn't have the time to update the layout, this will happen in one of the January updates. It will change visually as well as functionally, since with so many spells we already feel the need to add 1) tabs 2) filtering (i.e. "I have "Heat", which spells I can build with it?" query).

[h3]TUTORIAL AND HELP SCREENS[/h3]

Again, this is not something that we could have squeezed into these three (two and a half, to be real) days, but it's coming down the road. We hope you have discovered how to assemble spells, how to use elements from hand of one mage on formula of another mage, and especially the fact that you can at any time choose another formula from Spellbook and change the existing formula to it – the elements that fit the new formula, will remain in the new formula.

[h3]NEW EFFECTS OF TOKENS[/h3]

We've expanded the ways that different tokens may combine, which in turn makes combinations of different simple spells more useful.

* Damage applied to target with Acid now converts 1 Acid into 1 extra Damage
* Fire applied to target with Acid now converts 1 Acid into 1 extra Fire
* Damage applied to target with Fear now adds 1 extra Fear
* Damage applied to target with Frost removes 1 Frost
* Flash applied to target with Frost now issues splash damage of 1 Blindness to left and to right

There are also changes in activation and conversion mechanics:

* 3 Acid accumulated on target no longer issue 1 Damage
* 3 Frost accumulated on target now issue 1 Paralysis per round, and Frost remains (in earlier version this removed 1 Frost)

You will see that with Fire and Damage converting Acid, Acid can now be used as a chain-reaction token.

[h3]ENCYCLOPAEDIA IS NOW AVAILABLE[/h3]

We managed to bring back the Encyclopaedia, it is now available through –

* clicking right mouse button on any icon or name that has "magnifying glass" icon
* via in-game menu ("ESC")
* via main menu

There's still things to be improved (navigation: "next" and "previous", cross-linking, etc.), but already you have the whole thing in one place, and we're really happy that we managed to do this in this update.

Please note that all tokens have their own discovery cards in the Encyclopaedia, so you can read about their effects in one place.

[h3]A LOT OF EVENTS HAVE BEEN UPDATED[/h3]

There were small and big changes, some related to new spells and some related to new token rules.

Here's the list of what has been updated:

* Gigglers no longer get ENRAGED! when retreating
* Gigglers no longer issue Infection tokens when DESTROYED
* Giggler Haunt now requires a bit more Fire for BURNED, and issues Bag of bones when this outcome is achieved
* Restless shadow no longer gets ENRAGED! when retreating
* Restless shadow needs a bit less Fire to retreat
* Barrow now releases 1-2 Frost when UNLOCKED or DESTROYED
* Barrow now provides 3-6 Ashes of the dead when BURNED
* Barrow now provides 3 alchemic substances for use in encounters as loot (was: 5)
* Barrow now provides 2-3 Bags of bones when UNLOCKED or DESTROYED
* Spitting demons now provide 1-2 Ashes of the dead when BURNED
* Spitting demons have changed their actions: now they have Wrathy spittle (1 Fire) and Caustic burp (2 Acid)
* The action of Spitting demons where they would exchange 1 Fatigue from target to 1 Protection is temporarily disabled
* Corpse now issues only 1 Infection when DESTROYED
* Corpse now requires not 3, but 6 Fire to be BURNED
* Loot from the corpse has changed (including this welcome change: you still get 1 equitable item even if you burn the corpse)
* Chest no longer can be BURNED
* Chest no longer provides high-impact alchemy as loot (i.e. what changes stats permanently)
* Chest now releases 0-1 Shadow and 0-1 Spitter when DESTROYED

[h3]ENCOUNTER EFFECTS HAVE BEEN UPDATED[/h3]

The following EE have been updated:

* Emanation of Chaos now issues 2 Frost
* Breath of Chaos now issues 1 Flash, 1 Confusion
* Surge of Chaos now issues 1 Acid, 1 Fire
* Protective barrier now issues 1 Damage

[h3]MORE FOCUS ON CONCOCTING ALCHEMIC POTIONS[/h3]

In version 172 we already increased the number of resources that you find on the map, and now we have removed more complex alchemy from loot in Ruins and Barrows. What this means is that you'll have to rely more on concocting the stuff on your own – and with recipes listed next to Alchemic Cauldron, this is not too difficult now.

Explore different combinations – you can permanently upgrade your characters with quite a few potions!

[h3]IMPROVEMENTS IN USER INTERFACE[/h3]

You will see that we've rolled out a number of small improvements: changed the Alchemy/Backpack icon in travel mode, added "Death!" notification window, added "New season!" notification window, and so on. It's an on-going process of spotting gaps in the feedback loop, and fixing them. For example, now when you apply 4 Protection tokens (or a multitude of any other token), they are applied one by one and not as a bunch at once. Small things matter! We will continue on this with every version that we ship.

[h3]MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR![/h3]

2020 has been difficult for many, both on the personal and on the professional fronts.

For our team specifically, this was also the year when we faced our biggest crisis yet, and we're relieved that we have managed to overcome it – getting back on track to bring this game to you, the players, and being able to return to the weekly updates that give us the closest possible connection with the community.

We're thankful for the opportunity to continue to make games, and we feel lucky to meet so many friends from different countries who have supported us throughout this year – such friendship, and warmth, are especially appreciated when the world is going through the crisis.

We hope that our games will continue to give you moments of fun and laughter in 2021, and we wish you all a happy and a healthy new year!

Version 172 is now available on Steam, and brings a bunch of changes to items and events, as well as adds a recipe list, and equipment.



Release notes are available here.

ゲームの日本語版はまだ完全に翻訳されていません。 ご不便をおかけして申し訳ございません。

游戏的简体中文版本尚未完全翻译。 很抱歉给您带来不便。

Here's a video introduction to version 171 and 172 that explains how spellcasting works:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Dear community:

It’s been a few months since we stopped with the regular news updates, while we focused all of our attention on implementing the long-overdue changes in our development process.

We sincerely apologize if you felt let down because of this and wondered about what has happened. The reality is that we’re a small team that strives to spend its time in the most efficient way, which we decided is best invested into “doing what we need to get a good game done” rather than “talking about how we’re going to do this”.

Today, we bring back a new build of the game to Steam under the Limited Early Access program. If you own the app, you will see an update scheduled for the public branch. But before you launch it, please allow us a few words on how we arrived to this build in the first place.



[h3]SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2018-2019[/h3]

We started working on the concept art for with Spire of Sorcery in the summer of 2017, first with two people and later with more of our team members joining the project from Gremlins, Inc. We spent all of 2018 and 2019 working on the game that was “just around the corner”, even though the goalpost kept moving as the time progressed.

At some point, we honestly expected that we might enter Early Access in the summer of 2018. When we didn’t enter Early Access by the summer of the following year, we crunched for several months to launch it before the end of 2019.

Our main mistake was that having successfully released and operated Gremlins, Inc. for a number of years, we never prototyped the new project, or even documented our game design: we simply relied on our game designer’s “vision”, which we would follow until the game is ready for release.

Unfortunately, only while crunching for release, have we discovered that the “vision” was too vague and undefined and could not be completed in any predictable timeframe, because it was never properly defined. In the games industry, people call such projects “ghost ships” – it looks like a ship, but you can never board it. Ultimately, we ended up working on a game that was “fun to develop” – as opposed to creating a game that is “fun to play”.

In November 2019, we entered the Limited Early Access program with the first version of Spire of Sorcery. If you played the game around that time, you would probably remember that it looked like this:



[h3]WHY WE DID NOT PURSUE THE 2019 VERSION[/h3]

On the face of it, the version of Spire of Sorcery from 2019, was what players have expected: indirect control, survival mechanics, and an open world to explore.

Gradually, though, some serious underlying problems started to become clear:

• A game about a dying mage and his disciples had no magic in the game.
  
• The early survival mechanics were pretty knee-jerk: get lots of food now or die.
  
• The lack of control over quests lead to passive spectator experience, where it didn’t matter what happened on the quest; people just clicked through to see the loot of the returning party.
  

For sure, certain aspects of the game were fun: some weird diseases, and the choice of party behavior that was based on personal preferences. But mostly these were fun in a “cool to talk about” way, not in the “cool to play with” way. And our game events were so very mundane and so boring…

The game displayed three tendencies that ultimately broke player experience for us:

1. Everything was random to the point of becoming meaningless. For example, randomly seeded resources contained randomly assigned alchemic properties. Thus, you were never certain, what exactly did you need – you just hoovered up everything in sight, and then mass-produced whatever you could manufacture.
   
2. Magic played little, if any, role in the game about mages. You hunted, gathered minerals, and read books in ancient tongue, but you didn’t do a single thing that a mage would be expected to do. “Spire of Sorcery” was, more than anything else, “Spire of Foraging”.
   
3. The existing player experience naturally lead to automation, and then to more automation. The fact that every character could teach every other character resulted in constant multi-scheduling of classes. The fact that reading books upgraded skills resulted in lining up every single book for reading by every single disciple. And the never-ending foraging and crafting of consumables turned the game into “Spire of Mass Production”.
   

After 6 weeks of development sprint, during which we updated the game with new features and content on a weekly basis, we understood that no amount of patching will solve the core problems of that version, and so we took a break for a few months to change the direction of the project.

[h3]SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 1[/h3]

From an indirect control game happening in real-time mode with pause, we went towards a direct control turn-based system – breaking the world map into hexes and introducing turns, or days.

The visual style changed from “you read a book” to “you play a book”, thanks to the community suggestions of trying 2.5D format for the map that changed the camera’s angle with the mouse wheel.

We spent January, February and March of 2020 in a soft crunch – working whenever each of us could, sometimes at 4 in the morning and sometimes during the weekend nights – looking for the magic solution to the game’s core challenges.

You may remember that the game started to look like this:



We started to take seriously the need to document, and structure, our game design, which lead to some conflicting emotions internally. After weeks of discussions, we finally let go of our game designer, who couldn’t see himself working in the “new” way, which required documenting every mechanic before it was actually put into production.

Looking back from today’s perspective, at that time we still did not recognize the fact that the game lacked the very main thing: a concept.

Sure, we had tons of beautiful content, and dozens of mechanics (my favorite was character’s mood, which changed because of so many other mechanics that is almost always remained neutral, going through ups and downs with every turn to settle at zero: a pointless exercise). But we lacked the definition of what “playing Spire of Sorcery” should feel like.

[h3]WHAT WE KEPT FROM THE TURN-BASED VERSION[/h3]

A bit later, we will go through another crisis, but in the meantime, we’d like to highlight the things that worked well in the turn-based version:

• Everyone loved the 2.5D map;
  
• The algorithm-generated open world made of hexes where opponents chase you to push you into aggressive encounters, and where you explore different locations by discovering them as you travel, felt intuitive;
  
• It was becoming obvious that managing multiple player parties simultaneously was more of a chore than real fun; it was a “we can do this” feature that didn’t really translate into “this is fun to do” experience.
  

Nevertheless, the version from April 2020 retained huge problems:

1. The game about a mage and their disciples still had almost no magic: we got to making 4 spells, but all of them were copies of actions that you could do without magic anyway. Come to think of it, it seems unbelievable how any developer would spend 3 years to produce a game about a mage – but didn’t add any magic there!
   
2. Alchemy was still meant to be mass-produced. We didn’t design “one item”, we designed series of them – ranges of antidotes, lines of consumables, and sets of amulets. It was a design that I call “filler-style”, and that we’re not proud of. We fell into this trap like a tired horse trotting along a well-worn road, which doesn’t ask itself where it goes – it just places one leg in front of the other.
   
3. Most importantly, the skill system of the game – the key to competing any of the in-game events – was boring as hell. Essentially, it was a grind: scout around to level up, then venture further to level up some more. Even after transition to skill checks with risks and dice rolls, it felt automated to the point of yawning.
   

We had a moment of revelation when we found ourselves writing the texts for dozens of game events that felt flat and weak even as we wrote them. They’ve been designed to “fill the space”: we had N skills, and we needed N x Z events that would rely on these skills. This felt very mechanical and seemed to be the opposite of what making fun feels like.

I mean, seriously: perhaps this is how pulp fiction is written, but certainly this is not how we saw ourselves creating Spire of Sorcery.

[h3]SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 2[/h3]

By the summer of 2020, our studio has spent a bit over $1 million on the production of Spire of Sorcery – and the stress from still being stuck with something that we didn’t want to ship to players was palpable.

People talk about crunch being bad when it’s applied externally: say, when you need some art, and you push your artists like the horses that you don’t care about, as long as they carry you fast enough to reach the destination in time. That kind of crunch is physical, you feel it in your bones.

It’s less common to talk about mental crunch which comes from the realization that you’re working on a game that doesn’t have a reliable roadmap, and where what you do today can become meaningless tomorrow.

During the summer months of 2020, pretty much everyone in the team – with the lucky exception of the two of us who worked exclusively on Gremlins, Inc. – was under terrible mental pressure. How the hell do you take a project where we lost our way already twice, and make it into a fun game?

Against the background of the pandemic, and working from home, a couple of people on the team came up with the idea of replacing the skill system with a card-based event system. Forget the skills, it’s all about decks: each character would receive their own deck, which would be upgradeable, and each encounter would be played out as “opponents VS player party”.

In one way, this moved the game closer towards Gremlins, Inc., which is a familiar ground for all of us. In another way, this moved the game away from what we dreamt of, towards “yet another card battler” – a cliché of the modern games market which didn’t offer anything that the other games wouldn’t offer.

Most importantly, with that proposal we lost the feelings of exploration, open world, and individuality of characters. While the earlier versions of Spire of Sorcery had major problems, at least they offered the glimpses of what Spire of Sorcery could be… and if we decided to instead turn the game into a card battler, it would kill these hopes entirely.



[h3]SPIRE OF SORCERY IN 2020, PART 3[/h3]

If you are one of the 2.000 players who supported us by purchasing Spire of Sorcery in Limited Early Access, and after several month of updates that changed the game from one thing into another you felt unhappy… consider for a moment what we felt internally at that time:

Like soldiers at war, who first storm one hill and then another, only to discover that the goal of the current military operation has changed, at times we just wanted to lay down the arms and go home. Which would have meant either cancelling the project or shipping “something”, and then closing the chapter with it.

At one point we’ve been in a team meeting where the probability of Spire of Sorcery being cancelled exceeded 50%, for the lack of vision and leadership.

And as stressed as we’ve been, we still had a few more lessons to learn:

• We still thought in large swathes of time, such as “we’ll need six months to do this”. This is the approach that probably wouldn’t work even in a large company, as long as that company tries to invent something new. Innovation requires rapid experimenting.
  
• We still theorized a lot: what if we take mechanic A, add it to mechanic B, and then have player do Z? However, theories of why something is “fun” are normally made by people who cannot ship a product. Pretending to understand how a game will function in theory is like pretending to understand how a dish will taste, without cooking.
  
• We lacked one vision and we relied too much on group discussions, which are a great tool to fine-tune and polish – but when everything is up for a discussion and people don’t have a hard budget constraint, the talks can be endless, and fruitless.
  

Eventually, after a couple of months, we broke through the fog and found new footing as a new concept got assembled, from scratch, incorporating what was valuable from the earlier prototypes and going forward step by step, based on actual player experience.



[h3]SPIRE OF SORCERY 2021[/h3]

The version that we bring to you today has the following key highlights:

• Open world for you to explore
  
• Turn-based mode to give you control
  
• Spellcasting as the core activity, with alchemy playing a supportive role
  
• Events that are only partially designed around killing and destruction
  
• A player experience where some things are made “just for the fun of it”, no big theories behind why you can lick a skull or chew on ashes
  
• Decks of magic elements and spell formulas as the mechanic of completing encounters, which combines luck and planning
  

We aim for a game where:

• It’s easy to die for a character, and it’s possible for the whole party to lose the campaign due to taking a wrong turn; losing is actually a part of the fun.
  
• It’s fun to discover how things work in the world: to try exotic fruits, to drink strange potions, and to meet new creatures.
  

And this is our pledge to not screwing up with the development process anymore:

• We update the game every week; nothing is developed for months on end, because everything that is developed is directly related to some already existing mechanic. Forget the theories. Focus on the actual experience.
  
• We design the UI and content for what already exists in the game right now. If we don’t have diseases yet, we don’t design user interface for diseases. We spend time making things, and shipping them, rather than trying to harmonize the two things that we have, and then throwing it out the window when a third thing is added.
  
• We move in parallel with the tooltips, user interface and the mechanics. We’re sick of having buttons that have no explanations, or items in the game that don’t have descriptions – all of which are the signs of a team where people don’t sync, but just do their stuff, and let it burn.
  

[h3]WHAT NEXT?[/h3]

Starting from next week, we’re back to updating the Steam build on a weekly basis.

The English and Russian-language texts will appear in the game first, with the Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean translations following the lead. We’re not sure yet about French and German texts, which may have to wait.

You will see us taking small steps with every new build, balancing things and adding more content. Each new item is there to connect with the existing loop. We’ll be closely following player feedback on the Discord server to understand what the community finds appealing or burdensome, and in a few months, we intend to arrive at the version that, finally, we’ll be proud of – which we will then release under the general Early Access.

We thank you for your trust, and for your patience through the difficult year of 2020, and we hope that your wait would be worthwhile.

It sucks when a game is delayed, but it sucks so much more, when a boring game is released and quickly forgotten.

We’re throwing in our last money on the bet that this time around, we’ll deliver a fun experience that will keep improving – just like we keep improving Gremlins, Inc. that recently celebrated five years on Steam.

Thank you one more time, and see you around!