Abalon News

D20Studios is proud to participate in the WINGS 2024 Women's Day Event on Steam, featuring over 400 games created by women-led studios. Looking back on our dev journey for Abalon, which began in 2016, we have a lot to celebrate thanks to the accomplishments of the women on our team.

[h2]Kelly Przybylski[/h2]
Kelly and Ross Przybylski

Kelly Przybylski is my wife and studio co-leader. She heads up our marketing and creative. Her efforts were instrumental in growing our community and successfully funding our Kickstarter in 2017. Engagements she's crafted over the years have included community voting on artwork direction, newsletter updates, and my personal favorite "Kelly Comics" some examples of which you can find below:

Kelly has a strange yet delightful sense of gaming humor

Kelly is also responsible for our most innovative character designs, such as the Celestial Steampunk Timekeeper Rats. My best idea was something akin to the traditional sewer rat mutant, to which Kelly replied "Boring!!" and instead pitched a race of sophisticated and dapper rats dressed in steampunk who had the uncanny ability to control time. It's amazing ideas like this that I'm so grateful to work with Kelly. She brings so many totally original and refreshing ideas that allow our game to go where no other game has gone before.

In game character models for the Celestial Steampunk Timekeeper Rats. These character have abilities that manipulate time, such as slowing enemy movement and teleporting allies to the future.

Key Art of the Timekeepers illustrated by our concept artist Marvin Blattert.

Kelly enjoys many tabletop games including Hero Quest, Magic the Gatheirng and Warhammer (for which she has painted a spectacular Tyranid army) - and of course Abalon. For the duration of the event, we're streaming a throwback video on our store page from our initial early access launch (when Abalon was still called Summoners Fate) with Kelly herself playing and discussing the game. Hope you enjoy!

[h2]Laura Palavecino[/h2]
Another woman we'd like to recognize today is Laura Palavecino who hails from Argentina. Laura is an exceptionally talented artist who made a significant contribution to the game by redesigning the look and feel of our UI.

Laura named the signature textured stone look of the HUD "Blue Fate". The UI is more than just buttons and HUDs, though. Laura also helped improve the character movement and interactive flow and aesthetics.



We'd planned to launch our next major update in conjunction with this event, but after some initial testing, we realized there's still a few bugs we need to work out with the procedural generation algorithm before it's ready to roll out - so we're rescheduling the launch for later this month.

Among other player requested feedback and QoL improvements, our next update will include the new "Fast Adventure" featured that was inspired by content creators like Retromation and Wanderbot.

Here's what I can tell you about it so far:

1. Single large world with multiple biomes
   
2. Three bosses to hunt - No Boss Keys - you'll have the location of each boss identified on your map from the start
   
3. Targeted average completion time 80 minutes
   
4. Simplified resource HUD - (Gold, Marshmallow, Dice, Keys) only
   
5. Elites will drop soul gems, but they will be consumable satchel cards instead
   
6. You'll be able to play satchel cards during battle
   
7. No lore for fast adventure (because... well reading is not very fast)
   
8. You'll start with a full party and at your health max

The goal of fast adventures is to fuel faster, more diverse runs that encourage players to explore the different summoners and experiment with creating different teams. So far in testing, the diversity in biomes gives exploring vibes reminiscent of top down Legend of Zelda, with deserts or swamps adjoining forests and staircases leading to underground dungeons.

We're also aiming to address the player feedback around our signature "cards as stamina" mechanic by providing alternative play modes with different advantages/disadvantages. For those that have enjoyed this mechanic, you'll be able to double-down on it with a more "survival" path. For those coming from traditional deckbuilders and expect card cycling, there will be an alternate path that lets you recover your entire deck each battle (but with some attached disadvantages so as not to break the overall balance).


As always, I invite you to share your feedback with us so we can continue to improve the game. For bugs or improvements you observe while playing, it's best to report in game using Menu -> Share Feedback (as this captures a reproducable bug state to make fixes faster).

For overall ideas/suggestions, use our Steam community forum or come chat with us directly on Discord.

And, of course, the best kind of feedback is a Steam review. This helps us understand our strengths/weaknesses and gives our community a boost so more players like you can discover and enjoy the game.

Thanks for reading!

~Ross

Just a quick reminder that our public demo for Abalon Arena (the multiplayer version of Abalon with support for up to four players, including online and, as of today, local couch-coop) will be closing on Monday, February 19th.

If you haven't already checked out the free demo, be sure to login and give it a go here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2352400/Abalon_Arena/

Also, wishlist and follow the Abalon Arena store page for updates on the development progress and future demo opportunities.

Thanks so much!

~Ross

[h3]Greetings D20Studios fans![/h3]

Today, I'm super excited to announce the release of our first public demo for Abalon Arena that will run for the duration of the Steam Next Fest and through the following week for Steam's Remote Play Festival.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2352400/Abalon_Arena/

For those unfamiliar, Abalon Arena is our multiplayer-focused game in the Abalon series. This demo features the ability to create custom game lobbies with support for up to four players in 1v1, 2v2 and coop vs bots. The demo will run for the duration of the Steam Next Fest and through the following week for Steam's Remote Play Festival.

Full details available here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2352400/view/4021220068120318348?l=english

Be sure to Wishlist and play the demo while it's available :)

~Ross

In anticipation of our upcoming public demo for Abalon Arena, I've created a free map editor available to anyone interested in creating and testing their own custom battle maps.

Download the standalone Abalon Map Editor for Windows:
https://d20studios.com/abalon/downloads/mapEditor.zip

Watch this tutorial video to learn how to install and use the tool:
[previewyoutube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arU0evsnPy4[/previewyoutube]

Share your custom maps here in our Steam community on our Discord or email your map data to me directly at [email protected] for consideration to be included in the game.

Have fun creating!

~Ross

It's a 3 vs. 3 goblin snowball fight, but no-one said building a snowman was against the rules! Hope this playful piece from our concept artist, Marvin, brings you a smile :)



2023 was an exciting year with the 1.0 release of Abalon and several major updates, too! I'm looking forward to delivering even more next year, including our mobile build of Abalon and our multiplayer title, Abalon Arena.

I'll be continuing to support Abalon with new features and updates such as:

1. Ability to use satchel cards during battle in adventure mode.
   
2. Persistent artifacts on guardians when defeated/removed from party.
   
3. Equip/dequip feature to customize heroes
   
4. New Game Mode - Fast Adventure
   
5. Addressing more player requests
   

I'm also looking into how I can address player feedback regarding the "cards as stamina" mechanic, which is one of Abalon's signature features. It's intended to provide an element of resource management and put focus on maximizing the tactical position and abilities of your units. A lot of players love it and some do not.

During early access, I introduced artifacts as a way to modify the rules (for example, allowing you to recover cards after battle, increase your max hand size, etc.). While this helped some, it didn't fully solve the feedback. And, interestingly, some players now want to see challenge modifiers to eliminate these artifacts and bring Abalon back to it's survivalist beginning.

Since Abalon is all about fueling player creativity and satisfying lots of different play-styles, I'm thinking some alternate play modes might be the way to go. Pure survivalist route for some. And a more deckbuilding focused route for others. The key is to find ways to balance these changes so the game remains challenging. Maybe a more traditional deckbuilder mode has tougher enemies or you can't take guardians? I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this :)


If you're a current Abalon owner and can't wait to try out our upcoming mobile launch and/or multiplayer features and would like to shape the development by contributing feedback, we're running a closed-beta test. Information available in our Discord in the #multiplayer channel: https://discord.gg/d20studios


You can also Wishlist Abalon Arena here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2352400/Abalon_Arena/


Thank you so much for being a valued player and supporting our games' development. I can't express enough how much I appreciate our community and all of your insightful feedback that has helped us grow and improve.

I'll be working through the holiday season, though expect my availability to be more limited than usual as I take some time to spend with my family. If you have issues with the game or want to share feedback, I'll have Discord and Steam alerts running and do my best to respond. You can also report feedback in game using Settings -> Shared Feedback which will provide me with a gamestate I can use to quickly repro and fix any issues.

~Ross