These Doomed Isles News

Hello, Islanders!

Today marks a significant milestone – These Doomed Isles has officially launched out of Early Access and into its full 1.0 release! We are immensely grateful for the valuable feedback and support from our community throughout development, which has helped shape the game into its final form. Now, we are excited to present the full These Doomed Isles experience for you to explore. 🌊🏛️

These Doomed Isles invites you to wield divine powers, construct thriving island civilizations, and defend against waves of ever-encroaching invaders. Lead your followers, build intricate deck strategies, and unlock powerful synergies to overcome the trials that await your civilization.

[h2]🎥 Watch the Official These Doomed Isles 1.0 Release Trailer 🎥[/h2]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

What to Expect in the 1.0 Launch

The full release introduces exciting new features to enhance your experience:

The full release of These Doomed Isles introduces three major features designed to give you greater control, more strategic depth, and a richer gameplay experience:

[h2]Challenge Mode[/h2]
Choose from four base difficulty levels, adding specific challenges to intensify your run. The harder the challenge, the more MC (Miracle Credits) you’ll earn on victory, which can be spent to unlock powerful new cards for future runs with your chosen god. MC can also be used for starting modifiers, allowing you to tailor each run to your preferred playstyle. This new progression system rewards skill and effort, providing a greater sense of growth and accomplishment.



[h2]Researching Cards[/h2]
We’ve reworked card discovery to offer you more control and reduce reliance on random luck. In each run, begin with a core set of essential cards in the Harvest pool. By building a Research Library and playing Discovery cards, you can add up to three chosen cards to the Harvest pool, so that they can now appear in future draws. Cards are weighted to show up immediately after being researched, and a behind-the-scenes tech tree helps ensure your choices align with current strategies.



[h2]Campaign Mode[/h2]
Following the success of our tutorial missions, we’ve expanded them into a full 34-mission campaign across four gods. This campaign combines learning elements with unique challenges, as well as opportunities to interact with the game’s antagonist. Each mission offers a fresh, narrative-driven experience, with set objectives and card pools to highlight the strengths of each god. While MC won’t be earned in Campaign Mode, it’s designed to provide a unique progression through the game’s lore and mechanics.



These features are designed to give you more control, unlockable progression, and a variety of unique experiences in These Doomed Isles.

Reflecting on Early Access

Throughout Early Access in 2023, we set ambitious goals to make These Doomed Isles the best experience possible, and thanks to your support and feedback, we achieved every single one of them! Check out our Early Access Roadmap below to see all the milestones we reached along the way.



⚔️ Are you ready to conquer These Doomed Isles? ⚔️

Thanks everyone, and have fun!
- The These Doomed Isles Team

(Make sure to join our Discord!)

It all started one rainy day back in August 2021 (it might not have been raining, but this is England so the chances are pretty high). I’d been prototyping what feels like 1000 different ideas but none of them felt particularly inspiring until I started making a kind of Tetris island thing:



There wasn’t much to it, just a fun toy to fiddle around with until I started adding rabbits into the mix!



Oh, and cards too 🙂

And so it really just kind of spiraled from there until here we are, 3 years later, 1 day away from 1.0.

1.0 is a scary thing. Even after the 100s of bugs I’ve fixed over the past year, there’s always that underlying worry that something’s slipped through the net. The problem with bugs when you have a game with this many systems and modes is that, when you fix one thing, there’s always the chance that it breaks something else.

Aside from the bugs, there’s been some pretty big changes to the structure of the game.

Challenge Mode

You now select from 4 base difficulty levels. After the introductory difficulty level you can choose to add specific challenges to that run, which increase the amount of MC you will earn if you are victorious.



What is this MC that I speak of? Well, that’s another of the changes! Instead of being awarded new cards after hitting arbitrary thresholds, you now earn the currency known as MC from your runs in the Challenge mode. These can then be spent to unlock cards to be added to your future runs for that God:



You can also spend MC on starting modifiers to make your run a little more suited to one playstyle or another:



The idea here was to give more agency to players in order to make the whole experience more satisfying and to give you more of a feeling of progression. The harder the run, the more MC you earn and the better cards that you can unlock.

Researching Cards

Another thing that was holding back the game was the RNG of the Harvest, particularly as you unlocked more and more cards. Getting the card that you really wanted proved more and more difficult as you played the game more, having the weird effect of making the game more random the more you played it.

We tried to solve this with the Research Library but it didn’t really work as well as I’d hoped, so we redesigned it from scratch.

Now you start each run with only a very small amount of the cards available in the Harvest (cards that you kind of need for every run). When you build a Research Library and play a Discovery card, you are able to choose up to 3 cards to be added to the pool of Harvest cards.



These cards will now show up in future Harvests. They’re also heavily weighted so that they are more likely to appear in the Harvest after they have been discovered - they even have a big flashing “NEW!” sign over them so you can’t miss them!



There’s also a slightly randomised tech-tree of sorts that’s working behind the scenes to decide which cards to offer, so you shouldn’t be offered a card that won’t work with cards you’ve already discovered or built (like a Windmill when you haven’t already discovered Farms for example).

This changes the feel of the game quite significantly, but gives you a lot more control over what cards you will have available - just be sure to build a Research Library early so that you don’t miss out!

Campaign Mode

The final change I wanted to talk about is the Campaign Mode.



We added tutorial missions in the previous update, and these worked out a lot better than I’d expected. Even though they were just a set of objectives designed to teach you the game, it still felt a lot more fun than I’d anticipated - so I designed some more!

Initially I’d started out simply adding similar ‘learning’ levels for each of the Gods, but then I continued adding more levels that challenge you in a specific way.



It was also a chance to feature the game’s antagonist a little more, so really it was a win/win scenario!

So, from the 5 ‘missions’ that we had in the last update, there is now a 34 mission campaign that’s spread over the 4 different Gods. You don’t earn MC from these and some of the missions have a constrained card pool, but you should get a nice unique experience from each of them. I hope you enjoy them!

Thank you!

I just wanted to finish up to say thank you to all of you who have been playing the game and providing feedback, as well as all of the people that worked on the game to help get it here to 1.0. I always think of myself as a solo dev but, not only are there 90+ different names in the credits (not even including the “Special Thanks” section), there’s also all of you that have made this possible.

So, thank you for your support and your help and I hope you enjoy my game!

Hey everyone,

It's with MASSIVE excitement that I can say These Doomed Isles 1.0 is coming October 30th! 🎆



[h3]The full launch comes with some cool new ways to play, including: [/h3]

Campaign missions for all 4 Gods: 8/9 missions (depending on the God) designed to teach you their mechanics through pre-designed scenarios, and shiny new level selection maps.


Challenge Mode: Formerly called Ascension Mode, we now have 4 pre-set difficulty modes. Players will be able to toggle a number of different pre-set Challenges for each difficulty mode, and they can earn meta-currency to spend.



Meta-progression unlocks: We've introduced a new unified meta-currency called "Miracle Credits" earned from playing the Challenge Mode. You can then choose which Perks (i.e. bonus powers/modifiers) and cards to unlock for subsequent Challenge Mode runs.



Plus improved deckbuilding UI!



[h3]Thanks for all your support! [/h3]

We can't wait to launch 1.0 and for you to start playing with these new features, and we just want to say a humungous thank you to everyone who has supported the game. Launching in Early Access in September 2023 has been an adventure, and one that wouldn't have been possible without your incredible feedback - so thank you for helping us develop These Doomed Isles! 💚

If you'd like to find out more about our 1.0 update, PCGN has written a really awesome article which you can read here.



Talk soon!

Andrew

Hello everyone!

We're excited to dive into the deep strategy of deck-building that drives the core game-play of These Doomed Isles. In this post, we'll explore various deck builds for Cernunos and Plutus that you can create to overcome the challenges that await you. Whether you prefer to focus on economic growth, devastating attacks, or utilising unique mechanics, there's a deck that suits your style.

[h2]Cernunos Decks[/h2]
[h3]Rapid Scaling[/h3]

- Cabin x3
- Land x1
- Land x1
- Research Library x1
- Meteor Storm x1
- Fish x1
- Fishing Platform x1
- Forest x1
- Panning Hut x1
- Refuge x1

Perfect for a slow and steady start to your run, Cernunos' Rapid Scaling deck will put you in the perfect position to take on anything that comes your way. Focus on resource gathering and stockpiling as you try and get as many cards unlocked from the research library as possible.

[h3]Ready for Battle[/h3]

- Cabin x2
- Relocate x1
- Land x1
- Research Library x1
- Meteor Storm x1
- Hailstorm x1
- Ambush x1
- Crossbow Tower x1
- Fishing Platform x1
- Forest x1
- Panning Hut x1

Prepare your forces for the mightiest of battles with Cernunos' Ready for Battle deck. Scale your population, lay traps and be ready to fact any kind of threats that may come your way.
[h2]Plutus Decks[/h2]
[h3]Prepare for Prosperity[/h3]

- Fish x1
- Forest x2
- Democracy x1
- Refuge x1
- Taxation x1
- Hoplite x1
- Land x1
- Meteor Storm x1
- Mud House x2
- Research Library x1

Good fortune will come easily when utilising Plutus' Prepare for Prosperity deck. A gread all around deck that will be good for any situation, be prepared to pivot your strategy at a moments notice and guide your followers to victory.
[h3]The Greater Good[/h3]

- Catapult x1
- Democracy x2
- Refuge x2
- Taxation x1
- Land x2
- Meteor Storm x1
- Mud House x2
- Research Library x1

Grow your following quickly, collect their taxes and keep them happy. Plutus' The Greater Good is a quick early scaling deck focused towards gathering as much gold as possible to use for purchasing further cards to show your followers the path of victory requires sacrifices for the benefit of everyone.

Good luck on your adventures and let us know how you utilise these starting decks, and make sure to head over to our Discord or Steam Forums to let us know what your personal deck builds are!