Soulstone Survivors News

Hey everyone!

We have just released a minor hotfix update after yesterday's big update Omen of Spring (read more about it here), and in reality it is only to fix 3 issues:

- Crafting the 3rd Spellblade weapon would not grant the achievement on Steam;
- Heartrending Strike would remove all stacks of Bleed, but not convert them into Hemorrhage;
- Lock feature would sometimes work inconsistently, sometimes being consumed, but without locking the item;

And that's it! I thought it was a good idea to make an announcement just in case you find it weird you get a minor update on your side!

As always do let us know if you run into any issues with the game,
Best wishes,
- The dev team

With the release of the newest update, Omen of Spring (you can read all about it here), a new secret has been found. Are you brave enough to disturb the unknown forces of the void in exchange for power?

Enjoy the special decorations of the Ritual of Love event, which runs from Feb 13th until Feb 26th and introduces 3 new unique Seasonal Skills that once unlocked, are available forever!

PS: The secret will be available permanently, even after the event is over!

Hey everyone!

I am happy to announce the newest Soulstone Survivors update, Omen of Spring! It has been a long time coming, but it's finally here, with new skills, weapons, secrets, and a ton of quality of life improvements and features that were in our list for a long time! Here is the highlight of what you can find inside!















The focus of this update is not only adding new content to the game, but start acting on the topics we mentioned previously. First, we continue adding new weapons and skills that offer new playstyles, along with major balance changes and even the redesign of a negative effect. Second, we are starting to build the diversity of enemies per map we have promised for a while, starting with the Whispering Grove but soon expanding to all maps. And then finally, adding new challenges and continuously improving the existing content, interfaces and visuals of the game.

There is still a lot coming and a lot of hard work ahead of us, and we will talk a little bit about next steps at the end of this post, but first... here is the full list of changes!

[h3]New content and features:[/h3]
- Ritual of Love Event: 13 Feb - 26 Feb
Find new secrets in the heart of the woods and unlock unique skills, if you can! Secret will be permanently available in-game.

- 7 New craftable weapons:
Barbarian: Tempest Battle Axes
Pyromancer: Shard of Chaos
Hound Master: Heartseeking Rifle
Spellblade: Icelord's Blade
Arcane Weaver: Benedictio, Staff of Dawn
Sentinel: Misery's End
Paladin: Arcane Scepter of Light

- 17 new active skills:
Barbarian: Thundering Slash, Overcharged Strike
Pyromancer: Chaotic Inferno, Chaos Eruption
Hound Master: Precise Shot, Threshing Blast
Spellblade: Arctic Assault, Frozen Blade
Arcane Weaver: Sacred Orb, Celestial Retribution
Sentinel: Obscure Arrow, Void Trap
Paladin: Radiant Light, Arcane Mace
All characters: Secret 1, Secret 2, Secret 3

- New enemies:
The Whispering Grove now has unique regular and elite enemies, together with a new spawning system that should help bring more variety to each run. Over the next few updates, all other maps will also be reworked until all enemies are unique per map.

- New feature - Lock Power:
You can now purchase from the Skill Tree the ability to Lock power-ups a few times per run, so if you get more than one amazing choice in a single level up, you can lock one, pick the other, and then on your next level up, learn the power-up you locked before;

- Exposed and Vulnerable redesigned:
Increases direct damage taken by up to 8% for 6 seconds. Bonus is proportional to the damage caused by each attack. Vulnerable also multiplies that bonus by 2 on critical strikes.
Developer's note: The intention with these effects was always to focus on heavy hitting, slower attacks, but with the current mechanics they are too unpredictable and hard to use. We believe this implementation will provide a good synergy that can make heavy hitting skills such as Glacier, Savage Strike and others perform much better, while offering virtually no improvement for fast hitting skills such as Beams, Flurry, etc;

[h3]Rune changes:[/h3]
- Mastery runes can no longer grant you skills from weapons you have not unlocked yet;
- Made it so Critical Mastery rune now also considers bonuses from Dazed and Disoriented into its extra critical damage calculation;

[h3]Skill changes:[/h3]
- Made it so you can now cause a multi-critical attack if your critical chance is high enough, applying the critical damage modifier multiple times;
- Fixed an issue where Brittle would not apply to negative effects such as Burn, Poison, etc;
- Brittle is no longer over-influenced by skills that scale with different attributes, such as Shield Bash, and now provides the intended damage bonus;
- Smoke Bomb is no longer affected by Damage and Critical modifiers, since the skill does not cause damage;
- Fire Orb, Ground Slam and Heavy Strike are no longer available and might return officially at a later date;
- Arcane Beam damage per tick reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Beam now applies Exposed with every tick;
- Arcane Blade damage per stack reduced from 50 to 30;
- Arcane Missiles now applies Exposed;
- Meteor damage increased from 400 to 500;
- Meteor Burn damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Meteor cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Meteor Shower damage increased from 100 to 300;
- Meteor Shower Burn damage reduced from 200 to 180;
- Meteor Shower cooldown reduced from 10 to 8 seconds;
- Fire Wall Burn damage increased from 480 to 680;
- Fire Wall cooldow reduced from 11 to 10 seconds;
- Fire Bolt damage increased from 200 to 250;
- Fire Bolt Burn damage increased from 300 to 360;
- Flame Wave damage increased from 150 to 300;

[h3]Enemy changes:[/h3]
- Made it so the reach of Gammuth's Flamethrower damage area is aligned with its visual area;
- Fixed an issue where the Elite Snake's poison spit might not hit the player when it should;
- Fixed an issue where enemy Void Hunters could become unresponsive if they were stunned by certain skills;

[h3]General changes and fixes:[/h3]
- New additional soundtrack for The Whispering Grove;
- New toggle added to Level Up screen so you can automatically skip Active Skills once you have created your perfect build;
- Added option to disable New Objective Warning messages such as "Eliminate a Lord";
- The game will now let you know how many hidden achievements you still have to complete in the Achievements screen (but not how to complete them);
- Achievements Screen controller navigation now properly implemented, together with other improvements such as filtering for only incomplete achievements;
- You can now purchase skills from the skill tree by double clicking with the mouse;
- Fixed an issue where multiple player skills were not affected by effect visibility settings properly;
- Fixed an issue where Beam and a few other skills in extreme scenarios could become framerate limited, dealing less damage than they should;
- Fixed an issue where the Corrupted Death Knight's Poison Bomb would not show on the ground if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed issue where Bumble's Frost Aura would not appear if you had your visual effects set to the minimum;
- Fixed Scroll area in Crafting panel which was going over the designated area;
- Fixed a few instances where Tooltips could remaing on-screen indefinitely;
- Fixed an issue where if conditions were right, you could pull scenery objects from the Dungeon of Despair that shouldn't be movable;
- Fixed an issue where the Winter Holiday Defeat sound effec would play outside of the event window;
- Multiple UI improvements across the game;

[h3]Community Events in Discord:[/h3]
We are back to running community events in our Discord (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT)! These include feedback events where players send in suggestions about a theme for the game, such as new skills, new runes, new characters... and vote on the suggestions they would like to see in the game, and the top rated suggestion gets implemented in the game! We are also planning a Developer Q&A and of course, we are always hanging out, so come and have a chat with us if you got any questions or would like to know more!

[h2]Developer notes[/h2]
As usual, we aim to include a brief section discussing the update's details, so without further ado, let's delve into a few topics!

[h3]Growing Team[/h3]
This update is landing a little bit later than what we had initially planned, but for a good reason! As we have mentioned in our previous update, we are working very hard on expanding our team a little bit more to allow us not only to deliver bigger and better updates, but to start thinking about more ambitious features we might have ruled out at first. Since last update we received over 500 job applicants (which is mindblowing!) and spoke to so many awesome people already, that its hard NOT to get excited about the future of the game! However what that means right now is that we are investing quite a lot of time into finding the right people, but truly believe this time will pay for itself very quickly in the months to come!

Still on this subject, we are happy to welcome our first new team member, Juan Paixao, a brillian programmer that started with us for a little over a couple of weeks and is already responsible for a lot of the improvements in this update! It's great to have you on the team man!

[h3]Map Diversity[/h3]
This update brings the first step towards improving the gameplay diversity between the maps with new common and elite enemies in the Whispering Grove, but our goal is that every map will have a completely unique set of enemies. As we have mentioned before, this is an ongoing work that will be done little by little with every update to the game, so rest assured that these enemies are just the beginning!

[h3]What about our excess resouces?[/h3]
We know that some of you are out there hoarding thousands, even millions of soulstones and materials and thinking... but what do I do with all this stuff? And... we might have something for you, soon! We have a completely new system in the works that will give you a good use for those materials, and... ah you know what, we will talk about it in more details on a post of its own =P but rest assured that we are working on it!

[h3]Next steps[/h3]
As mentioned above, our next big priority for systems is a way for you to spend your excess resources that does not feel grindy, but instead gives you something cool to try and experiment with. We are hoping to officially introduce this system in the next update which we are aiming for some time in March, along with new skills, weapons and enemies as we continue to move towards the completion of our roadmap and more!

There is still a lot we want to add to the game, so many ways we can continue exploring, and you can rest assured that we are still super excited about all that is coming. I know that sometimes we are a bit quiet, and that some people will get nervous about when the next update is going to be... but we are at it! We are growing the team and taking the steps so that we can continuously support Soulstone Survivors for as long as we can, and we are always around, here, on Discord, should you get any questions!

Finally, I just wanted to thank you all for the amazing support once again, developing Soulstone Survivors has been an amazing journey so far, with a lot of hard work and late nights, but just getting all the amazing messages, emails, telling us stories about things you like (or dont like!) about the game... make all the effort worth it a thousand times!

Best wishes,
- The dev team

Hey everyone!

I know some of you thought this day would never come, but it's finally here! I am glad to bring to you today Soulstone Survivors Winterfall Update! And with it the first batch of new content added to the game!











While this update clearly had a focus on new weapons and skills, the new content added also required multiple systems that have been built from the ground up to allow us to develop new content a lot faster! For everything we build for the game, we have modularity in mind, and with every new block we create we get new tools to develop and expand the game, hopefully in fun ways! While we have the flashy images above, this is far from the full list of changes for this version, which you can find below!

[h3]New content:[/h3]
- Holiday Event: 22 Dec - 05 Jan
Guaranteed to find Bumble's Lair for a limited time to unlock secret achievements! Lair will be harder to find after the event.

- 8 New craftable weapons:
Paladin: Harbinger of Justice
Chaoswalker: Artifact of Corruption
Assassin: Curved Daggers
Legionnaire: Jupiter's Reach
Beastmaster: Nature's Fury
Elementalist: Scepter of Frost
Necromancer: Life Harvester
Death Knight: Greatsword of Doom

- 19 new active skills:
Paladin: Hammer of Justice, Penance
Assassin: Twin Daggers, Smoke Bomb
Death Knight: Unholy Aura, Reap
Necromancer: Unholy Bolt, Ancient Curse
Legionnaire: Jupiter's Spear, Summon Infantry
Beastmaster: Wild Strike, Summon Swamp Boar
Elementalist: Severe Cold, Freezing Blow
Chaoswalker: Seeking Chaos, Aura of Chaos
All characters: Secret1, Secret2, Secret3

[h3]Rune changes:[/h3]
- Now you can also pick starting skills multiple times with Singular Focus;
- Starting skills can now be selected by other characters with the use of a Mastery rune;
- Fixed issue where Mastery runes sometimes would yield inconsistent results, often adding less than 6 skills to the pool;
- Mastery runes will not add the same skill twice if you have two masteries that would apply for the same skill, it will always try to add unique skills if possible;

[h3]Skill changes:[/h3]
- Added new Seasonal skill type;
- Smoke Bomb is now an Assassin class skill, and Backstab is now a weapon skill;
- Changed how skills that deal extra damage on critical strike work to be an actual multiplier on top of the damage, instead of additional Critical Damage Modifier, increasing their effectiveness considerably;
- Increased the speed-up rate of Arcane Conjuration and Call Lightning skills so they don't accumulate as much;
- Paralysis extra direct damage per stack increased from 0.5% to 1%;
- Arcane Blade cooldown reduced from 10 to 8.5 seconds;
- Arcane Rift cooldown reduced from 12 to 10 seconds;
- Arcane Disk damage increased from 450 to 480;
- Arcane Disk cooldown reduced from 5.5 to 5.2 seconds;
- Backstab damage increased from 150 to 300;
- Backstab now also applies a 800 damage hemorrhage if you are behind the target;
- Beacon of Light area increased by 40%;
- Beacon of Light damage increased from 52 to 80;
- Bladed Chakram damage increased from 50 to 120;
- Bladed Chakram rot damage reduced from 500 to 450;
- Bladed Chakram cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Blizzard damage increased from 625 to 875;
- Bomb Barrage damage increased from 70 to 85;
- Chain Lightning cooldown reduced from 8 to 6 seconds;
- Chain Lightning damage increased from 230 to 400;
- Chain Lightning jumps increased from 5 to 7;
- Chaos Bolt projectile moves slower and can fire more secondary bolts;
- Chaos Bomb maximum damage increased from 700 to 1000;
- Chaos Totem projectiles move slower and can fire more secondary bolts;
- Combustion Burn damage increased from 60 to 70;
- Death Claw maximum damage increased from 500 to 1000;
- Demolish damage increased from 200 to 300;
- Demolish wave damage increased from 50 to 100;
- Fire Shield damage increased from 40 to 50;
- Fire Shield burn damage increased from 100 to 120;
- Firewall burn damage increased from 400 to 480;
- Firewall cooldown reduced from 12 to 11 seconds;
- Frostbolt cooldown reduced from 2 to 1 second;
- Frostbolt damage reduced from 330 to 300;
- Glacier damage increased from 650 to 900;
- Glacier area increased by 30%;
- Heroic Strike now properly multiplies damage by 3 on critical strikes;
- Holy Fire now properly multiplies damage by 3 on critical strikes;
- Ice Vortex now applies approximately 30% less stacks of Slow;
- Intimidating Shout cooldown reduced from 20 to 18 seconds;
- Intimidating Shout duration increased from 6 to 8 seconds;
- Lightning Bolt cooldown reduced from 6 to 5 seconds;
- Lightning Bolt damage increased from 310 to 700;
- Lightning Bolt Dazed increased from 8% to 10%;
- Poison Bomb damage increased from 40 to 100;
- Poison Bomb poison damage reduced from 500 to 450;
- Poison Bomb cooldown reduced from 5 to 4;
- Scent of Blood cooldown increased from 30 to 34 seconds;
- Shield Bash skill no longer stuns targets, which is the intended behaviour;
- Shrapnel Bomb damage increased from 200 to 270;
- Shrapnel Bomb sub-projectile damage increased from 30 to 45;
- Smite cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Sniper Shot now properly multiplies damage by 5 on critical strikes;
- Summon Battle Moose Horn attack damage reduced from 300 to 150;
- Summon War Tiger bite attack no longer applies a Bleed for 300 damage, but still applies Wounds;
- Summon War Tiger claw attack no longer applies Fragility, but still applies Bleed for 300 damage;
- Summon War Tiger claw attack damage reduced from 150 to 80;
- Templar's Verdict area increased by 30%;
- Templar's Verdict now properly multiplies damage by 3 on critical strikes;
- Thrust damage increased from 60 to 90;
- Thunder Clap area increased by 25%;
- Thunder Clap cooldown reduced from 9 to 5 seconds;
- Thunder Clap damage increased from 610 to 1100;
- Thunder Strike cooldown reduced from 8 to 6 seconds;
- Thunder Strike damage increased from 500 to 1300;
- Venomous Strike damage increased from 70 to 120;
- Venomous Strike poison damage reduced from 250 to 220;
- Weakening Grenade damage increased from 240 to 350;
- Weakening Grenade cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds;
- Whirlwind damage increased from 110 to 140;
- Whirlwind cooldown reduced from 1.5 to 1.4 seconds;

[h3]Enemy changes:[/h3]
Corrupted Paladin:
- Templar's Verdict damage reduced from 25 to 20;
- Templar's Verdict charge time increased from 1.2 to 2 seconds;
- Holy Fire charge time increased from 1.2 to 2 seconds;
- Holy Fire projectile spread reduced considerably;
- Holy Fire projectile speed reduced considerably;
- Holy Fire damage reduced from 15 to 8;
Corrupted Death Knight:
- Obliterate charge time increased from 1.2 to 1.6 seconds;
- Shadow Spikes charge time increased from 1.2 to 1.6 seconds;
Lords of the Void:
- Added minimum cooldown to most Lord of the Void skills, so at very high levels they will still use all of their skills instead of always prioritising the same skill;

[h3]General changes and fixes:[/h3]
- Attempt fix for issue where on certain MacOS machines the mouse can be invisible/bugged;
- Created all game achievements on Steam, they should reflect on your account when you log into the game for the first time;
- Further performance improvements that might assist in certain scenarios;
- Fixed issue where certain skill such as Lightning Bolt could fire their projectiles into the ground, becoming considerably less effective;
- Fixed issue where Doom and Cursed would not consider Exposed when calculating whether or not they have enough damage to execute the target;
- Fixed issue where Vulnerable effect was consuming 75% of its charges, instead of 25% as intended;
- Fixed an issue where Burn effects would deal 20% less damage than intended;
- Fixed an issue where Synergy effects that from one negative effect could apply another, were not scaling with your stats or skill modifiers;
- Removed invisibile objects from the Caves of Dhal Zhog which would cause strange pathing;
- Fixed issue with skills such as Storm of Arrows where lower FPS would cause them to pile up too many projectiles, being less effective;
- Fixed issue where with a controller it was possible to spend resources to craft the same item multiple times without any benefits;
- Bosses are now virtually immune to pushback effects to reduce some strange behaviour that could happen in extreme scenarios;
- Fixed issue where Arcane Blade would not count how many targets it hit;
- Fixed issue where the Corrupted Spellblade Arcane Overload skill could flash the entire screen with its effect;
- Fixed issue where the Corrupted Death Knight Poison Bomb would leave an invisible pool of poison in the ground if your special visibility was too low. It is no longer affected by this setting;
- Hit special effects will play up until Endless cycle 2. Previously, they would not play in any Endless/Overlord level to improve performance;
- Fixed an issue where if you Restarted a match by either the pause menu or end game screen from within an Endless level, you would restart in the current map, instead of the original map;
- Fixed issue where Totems would not scale with Curse Intensity like other summon skills do;
- Fixed Discord's "time alive" to count endless levels time as well;
- Multiple tooltip and skill description fixes where values might not represent the actual skill values;
- Multiple UI and visual fixes and improvements across the game;
- New seasonal soundtrack and sound effects;
- Tons of small bug fixes across all areas.

[h2]Developer notes[/h2]
As always, we wanted to add a small section below talking about the ins and outs of the update, so lets just jump right in into a few topics!

[h3]Update delay[/h3]
As you all know, this update took us about a week longer than we had anticipated, and I know we just came into Early Access, that we have all been burned with games that just got abandoned before being fully realised, so I completely understand how it feels to be on the player's side of the equation in these situations. I know these might be just words for you, but trust me when I say we are in it for the long haul, for the game, for the pride we have in what we are creating with your help, and for the pleasure it is that is developing this game.

Thanks to all your amazing support so far, the Early Access release has been incredible, reaching more people than we could have ever hoped for, and now more than ever, we feel we have a duty of making this game as good as it can be, but regardless of how things are going so far, we are still a tiny team, which allows us to move very quickly in some ways, but also makes it so the personal lives of each of us have a huge impact in how fast the team as a whole can work. This last month wasn't easy, and the personal challenges we faced ended up slowing development for a while, but thankfully that is now behind us.

[h3]Getting more help[/h3]
With that said, we are starting to take the steps towards a more healthy future. We are currently looking for extra help, trying to grow our team a little bit and to fill the role of Unity C# developer and potentially the help of another artist so we can at the same time tackle bigger features (and oh boy are there some big features coming) AND continue adding content in the multiple areas of the game at the same time, such as more weapons, skills, runes, skill tree, etc. We have a ton of plans for the game, and by growing a little bit with a likeminded team I'm sure we will be able to do a lot more, so if you have some experience (specially coding) and genuinely love working with games, playing roguelites, talking design and getting your hands dirty, feel free to send us your your CV at [email protected] !

[h3]Next steps for the game[/h3]
In this status update we talk a bit about what we see as some of the main priorities we want to tackle on the game in the near future. As you can see from this update, we are tackling these bit by bit. You can expect new weapons and skills very frequently, as for us offering as many ways to play the game will always be one of the pillars of the game, but two of the big features we will start tackling soon are "Map Differentiation" and "Interesting ways to spend your resources". Both are large features with their own challenges and but we expect to take steps towards both of these in the first quarter of 2023. We recognize especially the latter as a major point of concern with players hoarding thousands of major soulstones, and we want to reinforce that it is very high in our priorities list.

[h3]But what about X skill that is crap, or Y skill that is OP, or that crazy bug?[/h3]
Even though this update just came out, we still have a looong list of tasks to take care of. This update brought quite a few balance changes bringing some underperforming skills more in line, but not all of them. We haven't had the time to sit and test all skills just yet on all the different builds they can be used in, so we are aware there are still some that are lagging behind, and some that are extremely strong right now. We are also aware of quite a few bugs and missing features like the crappy controller navigation for curses and achievements, but we have to pick our battles. Those will all come, in time, and hopefully with a bit more help we will also be able to tackle these more quickly in the near future, but keep your feedback coming, reporting the errors here or in our Discord https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT is always an immense help!

[h3]Next update when...?[/h3]
As also mentioned before, we believe a cadence of monthly updates allows us to develop significant new content with quality, so we are planning the next update for the end of Jan/beginning of Feb. With the holidays coming it is time for everyone to be with their families and take a small break, recharge the batteries and come back for full power in the first week of Jan, but we are still around and we might sneak in a hotfix or two this next week. With that said, I ask you for a little patience if we are at times quiet, usually the quieter we are, the busier we are trying to catch up and making sure all is working well. We will try to do better next year with more transparency from our side, which is something we can do, another advantage of being so small, but it is just hard to juggle all the tasks, we hope you understand!

And with that particularly big wall of text behind us haha, I just want to say that we really, REALLY appreciate your support, we don't take the amazing community the game has for granted and without you there definitely would be no game, so thank you all once again!

If you have any questions, or run into any issues, do let us know and we will do our best to try and sort out the issues, and we hope you enjoy the update!
Best wishes,
- The dev team

Hello everyone!

It's been now 8 days since our last update, which for us feels like a lot of time, so we thought it would be a good idea to take a moment and share a little bit about our future plans and the content we are working on for the next major update. We want to be as transparent with you as we can (while trying to not spoil too much the content that is coming =P), and while this is a bit of a wall of text haha I hope it brings some clarity into what is coming in the future.

[h2]Release schedule[/h2]
First, while we like to do frequent and small updates to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible, now that we are working on new content, it makes more sense to have a longer release schedule so we can work on more expressive features to make more of an impact in the game.

Our current plan is to release the next major update around the second week of December, and from that point on, release content updates monthly, which gives us enough time to work on cool stuff, make sure it all works well, and release quality content frequently. In between those major updates, we will continue making hotfixes, balance and smaller improvement patches whenever necessary.

[h2]General improvements in our radar[/h2]
With the last patch, we addressed a lot of the most pressing issues with the game, including hundreds of bugs large and small, refactoring game modes, making sure the game is more resilient and that the initial Early Access experience was as smooth as we could make it. However, there are still quite a few quality of life and fixes pending for the next version.

We are still evaluating which fixes and improvements we will be able to get done in time, but very high in our priority list are some controller navigation improvements, accessibility options which include mouse-only control schemes and color-blind options, more UI improvements, and of course quite a few bugs reported by the community are in our radar as well. I don't think we will be able to finish all of these in time, but know that these are important issues to fix for us and they are definitely coming sooner rather than later.

[h2]Balance changes[/h2]
For the beginning of Early Access, our focus was on making sure that all classes and play styles were fun to experiment with and were viable to play with. The game offers quite a few tools that make it so certain builds will always be superior or even broken depending a bit on your luck, however, we are well aware that certain classes and play styles have a hard time in the more challenging content in the game, such as high Curse levels.

For next update, we want to take a close look at skills and play styles that are struggling to keep up. We will never be able to make all builds of all characters with all runes be equally strong, but that is not the intention really. Some classes will always be more challenging in certain scenarios, and we believe that this variety is good for the game, given this is a single player experience (so far, who knows =P), however, we want as much variety as possible, and for that, we need to make sure that ALL skills can be viable one way or another. This will be a constant effort, and we will make sure to take it one step at a time with each update coming in the future.

[h2]New weapons and skills[/h2]
Probably the part of the game that has received the least attention so far, are the weapons. We currently have a total of 20 weapons including the basic ones, but that is only a fraction of our goal. Our plan is to continuously add new weapons until each character has at least 5 weapons to choose from, and we are very far from that goal at the moment.

With that said, we are already working on a lot of new skills and weapons, and while I still won't reveal what those look like just now, rest assured you will get quite a few new ones with the next update!

[h2]Map differentiation[/h2]
Another big shortcoming of the current version of the game for us is that all maps play pretty much the same. The resources offer some incentive to play on different maps, but, our goal is to have enough enemy diversity and different challenges per map that it actually feels different to play on different scenarios.

This is a big endeavour and will likely take multiple updates to get where we want it to be, as it will involve creating lots of new enemies, new skills for those enemies and making sure that they lead to interesting gameplay scenarios that actually feel different from each other (we don't want to just make green goblins in the Whispering Grove and blue goblins in the Frozen Wasteland), but it is something that is already in the works in the background. It will take some testing, but its a very high priority for us.

[h2]New challenges[/h2]
In addition to the above, one of the areas we want to continue expanding the game for a long time still, is in creating new challenges. Those will come in multiple shapes and forms, with new bosses, new game modes, and quite a few... secret encounters to find along the way. I wont go into too much detail at this time, but what I will say is that we have one of those planned for the next update, and we are developing these in a way that will make future content easier and faster to develop as well.

[h2]Interesting ways to spend your resources[/h2]
While new weapons and characters will require materials and soulstones to be crafted, those are finite and we don't want them to feel grindy or to take too long to unlock. We have other features planned such as expanding the skill tree, giving more meaning to prestige levels and so on, so there is still a lot coming that will consume resources, however, we are currently planning another major feature that should offer nearly endless ways to spend resources, in exchange for cool bonuses and variations to your gameplay and classes.

This is a major feature that will not come with the next update which is still in the drawing board, and it is a challenging feature to design because we want it to feel rewarding and impactful, but not mandatory and grindy, which is a hard balance to strike. However, we thought it was important to communicate that we recognise this as yet another big shortcoming with the current version of the game, and it will definitely be addressed in the updates to come.

[h2]Future content and goals[/h2]
Our number one goal with Soulstone Survivors, is to make sure that there were hundreds, thousands of ways you could play the game and have fun with. We feel like we currently have a really good start, but there are still many more features coming that will expand your choices and overall power level in different ways moving forward.

Our next goal, is to offer enough variety of challenges, and activities to do in the game, to give you incentives to explore all of those ways to play the game. We believe we have a good basis right now, but there is still A LOT we can do in this sense, with enemy variety, unlockable challenges and so on.

And our third and final goal with every feature we think for the game, is to create content that feels well connected with the rest of the game, and that offers very high replay value. Once again I think we are going in the right direction, and this is a pillar for all of the features that are still to come.

[h2]Conclusion[/h2]
With this announcement, we wanted to shed some light into our vision for the game moving forward. As mentioned many times before, we see the Early Access as just the beginning of this journey, and with all of the above, we hope it shows you a little glimpse of the ideas we have in mind. Even when all of the above is implemented, there are still loads of different types of content we can explore in the game, and we have no intention of slowing down.

We continue hard at work on our side, we continue reading feedback everywhere we can, we really appreciate all of the amazing ideas that you guys have shared with us and I'm sure many of them will find their way into the game at some point in time, and we are also looking into different ways we can interact with the community.

Thank you very much for the amazing support, and we hope to have you along with us for the journey!

Best wishes,
- The dev team