Captain's Log: 1.0 is in our Sights!
Attention Crew!
We hope you've been enjoying the Ship Event update! Thanks to our wonderful community for helping us locate any bugs that weren't caught during internal testing, we've been hard at work to get them resolved as we tie up any loose ends from the update.
This Captain's Log entry contains a brief developer retrospective on the update and how it was handled, and it outlines all of the currently planned content for the grand 1.0 release.
As a friendly reminder, if you run into any bugs with the current version of BR, please report them to us on our Discord. We're not actively reviewing bug reports made on other platforms.
[h2]Ship Event Development Retrospective[/h2]
As a whole, we're pleased with the release and reception of the Ship Event update, and we managed to get quite a bit of content sorted out for this one. However, there were some issues that cropped up during development, and we wanted to talk about them here in slightly more depth.
There were several issues that hampered the development process for this update, with the primary problem being that development progressed much more slowly than we'd anticipated.
For context, this update took roughly 5 months to complete. For the amount of content included in the update, this is a comparatively long time. The easiest comparison would be the Crawling Chaos update, which had significantly more content than the Ship Event update and took ~7.5 months to complete. The big holdup for this update was an asset bottleneck where multiple artists had difficulties adhering to internal deadlines. Normally, missing deadlines isn't a huge issue, and with this being a community passion project, we expect it to happen from time to time. In the case of the Ship Event update, it was occurring on such a large and frequent scale that the update as a whole had to be pushed back several times. Moving forward, we'll be adjusting how we handle the allocation of resources to make it easier for us to meet those deadlines without simply delaying them. Just as importantly, we're taking stock of the well-being of our team members to promote a healthy team environment as we carry on to the finish line.
We also made some mistakes regarding how we handled the public deadline. In hindsight, the update release date should have been pushed back a bit, as several developers had to crunch pretty hard in order to meet the August 11th deadline. Additionally, releasing the update so late in the evening (around 9 PM Pacific Time) miscommunicated to our audience when the update was actually going live.
Moving onward to the 1.0 release, we'll likely not be giving out any public release dates until all of the content in the update is essentially done. This both ensures that we prevent crunch and ensures that we don't release something incomplete or break promises we make to our players.
[h2]The 1.0 Release[/h2]
So here we are... the final stretch to the 1.0 release.
This is the update we've been itching to get to. It contains the introduction cinematic to help explain the point of this campaign and what's essentially the entire endgame of Black Reliquary. That is to say, it's the last planned update that will add new content. Here is what we want to ensure is in the final update.
This is a current list of all of our planned content:
- The Black Reliquary Dungeon
- Six new Darkest-Level Bosses
- The Ascendant Hero
- Post-level 6 progression system for heroes
- Updated Skill Info (Specifically for heroes with alternate modes accessed via trinket such as Musketeer)
- New champion-exclusive enemies for all factions (likely excluding cactonids due to technical constraints)
- Activate/Gather quests for Caverns/Catacombs/Exposed Interior
- New Difficulties
- New Cinematics
- Multiple language localization
- Balance Adjustments
- A plethora of small additions and changes too numerous to list here!
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS LIST WILL LIKELY (IF NOT DEFINITELY) CHANGE OVER THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT.
We're looking to release all of this content in one big batch, as much of the content above is interwoven together. (i.e., it'd be weird to include a post-level 6 progression system for heroes if there are no hard quests to use it in.)
We'll be going over some of the more significant features above in finer detail via Captain's Logs over time as we develop them. Expect to see one every 1-2 months or so.
[h2]Save Reset[/h2]
The last thing we want to mention is that players will need to start new saves for the 1.0 release. This was a difficult decision to make, and it was something we wanted to avoid, but there are UI adjustments we'll be making that are objective improvements (Updated Skill Info) and some tweaks to progression that'd be really useful to include, and those require a hard reset.
To be clear, we aren't able to hard wipe your saves ourselves, so you'll still have access to your old saves; However, there will be some visual bugs and a progressional softlock (you won't be able to access the Black Reliquary itself) for saves created before the 1.0 release. Depending on the circumstances, there may be a way to bypass the softlock by editing your base files, but this is not something that we can guarantee at the moment, nor is it something we want to ask of our players.
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It's humbling to get this far and have so many fans of our work, so we're going to give it all we've got to make sure that your patience, fascination, and loyalty are properly rewarded.