Aliosso News

We've given our Steam page a new look to reflect the latest changes to the game, which came thanks to the incredible feedback we got through the playtests. If you missed out on those, the new page and trailer will catch you up to speed, but here's the gist of it.

In Path of the Djinn, you now control a single character at a time, each character having run-altering abilities and powers. The game blends cards and dice, with runes taking a step back in the form of consumables that can be applied to dice, used to grant miscellaneous effects, etc.

The game is now a mix of Balatro, Slice and Dice and Astrea. Each turn, you'll roll dice to get them to a desired state, then, by pressing play, cards and dice will trigger to boost your Power, cast abilities or unleash a cascade of effects.

Last but not least, we are thankful to the heroes that grant us the privilege to develop our game by defending Ukraine's freedom. If you ever feel like donating to help them in their effort, now's a great time. We aren't sure we can link to anything of the sort on Steam, but a quick Google search will provide plenty of options.

We're excited to share the new development of the Path of the Djinn playtest, which introduces traveling, merchants, new cards, new runes and finally new die types.


Traveling will allow you to move from one scenario to the next, eventually reaching the boss. Scenarios can have bonuses, like a merchant having a discount, a battle providing certain rewards on win, and so on. While for this version battles are somewhat simple, we plan to make them more interesting, likely by attaching maluses or by showing what enemies you'd be fighting.



Merchants are mostly in the business of selling runes and cards, but you might find that some of them also sell water. For your convenience, merchants will show new wares in exchange for gold ;). The introduction of gold and traveling has been a great opportunity to introduce cards which mechanics are, you guessed it, related to gold and traveling.




Green runes make their debut in this playtest, while yellow and blue ones affect support and character dice respectively, these ones have miscellaneous effects, like traveling to an oasis, transforming cards, or providing gold when sold to merchants.




New dice! The mechanics of some of these dice are triggered by all faces, whereas other types can be seen as a bunch of numerical faces with some "special" faces. We aren't exactly sure if we prefer the former or the latter yet, we definitively want to hear from you about this.




The next playtest will likely introduce one or more travel scenarios, we're also eyeing the idea of making it so that you only play one character at a time, with each character affecting the game mechanics in an important way.
Last but not least, the Ukrainian games festival will be taking place from August 19 to 26, so the next few weeks are going to be really busy, with a new playtest and the Steam page remake.

Dice have become the player's main focus during the turn. Support dice increase power or grant other effects, while Character dice cast attacks when played.

On "Play", all dice will be played from left to right. You can also Reroll up to 4 dice at a time, twice per turn.




Dice can be customized throughout a run by adding minor or major symbols to their faces. The common way to do so is to use Runes, which act as consumable items that, usually, have dice-altering capabilities.





Cards enact a more passive role compared to before. Their effect can range from a simple fixed Power increase to more game-altering potential, including conditioning of the game outside of battles.


With this patch, we're also introducing negative cards, i.e. cards that affect the player in a negative way. We're still not 100% sure where we want to go with these, but each boss will probably have its own card, alongside a card that is applied depending on the environment.

We're eager to see the player's reaction to this change, don't hesitate to give us feedback through the steam community forum or the in-game feedback button!

We're excited to finally put this build out in the open! For this first playtest, we're focusing on combat, which has gone in a direction that we'd describe as more Balatro-like, a game of which we're great fans.



Every (roughly) 4-5 battles you can expect some rest in the form of camping, which, while lacking content, is something we wanted to move forward with.

The playtest will last two weeks, if you wish to discuss or provide feedback feel free to post on the community forum or to use the feedback form in the game.
[h3]What *NOT* to expect?[/h3]

• For this playtest runes have no specific effect, that is, the symbol on each rune only serves the purpose of distinguishing one rune from another.
  
• VFXs and art assets are a work in progress, many cards have no art.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]
The next playtest will again be about combat, but with a slight change of tune when it comes to runes themselves, along, of course, with adjustments resulting from your feedback.

Early May we'll be launching our first playtest, we're looking for feedback on the combat, and that's what the first playtest will be focused on.

It will have a limited time window and we'll follow up with more playtests as we adjust things. To apply visit our steam page and look for the "Request Access" button, it looks like this: