KeeperRL News

In the last news update I revealed that KeeperRL will leave Early Access in the next (major) patch, and that it will bring some big gameplay changes. It's finally time to share some with you. I'll only write about features that are already implemented and working.

[h2]New world map[/h2]


Overhauling the world map has been my biggest goal in the past few years. It took a ridiculous amount of effort, especially considering that the end result is so obvious and simple. Here are its main features:

• Bigger: having 40x the area of the old world map, it adds space for much more content and esthetics. It'll give you an all around better experience when traveling in your conquests.
  
• Real biomes: the types of tiles on the world map will correspond to the biomes of the actual locations. You'll find white dragons in snowy areas, lizardmen in the deserts and dwarves in the mountains. Placing your starting position marker will also determine the biome of your home map.
  
• Fog of war: initially a small area is revealed, where you are free to choose your starting position. As you conquer tribes, more parts will become visible. This is so that players are not overwhelmed with information and all the possible starting locations right at the start of the game. The feeling of exploration and more visual appeal were also big reasons for it.
  
• Minor villains: in order to make the world feel more alive, the map will contain a lot of minor locations that you can visit that will not be relevant to your progress (or will they???).
  
• Difficulty increase: since the world will offer way more enemies, their difficulty will scale with the distance from your home map. The most faraway enemies will have their stats increased in the order of +100. This will also require scaling up the player's strength, which brings me to the next part.
  

[h2]Power scaling[/h2]
In order to conquer the most difficult villains, the player will need to acquire very powerful units. This will be achieved mainly through two new mechanics:
[h3]Uncapped combat experience:[/h3]

• Minions will become ridiculously powerful as they kill tougher enemies. This is a feature that was once present in KeeperRL, but got removed in the name of balance. Now I say
• *** balance, as it is immensely fun.
  
• Ok some balance is still needed. To realize the gains, you will have to provide more and more luxurious quarters to your superhero troops. It will force you to pause your conquest every now and then, and offer the opportunity for some fun dungeon design work.
  
• To counter the potential scenario of losing a few powerful units and the lack of motivation to continue playing, enemies will now attempt to capture your minions instead of killing them. This always leaves you an option of winning them back in the next attack.
  
• To keep your regular units from dying in battles of champions, I've added the concept of sharing experience between the team, so even a single beefed up team member will make the whole team useful.
  

[h3]Scaling the quality of crafted equipment:[/h3]
Another avenue for improving your army will be a new ability of crafting high quality items, with up to +100 bonuses. This will require some work: first you'll have to attract or capture highly skilled craftsmen, and after that provide them with upgraded forges. The highest tier forge will only be possible to build in highly specific, rare and dangerous locations.

[h2]Achievements[/h2]
This is a feature that I've left for the end of development. There are currently 31 achievements implemented, ranging from straightforward goals, to finding hidden content and doing tricky challenges. Hopefully they give you some extra fun!

[h2]1.0 Release time frame[/h2]
There are more big features in the plans, but I'll keep them secret until I have at least working implementations. Besides adding cool stuff, I'm also going to spend a lot of time playtesting and balancing everything. Winning the game now takes dozens of hours, so it's a pretty daunting task. I regularly update development builds, so you can get an early glimpse if you want. Visit the discord server for details.

All said, the progress has been very good, so I'm hereby committing to the first quarter of 2024. Wish me luck :).

When I launched the Indiegogo campaign to fund KeeperRL nine years ago, I promised a 1.0 release by the end of 2014. This kinda didn't happen, but I've always been committed to hitting that milestone some day. It's just that I never felt it was the right time for it. Well that time is finally coming, and I will explain the reasoning behind my decision.

The way I see KeeperRL is, first and foremost, as my job, as it has been my main source of income for the last eight years. Even though there have been swings in the sales, they've mostly been stable over the years, affording me a comfortable life. Looking at things financially, it was just a wise decision to keep working on it instead of moving on to something else.

On the other hand working on the same thing for so many years is very tiring, and can hinder your personal growth. I've been yearning to start fresh for a long time, and I envy other creative fields, where projects take months instead of years to finish. As some of you may know, I actually have started quite a few projects on the side, but they've been much smaller in scope and not really intended to make money.

The financial and creative components have more or less cancelled each other out, leading me to the deciding reason for KeeperRL's long development time, which is that I've always felt it has a lot of unrealized potential. I've heard similar comments from many people over the years. Because I'm a very stubborn person with big dreams, I've kept going back to the drawing board looking for ways to improve the game and make it more enticing and replayable, aspiring to make it as good as some popular games in the genre, such as Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.

In the last few months I've had some breakthrough ideas on how to improve KeeperRL, and their initial implementation has been very promising. With this in mind I've decided that the time to leave Early Access is now or never. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I need to put an end to my "one more feature" mindset and finally reach the goal or admit defeat. The second is that releasing major features in the 1.0 update is important for the game's promotion, as it brings back old players, and catches the attention of press and influencers, hopefully leading to decent sales on launch day. And it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to put out as meaningful an update as this one.

With the big announcement out of the way, I'd like to add some caveats. First of all, I don't intend to make the 1.0 update final, and it's very likely that I'll keep working on KeeperRL to some extent. Of course these won't be big updates, because I will finally start maintaining save and mod compatibility. I'll also be 100% committed to fixing bugs, performance, and other issues. The second caveat is that I still have no idea how long releasing the coming update will take, so there is no release date yet. Besides working on new gameplay, I also have to cross off things like proper sound effects, Steam achievements, hiring a marketing specialist, etc. It will very likely be 2024 before everything is done. It may be disappointing that there won't be any (major) official patches out before then, but this is the way it has to be.

I'm going to write another post soon revealing all of really cool stuff that I have been working on. If you're impatient, and would like to get more involved, I recommend popping in on Discord, where I often post updates and share development builds.