Our Development Manifesto (April 2020)
Warning - This post is super long, but it will give you a good idea of what we have planned ahead for Gordian Quest
[h3]Hey Heroes,[/h3]
It's been a wild launch week and while Gordian Quest is still far from its full potential, we hope you are having fun. We've received a lot of great suggestions from you guys. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting our launch and for the great feedback. As we continue building on the rest of the promised features, we will pay close attention to your ideas and see how we can weave the best ones into the game. We promised you that we would build a game for you and we intend to do just that!
Allow us to share our plans moving forward.
-------------
First, thanks to your feedback, we have identified two key areas we want to improve on - the game’s balancing and its progression system. We will work on the Skills, Items, Enemies and Talents components to achieve this.
[h3]Skills[/h3]
In general, we understand that you enjoy the early levelling stages, but consistently we hear that the deck-building process becomes more muddled as the run progresses due to three core factors.
What are we doing to address this?
We hear you. While the balancing of the cards is an ongoing work-in-progress, we believe in acting fast to enact positive change. In the short term, we are actively taking steps to change up how the skill grid feels, with these quick but consequential changes :
Over the long term, we plan to add these features:
We hope that the above will eventually resolve the current issues associated with skills.
[h3]Items[/h3]
Next up, itemization is also something we are looking to improve on in the coming weeks. We intend to release new unique items, as well as rebalance existing items with the following philosophies in mind.
To achieve these goals, this is what we plan to do :
Beyond these changes to items, we also want to make itemization less of a chore, and to help you find unique items more easily. We will add in more of these mechanics as we expand the variety of unique items in the game, allowing us to be more liberal with handing out uniques.
[h3]Enemies[/h3]
Thirdly, through your feedback, we’ve identified several issues with our current encounter system. As a bulk of the adventure is spent in combat, we concur that each encounter should feel more exciting and meaningful, rather than feel like something repetitive. To this end, this is what we will be doing over the next few weeks to improve on this :
[h3]Talents[/h3]
Lastly, we hear you about the current state of the Talent system. Most of the time, they feel like much less valuable versions of the other nodes, and something that players path around instead of actively looking out for. We want to address this with the following :
-------------
One of the more interesting topics has been the discussions on how punishing the game should be. We are acutely aware that the 4-8 hours per run that we aim to provide for each Act is much longer than a typical roguelike game session (which could be anywhere from 15-30 minutes), but less than a full blown RPG (typically more than 10 hours), and as such we are in a unique spot where we must adapt our gameplay to best meet the needs of you, our player.
For many, it can be frustrating to lose a run’s entire progress after hours of gameplay to a bad decision, but at the same time, we recognize that there are players who revel in these experiences. As such, on top of the 4 difficulty levels - Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare, we will be restructuring added options to augment your experience this way :
These game modes will also inform how we intend to set up leaderboards in the future. This will give each Act 3 different leaderboards for you to make your name on. It’s going to be a heated competition!
Manual Save Option
Related to the point above on being cognizant of the nature of our game, and how we are blending various genres together, we will also be providing an option to manually save the game, instead of auto-saving your game.
Fleeing Combat
Some players have mentioned the unfair nature of losing a run to battles that they were not prepared for. After much deliberation on how we wanted to tailor the experience for, we have decided that we will be adding in the ability to flee from combat, cutting your losses before you end up with a total party wipe. While this function can help you recover from a bad decision, it is not without some caveats.
Fleeing from combat is not a free action, and enemies will get in a round of free hits on you.
-------------
Act II will be available in June late July (unfortunately we have to push back the date due to lockdown inconvenience caused by the pandemic) - together with the game’s seventh hero, a bard. An eighth and ninth hero will follow in September.
Act II
The Act takes place upon a great stretch of desert, populated by various nomadic tribes of different descents, locked in timeless conflict. Somewhere deep within the sands lie the Vanai’s ancient machinery, their long sleep awoken by nefarious forces who seek to tread in the Vanai’s footsteps and continue their mad experiments.
Adding A Flavor of Wuxia
A little bit of tidbit we want to share is that we are planning to weave in some elements of Wuxia into this Act. For those not familiar with the word, it basically means Chinese martial arts. In case you are thinking Donnie Yen or Bruce Lee, think more Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon with some cool AOE attacks.
The Bard
We are currently conceptualizing this hero - her instrument serves to augment her magical prowess, which she can use in various ways. She can use dissonant chords to harm her foes, play soothing melodies that provide boosts to her party members, or even charm her opponents with her alluring tunes. We hope she charms you too!
-------------
And now, we have a veritable grab bag of features we intend to implement, as well as address some of the more commonly requested features you’ve brought up!
A Relationship System
We aim to bring you more synergy among the heroes. To that effect, we will be implementing a relationship system. Through having heroes interact with each other during combat, camping and events, you will be able to experiment and uncover special bonds that certain heroes can forge - be it rivalry, friendship, mentorship or love. Once such bonds are forged, the hero pair or trio will be able to uncover and unleash unique combo abilities.
Better Combat Feedback
To help provide more information as to what happens in combat, we will be adding a togglable combat log. This is in line with our intention to provide more information and feedback, to allow you to make better decisions in battles.
Endless mode
A hotly requested feature, an endless mode is definitely something we intend to implement. But don’t expect it too soon, as we intend to implement it only at the end of Act IV. The reason being that we view it as the ultimate end-game mode that will be able to combine all the content we’ve created and put it in a blender. It’s going to be epic, and we can’t wait to unveil more information on this, when we’re ready.
-------------
This concludes our development manifesto. We hope that our plans for the short and long term excite you, and once again we thank you for your support and patience as we build this game up together with you.
As always, we hope to hear your thoughts below on what we’ve put forth so far. Feel free to join us on Discord https://discordapp.com/invite/tce6YMW to chat with us.
And last but not least, if you haven't already, please consider giving us a positive review on Steam if you like how we are doing so far. It would really mean a lot to us. Thanks! :)
[h3]Hey Heroes,[/h3]
It's been a wild launch week and while Gordian Quest is still far from its full potential, we hope you are having fun. We've received a lot of great suggestions from you guys. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting our launch and for the great feedback. As we continue building on the rest of the promised features, we will pay close attention to your ideas and see how we can weave the best ones into the game. We promised you that we would build a game for you and we intend to do just that!
Allow us to share our plans moving forward.
-------------
Part 1 : Balancing and Progression
First, thanks to your feedback, we have identified two key areas we want to improve on - the game’s balancing and its progression system. We will work on the Skills, Items, Enemies and Talents components to achieve this.
[h3]Skills[/h3]
In general, we understand that you enjoy the early levelling stages, but consistently we hear that the deck-building process becomes more muddled as the run progresses due to three core factors.
- There are irrelevant nodes in the skill grid that you have to path through.
- Card draws may not be useful or impactful, and there is no way to avoid bad draws.
- Cards that come with some equipment bloat the deck, rather than add value.
What are we doing to address this?
We hear you. While the balancing of the cards is an ongoing work-in-progress, we believe in acting fast to enact positive change. In the short term, we are actively taking steps to change up how the skill grid feels, with these quick but consequential changes :
- Your specialty class now gives double the chances for nodes of your preferred type to spawn (e.g Playing Alphonse as a Trapper makes Trap skills spawn 2 times as often).
- Your first epic skill node will always be tied to your specialty class.
- We have doubled the chances of Mastery and Discard nodes spawning on the skill grid.
Over the long term, we plan to add these features:
- You will be able to find items and train under NPCs to modify your skill grid. Some ways you can modify it include replacing unwanted nodes with a free travel node on the grid, or locking down a particular card that you want to draw.
- You will be able to train under NPCs to remove skills from your deck, for a price.
- You will be able to use Fate to reroll a new skill draw. This gives you a limited ability to avoid a bad or useless draw.
We hope that the above will eventually resolve the current issues associated with skills.
[h3]Items[/h3]
Next up, itemization is also something we are looking to improve on in the coming weeks. We intend to release new unique items, as well as rebalance existing items with the following philosophies in mind.
- Unique items must provide mechanics that cannot be obtained in any other way, changing an aspect of a skill in an interesting way, or being a build-enabler. Very powerful unique items may come with interesting drawbacks.
- Common, magic, and rare items must not be viewed as “useless” to a good deck. They must play a useful role in the player’s build by having a meaningful impact.
To achieve these goals, this is what we plan to do :
- Items will be made valuable for 2 purposes - either as something worth equipping, or as salvage material if it isn’t.
- Salvaging items for crafting reagents will open up multiple avenues for hero improvement in the future. Items can also be crafted to be more useful.
- Skill cards on rare or lower rarity items can be Mastered, boosting their early game significance (when mastered skills are scarce), and keeping them relevant in the late game (when many skills have been mastered).
- Skill cards on rare or lower rarity can be removed. This keeps them relevant in the late game (when a lean deck is optimal to make a build work).
- Rare or lower rarity items will have sockets. This allows you to apply jewels to the attached skill cards, lending effects such as a sizable damage boost, AP cost reduction, or additional status effect. This keeps items desirable as the overall effectiveness of a skill that has been modified with a jewel (and is Mastered) will exceed that of simply Mastering it. As a result, items act as a way to add super-boosted cards to the deck.
Beyond these changes to items, we also want to make itemization less of a chore, and to help you find unique items more easily. We will add in more of these mechanics as we expand the variety of unique items in the game, allowing us to be more liberal with handing out uniques.
- Marco the Merchant will run a side gambling service that allows you to wager special coins you find on your adventures for a chance at his uniques.
- Deadly Encounters will be buffed to give out better rewards, including unique items.
[h3]Enemies[/h3]
Thirdly, through your feedback, we’ve identified several issues with our current encounter system. As a bulk of the adventure is spent in combat, we concur that each encounter should feel more exciting and meaningful, rather than feel like something repetitive. To this end, this is what we will be doing over the next few weeks to improve on this :
- We will be buffing Elite enemies and making them feel more ... well, Elite.
- In general encounters, we want to tune down the number of enemies, and instead put a focus on more unique mechanics for enemies to force strategic play, rather than simply assail the players with numbers.
- We want to improve the visual cues of enemy behaviors, so that players can pick them up and react appropriately.
- We want more ways to insert unique encounters on the map, with appropriately desirable rewards. We want to introduce the concept of enemy strongholds, which are side areas that you cannot leave from, and contain deadly challenges that guard powerful unique items.
[h3]Talents[/h3]
Lastly, we hear you about the current state of the Talent system. Most of the time, they feel like much less valuable versions of the other nodes, and something that players path around instead of actively looking out for. We want to address this with the following :
- Every Hero Brings A Global Bonus - Each hero will bring a global bonus to the party. For example, bringing Catherin along would give a X% boost to damage dealt on undead creatures. Such bonuses will be innately available upon acquiring them, so there will be additional value in considering a lineup of certain heroes if you know what an upcoming encounter consists of. Additionally, these bonuses can be upgraded through the Talent Nodes to augment their effectiveness.
- Big Changes Coming to Talent Nodes - Talent nodes on the tree will be getting a look at. As it stands, there are alot of talents that revolve around improving challenge rolls, which are not directly as impactful as combat-related nodes. We are considering more drastic changes, such as removing the less helpful ones and making it such that you can assign talent points directly into talents that interest you, without having to roll for a random talent.
-------------
Part 2 : On Life and Death Issues
One of the more interesting topics has been the discussions on how punishing the game should be. We are acutely aware that the 4-8 hours per run that we aim to provide for each Act is much longer than a typical roguelike game session (which could be anywhere from 15-30 minutes), but less than a full blown RPG (typically more than 10 hours), and as such we are in a unique spot where we must adapt our gameplay to best meet the needs of you, our player.
For many, it can be frustrating to lose a run’s entire progress after hours of gameplay to a bad decision, but at the same time, we recognize that there are players who revel in these experiences. As such, on top of the 4 difficulty levels - Easy, Normal, Hard and Nightmare, we will be restructuring added options to augment your experience this way :
- Classic Option (default) : If the party gets wiped out, it respawns back in town. Life goes on.
- Roguelite Option : If the party gets wiped out, the run ends.
- Roguelike Option : Any hero that dies in battle stays dead permanently. If the party gets wiped out, the run ends.
These game modes will also inform how we intend to set up leaderboards in the future. This will give each Act 3 different leaderboards for you to make your name on. It’s going to be a heated competition!
Manual Save Option
Related to the point above on being cognizant of the nature of our game, and how we are blending various genres together, we will also be providing an option to manually save the game, instead of auto-saving your game.
Fleeing Combat
Some players have mentioned the unfair nature of losing a run to battles that they were not prepared for. After much deliberation on how we wanted to tailor the experience for, we have decided that we will be adding in the ability to flee from combat, cutting your losses before you end up with a total party wipe. While this function can help you recover from a bad decision, it is not without some caveats.
Fleeing from combat is not a free action, and enemies will get in a round of free hits on you.
- In Classic Mode (default) - this function can be used any time.
- In Roguelite Mode - fleeing is only possible with the right escape consumables in hand.
- In Roguelike Mode - preparations are also required as per Roguelite mode, but your attempt to flee may not always work!
-------------
Part 3 : Act II
Act II will be available in June late July (unfortunately we have to push back the date due to lockdown inconvenience caused by the pandemic) - together with the game’s seventh hero, a bard. An eighth and ninth hero will follow in September.
Act II
The Act takes place upon a great stretch of desert, populated by various nomadic tribes of different descents, locked in timeless conflict. Somewhere deep within the sands lie the Vanai’s ancient machinery, their long sleep awoken by nefarious forces who seek to tread in the Vanai’s footsteps and continue their mad experiments.
Adding A Flavor of Wuxia
A little bit of tidbit we want to share is that we are planning to weave in some elements of Wuxia into this Act. For those not familiar with the word, it basically means Chinese martial arts. In case you are thinking Donnie Yen or Bruce Lee, think more Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon with some cool AOE attacks.
The Bard
We are currently conceptualizing this hero - her instrument serves to augment her magical prowess, which she can use in various ways. She can use dissonant chords to harm her foes, play soothing melodies that provide boosts to her party members, or even charm her opponents with her alluring tunes. We hope she charms you too!
-------------
Part 4 : Features On The Horizon
And now, we have a veritable grab bag of features we intend to implement, as well as address some of the more commonly requested features you’ve brought up!
A Relationship System
We aim to bring you more synergy among the heroes. To that effect, we will be implementing a relationship system. Through having heroes interact with each other during combat, camping and events, you will be able to experiment and uncover special bonds that certain heroes can forge - be it rivalry, friendship, mentorship or love. Once such bonds are forged, the hero pair or trio will be able to uncover and unleash unique combo abilities.
Better Combat Feedback
To help provide more information as to what happens in combat, we will be adding a togglable combat log. This is in line with our intention to provide more information and feedback, to allow you to make better decisions in battles.
Endless mode
A hotly requested feature, an endless mode is definitely something we intend to implement. But don’t expect it too soon, as we intend to implement it only at the end of Act IV. The reason being that we view it as the ultimate end-game mode that will be able to combine all the content we’ve created and put it in a blender. It’s going to be epic, and we can’t wait to unveil more information on this, when we’re ready.
-------------
Your Voice Matters
This concludes our development manifesto. We hope that our plans for the short and long term excite you, and once again we thank you for your support and patience as we build this game up together with you.
As always, we hope to hear your thoughts below on what we’ve put forth so far. Feel free to join us on Discord https://discordapp.com/invite/tce6YMW to chat with us.
And last but not least, if you haven't already, please consider giving us a positive review on Steam if you like how we are doing so far. It would really mean a lot to us. Thanks! :)