Thanks a lot to all of you for being part of our early build of Swordship. Congrats to our winners, RICQUI, Noeuguedum and Aless for blowing the highscore off the roof. We hope you’ll enjoy your prizes 🙂 And an enormous thank you to everyone for the most valuable feedback and playful times.
We recorded 134 players, who played a total of 80 hours accross 3500 games.
We’ve had a couple of days to wind off, and are now planning our next milestone, which is coming in hot: Gamescom in august. Now, the event is currently cancelled, stuff is happening online, there is a lot of uncertainty. But what we know for sure is that we’ll keep on moving forward. So we started planning our road ahead.
Here’s how we do it:
Keep what makes sense, discard (or postpone) the rest, mash it all together, extract high-level features, sanity-check that we can do everything for the deadline and call it a plan. Here’s what we ended up with:
A lot of you asked for it: « what can we expect from the final game? »/ »how are you going to keep us playing for hours? »
We already have a basic idea of what we want to achieve (a roguelike progression model, various levels and environments), but the devil’s in the details. We still need to answer questions such as:
So the goal of this will be to answer all of these questions (and more), and implement the basic systems that will let us put the game together down the road.
You all had the « chance » of experiencing our image-based tutorial. It was obviously not final, but it served us as a cheap way to see what info we needed to communicate to get you started. It helped us see what needs explanations vs what is obvious (dive cooldown, anyone?).
Now that we have a better understanding of that, combined with how we’ll go about for the meta game, we’ll implement a « real » playable tutorial (which will more likely be a gentle introduction to the game rather than a « tutorial » button, since we hate these as much as you do).
We’ll iterate the same way for the meta game. You can expect another image-based tutorial for the meta-game aspects in the next milestone, which will help us cheaply figure out exactly what needs to be communicated.
The current menu is slick and all, but we won’t be able to fit the entirety of what we want in it. We’re planning on rewamping them (and rest assured they’ll still be as clean as they are now) to better fit our vision for the meta-game.
We want to explore a lot more in audio than what we currently have. Stuff like spatialization of explosions, doppler effects, we want to go crazy with the sound effects. You guys also seemed to love the track, but like everything, it gets boring pretty fast. We’ll try to get another track running for you in this next release.
Two of the major pillars of content will be skills and containers (depending on our meta game discussions, these might end up being called pilots and ships, that’s still pending). In the alpha, these mapped to the dive and the explosion as you used your container. On top of improving what we currently have (cough cough dive cooldown cough cough), we’ll be adding one new skill and one new container effect in the next release.
What these will be exactly is still undefined (although we have some rough ideas already!), so if you have ideas, share them in discord!
I knew I had a french term somewhere.
This « feature » concerns addressing all bugs/unbalances/inefficiencies we observed during our public test, together with all of the leftover stuff we had from the alpha.
Planning for these events requires a ton of work, so to make sure we’re not forgetting anything, this is also accounted for in our planning.
The public alpha test was a blast for us, and we really hope you had as much fun as we had.
We’ll still be testing stuff internally on our discord, so if you’re already there, make sure to stick around. If not, join us on discord: watching how new players pick up the game is incredibly valuable to us.
The download link for the alpha has been revoked, meaning it can no longer be used to get the build. If you really want to give it a try, ping us on discord, we’re not closed to the idea of leaving it public.
Also, remember all of this is just a plan. It does not guarantee anything. Things can (and will) change. We’ll always take the decisions we feel take us closer to the game we want to make, with your help.
In any case, thank you all for being part of this with us, and until next time!