Developer Roadmap: Q1 2026

Our focus for Q1 will be polishing Act 2, adding a ton of new content, exploring new mechanics, addressing balancing issues, and improving quality of life in numerous areas.

At a rough glance, Q2’s focus will be building out Act 3 content and finalizing all the roguelite elements to complete the core game loop. The full 1.0 release is planned for early Q3 2026.

Act 2

The next Act will be available to playtest mid-January. This will include 20 new encounters to face and over 50 new enemies to vanquish.

Along with Act 2, we’re introducing a new experimental Draft game mode. Inspired by deck builders, players can draft a new party with power level strong enough to start Act 2, allowing players to immediately jump in without having to replay Act 1 every time.

New Content

We’ll be adding a whole bunch of new content to accompany the Act 2 playtest release, so expect to encounter loads of new builds and possibilities:

• Over 60 new items, almost doubling the current item count.

• ~20 New blessings, both general and class specific

• ~10 New party artifacts

• ~10 new mystery events with new upgrades to encounter

These will initially be available immediately, while some will be locked behind Achievements and meta progression as those are built out later.

Other new features we’ll be adding in Q1 are:

• Monster Compendium: view detailed information on enemies you’ve encountered

• Item Codex: browse all unlocked items

• secret and locked rooms, and discoverable lore in maps

Balancing

We understand that the difficulty in the Demo is easy – and more apparently so, as you level up heroes and get more accustomed to the gameplay. We want to assure you that we intend for an overall higher difficulty upon final release. As we work to get there, expect constant balance changes while we figure out power scaling throughout Acts 2 and 3.

Some changes you can expect next month are:

• Balancing specific items and abilities that are currently overperforming

• Strengthening late game enemies to pose more of a threat as your party goes stronger throughout the run

• Increasing the difficulty of “Hard” to feel significantly harder than “Normal”

Some hero specific balancing you can look forward to:

• Re-working Stealth: there’s been a lot of confusion on how the mechanic works, and we’ll be improving it to better match what the mechanic does in a more traditional RPG sense

• Paladin Ultimate: the current Ultimate is more difficult to pull off than we had hoped. Expect a different ability to replace it, while this ability will be tuned down to a normal ability

• Knight Ultimate: we don’t want the Knight to feel silo’d into playing Shield/tank builds, so the Ultimate will now change based on what stance the Knight is currently in.

• Monk: consistently over-performing – expect changes to bring her in line with other heroes

New Hero: Ranger

The next hero being added to the roster will be a Ranger. This class will be focused on archery with an arsenal comprising pets/companions, tracking, and traps. We’ll begin development this quarter, but she won’t be playable until Q2.

Along with the Ranger, we’ll be creating 1 new subclass, and some new abilities for each existing hero as well. These will drop as soon as they’re ready throughout Q1 in the playtest builds.

New Difficulties

We’ll be adding the Forsaken I and II difficulties for playtesters, alongside Act 2 in January. These difficulties not only increase the stats of enemies but introduce new “Affixes” which imbue random enemies with different powers and behaviors. We’re excited to continue building out this system which will introduce more chaos and variability during each encounter.

New Mechanics

There are several mechanics that we’re looking into exploring – these aren’t final commitments of what we’ll add, but are candidates we’d love to incorporate after figuring out the technical complexity of implementations and how they feel during game:

• Interactables during combat: activating/deactivating shrines, exploding barrels, droppable powerups, etc. Anything that a hero can interact or use during battle

• Environmental/terrain effects: pools of fire, oil spills, frozen ground, poisonous clouds, unwalkable or blocking terrain – effects that place emphasis on movement and positioning

• Adding new options such as purging or re-rolling abilities while visiting Rest Sites

• Allowing hero party sizes of 1-4, instead of always 3. This will allow up to 4 player co-op as well.

Other Quality of Life Improvements

Feedback has been amazing, and we’ll be implementing a bunch of QoL features. While this is not the full list of everything we’ll tackle, some notable improvements you can expect in Q1 are:

• Auto-looting: an option to toggle on/off auto-looting gold and chests on the ground after a level ends. We’ll let the player decide how much immersion they’d like here

• AI targeting behavior improvements

• Improved UX around character inspection to easily view relevant info of enemies

• Enabling team-based gold in multiplayer for easier sharing and smoother merchant experiences

Final Notes

The reception to the demo has been incredibly positive, and we’re so happy that you’ve enjoyed playing it!

Playtesting for Act 2 begins January 2026. If you’re interested in participating, please fill out this form. Finally, join our Discord if you'd like to follow development or stick around and chat with the community!