Save the Game

May was one of the busiest months I've had in awhile. Deck Builders Fest kicked off the early month while it was incredibly humbling, I learned a lot and was given loads of feedback. During deck builders fest, I logged 23 items resolved in the span of a week. While I'd love to highlight those, previous updates have more details on those (and it felt like double-dipping).

Outside of the fest tasks, the largest was implementing the save versioning feature (about 2.5w). The release list might look a little slim, but this change was a necessary one that I learned about from the folks at Sandfall Interactive and their work on Clair Obscure and the game would cause a lot of frustration if during each demo update I asked you all to delete your save files. Instead, the feature updates everything for you. The remainder of the items were implemented in the spirit of improving user experience.

I've still got a lot of work to do and my focus for June will be more user experience improvements. Ultimately, I need to improve these and implement a better onboarding experience. I've prioritized these items because the feedback I've received with the gameplay mechanics has been largely positive. It is just understanding these mechanics can turn off players who don't want to reverse engineer how everything works (I can't blame them).

I appreciate everyone who's stuck with the project and supported me. Please enjoy the demo update!

What's next?

I've got a long way to go with the onboarding experience. The most significant feedback items that were given to be during the fest were "you need to improve how new player's learn to play the game." Steam also provided playtime data that suggested the same thing. I'm dedicated to improving this to make a more understandable gameplay loop.

Tech updates

Feature work

• save system v2: version control

• visual effects added for who dice target to improve battle state

• card and spellbook selections will now have lingering animations to improve board state understanding. I was getting feedback that it was difficult to recall what you clicked on last, so this should help to denote that

• cards and spellbooks will be unselectable during the dice roll phase. Before, confusion was caused when new players didn't know what they should click during this phase.

• if a card is clicked during the dice roll phase, helper text will animate to note that clicking the dice will progress the game.

Bug fixes

• returning to battle with an enemy defeated, no longer lets you save scum to knock an enemy down. In tandem with this, you would once persist the player's lost health as a cost for the scumming. While this felt balanced, it confused players and was reported as a bug, so it's been listed here instead of in the balancing section.

Balancing

• n/a