Update log
Full Slay the Spire update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Compatibility
- Performance
New month, new Neowsletter :)
As all of us at Mega Crit are hard at work on Slay the Spire 2, we figured we’d start shifting these posts towards news about the game.
Starting this issue, we're also posting on Steam! If you're reading this on Steam, know that on our new and updated website you can sign up to receive these monthly Neowsletters straight into your email inbox (if that's your preference).
Okay, on with it!
Slay the Spire 2 Dev Update
Most of the team is hard at work making the game better while I slack off and write this announcement. Speaking of announcements, we're working on something called a "Gameplay Trailer". Hopefully, we'll be able to show it off this year, but if not— I apologize! Trailer-making is not really our forte but we've enlisted some help to make sure that everyone gets to see a lot of exciting gameplay soon enough.
In the development department, we've been running private playtests for about 4 months now and the game has been ported to Godot and stabilized. Currently, our core focus is on adding more content so the game is packed full of interesting enemies, choices, and the silliest of situations.
In parallel, we've been improving performance and increasing compatibility on a wide range of devices (at least for our desktop release). We have high confidence that we'll be entering Early Access with a PC, MacOS, and Steam Deck(tm) compatible build. Yes, Linux is also likely. We see you! There are currently no plans for Slay the Spire 2 to run on VR/XR/AR or any other R-ending piece of hardware on Early Access launch. I'm sure nobody is surprised by this news but that's okay.
Why a Sequel?
This is a question we get often and I'm happy to answer! Why are you working on a sequel? Why not expand Slay the Spire instead? Let's get into it!
For those not in the know, the first Slay the Spire was developed over 2.5 years before we hit Early Access. Myself (Casey Yano) and Anthony were programming, designing, and arting (this is the official term for making art in video games). We enlisted the help from a handful of contractors to polish up the rough edges and hide some of our shortcomings. This was done by various illustrators, animators, trailer editors, and of course our composer, Clark Aboud who's been with us the whole way and now Slay the Spire 2!
It's difficult to fully explain how quickly and chaotically we scrapped together Slay the Spire. There's no guarantee that any indie game with no reputation will sell more than 10,000 copies. Spending time writing clean, editable, and maintainable code for such a project seemed foolish. Commented code was sparse, issues were hastily patched, systems were cut or completely redone often. This happens in games with exploratory game mechanics. Big shocker!
On top of this, only about half of my time was spent programming the game, with the rest spent in technical art, QA (my former job!), UX design, and writing things like this. Strangely, writing blogs comes the most naturally to me. It's not beautiful prose but I enjoy the process.
With this in mind, I'll fire off some quick bullet points to the "Why a Sequel?" question:
Undoing many of my sins in the codebase
Cleaner and more expandable architecture
Improving the game's performance so we can add more stuff
Migrated to a higher compatibility game engine
Forming and growing a team
Source