Hey Ponderers!
Another dev status update coming your way! I had some insight that perhaps the best way to communicate where I am in this release sprint is to write out the content roadmap that will lead to release.
--The Final Release Content Pass--
The Beginning (Magic + Scholar) <-- Started this phase in October 2025
The World / New Druidry
The Workshop
Alchemy, Part 1
Alchemy, Part 2
Rituals, Part 1 <-- We are here, more than 60% done
Rituals, Part 2 + The End
New Game+ and Achievements
Each section on this map is not the same size. Rituals, Part 1, for example, is likely the longest section. The map also doesn't include everything, like the large amounts of Quality of Life I'm injecting into the game. But I believe this is the best way to communicate where we are and what to expect.
I want to reiterate that when this final content pass is complete is when I'll announce the release date. (ie. after New Game+ and Achievements) There'll still be some small todos to get this release fully complete, including things like controller support, mac support, and some branding stuff like trailers.
I also want to reiterate that I have no intention of gathering public feedback before the all the remaining major pieces are in place. Once the game is released, however, I will most certainly be parsing and implementing any feedback to continue to grow and polish the game.
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The beginning of rituals has been challenging, as it has been in its previous iterations. Historically, its been the point where the game starts to buckle under its own complexity and becomes very hard to develop. Keeping things like attributes and upgrades fresh becomes time consuming. This is also why v0.6 didn't include it.
However, my approach has been very different this time. Mentally, I'm far more prepped. When scaling a mountain, I've found meditating at the bottom incredibly useful. Letting the solutions come to me rather than trying to force it and create unsatisfying results.
The game's foundation is also far more robust this time around. The new mechanics and tweaks to the old mechanics has built the scaffolding required to hold this section's complexity. There is a ton of design space for creating interesting ritual effects and creating meaningful upgrades for the player to invest their new-found resources into.
The other major challenge here is finding out that the formulas you used to get here don't serve this part of the game.
For example, I found out when I hit rituals, that treating Mana as a unique resource that doesn't scale as well as other resources creates a massive disparity when reaching the new set of spells that rely on Blaze. If Blaze eventually out-scales Mana, dragon-spell costs will eventually become a non-issue. And so I had to tweak the formulas that I've used and bring Mana up to the scaling of the other resources, which messes with EVERYTHING. And it is so hard to tell how this impacts the earlier sections of the game without replaying it. Not to mention that a player's build can have a massive impact on how fast they scale at certain parts.
This is also why I've needed to do a full content pass from the beginning, because part of the major changes I made in this pass were massive tweaks to the capacity formulas. I've wanted capacities to be way less of a constraint in this version so now all capacity attributes scale at x1.08/level. (Instead of v0.6's x1.02/level, I believe.) This is a massive change. The math works out to: 100 attribute levels create x300 more capacity. For more context, this means when you hit Alchemy for the first time, your knowledge should already be in the trillions. When hitting Rituals your knowledge will be in the septillions. This has required me to tweak the cost of almost everything in the game, post-world.
But again, these formulas tweaks are where community help and feedback will kick in hard. Once the game is in your hands there will be a lot of polishing to do.
'Til next month!
-Marple