Hey all, Fourbius here.
The short of it is, Orestorm Factory has a new demo, with brand new systems, and I think you're gonna love it.
Orestorm Factory has been a dream project of mine for a long time, but its been tricky to figure out how to make it be the best thing it can be. So I took some time away and wrapped up some other projects and came back with new perspectives. And now I'm really happy with the direction its going.
Most of the mechanics in here have been rebuilt from scratch, to be scalable in mind. So from here I'm hoping bulking out content is going to be pretty fast. But I'm not dropping the release date just yet.
Since the last Steam demo, basically everything. Since the last finalised version its been a speedrunning game, a roguelite, a tower defence, and incremental game. All trying to find a home for the mechanics that I've never seen any other game do. But in the end, I ended up back at its roots, and its back to being a pure roguelike.
Explore each cavern, build a base with sufficient resources to summon and then defeat the boss, then explore a new cavern and do it all again. All whilst acquiring relics and experience to power up your character.
Also, we've gone all in on the ores having eyes, now everything other than explosions with eyes is a hazard to the player. Plus look a them!
Since its been rebuilt from the ground up. Here is the bullet points for the things that I think will matter the most.
Stylistically, everything has a fresh coat of paint.
Full rogue like mode, explore and loot four caverns to beat the game.
A dash to speed up mobility and add player agency
Characters now convert ores into refined ores to charge their spells. This gives a better cause and affect on the base building and the action portions of the game.
5 Characters, each with a different starting spell and relic.
50 relics that affect game play in various ways.
8 Curses that increase the challenge in various ways.
A really strong focus on accessibility, whilst still leaving the player a lot to discover. As such, the game is far easier until you've proven your mastery, then the action really cranks up.
A brand new tutorial to teach the new systems. Including a dialogue system I'm hoping to get a bit more use out of.
Two awesome new tunes by Ben Batros.
I've built a full roadmap of what I want for the full release, but there's still a lot of questions I'm hoping getting your feedback will help with. So please let me know your thoughts on the changes.
As a brief summary of the roadmap:
Full character, item, spell, and building info, so the player can make informed choices at all times.
Double the number of relics in the game.
Add some characters with some radically different play patterns, either in the spells they cast or the buildings they build.
Add another 5-15 distinct weapons.
Rebuild the two other bosses from prior versions in the current system.
Add 10+ challenges to add variety.
Enable survival mode & a steam leaderboard.
Smoothen out the new character difficulty scaling.
Assess bringing back roguelite elements either globally or on a per character basis.
Add item unlocks, and potentially a shop system to obtain new items/weapons to the global pool.
There's a heap more for you to discover for yourself, go give the new demo a try!