Hey Everyone! First of all thank you so much, to say that all the support, love and bugs have been overwhelming would be an understatement! We did not expect this much, and we are so happy and thankful to all of you! In Fact since Thursday last week we have already sold over 13,000 Copies! Which is absolutely amazing Obviously this means that there are a bunch of bugs, issues and other balance concern we have to address, so I'd figured we would give you and update of where we are at and whats happening next! Right now our main priority is Stability, Balance & General Game Health. We've identified a few problems we tackle first:
Bugs & Stability Issues: This is kinda a given, we will continue ship fixes prioritizing more severe bugs first!
Act 2 & Act 3 is too hard: We think the later acts are too difficult, and that the spikes between the acts are too severe. We did a quick fix earlier this weekend but more work to bring them inline with Act 1 will be coming, some Portal Heralds might also be nerfed individually to keep them inline.
Veteran/Older characters are too weak: Currently your older characters tend to scale more poorly than just cycling through new Children and Spouses. This is not our intention. We like the idea of compensating new characters and making them have more potential since it helps prevent runs feeling over just because you loose a few main characters. But clearly this has swung too far in the other end. We will be doing a few buffs to older characters like reducing Infirmary Costs, Increasing leveling rate at higher levels and changing relation stat bonuses to also apply to existing characters.
Stamina management is too rough: Enough said, stamina management is hard to balance, especially in the early game when you family roster is still small. We will continue to tweak the stamina values to make it more lenient, we are also looking at heavily buffing Recovery Facility which is way to inefficient right now.
Chroma Is too punishing to use: We have seen some players use Chroma more liberally really getting punished in longer expeditions and while we want Chroma to bear real consequences they don't have to be quite this severe.
Character Relations are too slow: We think progressing through the relations are going a tad too slow for what we'd like. It's especially important that you actually have time to explore the various late game classes before the game is over!
Of course there are additional pick-ups we plan to do like allowing you to delete save files in-game or buffing expedition healing encounter and more!
We hope to address most if not all of the above changes during the next couple of days. We are also currently working on the first content update, this one will be adding a bunch of new campaign modifiers, half of which are designed to spice up your next round with some wacky rules, the other half will allow you to turn off parts of the game you might prefer not to play with. Like Stamina or Permadeath. This update will hopefully ship end of week, or next week, but time will tell since we are still focusing on the above. Here is a little teaser, can you spot what is wrong with this picture?
We are all still reeling a bit after the crunch that is has been the last months leading up to launch. Once the game is more stable the team will be taking a much much needed break, we will likely already begin winding down from the start of the next week. As for future updates, nothing is set in stone yet. Once the dust has settled and we have an overview over our financials, we will plan accordingly. I know that we would all love to give this game more love, and there is many more places we can go, but at the end of the day it will depend on what we can afford.
We are 3 people working on this, so I cannot promise the world, but we will do our best!
If you ever want to chat or here more about what is happening day to day, please consider joining our Discord! Thanks again everyone!
/Josh, Nina & Nicos - The Chromatic Ink Team