Greetings our Friends!
It’s been a while since the last update. As some of you know, we were planning to release the game in Early Access in 2023. However it takes longer than predicted to implement all the features we planned for the launch. Please be assured that the game is still in development and we are really close now to bring you the 0.8.0 version!
Therefore, it’s time to share a little bit of what is up to come.
At the start of Early Access the game will feature 3 playable characters, including Johnny “Harmon” Wild available in the demo. The other two champions were presented in June during the Steam Next Fest: Barbara of Brookly’on and Captain Hexxer.
The idea is to make every character provide an “as much as possible” different gaming experience. The core of this will be sets of available skills.
Each champion will have 20 skills available, each with a max level special power. Most of the skills are unique for a specific character, and only few are common for all champions (e.g. Fungal Metabolism or Green Power) or shared among two characters (e.g. Rainbow Bloodsuckers available for Harmon and Barbara).
Currently there are 46 different skills in total. For the last couple of months we were mostly focusing on thinking up the ideas for new skills, implementing them, testing and altering, along with proper assets. At the moment we are missing just a few skills + a couple more max level powers. Aside from that we were working on new Artifacts, where some of them alter the existing skills giving them new functionalities, sometimes comparable with a standalone skill.
As mentioned, at the moment each champion will have 20 skills available, but we are still considering extending this number to slightly raise the difficulty level and variety of possible builds.
We were also working on new game modes and stages as well as improving existing ones.
This includes a new way of selecting a stage to play, presented in the form of a “world map”.
The “world” is divided into so called “biomes”. Initially there will be 3 biomes and the last one (4th) will be added on the 1.0 release.
Every biome will consist of several stages. Each stage has a specific goal within one of the game modes. Three modes are already known for those who played the demo or the Fantasy Madness (web iteration of the game): Elimination, Survival and Conquest.
Each biome begins with an Elimination mode stage, where the player is supposed to defeat a specified number of enemies to fight an elite foes and finally - the boss. The final stage of every biome will be in a Combat mode, where the player’s task is to fight the boss from the very beginning! Moreover, each biome will have some kind of an “endless” stage, where the goal is to get the highest possible score. The one we can confirm for now is Capture The Mushroom, where you need to get to a megashroom and bring it to a magical cauldron.
Biomes are also linked to a set of enemies, where each set (family) consists of 9 common enemy units, several (3+) elite variants and a boss. This gives us a total of 30 unique enemies (commons and bosses) at the start.
One of the important functionalities that will be available in a full release is Merchant. From the game’s main menu you will be able to open a merchant store that allows you to spend gold on Rare Runes for each available champion.
Along with that it’s worth noting that we implement a small but crucial change to how the runes work. Currently every equipped rune increases one property of a linked skill (in most cases: damage). However, players had to have a specific skill to benefit from the rune, therefore, equipping a rune of a skill the player has not obtained yet had no influence. Therefore, we made that in case you have not earned any level of the skill and you equipped a rune of such a skill, the rune activates related skill at level 1. In such a case the skill does not occupy a skill slot until it’s upgraded to level 2, similar to a starting skill (e.g. harmon’s Druid’s Staff). In result you can have e.g. 8 skills obtained by leveling up and up to 5 other skills at level 1 unlocked with runes (and boosted accordingly to the rune bonus).
This brings up new possibilities in regards to finding the best skill builds and makes equipping runes right from the chests more useful.
So these are the most crucial things that you should expect on the Early Access release.
Soon we will provide more details about the release date as well as some humble “road map” of what is to be expected prior to the 1.0 release. Therefore - stay tuned!
For Mother Nature!
