Hello everyone, happy New Year!
It’s time for our yearly roadmap post. The previous year was tumultuous, for both the gamedev industry and us with the launch of Hellcard 1.0, technology changes, and team shuffling. We are now well posed for a productive 2025, so let’s talk about Thing Trunk Past, Present, and Future.
The Past
Hellcard
The biggest externally visible event of the past year was the launch of Hellcard 1.0 and Bruja DLC. Both performed well, which wasn’t a given. We launched during a period of many, many failed launches of good games that went under without even making a ripple. After all, in 2024 a whooping 18996 games were released on Steam. That's over 2 games per hour!
Yet we hit over 2000 concurrent players, making it our biggest launch yet! And then soared to over 5600 concurrent players for the Bruja DLC launch.
We are now crunching numbers to see if making DLCs is a valid strategy moving forward. Adding one more class to Hellcard would be awesome, but with our limited manpower, we wouldn’t want to delay other projects unnecessarily.
We also have been polishing and balancing Hellcard, with more cards and complete rework on the Tinkerer class. As a result, we have recently hit an Overwhelmingly Positive rating in recent reviews, which we are super stoked about.
We have also been working on console ports; you can expect more news in that department shortly. The workload was shared between us and an external porting company, which allowed us to learn a lot. In the future, we are going to develop games for consoles and PC at the same time. This should save a lot of time since the work won’t have to be duplicated. It will also make the codebase tidy and organized.
Team Growth and Streamlining
On the team front, there have been changes as well. We took in three interns last year and offered each of them to keep working with us once their internships ended. We are 14 people strong now.
Sadly, Matt, one of the founding fathers, decided to take a more passive role in development, mostly due to burnout. He remains in an advisory role but doesn’t work on any specific project, for now.
Last, but super far from least, after 10 years, we managed to compartmentalize the development. Until now, each one of us has worked on all current projects. We had issues with delegation - team members would consult everyone else about most decisions. While this approach was great for what we call visibility, meaning everyone knew everything going on, it’s detrimental to efficiency. And it put unnecessary strain on the team.
For the last three years, we have been trying to isolate the bureaucracy of running the company and ongoing projects from each other. And on the project scale, learn how to delegate. We are now confident this new system is working.
The Present
First of all, we signed an unannounced project with a publisher. It will be our first UE5 project. That’s all I can say at the moment, though ːarchduckː It will be part of the series and Supporter's Pack, of course.
Book of Aliens
We are looking for funding to expand the Book of Aliens team. The environment is adversarial, to say the least with studios firing devs en masse and investors scared. We have a couple of options that we will continue to pursue while continuing to work on the game. The core Book of Aliens team is small now, we can iterate prototypes and design but we will need more hands on board before moving into preproduction.
Hellcard
We are finalizing the modding support update for Hellcard. This completes the Hellcard’s roadmap, encompassing all we had planned at launch. We even have added plenty of unplanned content along the way, so there is a non-zero chance that’s not all ːarchduckː
Book of Demons?
I know, that’s a name you haven’t heard in a long time! In my spare time, I have tinkered with the Book of Demons. Specifically, I remade it to work without path-bound movement.
There is a story behind it, too. One day I woke up and remembered a negative review from 2018 (these tend to burn into your brain when you are a green dev with starry eyes). Someone wrote that the game was “shit on rails” and that “devs made it on rails because free movement would be too hard”. Which was funny since path movement and mechanics were super complicated to implement.
I wanted to see if it would work and if I could rewrite the game secretly to surprise the team. Not only did it work but it’s also fun. Not sure if we are going to do anything with that, though. The changes are too fundamental to be incorporated into the core game’s code.
The Future
Hellcard
We will release the modding support update sometime early this year. This should allow anyone to add new classes and cards using pre-existing mechanics. We expect to spend at least a month fixing issues with it and supporting modders (assuming there will be modders ːarchduckː). This will finish the content roadmap for Hellcard but doesn’t mean there won’t be more content at all. If adding future classes as DLC proves feasible we might add one or two.
Book of Aliens and the Other Project
The work continues. Since we are fully transitioning to Unreal Engine with all future projects, we decided it would make sense to develop a smaller (or maybe simpler is the correct word here) project on it first. That way we will have a better grip on the tech before diving head first into Book of Aliens, allowing us to ensure the the proper quality you expect from us in both games.
Final Word
All in all, everyone is excited about the future, doing what they want to be doing and work is progressing very quickly compared to previous years. So, I dare say, it was a year of hard work but it seems to be paying off. This year will tell!
As Always,
Stay Safe in Paper Dungeons ːarchduckː
Konstanty