Long time no see, esteemed ORX-slayers!
We apologise for the silence, but we’re here to break it today. And this devlog is going to be out of character — to demonstrate our drive and motivation, we’d like to be honest and open with you. But first, let’s take a…
Look back
When we first started working on ORX, it was about a single faction — the Rune Guardians, — and a simple mix of RTS, roguelikes and Carcassonne. Well, not that simple, to be honest. But the game was much simpler overall. And the initial demos for ORX showed that a lot of you liked this concept. You’ve shown quite the support back then.
However, our ambitions grew and we wanted to introduce 3 more factions and make gameplay for each of them feel unique. During this entire time, one of our influences was Gemcraft. A tower defence game, which is pretty number heavy.
Then we’ve released into Early Access with the 2nd faction — which, obviously, didn’t get as much time in the oven as Rune Guardians. To cut the story short — we saw from your feedback, that the game lacked an endgame goal or the long-term pull. Simply having another faction to unlock wasn’t nearly enough. Especially, since not everyone enjoyed its playstyle focused around units.
We took this very seriously. And, as the time would show, a bit too seriously. We’ve began to pile up systems upon systems, while discussing and iterating on even more systems internally.
The result? Well, you’ve voiced it better than we could, again. “The game just doesn’t feel like those early demos anymore!”. It got lost in the sauce (ORX?). There was just too much thrown at the player right off the start. And figuring out how to play efficiently seemed like an impossible task.
All the while the veterans would easily break the game, since the balance wasn’t great either. And we were busy looking at them, trying to match their ingenuity with even more new systems. Classic mistake…
Round Three?
Well, now that you know the history, and we took one more look at it — time to discuss what comes next.
Firstly, we would like to go back and restore what made ORX appealing in the first place. We will retain major systems that we’ve added throughout Early Access, but going to make them feel more organic. Basically, make the game feel whole again. This means changing the balance in all its forms and restoring the initial flow of the game, but also tuning and simplifying the new systems.
This is not all, however! We will also greatly limit the amount of systems thrown at the player at the start of the game. Both inside a run and during your entire time with ORX. Instead, we will introduce them gradually — to match your growing knowledge of the game and up the challenge on a nice curve.
Secondly, we’ve decided to cut on some of the promised content from the Roadmap. Some of those promises sound cool even now, like the Throne Room and meta-progression. Others, however, would feel tacked on. So we’ve decided to not work on them altogether. This won’t affect technical stuff like performance optimization and proper Steam Deck support, of course. An updated Roadmap is coming soon!
Finally, it’s time we’ve added a proper tutorial. Well paced, engaging and accessible. With reduced amount of pop-up, text-heavy windows. Instead having more on-the-map hints — somewhat similar to how tutorial works in games like Star Craft 2. Note, that the upcoming update will have just the very basis of this system. Tutorial is much more work, than might appear at first, and we would like to get it right this time.
Glorious Evolution
Of course, we wouldn’t just say “we’re going back” and call it a day. New content and fresh gameplay ideas will still be added to the game. We’ve already mentioned the tutorial and balancing changes, so here we’d like to focus on other transformative changes that are coming soon.
- Memory zone — through the years, and thanks to your and our internal feedback, we’ve come to realize that starting each mission from scratch gets tedious really fast. To solve this, we’d like to try adding a Memory zone around the player’s main building. Any buildings placed in that zone will carry over to the next mission. Resetting only in the 1st mission of each new Act. And to make it more balanced, we’d like to also make more cards Fragile — meaning they completely expire from your hand after you burn all of their charges. Which should also help with deck bloating from gathering all the cards throughout the missions. Keep in mind, however, that this system might not make it into the game if it turns out to not be as much fun in reality.
WIP concept of Memory Zone. Subject to change.
- Tower rework — right now the towers might look too alike. Most of them lob some sort of projectile, which has different behaviour only after it hits an enemy. We’d like to change this and make every tower feel unique. Be it by turning Electric towers into giant Tesla machines, making Poison towers expel clouds of noxious gas or something else entirely. We hope that this not only going to help with different tower combinations, but also improve clarity of effects in a heated battle.
Mockup with finalized animations. The effects are yet to be implemented into the game.
- New win conditions — one of the key components in replayability is, of course, the variety of mission types. We have the Endless mission in the works for some time, but we’re still figuring out how to make it rewarding enough, without making other missions feel meaningless in comparison. But we’d also like to introduce new win conditions to regular missions as well. Stuff like city defence, Helm’s Deep style wave survival or, maybe, even an exploration style mission to find something on the map.
Even rougher mockup of a new mission type. Very heavy WIP, most definitely will change before release.
- Audio effects rework and improvements — good sound greatly enhances the game and even replayability. And right now the constantly repeating thud of arrows might feel annoying after some time. While we can’t really show you anything right now, we pledge to make the rain of arrows sound like a true hailstorm, put some oomph into blasts and maybe even make ORX sound more chaotically aggressive.
There are also more ideas focused around elevating what we currently have in ORX. Without adding too much of new systems. However, those are just in discussion phase currently, so we don’t want to bring them up just yet. Once those make it into production — we’ll cover every one of them!
Hopefully, now you can better see our train of thought while developing ORX. And our undying volition to improve the game. All of this is possible only to every single one of you. And we’re thankful for every player who chose to support us. Be it by providing feedback or simply playing the game. You are what makes the games whole, and the reason for us to keep moving forward.
Stay tuned for the update overview post this December, and for the updated Roadmap and more devlogs coming next year.
From the entirety of Johnbell and Critical Reflex,
THANK YOU!
