From the 4th - 11th May, Husk Protocol will be part of the Steam Deckbuilders Fest!
Loads of awesome strategy games are being showcased, so make sure to check out the event. Plus, our playtest is still live, AND we've made some pretty cool updates!
Playtest patch notes:
- No Overseers at map generation
- Harpy and Exploder have been reworked to work with Trace rather than Overseers
- Not completing a Hack doesn’t reduce time to detection
- Countermeasures integrity increased to compensate
- Countermeasures tutorial shortened to account for those changes
- Starting in Tutorial starts with the encounter instead of the map
- After the first room on the map (during tutorials), you cannot proceed straight up and there is a tutorial highlighting the importance of exploration
A little context!
Over the past week we've seen some patterns with people playing the game that made us reevaluate the baseline difficulty that it offers. Specifically we have about a 5% success rate of people actually beating the playtest and the main pain point seem to be the Overseer encounters.
This goes hand-in-hand with a rather overloaded onboarding experience where we try to teach you about all the cool stuff in the game in a very short amount of time and that is not working out great either.
So, to try to smooth out people's initial experience with the game we've decided to EXCLUDE Overseers from the playtest. We're even extending this further to make regular Trace attempts not reduce your Time to Detection if unfinished.
Don't worry if you were a fan of the way Countermeasures worked - we like it too! They will come back as difficulty modifiers after you've won a few runs and gotten used to the basics of Hacking.
The other thing that we noticed is that people tend to beeline it toward the boss node at the end instead of spending some time to explore the map and get stronger so we've implemented a small tweak to Tutorial games that makes it impossible to go straight up after your first room on the map - just to highlight the fact that going sideways is an option and included tutorial text to emphasize this further.
Enjoy the changes and let us know how you feel about them using one of our feedback options!
Feedback is super helpful - if there's anything you reckon we should tweak or change or add, please let us know! You can access the feedback form here.
Thanks!