It’s been some time since we last posted here, and we have some explaining to do. The last two months certainly haven’t been easy; we’ve had a couple of internal issues, but we’ve managed through them. Now, we’re nearing the last stretch of the development cycle for Shards of Order, and in celebration of that, we’ve decided to take a little time off to talk about what has changed and showcase a few things.
First and foremost, the one thing everyone has been waiting for and the reason you clicked on this post - the release date. We’re stoked to announce that:
It certainly has been a journey, and to finally be able to see the finish line gives us a much-needed boost of motivation. With that out of the way, let's focus on the game itself and talk about some of the changes that have happened.
When reviewing gameplay from people who played our demo and participated in our playtests, we noticed one significant detail: the players didn't pay much attention to their characters' dying. While it worked nicely in the short, sweet demo, playing with this mindset through dozens of fights quickly became boring and unengaging.
We’ve given the player more options to maneuver and protect their party, all the while substantially increasing the punishment for letting their party members die by introducing the fracture system.
Whenever you Revive any of your party members, it puts a strain on your party's minds, adding a fracture stack. Each stack causes your redraws to deal 6 damage to each of your party members, up to 3 stacks, at which point each redraw costs you 18 damage. This puts pressure on the player: do they want to revive and tank the damage, or would they rather have a bunch of useless revive cards that make dealing damage harder? It is also accompanied by a badass visual cue that ramps up the more stacks you have. Take a look!
Another notable change involves the redraw economy. Previously, a redraw cost you 3 time, and that number went down each time you played any cards. This unfortunately came with an unfortunate side effect. As one of you in the discussions pointed out, this system meant that cheaper cards were way more effective at getting your hand full again. Why would anyone choose expensive cards if you could just build a deck out of cheap cards and redraw your hand for less time, delaying the enemy actions?
We fixed it by tying the redraw cost to the actual passage of time. When you play a card that costs 3, it reduces the redraw timer by 3. Alongside that change, we also increased the redraw time to 4. This does a couple of things. First of all, it increases the value of expensive cards in comparison to the cheap ones, because while being more powerful themselves, they are also more effective at getting rid of the redraw time. Secondly, it encourages the player to engage with the positioning mechanics. Moving your party members costs 1 time, and that also gets retracted from the redraw cost, which gives the player more opportunities to make strategic choices. Do I want to play this 1-cost card, or do I want to reposition and potentially trigger a passive ability?
We had to make some sacrifices we had previously highlighted to ensure we released the game on time and in a balanced state. Unfortunately, we’ve reduced the number of playable characters to only 3: The Exile, The Soldier, and the Scholar.
The other two characters: The Warlock and The Bladedancer, were all but implemented; however, coming up with builds that make sense, are satisfying, and don't break the balance of the game for all five characters was proving to be extremely difficult for our small team, so we had to scale down, and decided to instead more of focus our efforts on the story, and really flushing out the three base characters.
Hope you’re not too mad about that; don't worry too much, though; they’re still in the game as parts of the story, and you will get the chance to play them.
As a fallout of that change, since we knew that the players' party is now always a team of three, we were able to design a new skill tree around that fact. Now you can adjust the skills of all 3 characters at once! Here's how that looks:
Alongside all of the content changes, we also focused a lot on the UX side of things. The demo has always felt slow and sluggish as far as combat goes. Having to wait each time you play a card before playing the next one was the main culprit. We took time to improve how combat and playing cards feels, and we think we did a pretty damn good job at it. Each card you play now gets added to a queue, so you can play your cards, end your turn, and sit back and watch to see how things turn out. This is also accompanied by quicker transitions between animations with fewer delays overall. Take a look:
With the release date nearing, we’re still looking for people to test and help us flush out the game, get rid of any lurking bugs, and help with the balancing. If this is something you’re interested in and want to get a copy of the game for free as a bonus, feel free to register via the link below:
We’ve received a lot of feedback and iterated through a couple of different versions, all to finally reach this point. We’re really happy with how the game is turning out, and we’re sure it will be worth your time and money once it finally comes out. The things we mentioned here are simply the most systemic and gameplay-impactful changes; we’ve got dozens of unique enemies, encounters, quests, and stories prepared. Again, sorry for not keeping you up to date for the past two months; we’ve had a lot of work (we still do), but we’re feeling good and keeping the pace. Thank you for sticking with us, and as always…
Stay safe!
Fardust team
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