If you've been wondering where the heck I've been all week, I've been knee-deep in a bunch of 2.0-related changes and updates for Skyward:
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Skyward_Collapse_-_Post_Release_Notes#Beta_1.014I'm really excited about this stuff, but it's a huge undertaking and taking me a bit longer than I'd hoped. I look to be on track to finish this stuff today, but I really don't want to do an update of this magnitude right before the weekend; then if you guys find some game-breaking bugs, I have to work on the weekend to fix them. And even if you don't find anything, I'll be checking my phone in paranoia all weekend, looking for telltale emails or mantis reports.
Also due to the scale of this particular update, I'm going to be releasing this as a beta (solid idea, Bluddy). Aka, this will go out in the beta branch through our in-game updater only, and won't be released on Steam at all for now. We'll then have a short string of beta updates (probably) as we tweak and tune and test this next week with folks here. Once everything seems good to go, then I'll switch back and do another official update that will push this out to everyone.
My main concerns with this upcoming release are bugs and balance. Conceptually I think all this stuff is great, and it feels great in practice (not just sounding good on paper). At least to me. But so much is changing with the bandits, the monster caves, the ally camps, etc, that it really needs to have some testing with balance to make sure that I didn't make the game impossible or something for people on certain difficulties, etc. That hasn't been my experience, but I'm only one person and can only test so much while also implementing all of it.
On that subject, there are a goodly number of revisions coming in terms of the resource model (town specialization, building upgrades), so on the flip side I want to make sure those aren't trivializing any aspects of the game. Plus the soul cost on mythologicals is something we may or may not keep. So I'd rather have that experimentation be in a beta branch rather than official. Actually, the new embassy thing is somewhat similar, in that I want to make sure it's not too powerful. Same with some changes to Flowers, which are yet to come.
And actually, I want to see how the added complexity of the new unit defensive specializations plays out with more people. My experience is that it doesn't make much difference on the base difficulties, but on higher difficulties I expect it to matter a lot.
Anyway, so there are several competing forces here making the game both easier and harder in various ways, and making things a lot more varied and interesting as the ages progress in general. I want to see how that balances out in the hands of more people than just myself.
Somewhat side note: I don't think that these changes increase the baseline complexity of the game -- for new players, I mean. It does make things more complex in a good way at the upper end of the skill scale, but that's rather the idea. I also don't think that this is going to be much cause for relearning the game for anyone; particularly not for the more casual players of the game. At a higher level in particular it will require rethinking a great many strategies of how to go about defeating the game, but there again that's the idea. Overall there are now a lot more viable strategies to winning, I think.
Questions or thoughts prior to the release of this, always feel free to let me know!
