Devlog #4 - Putting the Progress in Run Progression

Last week was our third update to Malys, bringing you a brand new region, beta access, and more. Yep, it’s been a busy (and cold!) winter here in Melbourne as we’ve been making adjustments big and small to the game based on your feedback!

We’ve pulled the beta down for now, but never fear - we’ll have it back up with our upcoming update for those of you who can’t wait to dig in to the changes we’re investigating.

As we mentioned last devlog, we were really keen to hear your thoughts on exorcisms. There are a lot of layers to exorcisms working well and how we intend - from the multiple stages you’ll encounter, requirements for those stages, lesser demons compared to demons compared to region bosses - so hearing from so many of you on what you like and don’t like has been super useful. A lot of the comments have been around infinite card draw - which while feeling kind of fun, is also a little broken in terms of experience. We’re pleased to see Ashed cards have helped with the feeling of infinite card draw becoming far too powerful, and that that’s helped level out the balance in places.

We’re focusing our next update on a lot of moment-to-moment cardplay, quality of life issues, and run progression - trying to encourage different opportunities for choice, run variation, and cardplay in builds as well as ensuring you have all the information you need to make choices during exorcisms.

For many of you, you’d been mentioning having difficulty in understanding each part of the exorcism. You need to know how much damage you’re dealing, taking, buffs and debuffs applied, stacks of those - the list goes on. At launch, we didn’t have nearly as much implemented to help you understand what was happening, when, and why. We’ve made a bunch of changes around this to make things a little clearer. Improvements to animations, VFX, tooltips and general UI/UX fixes have brought these things a little closer to where we’d like them to be. So far, the feedback has been super positive that this is feeling good and much improved, and a lot easier to follow what’s happening in game.

To help address this further, especially around demon intent and damage display (whether it be from a demon attack, or on a card you’re about top play), we’re building entirely new systems to better display the information you need to make decisions more accurately. This will include more information on what the demon will do next (going into more depth on the tooltip as well), and ensuring that any numbers you see are the numbers that will actually be applied. This is a big behind-the-scenes rework but we’re making good progress, and depending how things go, may even make it into this next update!

There’s also been a lot of conversation around difficulty - some exorcisms have been feeling far too hard, or simply grueling in the case of Mammon. We’re pleased to see that with this update a lot of you reporting Mammon is much improved, but there’s still some issues around the gameplay that’s making it hard to feel like you as the player can get the upper hand. Dysthymia has had similar reports, so we’re going to continue to tweak. These should be hard fights, but not to the point of frustration. We’re continuing to keep an eye on this as you play and report back - there is a difference between challenge and grind, and we’re committed to making sure the exorcisms are enjoyable.

Mammon: Am I the baddie?

We’re also grateful for those of you who continue to submit ideas for clever solutions or features throughout gameplay. We do a lot of discussing and iterating in our small team, but as you can imagine - development takes a lot of our time, and there isn’t always hours and hours of whiteboarding time. Being able to gather thoughts from you all often means hearing really clever solutions that we can then quickly explore and interrogate to see if there’s a path forward.

As we’ve mentioned previously, we read absolutely everything you share - it’s much easier when it’s submitted through our proper channels as it lets us really quickly understand the direction and goals, but we read the reviews, discussion boards, YouTube comments etc etc. Where you are, we are, because what you say matters. We then catalogue all your feedback into whether it’s a problem you’ve identified, a suggestion for gameplay or a feature, or a request for a change. What this means is those suggestions you make even once are logged for us to keep considering as we plan out our continued work on the project. Don’t be afraid to tell us what you think! We can take it - and we’re always happy to take or leave things that don’t fit with David’s vision for the game experience.

Our big ole spreadsheet that catalogues every report - feedback or bug, how many of you are reporting it, and more!

With the addition of Region 2 and the change to the nodes, we’ve been hearing a lot about how it feels to move through the map itself. While making it five nodes rather than 4, some of you are still feeling like the variability is causing issues, leaving you with nodes where you don’t feel like you get to make many choices. Similar to the work we’ve done with shops and Faith occuring at the right times, we’ll be working on getting this right over the next few updates.

As we mentioned previously, we’ve been working on a codex! This codex will provide some useful insight into card types, behaviours, and actions. While we haven’t yet got it implemented in game, we’ve now set up a page for it online. Note - this page could spoil the excitement of running into new cards and actions, so tread carefully! With seeing some of these abilities and behaviours out of context, we’d love to know if there’s any you feel we’re missing, or any you’d love to see tweaked.

The big focus for this coming update is player decision-making, as mentioned earlier. This will include ensuring there are plenty of cards that synergise well together, and building up a broad variety of build possibilities through card, Ally, and curio combinations. Expect new cards, new curios, power rebalancing, upgrade rebalancing, and more — we’ve been paying attention to all of the incredible feedback you’ve given us. With any luck, when you play through after this update, it should give you significantly more options for interesting synergies when progressing through a run as well as some fun new things to explore.

We’d love to hear what your thoughts on what builds, cards and curios you’ve enjoyed — what cards do you often use? We’ll be reworking a whole lot of them, so if there are ones you particularly enjoy, letting us know is hugely helpful as we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Speak soon!