Devlog #5 - Content, Bug-Fixing and getting to v1
Hello everyone!
Last week we released v0.4, with a variety of content and UI updates designed to give your more options, and more information with which to make your decisions during exorcisms. A swathe of new and updated cards and curios — and, predictably, a swathe of bugs to join them!
Feedback on v0.4
Huge thank you as always to everyone who has played and given feedback (big ups to janaka42 for some excellent bug reporting) — apart from the necessary fixes to the various issues that have come up (eg. Spark not working as described and not having tooltips on some cards), the feedback on v.05 is pretty clear:
Difficulty: The difficulty has swung a little too far towards painful, and now that we’re moving towards the full run, we need to pare it back a little while still giving options to players who want things to be a little more difficult.
Those Who Feast: Our hungry friend needs to be nerfed, particular in regards to the amount of curse cards it gives you.
Card-draw has become boring: With the addition of Ashed, card draw obviously has become a less viable approach for power-spam. We’re addressing this by adding new ways to gain Candles and light them, as well as some Ashed-specific interactions that should add a little more jazz.
Reward reshuffle is needed: We’ve said this is feature is on its way for v1, but several of you reiterated the need for this especially now that thee are less card options! We are also ensuring that you won’t see duplicate cards as rewards, which should help as well.
Damage calculation is broken on some cards: The new damage display system has some issues to be ironed out, one of which is that for cards that require card counts, what is displayed when in hand versus when picked up differs - and that cards on the reward screen reflect your statuses from the exorcism previous. We’re on it.
The Book of Holy Flame (Light/Glow Artifact) sucks: What it says on the tin. We’ve got a few ideas for how to solve this.
Plans for v0.5
This week we’ve been focused on four primary areas:
UI & Acessibility Updates
Finishing correct damage display for demons
Improving the presentation of Ward
You can view what cards are in your Draw & Discard piles
Cinematic subtitles are now available in the Accessibility menu
Our new Ward display
Bugfixing
Last update introduced a fair amount of content bugs, from cards to curios and beyond - a result of us trying to move a little to quickly to get new features in, without doing enough thorough testing. This is a difficult balance in a small team (there are only 5 of us full-time at the moment!), but we’d still like to do a little better. We’ve focused on fixing as many bugs that have been raised as possible, and doing more substantive testing on our new content and features.
More Content
As mentioned in the release update, we didn’t get all of the cards and curios we wanted in v0.4 due to time. Some of these required some pretty significant work, so we had to delay them in favor of getting v0.4 finished.
We’ve added several more curios and a variety of new cards that we’re currently testing, and anything that didn’t have unique art now does thanks to Ben, our incredible art director.
Shop Upgrades
Another one that took longer than we hoped, you can now upgrade shops at the cost of Faith for permanent discounts. In v1, shop upgrades will have some other benefits, and will be critical for advancing through the game itself.
Shop upgrades
Getting to v1
Speaking of v1, how is that progressing, and what is left to do?
The Main Story
v1 will finally include the full story, and you will be able to finish the game! Who is Noah, what is happening, and why does he seek out Malys, the demon of Babylon? All this and more will be answered at launch.
You’ll also learn a lot more about Gideon, Angel, and Lydia - and the various victims and demons you face.
Region 3
Finishing the game means you will be able to reach the final Region: The Inner Core. New demons, new stories, new mechanics and the final boss fight! We’ve already started to work on this one and it’s a doozy, we can’t WAIT to show you.
New Feature: Ally Upgrades
One or two other big features may be going in, time-and-testing-dependant, but one we’re pretty excited about:
Ally Upgrades! If you have an Ally card in your deck, a small amount of Ally Upgrade cards will become available as card rewards. These Consume cards infer various bonuses to Allies during an exorcism, giving them new attacks, abilities and defenses — all of which can be used in synergy with various cards and curios themselves.
Meta-Progression
While we don’t plan to go ham on the meta-progression front, we want to make sure there are some interesting incentives to progress and move through the game — to give you additional power, or more options.
Two of these mechanics we’ve already talked about — the reward reshuffle system, and shop upgrades — but there will also be card and artifact unlocks as you progress, as well as potentially one or two other fun mechanics. If there’s a particular idea you have for a mechanic you’d love to see in Malys, now is the time to let us know!
On-boarding and tutorialisation
Finally, we’re adding more in-depth on-boarding and tutorialisation! This includes an in-game glossary of features, as well as a much more sensible progression of tutorial popups and on-boarding as you move through the early game. We recognise a lot of people are new to the genre, and want to make them comfortable, while keeping plenty of things left to investigate and discover.
How are we going?
While we’ve been doing our last few updates, we’ve also been working towards some of the bigger features and additions for v1, and we are well on our way. That said, there is a LOT of work to do, and with lots of new content going in, we’ll still need your help!
Join the Malys v1 private beta group!
As we move closer to v1, there are many things we'll need help testing and getting feedback on as always, but we want to make sure these things are still a nice surprise to people when they jump in at launch.
To do this, we're going to do a private beta-test closer to launch, and we want volunteers to lend us a hand!
Have you been following along, giving us feedback and bug reports as we go? Are you an expert in the genre, keen to provide your expertise to help make the game better as it all comes together? Or are you just SUPER CURIOUS to see what v1 might look like?
Thank you!
As always, thank you SO much for your continued support, bug reports and feedback., whether in the forms or on the Steam forums. We read absolutely everything, and keep track of it all internally to to help guide what we focus on.
As a reminder, the best way to give us direct feedback is through our Feedback Form and our Bug Report Form.
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