Devlog #2 - Malys’ Reception & Plans for July Update

Hi everyone, and welcome to our first post-launch-into-EA devlog!

As I mentioned last time, my name is Liam Esler and I’m the Managing Director for Summerfall Studios and Project Director on Malys. Today, I want to talk a little about what we’ve been hearing from you in terms of feedback, what we’re tackling, and what’s likely to come in our next update.

Thank You!

First of all, a massive thank you to everybody who has purchased, played, and reviewed Malys. Reviews are hugely important for independent developers - they help us get more visibility in Steam against other games. We are currently still 100% positive at time of writing, which is massive. We appreciate all the grace you’re giving the game as we work through teething pains and adding content on the road to launch.

You might not know this, but on Steam there are thresholds for reviews, meaning it takes 10 reviews to even be eligible for recommendations. You need an 80%+ positive review rating to read ‘positive’, and at 50 reviews, you get the ‘very positive’ label, and over 500, ‘overwhelmingly positive’. As any player browsing Steam knows, seeing these positive ratings is a massive checkbox in terms of the leap of faith you might take in trying something out. If you haven’t reviewed yet, we’d love to hear what you think!

In the same vein, your bug reports and feedback are so important. We’re so happy to hear that most of you have had a relatively bug free experience with Malys so far! We’ve read every single thing you’ve said - reviews, discussion posts, submissions - everything. (Big apologies to the person who ran into the character limit on the gameplay section of the feedback form but persevered to share anyway - that issue has been fixed and there’s no limit now as originally intended!) We’ve been organizing, processing, and discussing everything you’ve raised as we plan for our first update. Our hope is to deliver this to you mid-July, which gives us time to process, plan, and fix issues raised. The more reports we get, the easier it is for us to tell what’s an issue affecting a lot of you vs what’s a one off that will need a lot of investigating. We know the form is involved, but it speeds up our process and lets us fix things so much faster when it all comes to the same place.

We’re all systems go here, so let’s dive in!

FIXING TOOLTIPS

Tooltips have been misbehaving for a bunch of you, with card text being cut off, tooltips getting stuck or being incorrectly sized, text not being consistent and more. This will be the focus for us in the coming update - to bring all these things into line and get them to play nicely together. We’ve started working on how the tooltips position themselves to make sure they stay legible and on-screen, especially when there are multiple of them - and depending on where the card appears. We’ve been stress-testing with four tooltips on one card to see how they position, and so far so good.

One challenge we’re running into though because of it is that in order to prioritise legibility, we have to create an anchor point that’ll work for multiple tooltips as well as just one. At the moment, they anchor to the bottom, which isn’t our ideal solution, but having it be extensible for the more likely scenarios of multiple tooltips is the priority for now, and is likely the solution we’ll stick with to give us more time to prioritise bigger fish to fry.

TROUBLE WITH TEXT

For those of you who are having trouble with the text, we hear you! As we manage all the different potential resolutions, this is one for us to keep tweaking. Thanks to the eagle-eyed exorcists of you that spotted typos and mark-up errors in the storylets, we’ll be getting those fixed up for the next update.

One thing worth calling out is some of you mentioned wanting to be able to get up close and personal with the cards - you can! If you head into your deck menu, you can see your cards up close in an enlarged size.

If you open ‘View Deck’ at the top, you can see each card a little closer if you so desire, with tooltips also enlarged.

NERFING THE PRIEST

We had a number of reports come through about the Priest. In case you haven’t run into it just yet, in the Those Who Feast encounter, you can infinitely use the Priest to damage the enemy by burning or playing Infestation curse cards while The Priest is on the field. One report mentioned, “After summoning Mister Priest (he is my fav), I just kept burning Infestation to light a candle, then played another Infestation so Mister Priest could strike one hit. The demon cannot make a turn. I took a screenshot as my Noah is plagued like 50-ish LOL.”

This is obviously, hilarious, but not intentional! We’ll be adjusting the cost of Infestation to 2 instead of 1 to fix this in the upcoming patch. Some other people may have encountered a bug with a particularly persistent Priest - that is, sometimes The Priest continues to damage the enemy even when defeated from the field. I guess some jobs you really can’t ever take time off from. That issue will take a little more investigation, so it’s a maybe for the July update!

ISSUES WITH SLOW GAMEPLAY

We know some of you have encountered issues with the game slowing down as you play it - taking forever to play cards or actions. We have some theories about why this might be, but investigating this is going to take quite a bit of time. We have suspicions that it’s an issue with the way the action queue is tracking actions, but there are a number of things that could be contributing. This one is a bit of a doozy, and we’re fairly sure we won’t be able to fix it in short order, but know we’re digging in to see what we can find out - we know it’s frustrating!

A NOTE ON BALANCING

Balancing is the biggest and hardest task on our list. Our focus is on resolving the high level widespread issues first for this update, as well as adding a bit of additional content that will change and adjust the gameplay experience. These things can also affect balance, so we’ll really be digging into the balancing feedback after this coming update. This applies both to balancing the build and to balancing the economy - so those of you saying it’s too easy/hard, or certain purchases are too expensive, etc etc, know that we hear you. We’re tracking every piece of feedback we receive and considering tweaks we’ll need to make. It’ll be a lot easier for us to do broad balancing once all of the intended features are in, working, and relatively bug-free. In a similar vein, achievements are currently bugged, but this fix will come a little later.

…AND EVERYTHING ELSE!

We’ve had feedback and bugs come in around specific card or encounter issues too. Some of these pieces of feedback are easily fixed - for example, Upgraded Gods’ Hand having an incorrect damage amount is a relatively easy fix - whereas others require a little more investigation. Faith Restored at the moment is not reducing cost when burned as many of you have noticed, but this won’t be fixed for the upcoming update. We need to check in on a bunch of systems and their interactions to make sure we resolve this fully, so it’ll take a little longer. For other issues, we just simply don’t have enough information or aren’t able to recreate the problem (e.g. a one off crash that resolves). Your continued support in letting us know when you encounter them lets us know which issues are affecting lots of people, compared to those that might be something to do with someone’s settings or system.

Cloud Saves and Steam Deck controls - while important! - are also lower on the priority list right now as we try to get all the major elements working first. Saves are unlikely to be persistent between Early Access and our 1.0 launch, so keep that in mind too. There won’t be manual saving in Malys, but we’re working to make it clearer that the game is autosaving at every opportunity it gets - the only time you’d lose progress is quitting mid-exorcism.

We’ll be a little quiet for the next week or so until the update rolls around, but you can stay in touch on our socials, and we’ll still be reading everything you share! Thank you, and speak soon!

Liam