v0.3: The Stealth Update!

First and foremost, Happy New Year! How did it go? We know it is a good time for some, yet not so much for others. Hopefully, this year will be better 🤞.  We’ve had finals and are now all graduate game producers. Yay for us! 

But we want you to know that we've been also at work! It's been 45 days since our last update (I know, it's a lot of time, we'll do better). It took us that long to launch this new version, and it brings lots of new features.

New features

Character selection

So far, the game walked you through the presentation, and the tutorial, and dropped you into the gameplay. Now we added a new step. After finishing the tutorial section, you are thrown into the character selection screen. There you have to choose your Virtues, the suits of the cards you will encounter during your adventure. In the future, these will inform the decisions available to the player during narrative events, but for now, it's only cards. You can choose just between the first three for now from the planned six (although you can sneak peek at what they will be 😁) 

Virtues (Card Suits)

So far, cards were grouped in suits (those icons in the card's corners) but didn't mean anything. We want that to change. Currently, you can choose between stars, swords, or keys, in any combination of them. Stars mean knowledge and magic, swords represent patience, and mastery, and steel and keys are subterfuge and craftiness, for all those sneaky players out there 😉.

New Cards

The new suit also brought tons of new cards into the game. A whopping 19! All by itself, plus new additions for the other suits. Not only that but now any card from your suits can come up as a reward, so you can access all the cards in your own (but brief) gameplay session!

Replayability!

I know that a tutorial and three encounters are not a whole game. But if you want to play multiple times, you can! And your experience can be different each time. Not only 

The new enemy, the bandit

This truant is sneaky and deadly, like key-suit players. 

Tooltips

Over playtesting sessions, players told us that they wanted to know what stuff meant. Tokens, enemies, card's keywords, etc. While we had tooltip prototypes in previous iterations, this time around we have a fully functional version. We also wanted to let you know that we hesitated to add tooltips because we feared they might break immersion, so let us know how they feel! 

(I also wrote a design article about our decisions, in case want to know all about it.)

Lots of visual changes

FOV, textures, VFXs, and we even started adding some animations! Understandably, the game is in alpha versions, so each new iteration does look wildly different from the previous one. We are still iterating and trying new things as we go, so let us know what you think of the newer changes! 

Tons of infrastructure

We are new professional developers and have a lot to learn and improve. That's why we are always iterating on our workflows and internal tools. While these are not visible to the players, they are great at making our developer's job easier. 

If you made it this far... 

Thank you for reading! You can try our new version or wait for the next one! We will let you know when you can wishlist us on Steam. In the meantime, you can follow us on Instagram! And if you have something you want to let us know, feel free to contact us!