July Update - The Song of The Fae

Hello! Welcome to the July development update for The Song of The Fae. Just over a week ago we finally whacked the publish button on SoTF’s Early Access campaign. Since then I’ve taken a fair few rest days to recover and squashed some bugs.

Latest Changes

Most of the work over the last week has been invisible quality improvements. Fixing some inaccuracies in the tutorial, sound effects and naughty tooltips etc. This took place over 2 patches so far, we’re aiming at a roughly weekly patch release.

You can find full patch notes on itch.io, here are some highlights.

Killing the Unkillable

We should probably give this boss a name

The snake boss is pretty difficult as-is and is fairly unbalanced, but if you did happen to beat it then you would’ve been pretty mad… Because it didn’t die. We’ve exchanged some strong words and the snake has agreed to die in the future.

Defying the Grid

Excuse me sir would you kindly pick a square and stick to it?

This has been a longstanding bug in the game, sometimes units could find themselves stuck between squares. This comes about when two routines try to animate the unit’s position at the same time, one cancelling the other out.

This bug is my nemesis and may return yet, but I seem to have fixed it in the current build.

Double the Bards = Half the Fun

Just one Bard is quite enough thankyou

The bard was being generated as a possible reward for beating an encounter but… Well, as the king is to other chess pieces, the bard is to your army. The entire game stops making sense.

This actually is quite impressive to me, while also very broken. The game is perfectly happy to let you do this and keep playing which speaks to how robust our underlying unit system is. We’ve written the game to encourage these kind of unanticipated outcomes and we’re only guarding against them when it actually breaks the game.

Up Next

So far we’ve got two biomes locked in: mountain and swamp. We’ve got a total of 5 biomes planned right now including the endgame but rather than working from start to finish we’re planning to tackle the end game biome next up.

Once we have a prototype of how a run ends it’ll help us design a tight experience where we have a good understanding of a typical run duration and scope. From there we will continue adding content to the game with the sole objective of making it more fun, instead of “longer”.

Thankyou!

We have so far only manage to convince one brave patron (my friend Zaymon) to support us, so a massive thanks to him! We just published the first monthly source-code snapshot on Patreon for anyone who wants to see how the magic is made. Anyone who supports us at the $9USD tier or higher gets access to the game, and $18USD or higher gets you access to the code.

I (Ben) have also been streaming semi-regularly, it’s been a mix of playtesting SoTF along with whatever side project or experiment I’ve cooked up. It’s a great way to learn more about the game and I’m enjoying myself so far. We actually found and fixed all the bugs mentioned in this post on stream, so come hang out sometime :)

That’s all for now, see you soon!

Ben