Greetings,
Another month, another devlog! We’ve consistently released new Early Access builds on itch.io throughout July, get access for $20 USD or supporting us on Patreon.
Now that we’re in a somewhat steady update cadence we’ve set our sights on the next milestone: Steam Early Access. You can wishlist the game on Steam already, but we have a few more details and bug fixes to work through before we’ll launch there.
We initially set the price of SoTF EA very high to give us time to get comfortable iterating in public before “opening the floodgates”. We overestimated the demand a little in retrospect, since barely anyone has picked up a copy 😂.
When the game goes up on Steam the pricing will be lower and changed on itch.io to match it.
A “final” boss?
We feel like the game needs some final challenge at the end, even as a work in progress. There’s still a lot more content we’d like to add to SoTF but defining the shape of a run start-to-finish is our priority right now. We’ve deliberately tried to design a game that can expand over time, which is just what Early Access is for.
Pictured above is the final encounter we implemented this month. It’s much larger than a usual battle and it’s in a new biome, The Castle. We think this is a nice changeup from the current battles/bosses and it showcases all the ridiculous interactions between units perfectly.
A little help
For most of the game’s existence you’ve been able to send your units out the doors. For the bard, this is equivalent to running away from the encounter and the battle ends but for any other units they just… leave.
We’ve finally come up with a use for this, sending a unit for reinforcements. Now when you send a unit through the door they return a turn later and you can place additional units on the map. We added this to help combat a longstanding annoyance in the game: being stuck in an encounter with only 1 unit.
Next up
We’re working through our bug backlog right now. Once that’s clear then the only barrier remaining is my sense of perfectionism and my procrastination on sorting out our Steam tax configuration.
I’ve been streaming development weekly on twitch, last week Ricky joined me via Discord and we talked a lot about the design of the game. You can catch the VOD on youtube.
Thats it for this one, see you next month!
Ben