devtrackers.gg
Thanks for your thoughts Ohpee!
Some (totally hot take) notes:
- Originally only Frostborn could skate on ice, for everyone else Ice was slippery, even preventing you from going up slopes.
- Most of our audience is playing on console, which might be surprising for a lot of folks on Reddit/Discord/etc.
- "Designing for cross-play" has never been a goal. When we have a larger audience (particularly outside U.S.), cross-play will be rare/opt-in. In the meantime, our matchmaking system prefers to avoid matches between Switch and other consoles, and prefers to avoid console versus PC. Matchmaking would be much quicker if we just ignored platform, but I think almost everyone would rather wait extra time to try to avoid pitting controller versus M+KB players.
- Adjusting the game to be fun on console definitely HAS been a major part of our efforts since Beta. Simply put, Spellbreak absolutely would not exist anymore if not for our console audience. Making both controller/console and mouse/PC players happy is a challenge in any game, but something we remain 100% committed to.
- "Casual" and "accessible" are loaded terms. Of course, we're not *only* designing for folks who have been playing for 2+ years. But we're not designing for your Bejeweled playing grandma either - unless she's also really into fast-paced shooters. I'm not even sure what a "casual fast-paced shooter player" looks like, but I'd like them to try out Spellbreak, they'd probably like it!
- People have to want to learn. Yes, anyone can learn how to play Spellbreak. It needs to be fun at all skill levels. No one is going to want to climb the ladder with the promise that it will eventually be fun. This isn't easy, but it is easy to screw up, and we have screwed it up sometimes.
- Sometimes we'll do things specifically for "new players" (such as progressive class unlocks in 3.1), but the extent that we spend our focus on that tends to be over-exaggerated.
- I've expressed openness about something like a 3v3 Arena mode with a buy system in the past, but I want to be real with y'all: we see that as a relatively niche game mode. That's the kind of thing we'd introduce once we have a larger player-base that can sustain it. Some may disagree, but frankly it would be difficult to convince us otherwise. (Personally I really hope to get the opportunity to build that at some point -- I'd play the sh*t out of it.)
- Re: Roadmap: I'm sorry I don't have more to say here at the moment. We're running a business so unfortunately Bizness Things tie our hands sometimes. We're in active discussion about how we can be more transparent here. That's about all I can say right now. :/
- We continue to improve on retention - those who continue playing - every release. That's new player retention, current player retention (someone playing weekly), and even returning player retention (someone who hasn't played in a while and started playing again). No, we're absolutely not where we want to be yet. Yes, we're aware that some changes in Chapter 2 alienated some of our long-time players, and we hope to address a lot of that feedback in Chapter 3.
- Chapter 3 combat is pretty dang fun, tbh. Excited to share more soon.