Stormgate Dev Tracker

No spoilers, but I hope you'll be pleased with our next hero...

This is really an "Early Access" release and some audio/sounds are not implemented yet. (Please remember that we're not a large development team by AAA standards.) We're aware and will be adding these sounds to the game before 1.0.

We are planning a separate post from our game director about our vision for the future of campaign and I believe we'll touch on story there. Rest assured that we're reading and absorbing the feedback.

Can't be soon enough.

Hi, everyone, Tim Morten here. 

Two days ago, Stormgate was released publicly into Early Access. This was a huge milestone for us. Early Access is a new experience for the team, but I genuinely believe in the benefits of using feedback to drive development.

We want to thank all of you who have been supportive of our team and of Stormgate. 

Remember: this is only the beginning of our journey. Our Early Access launch formally begins on August 13 when we open up the game for free to all players and we still have a long road ahead. We expect to be in Early Access for at least a year of active development before we believe we’ll be ready for 1.0. That won’t be the end, either, as we plan to release new stories and more content for years to come. 

Here are a few highlights we’d like to share after our preview release:

• Stable launch: We were able to bring together players from all around the world and, despite a few initial h...

We're working on a lengthy standalone post that specifically addresses the negative feedback. That's taking a little longer as it includes specific steps we're taking to address that feedback.

That's really kind of you to offer! I'll just screenshot your response, share it with him, and I think that'll be thanks enough!

I learned from pre-announcing the roadmap to not announce these things until they're ready. Please stay tuned, we're working on it!

The current plan for the update is a blog on playstormgate.com, which would be cross/posted here.

Thanks so much for the support!

We’re excited to see the positive response to 2v2. This was something one of our engineers championed early on and worked on on his own time so that we can get it into the game. I’ll make sure everyone knows that there’s appetite for a 2v2 ladder, though to set expectations, if we were to add it, that’s not the kind of thing that we can throw into the game very quickly as we have a lot of competing priorities.

We KNOW about hotkeys. Trust me, we've been hearing it from our first pre-alpha! It's just not something we could put into the game while the base game/underlying UI was still being developed.

This is Early Access, not our final release, and more fully customizable hotkeys are absolutely part of our plan for 1.0 (if not sooner). It's something we'll address specifically in our upcoming update(s).

We’re working on it. There’s a lot to discuss and we’re planning to cover a lot of ground.

UPDATE: Posted here! https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormgate/comments/1ehseqi/early_access_preview_learnings_and_feedback/

This is something we’re tracking and looking to correct in the near future.

Hey folks—updating here: We'll have more to share on this soon as folks want to know more about it, so we're planning for a blog with details. (It came together very recently.) Stay tuned as we want to answer your questions!

Thanks, man! Appreciate the support (and the bug reports)!

This is incorrect--campaign players are a major priority for us, but that content is not as "far along" or polished as other parts of the game because those have been in development longer and more thoroughly tested by players. Campaign is very fresh content--it was never part of our beta testing process, so this is the first time players outside of the studio have gotten their hands on it. The feedback we're getting now will help us make it better--that's one of the biggest benefits of Early Access.

Why didn't we focus on campaign first? Well, the team needed to build 1v1 first as it's foundational work; they then used those tools to build 3P co-op... which was then used to start building the campaign fairly recently. We still have the upcoming 3v3 mode and our editor coming as well. Back to PvE, I'd say that Campaign-focused players who want a more polished experience should check back with the game for 1.0 while we continue to expand and improve it.

I'm glad to hear your opinion changed after spending more time with the game. We see this a lot -- for example, if you filter Steam reviews to remove those that were written with under an hour of playtime (snap judgments), they're much more positive. You're another example of how once people sink their teeth into the game (and get over an initial bad impression because they were expecting a more polished product), they're having fun.

We have a lot more work to do, but I appreciate you coming in to share your new perspective. Hope you love the improvements that we have in store. Thanks again for being part of our journey.

Early access release was just the beginning--we still have a long road ahead and it's important to remember that the game still has a lot of development time before we reach 1.0.

And yes, 3v3 is coming, along with improvements to many other areas of the game. We'll be discussing that road ahead in more detail soon.

I think it's important to remember that the reason players like you are getting the impression that the game hasn't been polished is because... the game hasn't been polished yet! Polish comes right before the game is done, but we still have at least a year of dev time ahead before we reach 1.0.

We're in Early Access, which means this is an unfinished product still in active development. Working as intended!

Lots of fine-tuning and UI improvements are slated to come later on. You'd be surprised by how much work certain features require to implement, or how they may impact other areas. Game development is complex and challenging. We can't do everything at once and our team is significantly smaller than that of a AAA studio, but we have faith in the process and we're moving quickly.

We appreciate you and the reminder of the feedback, though, and please know that we're listening, even if we can't jump on things immediately. We're planning to get there, ...