Hey there! I'm Lucas Demo, producer of Dungeon Drafters, and today I'm here to announce the release window for the game, talk about recent events that we are taking part in, and also give updates on how the development is going.

Release Window

Oh yes! Dungeon Drafters will be released in the second quarter of 2023. After many years of long and hard work, we are finally approaching a version of the game that we are happy with. We know that during this journey we faced a few delays, but at the end of the day we are truly glad about how the game is turning out.
The closed playtest helped us a lot to visualize aspects that we needed to address. We are focusing on finishing the final parts of development, and working on related things necessary to prepare the release.

Events

Part of releasing Dungeon Drafters is, of course, building the hype. Because of that, we recently took place in two big events. One of them, the Taipei Game Show, just ended today. It was amazing to see our game community expanding, and we got excited to localize Dungeon Drafters and take part in this event.

The second event, which is starting today, is Steam Next Fest. This is huge. Many players will be looking at Dungeon Drafters for the next week, and we might have a lot of new people joining the community. We are glad that the game seems to have a decent spot among other amazing titles in such a massive event. For that occasion, we've prepared a new demo of the game (and hopefully the final demo that we have to work on), which features changes to decks and all six playable characters.

Development Report

Besides the effort that we are putting to prepare the release, we also have to keep working hard on the game itself. We still want to work on changes, balancing, and polishing.

• VFX Rework

As you might expect, you learn a lot while developing 300 different cards in a video game. And once you finish working on the 300th card, the first one that you did no longer meets the quality standard. It is easy to find yourself in an infinite loop of reworking the visuals, but I believe we are doing our best to make spells look great.
Over the past few weeks, we've revisited many cards of the game to address issues and quality improvements, both in visual and sound effects. Here are a few of the spells that we put some extra love into, and they now look outstanding!

• Deck builder and Text

Another element of the game that we've been putting a ton of effort, improvements in the deck builder interface, and also text consistency and readability. One of the biggest challenges in creating a game with hundreds of unique cards is to find the standard to make all of them consistent while describing unique events and effects. Since the closed playtest, we've found better structures to describe how cards work, how they should look in the deck builder interface, and what are the key elements that make navigation more intuitive and informational.

• Quality of Life

We also got a lot of requests to improve quality of life options. For that reason, the settings of the game now offer much more flexibility to the player, allowing you to customize what animations you want to skip, what is the base speed of animations in the game, and also give you the option to read the text in high resolution.
We sincerely hope that improvements in the settings will help Dungeon Drafters to be more accessible for all different players, and allow you to personalize the options that better suit your gameplay flow.

• Music

Our amazing composer, Leonardo Lima, took the time to update the music that we had online. We now have updated versions of those songs on Soundcloud, featuring different dungeons and floors. If you want to have a preview of what our soundtrack will sound like in the final game, give a listen! https://soundcloud.com/leonardolimasoundworks/sets/dungeon-drafters-oficial

• Cutscenes

And finally, I want to report on our progress on the cutscenes of the game. Dungeon Drafters has evolved to a point where we feel like we have time and space to fit small scenes for contextualization, at the beginning of the game and special endings.
We wanted to visit retro games to get a reference of what these cutscenes could look like, how they can effectively present the world, and also stay relatively manageable from the production view. Our artist, Lucas Bressan, is right now putting a lot of effort into creating these frames, and we hope that this, combined with the right sound, will create an immersive layer for players while accessing their nostalgia for old games opening!

Thank you

Thank you very much for your support. I mentioned countless times how our community gave us amazing feedback, encouraged us to take the time to work on this game, and respected the decisions that we've made while the game evolved. I'm thankful. Best, Lucas Demo

[ 2023-02-06 22:36:08 CET ] [ Original post ]