When we first put Zofia in Early Access, we anticipated a 2023 release date. We have (most of) the quests added and have been testing them internally, but as we have been playing through the whole game, we're finding a few things that aren't clicking, so we're pushing the 1.0 release to 2024. Let's talk about some of them: - Encounter Design Early on, enemy placement was static. In some locations the enemy placement is still static, but we've included a lot of enemy spawners that can adjust to difficulty settings and the amount of players. The default 'trigger' area for enemy spawns was ~10 meters, which isn't enough space to assess a situation before you're in the fight, and doesn't allow you to effectively sneak.
The new default is roughly ~40 meters, so you often won't see enemies spawn at all. This is compounded by another issue. As Zofia's magic system requires a nearby element to leverage in combat, we're finding too many areas where options are too limited and so don't give you much to work with, so we're reworking some areas to include more element types. Lastly, some of our enemy types are a little too limited and predictable, so we're looking into expanding the current set. - Quest Designs Currently we have ~11 quests that will be available. One of which is not very good and may just get removed entirely, and two that need some reworking.
We expected the quests to be challenging to make, but we're running into unusual difficulties having all the pieces connect together, having things change if a quest is completed and you revisit a map, and trying to make sure the quest is intuitive. My concern early on was to leave quests until later as to not get wonky save data if the quest is changed or updated, and unfortunately in our testing, this is absolutely something we ran into. - Some Quality of Life features and changes There are several things that have been brought up previously that we're also trying to add, and one of the bigger ones was PlayStation gamepad support, which should be included in the next update.
There are some other smaller additions/changes but I'll talk more about them when I actually get them done and in an update.