Rewatched the VoD and took notes through the whole thing:
Summary
Development Commentary
- “The world moved on from Puzzle Quest… Other games had done certain things better and we wanted to learn from all those games, as well as apply what we learned from Gems of War.”
- What was the thinking behind changing the gem matching mechanics? “We wanted to speed up the game… the back and forth scheme had been pretty fully explored with Gems of War… we wanted you to feel like you weren’t waiting around for enemies to move. When we had the smaller play area and fewer gem colors, it felt like you didn’t have enough to do, so diagonal matching ratcheted that up.”
- The developers built an AI program to play through the game for testing purposes, and it is “brutally efficient. We can see with the current rules that the game has a really high skill ceiling.”
- “Watching the automated testing play the game is mesmerizing… you can watch it for ages, which is bad when you’re supposed to be working.” -GoldPhoenix
- They had to change the Wolf death SFX a lot because it sounded like you were hurting puppies.
- One of the things we love about live service games is that we can look at the data of how you’re playing and make choices based on that.
- Salty: Wouldn’t it be funny if we brought Darkhunter back? Sirrain: YES Salty: NO
- There is a spreadsheet which estimates and evaluates how much of each currency players should be and are earning on a daily basis.
- “If we find early on that you’re getting too much of one thing and not enough of another, that’s kind of a no-brainer [to add the option to convert them].”
- Every small change needs to be developed and tested before it gets pushed out, that take more work than people realize.
- Managing pushing things to a server takes more work, but in the long term the game is more stable.
- Early Access, in our case, was a way to get the game out in a form we considered completely unfinished! The purpose of our Early Access is to tweak balance and design to its best possible form for global release.
- We have a vision for the end of Early Access that we’re working towards.
- Some companies have Early Access as good as their release.
- “My favorite feature of the game is the cinematic nature of the visuals. So many games I’ve worked on have been light on the fancy production values.” -Sirrain
- “According to our data, the story is helping a lot with retention.”
- Joe (from the Animation department) is working on some new things that we can’t talk about yet!
- You’ll see that in the Fall some time.
Relics and Challenges
- We added the new systems for upgrading items but the primary game mode for obtaining them wasn’t ready yet.
- Relics went in without the drip feed going with it.
- This was a product of being in Early Access.
- Once Relics actually enter the game, if players aren’t getting enough of them, the dev team will have the data to know that.
- Relics will be available from a new mode called Challenges.
- Challenges will let you replay skirmishes and dungeons, with rewards for daily play.
- Challenges will be the main source of Relics.
- Challenges will be replacing Skirmishes.
- “There’s also going to be Crystals coming from the Challenges mode.”
- Relics will be a lot more readily available from Daily Deals in the shop.
- Temporary/interim means of adding relics? “Wasn’t given a lot of consideration”.
- The primary concern was potential for community backlash from “taking away” relics.
- “Let’s not do it, because it creates an expectation we’re not going to be able to fulfill in the long-term.”
- “'Them’s the nature of early access!”
- “We could have increased then decreased the drop rate, but the negative sentiment would have been strong. I know people say they would have been fine with it… but it’s those sorts of changes that get you a lot of hate. Those are the sort of changes that end up with people threatening Salty online.”
- “I don’t like seeing people frustrated at their game either, but it was never going to get done in time, and we had to get a new version out to test some other things. As developers, we have to be okay with riding it through and do the best we can, and as players, we hope you understand and stick with us.”
- Why did Sirrain choose to add so many new currencies?
- “It lets us control the rarities better, and make it harder to grind for the rarer ones. It gives us more levers.”
- “We don’t want to stifle people’s ability to progress, but we don’t want progression to be too easy because it’s not rewarding.”
- “One of my design theories is to create space to work into. If we have a lot of related currencies, we can start building minigames and systems that work with those systems. Then we can make Relics more common since there’s more sinks for them.”
- “In Gems, we learned to create large spaces we can work into for multiple years.”
- “Too much space? We’ll see, I’ll be surprised if we’re sorry about this in five years’ time.”
- “One thing we’re looking at for the future is rewarding people for sets of things. Sets of Relics, sets of Dungeons Gear, sets of Minions, sets of Spells, and reward you for collecting those sets.”
Feature/Change Requests
- Speed option? It’s a little weird to implement especially for this game, no plans for it at the moment. Because of how animations work, speeding it up could be weird so we have to be mindful of that.
- Changing hero appearance? “We don’t want to give too much away, but we’re talking in the background about implementing Skins for heroes” such as “a different, more elaborate set of armor.”
- We made a decision early on that gear pieces (helms, chestplates) wouldn’t appear on the character, because for the first few levels you’d “look like a murder hobo”.
- Minigames weren’t carried over because we wanted to focus on the core gameplay during early access. Minigames will be dripped out over the course of the first few years of the game.
- The Capture minigame, despite being popular, is hard to implement for a live service game. They’re looking for ideas to make it work.
- Offline mode? Nope.
- Disabling/slowing timer for accessibility/consoles? While there aren’t plans to disable the timer completely, “we need ways to handle the timer better”
- Converting lower runes and shards? Maybe not directly upgrading, but being able to turn them into something else would be good.
- Sirrain: “I’ve played a lot of games where you get a dead currency, and that’s pretty unrewarding.”
- Food sink? Sirrain recognizes Food is a bit of a dead currency at the moment.
- Set bonuses? High on the list of things we want to get in, in the short term.
- We want it in before the full release to prevent too many people from salvaging gear that later becomes useful.
- Diamond chest rewards not worth the wait?
- “The wait is appropriate but the rewards are not. I’d like you to feel like it was worth the 24 hours.”
- “I believe that is getting some tweaks at the moment to come in 0.36. We did some tweaks for 0.35 but I don’t think it was enough.”
- “It’s tabled for discussion with our economy guys.”
- Storage for gear?
- “We know people aren’t levelling Northelm quickly enough to get the space they need. We might need to look at the base number of slot. Maybe we could add another way to add space.”
- “We don’t want to be one of ‘those guys’ who sell you inventory space.”
- On issues with restricted tournaments: “We’ve seen that too, and we’re working on it.”
- Why even have a storage cap at all? “It’s very much game theory”
- “You want players to fill up their gear space because you want them to learn to salvage, to keep the amount of shards obtained where it’s expected to be.”
- “You want players to hit that limit at the correct time so it feeds into that tertiary game loop and they get the correct number of resources.”
- “Additionally, the higher inventory limits are, the more strain is put on the game’s databases and the harder it is to find the things you need in your inventory.” -GoldPhoenix
- “Star Wars Galaxies struggled significantly with their databases because all items had unique data tied to them that had to be stored and size limits were constantly being exceeded.”
- Are we set on the 7x5 board? “Yeah I think we are. The core gameplay was set on 7x5 but we could have minigames that change it up.”
- Modifying color of gear? “I have a plan but I’m not ready to share it yet. We’re talking about that.”
- Hero classes? “We certainly hope to have more of those in the future.”
- “Shaman’s kind of locked into a build right now and we’re working on rebalancing that.”
- “We’re working on redoing the wording to make Venoms and Toxins easier to understand.”
- “‘Please don’t make me play Shaman?’ We’re going to rebalance Shaman and you’re going to play the S H I T out of it! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?” -Salty
- “Expect changes in levels and gear coming in 0.36 or 0.37”
- “We weren’t happy with the difficulty curve into the 20s and 30s.”
- “We are working on the endgame, and more stuff for Kingdoms to do.”
- It’s a bit easy to just make a mono-color build, but it’s complicated to solve.
- “It feels too easy to go all in on one color and we’ll be addressing that.”
- Any wipes before official launch?
- “Wipes are right out.”
- We can’t assure players that everything will be the way it is, but we have to honor what you pay for.
- There was a bug early on where VIP was displayed as giving an extra Ruby key, and after it was rebalanced, players who had bought it were compensated. If you bought a year of the VIP pass you got a massive dump of Ruby keys in your mail.
- If an exploit sneaks into an update, we may have to roll back by a day or two but not a full wipe.
- Unequip button?
- “incredulous An unequip button? So you can take a piece of gear off and leave that slot empty? Aaaaahhhh, good feedback, thank you. Don’t know why I hadn’t considered that.” -Sirrain
- “Gotta make a Jira task for that.”
- Dragon hero class?
- “I feel like the story would have to change for that to work.”
- “Etheria has a race of Lizard People, in the south, called the Sirathi (spelling?), that live in the jungles.”
- Resetting citadel points?
- “That’s a good idea, I don’t have a timeframe for that.” -Sirrain
- Redeem codes?
- At some point, we will have them, but we need the functionality for that first.
Other
- Salty now has a new computer for streaming! It’s based on one of the old build servers.
- Salty and Sirrain appear to be long-time family friends (Salty’s dad is a game developer)
- The first drafts for dialog options were a little too risque for the final game
- Salty called me out by name but thought my name was Elric
- PQ3 is the 35th game that Sirrain has developed on.
- “Follower dating sim minigame! Like HuniePop but less slutty.” -Salty
- “I’m sometimes a little embarrassed about having HuniePop in my Steam library.” -Sirrain
Future Streams
- Next week, we have Joe (from animation)
- The week after, we have Cyrup (the game’s producer)
- Sirrain will be returning in the future.