UPDATEAugust 24th!
Still working on the update, I'm afraid. Apologies, y'all, but this is turning out to be a lot larger than we had originally anticipated! There's turning out to be a lot of knock-on effects that we need to fix before we can release.

Basically it started as a "Hey our data is showing that the majority of people are going to the wrong/hard islands first, getting stuck, and leaving the game forever" so we wanted to address the way the map works and your route through the world. And that's basically turned into a reballance of every area, and changing how prestige works. It's dug up a lot of our long-term deeper issues with the game, and we want to actually try and fix them instead of paving over them.

Here's a look at the new world map, though! (All the same areas, in a different order, and on different layouts, for the most part.)

The bonus islands are…probably not going to happen at launch of this update (since we're already so late), but we'll see!

Again, really sorry that we don't have anything to play yet, but it's a really big update!

UPDATE August 17th!
I was hoping to unveil the new game balance this week. It’s not ready yet, so we’re going TWO weeks without an update, which is a first for us on Steam. But less nodes meant more rebalance, and we discovered some serious issues that we should probably fix which has led to a new world map, new island flow, and new balance to every single island.

This won't solve end-game issues and people who are just out of content, but I'm hoping this will help make NEW content faster. But first I need to get through all the existing content. This also doesn't involve us using the new 3D-looking maps I showed last week.

ANYWAY, apologies for another boring week. The three of us are heads down, and hopeful we’re making good steps forward with taking this extra time. Fingers crossed we'll have something for next week!


ORIGINAL
The news up front is that we're not launching this week.

The short version is that we've been working on some fundamental changes that need more time to test and feel out before releasing to everyone, and want to take an extra week to round it all out.

The long version is basically I've gone and reballanced the entire game.

There's only the three of us actively working on the game, which means we can only focus on a couple things at a time. So when we finish a big feature like a card refactor, we can finally look up and reevaluate things. One of the things we wanted to question is how and why we've set up quests like we have.

The goal was always to give players a choice of different quests, but with only two quest types there weren't much meaningful choices. Instead we ended up with 3 (we were even at 4 at one point) different quest choices, but usually only two of those choices were actually different enough to warrant decisions.

So we wanted to see what it would feel like to reduce the number of decisions and instead focus on meaningful decisions.

I've got the game down to two quest choices per quest node. And it's almost always split between Adventure and Battle (with the occasional Battle/Battle selection since those can be spread out more). There are no more quests that feature two Adventure quests and a Battle, or three Adventure quests, etc. Anything that didn't feel like a meaningful decision has been axed.



We've also been working on helping to explain the differences between quest types better too, since we still have players asking what Adventure Quests are (which is a failure on our part).

The dev build of the game is at a point where everything has been paired down to two options, but it came in hot Wednesday afternoon and more time should be spent on it before just shipping it out to all of you.

The extra time will allow us to address one of the other issues with making meaningful choices–a new quest type!

When this ships next week you'll have access to some new quests to play with, which could end up being a healing quest type, and a rally point quest type. (Things might change, though.)
[*]The healing quest type will automatically heal every guildian who walks onto the node.
[*]The rally point quest type will be a place where you can set a threshold before guildians will move on. So if you set the rally point to require 20 guildians, your guildians will stay on the rally point until they reach 20 guildians. And then that group of 20 will leave the rally point and move on. These won't be options on every single quest node, but they'll be peppered around the islands. The OTHER thing we wanted to finally address was the look of our islands. We literally haven't taken the time to address the style of the game since the launch. We've actually been a 3D game this whole time, but we don't really show it properly, for example. So we wanted to see what we could do. Now this is all very early and no final textures or anything, but here's a shot from some of our experiments this week: The idea being: can we get more than two colours on a map at a time, and can we get more definition and variety in the terrain and heights. And it looks like we just might be able to after all. Apologies for no update this week, but next week will hopefully have a whole lot more for you to play around with. It still won't fix any of the issues with late-game players but we're working towards fixing what we can to try and get more players to late game, and we've got ideas on how to add a new set of islands at some point, it just takes time. See you in a week.