First of all, happy Halloween 🙂 The image above seemed appropriate for this occasion!
I’m proud to announce that I’ve put SOTW live on my site. Is still in “soft release” mode. What does it means? It’s a sort of soft-launch, not because is not complete (it has been complete since two weeks!) but because there might still be some small bug or gameplay tweak.
I want to be clear, the game is complete, you can play the full story and discover all its secrets. There are only some minor things like battle tweaking/balancing, we’re currently trying to make the battle shorter by lowering enemies HP in some scenes, but still trying to preserve the difficulty by increasing their attack/speed.
In one of the latest updates I even added a “tweak menu” that the user can invoke with the letter key o:
Since I don’t have big testing team and limited resources I thought to try that, since is optional it means the base game is untouched, but if enough people play with it and share their experiences, I might “commit” the tweaks. I think the first one should be “safe”, but you never know. The latest option, +30% attack and +15% speed with -30% HP can lead to some funny results 😀
Ideally I wanted to release the game next month, in mid-end of November, before the “Christmas madness” (in which a lot of titles and promotion take up all the people’s attention). However after spending a year on it, I definitely don’t want to rush things! That’s why I’ve added that menu, to get some final feedback from players.
The game price is currently at $24.99 but will increase to $29.99 once it’s officially out (not before mid-November in any case). Why? Because the game lasts longer than Loren+DLC put together! Really, is very long 🙂 And also has a lo more features (isometric map, randomized items, lots of skills, better battles, more animation/characters/locations, etc etc).
Also, this isn’t an official announcement yet, but I’m talking with the writer about a possible DLC. I won’t go in details since would involve spoilers about the story 🙂 But it should be an interesting setting/story, happening after the events of act4.
People asked me about mobile and/or Steam: the game definitely will come to mobile, even if I’m not sure how playable will be on small screen device (as always you’ll have a demo to play before deciding if is worth buying) and regarding Steam I’ve put the game on Greenlight here:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=314755751
I am not sure if I was supposed to put it there, but anyway getting more votes won’t hurt 😉
I have no time estimate for when it will be on Steam but as always if you buy direct you’ll get a free Steam key later, so not a big deal! As for mobile I first need to do some tweaks to the interface to adapt it to the touch devices, so that will take longer (at least a month).
That’s it for now! Stay tuned for news about the other games.