Oct 12, 2022

Decks - Laxie

Development Update

Thank you for checking in on Decks! The project started as a hobby of mine in 2018/2019. Since then, the game has gone through several iterations and now has over 50 unique units, different maps, PvP / PvE game modes, and varied progression systems.

Being the only developer on the project, progress takes time, especially when my life gets busy outside of game development. In 2021, I spent my free time developing a random map generator for the game. This was a frequently requested feature, consisting of multiple components, each with different caveats.- from making a database of tile pieces to writing the logic that puts them together. Unfortunately developing this was complex, took lots of time, and ultimately didn't turn out a fun feature. The maps were semi-random and different each time but lacked character and uniqueness to them. It felt like I spent 9 months of work to make Decks worse. Combined with my job getting busy, I took a break from development in the summer of 2021.

A few weeks ago I moved jobs, which gives me a bit more flexibility and ultimately time to work on Decks again!

The Good and Bad

Over 20 people helped test the game in its early stages. I genuinely appreciate everyone who helped test the game. Your feedback has been invaluable - it helps guide the development and makes the process more fun! If you are keen to stick along for the ride, there will be new updates and features coming that could use your help. ːtgrinː

This let me narrow down the fun and not-so-fun aspects of Decks as it stands today.

The Good:

Co-operative Maps: It is fun to play with others, team up with your friends on missions, help them out with your cards, and defeat the bigger bosses together.
Card Collections: I am quite happy with the collection aspects. The cards feel distinct, fun to collect, and always give you something to look forward to. It also doesn't feel prohibitive if you're lacking some of them - you can make fun, themed decks even with a handful of cards.
Unit Diversity: The units have different spells, giving you lots of options to choose from. While I haven't spent much time balancing the newer units, there are different playstyles and all feel relatively viable.
Lore: While it may not seem obvious, I spent quite a bit of time thinking through the lore of the different factions. As I'm going through the cards and maps, they do seem to have a cohesive character to them.

The Bad:

Progression: The main complaint has been the overall progression. There is no use for duplicate cards, nor is it too rewarding to progress as a whole.
Movement / In-Game Systems: The actual gameplay is rough around the edges, with the movement feeling very clunky at times.
User Interface: The UI has not had a lot of love across the board. It is missing effects and polish, both in the menus and in-game.
Maps / Game Modes: There has been a lot of experimentation with the different modes. This leaves the maps feeling quite disjointed and all over the place.

Roadmap for 2022

Looking ahead, I am excited to work on both revising the older features and implementing new things into the game!

The plan is to slowly work through some of the negatives listed above, and expand on some of the positives. Some of the systems will take a while to design and will include back-end re-designs. This means things that take a lot of coding may not be immediately obvious. That said, it is my goal to balance the back-end work with adding new features so that there is always something new to play with.

In the next two months, I will focus on re-designing some of the core components of the game. This will provide a stronger foundation for the game going forward. Many of these are based on the game testing feedback. The plan is to provide a more stable, rewarding experience.

October 2022

Quests

The progression will now heavily revolve around daily quests. Each day, you will be assigned a selection of quests that ask you to complete specific maps with specific decks. The aim is to make your progression more rewarding and themed around specific achievements. You can still gain additional progress just by playing through the maps as you have been previously, but there will be a nice rewarding bump each day for completing the quests.

This is now implemented in the test build and works fine. There are currently 10 different quests - quite simple to begin with. But the system is robust enough to let me build on this in the future!

Dynamic Cards

Each card used to be manually designed in Photoshop. This meant that adding each new unit took quite a bit of time - I spent a good chunk of the Summer of 2019 adding the 50 cards into the game. You would need to design the card graphic, the card stats, the units, the unit stats, and the spells independently. This also meant that any small change to e.g. a spell damage number would mean redesigning all of the above. I am now working on a dynamic system that lets me define everything in one file, and then automatically generates the cards.

This is one of the features that's not as visible but leads to huge time savings down the line. Changing the damage of a unit now automatically changes its card, and the unit stats in-game. This also makes it much easier to have multiple stats for a single unit (a requirement for the card upgrades below).

All of the information on this card has been generated dynamically based on the stats in-game:

November/December 2022

Card Upgrades

Right now, getting a duplicate of a card does not reward you with anything. I will be implementing a tiered upgrade system, where you can use duplicates to unlock stronger versions of your cards. I am currently planning for 4 tiers per card, with increasing strength and spell effects as you upgrade your cards. The system will even allow for completely new spells at higher tiers, although I am not sure if I will enable this in the first iteration of the system! Having 50 cards means defining 200 unique stat lists if I want 4 tiers, so quite a bit of work. I could potentially release this in stages (e.g. 2 tiers to begin with).

The game has upgrade tokens at the moment. I still have to decide if I want to keep this - i.e. you need both the duplicate cards and the tokens to upgrade the card. This would ensure you need to play enough games to get the stronger cards and can't just randomly open a bunch of booster packs to get the strongest army.

I also need to decide how much strength each upgrade should be. I am leaning towards having the upgrades only slightly impactful (10-20% per upgrade). That way new players are still viable when playing with veterans.

UI Redesign

I started working on an overhaul of the user interface. This will start with the menu screens first. I am hoping to make the menu more useful, understandable, and generally more appealing to use. Here is the redesigned version of the main menu:

Movement Updates

The movement logic has been one of the most requested features. In fact, the current movement system is one of the oldest parts of the game, going back to 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOq4GnyUfqg). I will spend some time reworking the movement and the unit AI so that it feels more responsive.

Roadmap for 2023

There is a long list of features I want to look at. All of these have been on my mind for a while and are key to helping Decks be a more stable experience. I will chip away at these throughout 2023. By the end of 2023, I would like Decks to be a fully-fledged game to justify an Early Access release in 2024. In no particular order:

Map Events

The current maps are very straightforward. Since 2020/2021, I've been thinking of implementing "events", where specific locations on a map would require you to do something to progress. I am thinking of things like helping a squad of archers reach a tower so they can shoot down a dragon; defending a city gate against an army of orcs; clearing out a spider infestation by burning down their nests; or breaking down city walls to invade a castle.

Two key things on my mind are replayability and lore. I would like the areas to perhaps randomly choose 1 of 3 possible events, so that it isn't always the same.

Map Rework & New Maps

Similar to the above, the maps themselves could use a quality-of-life pass. I never properly spent the time to make each small part of a map feel appealing and detailed. The plan for 2023 is to come up with a core set of maps that feel fun and solid to play. I may aim for 6-10 maps, thematically linked together, each with several replayable events.

Networking

This is an update I am not looking forward to (lots of work!), but something that is crucial. The game currently uses a third-party library to enable the connection between players. This is a bit clunky, but most importantly costs quite a bit per player. Looking ahead at a possible release, it is important there isn't a steep cost per player so that I am not forced into a monetization strategy I wouldn't be happy with. The networking rewrite will switch the matchmaking and lobbies to Microsoft Playfab, which is what I am already using for the inventory systems anyway.

The rewrite will take quite a bit of time though, as it's interwoven through all aspects of the game. On the flip side, I am keen to get it over with as it will help Decks be a stable, financially reasonable experience regardless of if it has 10 players or 10,000.

Customizations

This was one of the very original ideas in 2017, but never felt crucial enough to justify development time. The game is built around the idea of capturing campfires and progressing linearly through maps. This is not by chance. The original plan was much more ambitious, with you equipping customization options to your profile, and capturing a campfire would transform the world around you to reflect your customization. For example, you could equip a nature-themed customization, and capturing a campfire would turn your surroundings into a lush oasis. Or you could equip a skeleton-themed one and the world would change into a haunted graveyard. This would hopefully make the maps feel respond to your actions and make each expedition more "your own".

Customizations would also let me (in my opinion), monetize the game quite ethically. If these were cosmetic and partially available in an in-game store, you would then have more leeway to provide the cards/units themselves via in-game tasks.

Voice Acting & Lore

In 2023, I would like to implement a cohesive storyline supported by in-game voice acting. The maps themselves would be themed to tell an overarching story of the different elements. As I was designing the 50 cards, I had an idea for a backstory for each of the 5 elements (factions). I would like to tell the story by making the maps themselves be narrated experiences.

Global Quests

The idea of having an equilibrium between the various factions, and you playing through the different maps would influence this. For example, one of the map events could ask you to choose to deliver an artifact to an oasis (strengthening the nature faction) or to an orc tribe (helping the war faction). These decisions would then add up across the players to tell broader stories and affect all the players globally.

Social Features

Finally, since the game is inherently a social, cooperative experience, I would like to add friend lists, chat rooms, and guild features. I have always been a fan of guild management and guild instances in games. Decks could support this too, with things like you working with your guild to unlock special cards by defeating bosses as a squad.

Testing and Community

As always, the main reason I love developing Decks is sharing the game with others! It has been an amazing journey in 2019/2020, being able to play through the maps with others for the first time. We added more cards, the dragon raid, dungeons, and new bosses to tackle together.

Involving the community will continue to be an integral part of the development process! Going forward, I am hoping we'll be able to test the game with more players, have some fun scheduled events together, and perhaps commemorate some of the testers by adding cards based on your own ideas!

In case you haven't yet, do drop by our Discord to join the chat! That way you can be the first in line to help test the upcoming updates.

Thank you for your patience and I'm hoping to see you in the flashy, new version of Decks as we release the 2022 and 2023 updates,

Tom

Oct 12, 2022

Simulator status update 2

Derail Valley - Altfuture

Hi everyone!

It's about three months since our last news post, and we wanted to give you some new information on the update progress and show you a couple of screenshots.

(open images in a new tab for higher resolution)

The work on Simulator has been going well, as usual. Finally, as we near the end, we begin to see what aspects of the update can be called done, or at least what it will take to finish them. So, we'll talk a bit about that in this post.

I’ll start with perhaps the biggest goal we’ve reached this year -- putting it all together to a coherent whole. While we've been adding and testing new features internally on a daily basis, for nearly a year the game was not in a shape where much of it was presentable. We were finally able to change that a few months ago, and have been building on top of it since. In that period, our closed beta team was kind and eager to jump in and help us thoroughly test the update and find plenty of quirks that needed fixing.

We’ve been updating the beta almost every week since. It was pleasing to see no major issues being discovered, and feedback mostly revolved around small improvements that we either had in the plans already, or that are relatively quick to do. However, it’s worth noting that a LOT of small improvements had to be made, and many still await their turn.

We're showing more screenshots today because, finally, visual aspects of the game such as day and night cycle, fog, rain, window droplets, lightnings, lighting, reflections and others are pretty much done and more or less represent the finished product. Along with them come the necessary adaptations for VR and settings for low-end hardware. While creating all these features we were adamant on keeping the performance good, and it does play well on the PCs we and the testers have tried it on. However, we are yet to do thorough testing on low-end machines and VR when everything else is complete too, so whether there's additional work to be done on this remains to be seen.

In regards to visible objects, we finished the several new items that are coming with the update, as well as over 25 road vehicles you can see parked around. The new water implementation is done, and the improved HAZMAT and derailing effects are being worked on right now, to be done in a few days.

Another very important thing that we seem to be weeks from finishing is the structural design, both in code and UX sense, of how the game is dealing with multiple user profiles, sessions, saves, scenarios and difficulty presets. Unfortunately it's not something fun or visible that we can showcase outside of the finished product, but it took a lot of time to do, admittedly many more months than originally anticipated. The whole scope of that work wasn't really possible to be known in advance, until we dug deeper into the matter.

Now that it's almost done, the rework really seems to have transformed the game's usability. For example, starting a sandbox run at a particular location with a particular train, just to try out something quick, without having to ruin your ongoing career session, is a major convenience. So is being able to go back to the last autosave when a cat unexpectedly jumps in your lap, causing the entire oil well industry to blow up. We've all been there.

On that note, the design of new graphical user interfaces, as well as localization systems are all in place too, with relatively minor work to be done as we get closer to starting accepting translations. More on that in a few months.

We’ve finished all the diesel locomotives and added them to the game, along with their behaviors, sounds, textures and other aspects. This includes DE2, DE6, DM3 and DH4. Implementation of old locomotives had to be fully redone, mind you, to accommodate for the new train simulation code. Most of their graphical assets received an update (or a revamp) too. The steamers S060 and S282 currently have their models finished, but remain to be added to the game in terms of simulation.

The new train simulation code is a behemoth that took us about two years to write from scratch. There’s a LOT of work put into it, mostly future-proofing the game for new locomotive additions. This is something that's not particularly visible, but is very important in the long run.

With that said, a lot of work still remains to be done on train simulation in regards to mod support. Originally we wanted to keep this for after the update, but we see now how that could slow us down in the future. There are important decisions to be made, and we’re currently working on finding ways to reduce the necessary work to a minimum possible timeframe. At this point it looks to be in the 2-5 months ballpark, and remains to be seen.

Another important aspect of Simulator that wasn’t really properly announced in the past, but was added subsequently and is for the most part finished, is the all new external camera driving UI. I won’t go into details of how this works just yet, but being able to drive the trains from an outside view with intuitive camera controls and contextual UI elements makes it a whole new experience for the nonVR players.

Driving in first person view has been improved too, with the ability to freeze the camera and use your mouse cursor to operate the levers and buttons. The game now offers a really nice balance of using both camera views and many controls methods, depending on your mood and the activity at hand. There are also proper tools in place for easy camera and scene setup, for taking videos or screenshots like the ones shown here. You’ll hear more about all of these features in the future.

With that I should also mention that the game is now powered by a robust difficulty parametrization system, which took a while to implement and lets you setup the game in a whole range from being a “noob-friendly relaxing arcade” to “hardcore realistic simulator”, with individual parameters on what’s allowed and what isn’t -- such as for example the external camera usage. Going forward, we want to continue expanding the game in both directions simultaneously, expecting the most players to find fun somewhere in between. This is why the game will ship with three difficulty presets, but you’ll also be able to make your own.

On the VR side we've replaced controllers with proper hands that naturally adapt their grasp to levers and buttons in their vicinity, adding so much to the immersion. The game also features a whole new inventory experience, consolidated between VR and nonVR -- but more on that later. Of the larger things remaining to be done, apart from the leftovers of train mod support and steam simulation, there’s the environment sounds system and reworked tutorial. Then, of course, there are a myriad of small things remaining, as well as translations, marketing material and other necessary logistics. It may not sound like a lot, but it is still an overwhelming amount of work left.

So, with that, we can see Simulator possibly getting released in the first half of next year. Our aim is the first quarter, but the eventual date may be later and it cannot be foretold yet. Whether the update will be ready in three, five or more months from now remains to be seen. However, as we get closer to the release it'll be easier to reveal more details, so we'll keep making these progress news posts at approximately every three months. Hopefully there won't be many more until the release date is in sight.

As we’ve mentioned previously a couple of times, with the release of Simulator the price of Derail Valley will be increased for new buyers. The new price will be $39,99, slightly more than previously announced. We're making this increase to help support our efforts. We think the new price will be rather fair given the recent developments not only in our game, but also the world and the train sim market itself.

I hope you enjoyed this update and as always, thanks for your patience! We're getting there!

-Slobodan