First of all, let us thank you for your support! We really hope you're enjoying the game and look forward to your feedback in the forums and Discord server.
While we usually spend the first day of Early Access on bugfixes and quick changes, this time there hasn't been any report that requires an urgent change, so we've been able to dedicate some time to check on the game's telemetry data, and we wanted to share some of this data with you.
Stage analytics
First of all, here are some graphs showing the mission duration distribution (that is, on which minute do missions tend to end):
At the moment of gathering data, nobody with telemetry enabled had reached Forge 2 or further. Also it doesn't tell if it was a win or a lose, that's something we'll change in future updates.
These graphs shows us really interesting and useful data. For example, we can see that on Graveyard 1 most people finishes the mission at Minute 11, so until we can determine if they won or lost, we can safely say that most people is reaching the boss stage.
However, there's a spike of deaths at minute 2 that bleeds a little into minutes 3 and 4, so maybe there's a surge of enemies at that minute that causes more deaths than intended for the first stage.
Forest 1, on the other side, has really distributed values, which is indicative of a difficult stage: While most people end the level on minute 11, there are also some spikes in minutes 2, 5 and 9, so those waves will need to be looked into.
Forge 1 has an important difficulty spike at minute 3/4, so again we'll need to tune difficulty of it a bit.
You can see data for the other levels too, with nobody being able to get past the 8 minute mark on Forest 2 yet.
Character analytics
Now, here's a table with information on pick rates/win rates of each character. Note that the amount of people that unlocked Lanyz is still small, so a Win rate of 0% is not as worrying as it could be (yet).
This data shows the strongest (and most popular) character right now is probably Saul (I say probably because it doesn't tell on which stages they were played, which is an important factor). So we'll probably need to improve the others so they feel a bit more powerful.
We'll wait to show weapon/trinket charts until we have a bigger sample size, however most weapons are rather balanced in popularity and effectiveness, with a few outliers, such as Meteorite Blast being the weakest one. On trinkets there's a bit more variance, and we'll need to boost strength of non-damage trinkets to make them more powerful and interesting.
Difficulty discussion
We think this topic needs to be discussed a bit. We wanted Army of Ruin to be an autoshooter that's generally easy to approach and play, but that can offer a challenge at some points to be interesting. This means that you should be able to win stages if your skill distribution is adequate for the mission and your level up choices have a decent synergy between them.
Currently the game is probably a bit on the "too challenging" part of the scale, but we wanted to wait until we have feedback and data before performing the necessary steps to tone down overall difficulty.
We'll prepare a patch next Monday with some quick balance changes, so please keep the feedback coming so we can be sure we're changing the things that you feel are problematic!
You know it’s Halloween time when the leaves have fallen, everyone drinks pumpkin spice latte and your neighborhood looks like a scary Doors level — vampire houses, spiderwebs everywhere, black cats and a creepy goat head that came straight from your nightmares. Take out your candy bag, because boy do we have a treat for you!
For the whole month of Spooktober all the way till 4th of November, Doors: Paradox will treat the horror enthusiasts with a spoopy Halloween demo, which features:
A vampire mansion riddled with mysteries
A spiritual séance in the middle of a cemetery
The tormented souls of a creepy mental asylum
A spider lair entangled with the voices of the past
13 Languages localization
and most importantly, a little witch hat for our favorite cat Zula. ːsteamhappyː
Here's yet another character reveal. Meet Witowir!
What's that, flying in the distance? Are those... whales!?
These legendary, mysterious animals are called Malamu - just one of many magical creatures that you'll encounter during your stay on the Fern Island.
The world of Fern Island is alive - and you don't need to look up to the sky to notice that. Sometimes, the nature will even come to you! Imagine you're just sitting down, chilling, and suddenly this happens..
These deer-like animals are called Dree. They're just the cutest.
Instead of a Bug of the Month, we instead have a blooper for you this month. Making animations for the game is hard work, but our team is working with high-end equipment and doing their very best to deliver. Of course, they wouldn't be themselves if they didn't occasionally just mess around a bit...
Finally, we have a special announcement for you. In an ongoing effort to make The Witch of Fern Island the best game it could be, we will soon launch a Kickstarter campaign. Make sure to visit the link and click "Notify me on launch" button, to make sure you don't miss a big reveal!
It has been more than a year since our last patch note, and a lot has happened since then. Some good, some sad, but I can assure you we've been working non-stop to get Gloam back on track!
Our last patch note was in March 2021, and sadly two weeks after our dear friend and lead developer Tanguy had posted it, he passed away. This was devastating for our small team of three, and so Thomas and I took a small break to think about our next course of action.
A lot of knowledge about how our game worked was lost at that moment, and after some consulting with outside developers, we ultimately decided that we needed to rebuild our game so that we had a full understanding of it ourselves. That being the case, we decided it would be a good opportunity to switch engines, and hopefully solve some performance issues we were having on mobile devices, a small silver lining.
It's now a year later, we've come a long way, and we're ready to launch a brand new playable Early Access version of Gloam!
Thank you for your patience, we really should have kept this page up-to-date with everything that was happening, but because of our difficult situation I hope you can forgive us :) From now on, written updates will come more often!
P.S: We recently presented the game at Animasia, an anime and indie-game expo in Bordeaux, France, where we received a giant boost to our morale as we were voted the best indie game and best studio of the event! Now, all we need to do is work our butts off to prove they were right, haha!
TLDR: We spent a year rebuilding Gloam in Unity, and a new playable Early Access update is dropping today!
