Dream Cycle is 50% off in the Spring Surprise Sale!
To those who wish to walk the Dreamlands,
Spring has truly sprung, and we’re celebrating with the surprise sale!
To honor the occasion, you can grab Dream Cycle with 50% off from the 4th of May to the 10th of May.
If you've waited before joining Morgan on her quest, now's the time to jump right in!
The Dreamlands expands; a new update comes soon!
Hello to those who've stepped through the Deep Gate (and welcome to those about to take those steps),
Early Access has been a journey for Dream Cycle, and we want to thank you for joining us each step of the way. Our last update (adding the beta branch) showed a whole new direction for the game. It was a bit of a jump into the unknown and a departure from what had come this far; we couldn't have done it without your feedback. So again, from Toby and everyone at Raw Fury, thank you!
Now, what does this mean going forward? Well... In the next couple of weeks, we'll be pushing a relatively large update that will seek to expand and add more to what you experienced on the beta branch. The most substantial updates you'll encounter are when you enter the Deep Gate and view the world map; more pins have been added, increasing the number of adventures Morgan can take!
We also want to be upfront that at the time of this update's release, it will replace the current live branch, and the beta will be taken down. So for those of you who played the beta, great! You'll get to see everything new that has been added! For everyone else, it will be a rather significant change from what you played previously, but please, take your time and explore. We're here if you have any questions.
We'll be back in the next two weeks with more information, including patch notes that will detail changes across many aspects of the game.
Until then, take care and safe travels!
Beta branch is now open, new adventures with Morgan await...
New adventures await Morgan on the other side of the Deep Gate. It will take all her cunning, skill, and abilities to free the many trapped souls already taken. With each trip back through the gate, her thread to her own fading life grows weaker but return; she must. Only through her work can they be saved.
Get your first look into the adventure Morgan faces as she tries to save humanity from an eternity of unwaking purgatory. Scour each shard for hidden stashes, the best of which will present their challenges to unlock. Face mighty guardians and hold off the crawling chaos. Only you can return these souls to their rightful human vessels.
Join the open beta now.
Big game changes and new beta branch coming soon!
I’m happy to announce that the Beta for Update 2 is in testing and will be opening up to play on the Beta Branch in the next next week.
This update represents a major change for the game. When we started work on it, the focus was just to add specific stories to every single adventure, but that goal ended up affecting almost every aspect of the game.
The goal of Dream Cycle has always been to make a Procedural Action Adventure game. To my mind an Action Adventure game is a combination of exploring, combat, story and puzzles. The previous instantiation of the game delivered on exploration and combat but had no real puzzle or story elements in individual adventures. This update strives to add both.
Adventures are now created around procedural ‘archeological’ stories. By that I mean stories told through objects found in the environment, as seen in the dungeons of games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Skyrim.
With these stories comes a greater requirement to explore the levels searching for clues and puzzle pieces and to support that Morgan has greatly increased movement capabilities in the form of a base levitation ability.
A new Main story wrapper has been added to help contextualize these in-adventure stories along with an updated (and streamlined) intro and tutorial section.
We are opening this version on the Beta branch rather than as a full update because it doesn’t yet represent the complete intended experience. It is a ‘vertical slice’- a single adventure that is limited in scope (as it is the first one.)
We hope to gather feedback on this but it’s important to understand it’s only level 1. The goal going forward is to add many different adventures with different enemies, biomes and stories.
To that end we have added a new map. This map may be familiar to those of you who are fans of Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle stories, as it’s the map made by the amazing Jason Bradley Thompson.
This is the final way that the story update shifted the focus of the game. The previous map system spread the procedural variation across the 10,000 spaces in such a way that you could end up having very similar adventures one after another. The new paradigm narrows the variation within a single adventure but will allow us to have very different feeling Adventures for each ‘pin’. Even so, each pin can be replayed endlessly, each time giving a new variation of the layout and a different story.
- Toby
Dream Cycle is 50% off in the Lunar New Year Steam Sale!
To those who wish to walk the Dreamlands,
Dream Cycle is now -50% off on the Steam Lunar New Year Sale! This discount will run from the 27th of January until the 3rd of February.
If you've waited before joining Morgan on her quest, now's the time to jump right in!
Our goals and future update ideas for Dream Cycle!
Folks, I'm posting on behalf of Toby who wishes to share some updates and thoughts on Dream Cycle today, enjoy!
Hello!
It’s been a little while since I last posted here. After the winter break, we are back hard at work on the next big update.
The high level goal for Dreamcycle has always been to create a portal into infinite adventures. At the close of last year with Update 1 under our belt, it was a great time to take stock of the game. Thanks to community feedback and discussion, it is clear to me that Dreamcycle is falling short on a few fronts. While that’s to be expected in Early Access, one particular issue stands out as not a result of roughness, but as a fundamental design problem, and that is the lack of meaning.
As we continued work of story adventures, it became increasingly clear that the other levels started to feel like filler. Because they only offered basic objectives to encourage exploration, the lack of story points by comparison ended up with the unfortunate sense that there are 10,000 filler levels and only X real ones. This was absolutely not the intention.
Every Adventure should be worth playing, so the way we implement the story needs to be reworked.
This has sent us back to the drawing board at a fundamental level. Update 2 will be focused on giving every Adventure its own Context, Story and Objectives. Each Adventure will be a mystery you are there to solve, with the addition of a ton of new interactables, puzzling and other gameplay surprises, we hope to make every one a satisfying story of its own.
To support this new focus, the map is being reworked. It will be much simpler, the choices less overwhelming and more informed about the type of experience you might expect. Despite this simplification and paring down of the map, the upshot will actually be a total lifting of restrictions. Every adventure will be replayable any number of times, generating a new story and layout each playthrough, legitimately delivering not 10000 adventures but an infinite number of them.
I look forward to revealing more specifics about this major change as well as a host of other features we will be adding in the next update. As always, thanks for supporting the development of DreamCycle and I hope to see you in the Beta when it opens soon!
Toby
Hot Fix 1.2.27
This quick little update ads a "Challenge Rating" message at the start of each mission. It compares player level to the difficulty tier of the adventure to give a general idea of readiness to take on the map. There are 5 ratings.
Easy
Balanced
Challenging
Dangerous
Deadly
We hope this helps players avoid getting overwhelmed by unintentionally jumping into a way overpowering level and getting wiped out.
