Thank you for making Day 1 quite exciting for us! We had a great first day, but we want to keep this momentum. We’re going to outline a few issues and what we have planned so that people know what is going on.
First off, let’s talk a bit about Combat and unit placement:
- Random unit placement allows us to have a more dynamic and reactionary experience on every battle, keeping with our more ‘arcade’ feel as opposed to a long drawn-out process. We really enjoy the puzzle that it creates at the beginning of each match, compelling the player to either go on defense or offense right from the start. We understand the desire for player controlled deployment because it would definitely make the game easier, but we really didn’t want players spending half of their time carefully deciding where each of their pieces should go. But if the majority of players would rather spend additional time before battle carefully placing unit deployment, then we might have to rethink this design choice. We are still discussing this, but perhaps there is a way we can have both worlds.
- What are we doing about it? Our next patch is going to mitigate this issue by moving deployment areas far enough away where you will have more time to make an adjustment to your randomly generated spawn point. Right from the start, you can activate shields to prevent death, while you can also find other equalizers that allow you to teleport units where you need them or use invisibility to cloak your crew, avoiding that round of retaliation from the enemy altogether. We think if you experiment with the tools at hand you will find this to be a fun and challenging part of the game.
What about Difficulty, some folks think the game is just too hard
The difficulty of combat is a ramp and the nature of the game is replayability, so we followed a typical roguelike design element where your main characters don’t level up as much as the player themselves improve the more they play the game. Once players gain an understanding of the units they actually go from getting beat up to beating up the game pretty solidly. There are the occasional boarding events which are always tough, but that’s an aspect of the roguelike genre we really love.
- What are we doing about it? We are easing the difficulty ramp via the threat meter so that LOW will have fewer units, to allow you to feel more confident with combat, get a few wins under your belt and learn the nuances of battles without losing too many of your crew. If you are experienced you can try to collect as many resources as you can and level up a few crew to veteran status before the battles get much more difficult.
- EASY difficulty will be made easier by reducing the amount of enemies faced in each threat level.
Overall we approached a lot of our design decisions to streamline the entire game and move things along as quickly as possible. Like chess, we want all of the crew to be somewhat expendable so that ‘sacrifice plays’ are a core aspect of the game. Rookies are ‘meat for the grinder’ and heroes are not born, they are made, which is why you can continually level up your veterans and elites. We really enjoy this aspect of gameplay -- It’s a brutal world so don’t expect everyone on your team to survive or become a hero unless they earn it in battle. This is the reason you can create a damage-dealing badass if you can keep them alive long enough to earn additional kills. We’re currently discussing adding an extra health point to level-ups on top of the damage increase, we think this might be a fun addition but we’ll have to see how it plays out.
Here are the priorities for our next patches over the next few days and beyond:
- Make sure all of the achievements are working properly
- Decrease difficulty in the early game
- Make Easy mode easier
- Adjust the random deployment of units to give more room to adjust player strategy
- Address bugs, such as the “black screen” seemingly caused by Flash Hardware Acceleration, and the problem of losing crew after using Hologram.
- Optimization of maps and reduction of enemy visual variants per map to resolve memory issues on some machines causing an endless loading icon before battles.
- Balance tweaks to make the game more fun.
Once again, thank you for the great feedback and comments on the first day! It really motivates us to ensure you have the experience you want to while still not compromising our own vision of the fast-paced strategy game we’ve always wanted to make. We want the game to be challenging, but at the same time we do want you to have a fun experience so we’re going to our best to ensure that happens. Thank you!
Here’s some helpful links and info:
If you’re experiencing that pesky black screen issue - try enabling Hardware Acceleration via Adobe. You can learn how to do that by going here: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/891337
All of our KS backers should be able to go to https://www.humblebundle.com/resender to grab their copy of the game. However, if you have any issue whatsoever with this - please send us a KS message and we’ll get it worked out!
We do want to hear about bugs and issues so we can get them logged and get fixes for them. Please help us by posting issues/bugs/errors in our forums at http://www.gobedlam.com/forum/forum/surveys-amp-feedback and the steam bug forums at http://steamcommunity.com/app/367600/discussions/1/
Please give us your feedback and comments! We may not respond to everything as we continue working on the game, but we do read them and our community team does report back to us! Share feedback, comments, and opinions - we want to hear from you! You can leave comments in our own forums at http://www.gobedlam.com/forum/forum/bedlam-general-discussion or via the Steam general forums at http://steamcommunity.com/app/367600/discussions/ .
-Skyshine