Devlog #37 - Home Stretch

Hello Talented Gamers!

Wow... What can I say except thank you for all of the amazing reception to our latest update. We've had over 6000 new players in just under two weeks, making this our most successful update so far! 

We've also heard a ton of positive feedback surrounding our trailer and the Steam release in general. If you've somehow missed that, you can find our Steam Page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2435090/Talented/

Wishlisting Talented helps us more than you can know!

Something I want to be open about, from this point onward all new features discussed in Devlogs will be Steam exclusive. On Steam the game will be purchasable for a very small price, which we hope is reasonable given our hard work over the last 2 years!

So, with that said, what's coming next in the 0.10 update? Here goes nothing!

Steam Platform Support

As well as getting the game onto Steam itself, we will be releasing with a full set of Steam specific functionality! 

Cloud saves will be up and running in 0.10, allowing you to finally back up your Talented saves and play on multiple different PCs.

The game will support fullscreen 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the usually 4:3, no more squinting to read tooltips!

We'll be releasing with 50 achievements! I'll be revealing a few with each devlog in the coming months, will you be the first to collect them all?

Performance and Stability

The #2 goal for 0.10 is making the best impression possible the moment we land on Steam. As super indie games go, we're quite happy with how stable our builds tend to be but we want this one to be our strongest build yet.

Additionally, we've noticed creeping performance issues on the Talent Tree and we want those squashed. More on that in the coming weeks.

New Title Screen

For those keeping careful track you'll remember we had a title screen rework planned for 0.9. In the end we decided to prioritize other goals such as improving game pace and making the best Steam Page possible! 

That means it's coming in this update instead! We'll be revealing our progress on that in an upcoming Devlog.

Difficulty Balance

We've never been so happy with the state of the game. Classes each have win conditions, the pace is very close to where we want it (even if it could afford to be a touch faster), and it's starting to feel like higher mastery levels are possible!

We know, however, that the Classes need a little more help to conquer Mastery 25. We'll be looking to add new tools for each class to do that in 0.10.

Additionally, classes can feel just a little too strong on low mastery levels - making the late game of each run repetitive in some cases. We'll be looking at ways to make nights 10-20 remain engaging at all difficulty levels.

...And that's about it for this time! As usual we'll be responding to as much feedback and fixing as many bugs as we can, so if you're feeling chatty please join us on the Discord so we can make this the best build ever!

Stay Talented