It’s been nearly 3 months since we launched the Public Beta, and what a ride it’s been! Since then, our little team of part-timers has been hard at work implementing new features, improving backend infrastructure, fixing bugs, and so much more. As we inch closer to the next milestones, we wanted to share some updates, as well as provide insight into the team and where we’re headed.
This one’s a bit long since there’s a lot to catch you up on, so if you’d rather just go back to playing ranked games, here’s a quick TL;DR:
- Onboarded some full time contractors to help with development!
- Started work on the new frontend client in the Godot game engine!
- Gauntlet is close, just needs a few more tweaks, will hopefully be releasing this month🤞
- Working through Kickstarter fulfillment alongside content updates, poke your nearest backer to contact us if they’re supposed to have a skin/card made ($500 tier and above).
- Check out the new Events Calendar for tournaments and events!
- Expect more devlogs and news in the future!
- Lots of stuff in progress… too much for a TL;DR so you’ll have to read the post to learn more. 🙃
The Dev Team
If you are a member of the official Discord server (if you aren’t, you should be!), chances are you’ve seen me around. I’m known as Suraako online, and am one of the co-founders of Dream Sloth, and Duelyst II’s technical lead. Like most on the team, I loved the original Duelyst and was super bummed when the game shut down… so much so that I joined up with a bunch of other like-minded, hyper-obsessive individuals to try to bring it back. Programmers, artists, musicians, designers, and more… we all brought our skills and passion together for the sake of this one goal. Through it all, I have been consistently amazed by the diversity and quality of talent within this community, and just how much this unique game impacted us all.
This may surprise some of you, but until recently, everyone working on Duelyst II were doing so in their spare time. When Duelyst II’s Public Beta launched back in December, we had about ten active contributors, less than half of which working on code. We knew though that if we wanted to support a live service game, one with regular content updates, this structure couldn’t last.
We’re happy to say that, thanks to support from all of our players and backers, we’ve been able to onboard six full-time team members to help in both managing the game and developing new features! With this team focused on delivering content, the rest of the original part-time team can focus on the high level direction of the game and feature implementation as time permits. We’re still working out processes and the best flow for this new arrangement so you won’t see too much change in the short term, but we hope this will soon result in more quality releases and the ability to deliver our roadmap items more effectively.
Roadmap
Speaking of which, we should talk about where we are in our published roadmap and where we want to go from here.
As a refresher, here’s the roadmap we published last year shortly after the Kickstarter campaign ended, updated to show both completed and work-in-progress items:
The Gauntlet
For the unaware, Gauntlet is Duelyst II’s Draft mode. In the original mode, you built a deck by repeatedly picking 1 card from 3 generated offerings. Once your deck was complete, you battled it out against other players. The goal was to reach 12 wins with your deck before accumulating 3 losses, with rewards distributed based on your performance.
For our iteration of Gauntlet, we’re looking to bring down the duration of runs by both reducing the number of games to play per run, and introducing a “bucket” system into the drafting process. Both the entry requirement and rewards will, of course, be adjusted to suit the new structure. We were hoping to have this version of Gauntlet released with our March 1st patch, but there were still a few kinks that needed to be worked out. Look out for more details in the coming week or two, and expect Gauntlet to (hopefully) release this month!
New General Portraits
As promised in our Kickstarter campaign, we were able to commission Nicola Saviori (the artist behind the third generals of each faction) to breathe new life into the rest of the cast. Needless to say, he did a fantastic job on their new portraits, and was a blast to work with! If you haven’t seen his work, check him out on Artstation or pop in whenever he’s streaming on Twitch! His work in establishing this unified style will be key as we approach full launch and begin ramping up marketing. Check them out all together in this 4K wallpaper that you can download by clicking here!
As for those who hold the old portraits dear to them, we’re considering having them reappear in Legacy Mode, so stay tuned for updates!
Modernized Client & Localization
We’ve started down the path of building out a new frontend client in the Godot game engine! With it, we’ll be able to implement new features significantly faster than with the original client, especially in the visual department. The Godot engine was chosen for a number of reasons, but the most practical of which (besides the fact that some of us are huge Godot fans) is that its open source nature lets us make adjustments to the engine to suit our needs. This includes baking in a Javascript engine to natively run a sizeable portion of the current codebase instead of needing to rewrite everything from scratch. Most importantly, the move to a proper game engine will aid us significantly in getting Duelyst II onto mobile devices.
We’ll also be taking the opportunity to revamp some of the UI to make it both mobile and more user-friendly! When we have some fancy screens to show off, we’ll share them here and on our socials. In the meantime though, here’s a preview of our current concept for how cards might look in this new engine.
In parallel to the new client, we’ll be making the changes necessary to properly localize the game into different languages. We’ve received a number of offers (and even full files) from members of the community to aid in the translation effort, but we need to do this centralization work first so that all of the text in the game can be properly translated.
Kickstarter Fulfillment
On top of everything else, we’ve been working with Kickstarter backers to deliver their custom skins and card designs, as well as making the changes needed for in-game titles and other rewards we’ve promised. If you are a Kickstarter backer who pledged at the Mythron Conqueror tier ($500) or above, please check your email/Kickstarter account to work with our team to design your skin or custom card! If you haven’t received an email or haven’t heard back from us in a while, send us a message on Kickstarter or send an email to [email protected] from your Kickstarter-registered email address and someone on the team should be able to help.
What’s next?
Card Implementation Improvements
The process for implementing new cards and effects has been slower than we’d like – we’ve begun working on ways to iterate on card changes faster to make it easier to implement and test card changes. While on its own that may not sound too exciting, this will make it so we have more time to test and tweak changes before a patch, as well as set up the foundation for custom community modes and cards in the future!
Organized Play
F8 has been doing an incredible job organizing weekly Mythron League tournaments in Discord, and we’ve been helping with prize support and discussing ways to improve Duelyst II’s competitive scene. If you haven’t participated in any of the Mythron League tournaments yet, check out the new Events Calendar to see when the next one is and how to participate! There is also a Team Wars event on the calendar that players can join, hosted by Harpu in Discord – registration is open until the end of the month. Both the Mythron League tournaments and the Team Wars tournament will have prizes for in-game loot, including Spirit Orbs and skins! Over the coming months, we’ll start planning and implementing in-client tournament support and working with community leaders to define prize structure, tournament formats, and logistics for sanctioned tournaments. If you would like to have your event added to the Event Calendar, start a conversation by sending an email to [email protected] or speak to F8 in Discord.
Communication
While not the greatest excuse, the sudden influx of work may have led to communication and active community engagement falling a bit to the wayside. We aim to do better in the future – more devlogs, designer notes for card changes, sneak peeks of the new client, streams similar to the one for the new Experimental MMR system, and hopefully more fun events. As mentioned earlier, the team dynamic is changing rapidly, so it may take a bit for us to get into the groove, but you’ll definitely be hearing more from us going forward. Plus, we’re always lurking in the Discord, so come hang out and meme with us if you haven’t already joined!
Final Thoughts
The main purpose for the Public Beta is to have players play the game and help us refine the experience leading up to the full launch, including changes to monetization, balance, and content. During this time, we’ll be experimenting quite a bit, so brace yourself for some weirdness. I sincerely hope you’ll stick with us through this journey and continue to provide your encouragement, criticism, and feedback to help us grow and evolve Duelyst II into something truly special! 😊