Hey all! It’s been a few months since our last big update post, so we thought now would be a good time to do a little quarterly update to share what we’ve been up to and where we’re headed. We’ll also be revealing one of the new, never-before-seen, Duelyst II-exclusive cards you’ll be seeing in-game very soon!
In case you missed it…
Before we dive into the exciting new things, here’s a recap of some of the things we’ve done since the first Updates from Mythron post:
- The Gauntlet released!
- It differs a bit from the Gauntlet mode in the original, and you can check out Blatm’s original Gauntlet devlog here to learn more about the design principles that went into it. We’ll be continuing to enhance and improve this mode in the future, so stay tuned and continue to give us your feedback!
- Canny Feature Requests!
- Feature Request site that you can use to request, discuss, and upvote features you’d like to see in the game! We’ve already implemented a few of the most voted features, and we’ll continue to use this as we plan out and implement more functionality in the game. If you haven’t already, make sure to check it out and upvote features you’d like to see or share some of your own unique ideas and see what your fellow players think of them!
- Deck size increased!
- The maximum number of cards allowed in a deck was increased to 55 cards, giving players more freedom to put their favorite cards into their decks!
- Daily quest tweaks!
- Daily quests were tweaked to provide players with more quests and we increased the variety of quests. We have lots of plans for improving and enhancing the quest system to give players more ways to have fun playing the game and be rewarded for doing so, so stay tuned for more changes in future updates!
- Skins, skins, and more skins!
- We’ve released many skins over the past few months, too – some designed by Kickstarter backers as part of their backer rewards and some designed by the team internally. Many of these also come with alternate visual effects from the base unit to match the theme of the skin! Be sure to check those out in the Shop!
- Emotes!
- Along with skins, we’ve recently started to add brand new emotes to the Shop as well, designed by krackocloud, a member of our official Discord! We love seeing the creativity of the community, and if you haven’t already joined the Discord, you should!
- The Codex narrator is back!
- Learn all about The Age of Disjunction with his epic voice for you card game players who don’t like to read.
- MMR and matchmaking updates!
- We’re making more changes to the competitive scene and how the ranking system works – check out the last patch notes and look out for more devlogs in the future on this topic!
And this is just the tip of the iceberg – there was a lot of work done with the backend infrastructure and code to modernize it so that we can be ready for the new client and work towards a robust full launch. We’ve also been working on fulfilling Kickstarter backer rewards, which leads me to the next exciting topic…
The Founder’s Collection
We will be releasing a mini-set of 21 new neutral cards that we’re calling the Founder’s Collection! These are all cards that were designed by Kickstarter backers (with one exception being the Dream Sloth designed unit) and will include both re-imagined minions using sprites from the original Duelyst AND will also include brand new, never-before-seen minions with art from the original Duelyst’s artists and animators! The first wave of 7 units will be released in a few days, and I’m happy to reveal that brand new Dream Sloth designed unit exclusively here:
Slothguard Letharus is a character originally from an unreleased Dream Sloth game that we worked on but never got a chance to complete. But thanks to @unseven‘s awesome sprite work and @conzeit‘s animations (both veteran artists of the original Duelyst), Letharus can come to life in Duelyst II! In that game, his primary role and the game’s core mechanic was to support his allies with different types of barriers that provide a buff and a debuff to whatever passes through them (friend or foe), and he would have to carefully apply these so his allies could maximize the benefit from the buffs and enemies would suffer from the debuff. The “auras” this card places are tile effects that attempt to represent that same kind of concept in Duelyst. Look out for the full reveal over the next few days!
Check out Letharus and the other new units in the first wave of the Founder’s Collection mini-set, releasing next week!
NOTE: There are still some Kickstarter backers that have not gotten back to us regarding their designs! If you are a backer or know someone who is a backer who backed at the Mythron Conqueror tier or above, please reach out to someone on the team, either via Kickstarter, Discord, or via email at [email protected] in order to get in touch with someone on the team to finalize designs. For Mythron Deity or Mythron Champion tier backers, your deadline for having your new minion designs included in the Founder’s Collection is August 15th!
Community-Run Tournament with Cash Prizes
We also wanted to shout out some of the awesome competitive tournaments that our community members have been running with subsidized prize support from Dream Sloth.
Team Wars II Finals Cast – Friday, July 14th
Harpu has been running an awesome Team Wars series of battles, which concluded in the first week of July. The finals of the series will be cast in a few hours as of this post at 11pm ET on Harpu’s Twitch. Check it out to see the epic conclusion of the first season of epic battles!
Calvin’s Epic Series 2 – Saturday, July 15th
Epic Series 2 is a $1175 prize pool tournament run over two days by Calvin starting on July 15th. Participation is free and all entrants receive a skin for participating. The bracket is best of 3 and double elimination so every player is guaranteed to play at least 4 games. The tournament is closed decklist format with up to 2 decks per entrant.
To learn more about the tournament and sign up, join the Epic Series Discord: https://discord.gg/rsDwj7a4Sv
Casting is done on Calvin’s twitch channel a week after the tournament (https://twitch.tv/duelystcalvin).
Roadmap Status
As a refresher, here’s the roadmap we published last year shortly after the Kickstarter campaign ended, with the things we’ve completed in green and things in progress in various shades of yellow based on how far along we are:
We’ve been aggressively working on making a dent in this roadmap as well as delivering Kickstarter rewards, new features, and making backend improvements in parallel.
Kickstarter Fulfillment
The 21-card Founder’s Collection will include all of the designs from Kickstarter backers and will be released in multiple waves over the next few months. These 21 cards will be added to the Core Set and can be obtained via Spirit Orbs, crafting, or some of the special, limited-time shop bundles we have planned to coincide with the waves.
In addition to the mini-set, we’re working on the other promised backer rewards, including emotes, replace animations, skins, and more.
Godot Client
As mentioned in last quarter’s update, our focus has been on integrating as much of the core game logic code into the engine as we can in order to get the new client out quicker. This involved making some structural adjustments to the code, but we hit a significant milestone last month where we were able to create a sandbox game using the same code that the current frontend does! With that stepping stone achieved, we’ve been working on blazing through the path of processing in-game actions in order to fully recreate the game scene. Once we have the barebones plumbing in place, then we can work on adding more visual polish to make it look even slicker.
Although we were hoping to be a bit further along at this point, the steady progress we’ve been able to make up until this point means we’re heading towards a game client that we’ll be able to add more visual polish to as well as iterate on features quicker than we’ve been able to. We hope to be able to share even more sneak peeks and new client updates in the future, so make sure you join our Discord and keep your eye out for future devlogs!
Future Plans
- Reworking matchmaking backend to improve quality and monitoring
- We know there have been frustrating issues with our matchmaking, and unfortunately they’ve been trickier to nail down than we’d hoped. However, we’ve been working on improving the infrastructure and monitoring around this and plan on reworking large chunks of the matchmaking backend to be way more reliable, extensible, and overall better.
- Adding divisions to Gauntlet
- We want Gauntlet to be an alternative game mode that is both fun and competitive, so we’ll be improving the competitive experience and skill expression in this mode in a way that’s comparable to the Ranked mode, including division-based rewards similar to Ranked. Stay tuned for a more detailed devlog in the future!
- Enable community content
- This project started out as a grass-roots community effort, and although we have our own ideas for Duelyst II, we want to make sure we can give our community the means to express their creativity and ideas through Duelyst II. Community-shared lethal puzzles, game modes/rules, custom cards, cosmetics and more will be available as ways for you to make your mark in the world of Mythron for all to see!
- Full expansion design starting
- The Founder’s Collection has been our focus for new cards over the past few months, but it was a mini-set full of neutral minions added to the core set. The next big design focus will be towards a full new expansion! It’s too early for us to share more details, but make sure to join the Discord and follow our socials to stay up-to-date with our progress on this!
- Rewards Shop and Organized Play
- One of the things we’ve been working on behind the scenes is a Rewards Shop that would give players who play often and in competitive formats a way to be rewarded with exclusive content. We also want to continue to support and enhance our Organized Play tournmanent scene, supporting current tournament organizers and future events with both in-client and prize support and guidelines. More details to come in future updates!
- New Client
- We’re going to continue to hammer away at building the new client, but hope that we can provide the community some glimpses into that work and beta test portions of it as soon as they’re ready.
- Titles
- Titles are coming soon! Backers will be the first to receive their exclusive titles, but there will be more titles to earn and show off through in-game achievements and activities.
Final Thoughts
Player feedback and bug reports have been absolutely vital in helping us improve the game, and although we haven’t been able to address all of the issues that are brought up in a timely manner, we’re doing our best to track and prioritize everything that comes up. Thank you to all the community leaders and players that have helped us by identifying bugs, reporting issues, and suggesting new features! Please continue to provide us that feedback through Discord or Canny so we can do our best to make Duelyst II awesome! 🙂