Elementyle

It has been a while. Too long, even.

While development is still continuing in the background (not as much as I would hope), there has been a lot of personal and professional adjustment lately. New responsibilities and tasks with my job, and new personal obligations and home life changes have slowed things down. Development progress has slowed in a few different ways, but has continued nonetheless.

A few background things that have been worked on since the last update include a few things which are still not ready for release (or aren’t even release items) but progress is still progress. A lot of work has been done on simulating and testing different aspects of the game such as item drops. Other enhancements include not only vast improvements in the move engine but also the testing framework and iteration testing for the move engine. Being able to programmatically test and develop the move engine to play thousands of games is expected to have a significant impact on the quality of computer matches. This feature is expected to come in the new 0.3.0 update slated for mid-July.

Other features are being developed as well, but are nowhere near release ready. In order to get the information out and more or less set the goals and expectations for their deployment, as well as set the target for full release, a hard list of 10 features has been put together. These 10 features will constitute what feels to be the highest priority for the base game to feel “complete” while still leaving room for other developments and additions in the future. While ideally all 10 will make it into full release by end of the year, this list has been further broken into 3 categories:

• Critical – Must Have
• High – Really Want
• Medium – Nice to Have

Full Release Feature List

• Android App – Full support for play on Android devices.
• Asynchronous Matches – Support asynchronous (play and wait) matches.
• Set Progression – No-reset cosmetic unlocks.
• Pieces as Items – Pieces drop as items; can be crafted for added player agency and strategy development.
• Ranked Ladders – Periodically reset ranked ladders, eventually supporting special cosmetic unlocks.
• Achievements – Cross-platform unlockable achievements.
• Replays – Review and rewatch past matches.
• Hardcore Mode – Add Gauntlet (PvE) and Arena (PvP) game modes.
• Quests – Add daily/weekly/monthly objectives to complete for in-game rewards.
• Economy Refactor – Rebuild of the item reset system to support “seasonal” development cycles.

There are a number of other features and developments which have been worked on and not quite hit the mark for release or not been high enough priority to make it to this list, such as controller support. These will still be worked on and released over time but with over half the year done already and the desire to exit early access at end of year, these kinds of decisions need to be made. Some features may get worked on alongside these key features but there is no guarantee.

I’m hoping to get full patch notes and more updates out soon. Expect July to be a bit lighter compared to the last few updates as a lot of work has focused on the refactored move engine. This was a heavy piece of development and had a lot of requirements to work. It had to be measurably better at playing the game, it had to get better in steps to match tyles, and it had to be lightweight and efficient enough to not eat up resources on the server at an unreasonable ratio. There will be more tweaking to do as more data is collected but hopefully will make for more meaningful PvE matches.