Dear Tacticians,
Can’t believe it’s already July! We would like to update everyone on how we have been working on the game so far in 2022, and provide transparency on our plans for the remainder of the year. Our goal is to provide the best possible turn-based tactics and RPG experience, but doing so without making any further delay to the game launch. The team has been discussing and debating the dev roadmap everyday to achieve that goal!
Wrapping Up the First Half
In the first half of 2022, our primary focus was on making improvements and changes based on the feedback we collected from the community during last year’s first beta while building the content.
Thankfully, we could test the new changes and improvements via the second PC beta, and we were happy that the changes and improvements were received with positive feedback! The second beta also provided us with an opportunity to identify new areas for improvement. If you want to learn more about our learnings from the second beta, as well as the changes we are planning to make based on the feedback, you can read them here).
We also worked hard to create the Lost Eidolons build for Xbox consoles! Initially, we aimed to support both the Xbox One family and the Xbox Series family. However, we encountered hardware limitations on the Xbox One family, learning that we might not be able to provide the best possible game experience. It was not an easy decision to make, but after multiple discussions we concluded that we should keep Lost Eidolons only on Xbox Series X|S consoles, while we focus our resources on optimizing the game for the Xbox.
With the Xbox build available, we were able to run a small first beta test via the Xbox Insider Program! All the feedback and the performance data from the Insider Program helped us craft a plan to complete the game. We are currently working hard to finish up the final dev roadmap for the Xbox version and hope we can announce a more detailed schedule for the Xbox in the near future.
Plans for the Future
Thanks to the community, we have successfully participated in the Steam Next Fest, and took more feedback on the game! Since we have all the great feedback from the community, we are very close to finalizing the dev roadmap up to the official launch!
We plan to share the details once we finalize the plan, but we wanted to first share some high-level focus items to give you an idea how we plan to make further improvements to the game!
Key Dev Focus
Story/Lore
The team’s main focus of improvement will be how we tell the story/lore so that it can be more immersive. We could clearly understand current cut-scene progress can be boring and not effective in progressing the story. Thus are allocating more resources to make significant improvements and acting on things like below:
- Adding more in-game rendered cinematic cutscenes
- Shortening/removing some of the dialogues to streamline the storytelling
- Potentially converting some of the dialogues to in-game event cutscenes
- Improving the speed of dialogue transition among characters
Same line shown in a dialogue cutscene and a cinematic cutscene
Camp Contents
While the contents of the camp are not close to final, we believe it will provide a much better experience at the official launch That does not stop us from taking in the valuable feedback you shared with us, so we will be working on some of the major improvements as below:
- Adding VO or reaction voices to the dialogues in the camp
- Providing more context related to the upcoming battles in the camp so that players can make better preparations
- Adding side battles (this was already planned, and we could confirm the importance of this content through feedback during the beta and Steam Next Fest)
Other Areas
We can assure you that we will also be working on more areas than what we shared above, such as quality-of-life improvements, polishing graphics and animation, adding more sound effects and BGMs, etc.
We will be sharing all these progress via the regular dev chat streams. If you haven’t already, please follow our Twitch channel and YouTube channel to watch them!
Also, we are working hard towards preparing the marketing for the official launch. We are an independent developer and self-publishing the game–which means, while we will have our own marketing campaign prepared, we hope the community can spread the word about the game to help us along! Every bit of your support would be very appreciated!
Know any tactical turn-based RPG fans? Make sure they have their eyes on Lost Eidolons. Know any content creators we should partner with? Give us a holler! You can always reach out to us on our Discord server 🙂
We are deeply grateful for your support for Lost Eidolons, and we look forward to bringing you more updates in the future.
– The ODS Team
