What we are busy on at Polymorph Games since the Early Access launch!14 MAY @ 8:38PM - POLYMORPH GAMES
Hello everyone,
We’d like to share with you some news about the next content update and what’s going on at Polymorph Games.
Since the launch, feedback from the community has been incredibly positive. Despite the early crashes, bugs and rough-edged features, people have been appreciative of the core experience.
After the Early Access launch, the focus for the first month was to handle game crashes. The variety of different PC configurations that came with the increased player base was a challenge to support, however we updated the game with fixes as frequently as we could to allow as many players to play uninterrupted from crashes as possible.
With no internal Quality Assurance (QA) specialist at the office and updates now affecting tens of thousands of extra players, QA was adding to the workload for the team which was something that we needed to address. Another matter that we wanted to rectify was the art style and workflow. With no senior artist in the team, a certain lack of cohesion between different art assets became apparent. Before continuing to develop new assets and content, these concerns needed to be addressed.
Long story short: We made our priority to hire a QA Manager and a Senior Artist, which we did with the addition of Nicolas and Claudine.
Since his hiring, Nicolas has been working on an internal and external QA workflow. He’s been acknowledging bugs received from the community on our public Mantis and adding and prioritizing them in our own internal bug base, which has relieved our programmers and our community manager from doing that.
With the addition of Claudine, the art team has been working on improving the cohesion of models and textures and standardizing some buildings design as well. This was a necessary step prior to designing and adding new buildings in the game, to ensure the cohesion will be respected in the future. This task progresses steadily and we have started to create new buildings and monuments again.
Other positions also needed to be filled to release other bottlenecks, the gameplay being the most important. Why is that so? Our CEO and Creative Director happens to be our only gameplay programmer on the team. Since the Early Access, with the need to hire new staff, planning work for the team, ensuring the vision for the game is respected and other “non-programming-the-game” tasks, he has been extremely busy. The good news is, we have just found a new gameplay programmer who will join us in two weeks. This will have a positive impact on our velocity!
Our two engine programmers have been working to fix bugs and on optimisations of the game. One of them is now mostly focused on improving modding capabilities. It is very important for us to make progress in modding whilst the game evolves as it allows us to ensure our architecture is modding-friendly and allows us to make adjustments as we identify any problems. Soon, we’ll allow the community to mod more of the actual content of the game: productions, monuments, resources etc...
News on the next content updateWe know many of you crave for new content, and as much as we’d like to make it happen fast, the next content update has no official date yet, and is at least a couple of months away. The new content is not just about adding new resources and production lines. We are working to add depth to the gameplay as well, especially by expanding the Estate and Event system. For instance, we are expanding the Military Quest System so it becomes the main focus of the Kingdom Estate progression path. It will be more challenging but also more rewarding. Each Estate will have its own playstyle, so the other two progressions need to be implemented as well. We are also adding the first achievements in the game, that will be awarded when achieving specific challenges. Furthermore, there’s a lot of work to be done in the actual system that we lacked time to do. There’s a huge list of QoL and balancing improvements, like adding desirability effect to all buildings, improve how the villagers chose their home location, being able to pause productions, rehaul the UI, improve the capabilities of the monument system etc. All those changes will have a large impact on the game balancing, thus the importance of take the time to tweak and test thoroughly before deploying the update.
To Sum UpSince the Early Access launch, 4 new members have been added to the team, making a total of 12 people at Polymorph Games. This team is 100% dedicated to Foundation as we speak, working on all fronts: gameplay, art, modding, and tools, with the objective to deliver our dream game to you. We are so excited to be working on this game and can’t wait to officially present you the next content update! In the meantime, expect more QoL updates!
Sincererly,
- Your dedicated Polymorph Games team