Collateral Souls has been accepted by steam to be released! Now, I’m no where close to ready for this so I don’t expect release until around mid-2018. Here is the roadmap I foresee going forward to get the game ready to launch:
Art
The game looks like terrible programmer art (because that is what it is 🙂 ) If the game is going to have any broad appeal I need to get this looking much more consistent and sounding like, well anything. The sprite updates have given a new layer of information I can play with, I want to take advantage of this as much as possible and have more creature/ability telegraphing to help reinforce gameplay concepts to new users. I also want to incorporate some basic sound effects and layered music to add to the thematic aspects of the game.
Challenge Mode
The current challenge mode is very random and and extremely unbalanced. I want to align this with a more consistently enjoyable experience and integrate the Steam API’s leaderboards for daily seeded challenges. There is a lot of work to do here and I haven’t designed it all out yet.
Broader Input Support
The game was originally designed to work on the number pad, but not everyone has one of those and the qwerty controls are a bit terrible. I want to get mouse and controller support. Not just superficially so, but actually take the time to make them shine with details like mouse based pathfinding previews. Going to be a lot of tuning in this area to get it right but the controls seem to have been the greatest sticking point for complaints with gameplay so it will be worth it to get right.
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I don’t want to do an early access program as I don’t feel the game has enough gusto outside of niche roguelike players at the moment. However I don’t plan on suspending releases until launch either. I haven’t looked into the details of the Steam beta programs, or releasing development versions with steam API integrations but once I figure it out there will be further announcements on how exactly I am going to handle this.