Drake Hollow roadmap: Fall 2020

Hi Folks,

We’ve been blown away by the reception Drake Hollow has received, but also recognize that there are a lot of things we can improve. I wanted to share with you all the roadmap of changes we’ve got in the pipeline for the coming months.

First of all, I’d like to take a moment to look at what we’ve already accomplished in the weeks since launch. We’ve added the Sandbox mode, made user experience improvements to the depot, fixed a bunch of behavior issues with the Drakes, added widescreen support and an FOV slider, and fixed a number of bugs that people brought to our attention. We’re happy to have gotten all this in, and are excited to keep adding more.

For our next patch, we’re focused largely on a couple main areas: adding key rebinding, and fixing a number of bugs that lead to save loss, the inability to join or host multiplayer sessions, and a number of tuning and balance changes both for campaign and sandbox.

After that patch is when things get more exciting!

Gameplay Modifiers

First up is gameplay modifiers. They’re a collection of toggles that will allow you to customize the game to fit your style of play. Here’s a look at the tentative list of modifiers:

  • Enemy Difficulty: Easy/Normal/Hard: adjusts the health and damage of enemies

  • Improvement Build Cost: off/on: allows free building

  • Improvements Unlocked: off/on: allows all improvements to be build regardless of camp level and removes the need for schematics

  • Raid Frequency: never/rare/normal/frequent: allows you to adjust how often raids occur, or turn them off entirely

  • Permadeath: on/off: there’s no self revival, players must return to a prior save on death or be revived by a friend.

  • And more!

Additionally we’re adding a number of named presets designed to set things for specific styles: 

  • Creative

  • Competitive

  • Iron Man

  • Classic

  • Brawler

  • Strategist. 

Combat Improvements

After gameplay modifiers, we’re working on Combat Improvements!

Improving the combat experience is a wide-ranging effort that will be ongoing, and involves a lot of factors. Initially we’re looking at the player themselves, and will be working on improvements to how it feels to engage in combat. I’m not going to go into specifics here, as the process will involve a lot of testing and discovery. Making combat feel better takes a mix of work in animation, game logic, enemy behavior, tuning values, and a variety of other areas. Our main goal initially is to make the character feel more reactive to the player’s intent, and then to start layering in a greater ability for the player to demonstrate skill in combat. Right now, it’s pretty button mashy, and we’re aiming to add more nuance.

This effort is starting now, and will be incremental and ongoing.

Meta growth

The next big system addition will be adding meta growth: experience that accumulates across sessions and games, so that when you’re playing in a friend’s game, you are still earning rewards beyond the cosmetics you find.

Initially, this will take the form of a global XP system, in which players will earn XP for their character that can be used to improve their effectiveness in combat. We’d like to tie in even more rewards in the future, but for the 1st pass we’re making a simple skill tree that players can unlock through XP earned while playing.

In Summary

In addition to all this, we’ve got a bunch of improvements happening behind the scenes on tech, and of course ongoing bug fixes.

If you’re interested in checking out any of these systems as they’re being implemented and tested, keep an eye out for upcoming announcements. We have a test realm version of the game and will be making it public in the future so people can jump in, check out the latest improvements, and provide feedback as we implement. Swing by our discord! That’s where we manage the test realm and invite folks to take part.

Whew! That ended up being a pretty long update!

We love how much people are enjoying the game, and how active everyone is with providing feedback on the experience, either directly or via reviews. We’re looking forward to continuing to improve and update Drake Hollow, and can’t wait to keep sharing more as these systems are completed.

Thank you!

Forrest Dowling
President & Creative Director
The Molasses Flood

Forrest Dowling8 Comments