Everything We've Improved Since The Demo

Thanks to your valuable feedbacks, we've made lots of tweaks & fixes to smooth the experience: be prepared to experience them when the next demo comes!

Hi, I’m JB, game director & developer of Drop Duchy.

The response to our first free demo is fantastic, with over 40000 players, 40% of whom have played over an hour! We’ve received a lot of praise and attention, our wishlist count is skyrocketing, and we also got hundreds of feedbacks on Discord, Steam, or through the in-game form. Not all is perfect, but for our tiny studio, that’s a huge milestone to release a polished demo that (most) people enjoy!

In this post, I’d like to tell you more about what we’ve been doing during the last weeks to address the feedback and how we’ve improved the game, thanks to you. You’ll be able to experience these changes when the new demo drops in a few weeks (or when the game launches in a few months).

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Combat difficulty

Balancing a game such as Drop Duchy is particularly tricky since every player comes with different expectations and learns at their own pace. In the demo survey, we’ve had players in all the categories, ranging from “too easy” to “too hard.” But it is definitely more “too hard” than “too easy,” so we’ve decided to make a few changes to improve the experience (and if you want more challenge, you can always crank up the difficulty level!)

Changes

• New rule for the first boss: it now starts with lots of units and loses some each time the Wall goes up. You still gotta be careful, but no more extra-hard penalties for leaving holes in the grid (that’ll be an optional challenge for later!)

• We’ve made many of the enemy groups more manageable and lowered the default amount of garrison they have.

• Added a new “battle over” UI at the end of a round you survived, because that “Battle Lost” was depressing! You win the war when you can eliminate enemies and still keep enough defense.

• Lowered the difficulty for the Easy mode: it might still require some practice to beat the boss, but it’ll be alright.

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Tutorial and indications

While my design intention has always been to let the player ‘learn by doing’ (I hate mobile game tutorials), I agree that the explanations were lacking in some areas.

Changes

• Added an extra step to the tutorial map, allowing players to try out a more advanced combat

• Added tutorial panels for the reserve & multi-exploration and rewrote many texts for clarity.

• Added an encyclopedia page in the pause and the main menu so that you can read all the tutorials again

• Added a large “combat rules” panel with a detailed explanation for the combat phase

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Feeling of randomness

Drop Duchy, as you can tell, is a roguelite with many random elements to manage. Doing your best with the pieces that come is the game's primary challenge. You have to think ahead, prepare the right place for a building that’s coming, and sometimes cross your fingers for good luck. As an avid card game player, I know that having to deal with bad draws can be highly frustrating, but sometimes it also makes you find creative solutions and keep each round fresh.

Changes

• Added a button to reroll cards at the end of the round (for a cost). Since the demo has a limited number of cards available, not getting the right ones could be frustrating

• In the Trading Fair, you can select which card you want to replace with a random card.

• Player buildings can no longer be in the very first or very last pieces of a round.

• Added a “Reload save” button in the Pause menu, which is essentially the same as quitting & loading the run again to restart the round. If you want to use it because some bad luck or when a mistake is about to ruin your run, feel free to use it as much as you want!

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Quality of life & bugs

There are many little suggestions to make the game smoother and more enjoyable, and while we couldn’t address them all, we couldn’t resist implementing many of them.

Changes

• The piece's initial drop timer is infinite. You don’t have to swap back and forth with the reserve to get more time to think. As soon as you make a move, the piece will start falling.

• Added a button to leave the trading fair without trading (kinda defeats the point, but ok)

• Added a button to refill defense after entering the grid (a tiny one!). You can now also hold these buttons instead click spamming.

• Added an option to automatically speed up + an option to change the speed of the speed-up

• Can remove any group from the combat sequence, and it’ll adjust automatically.

• Can use Escape to close many of the menus and use the W/S keys to move the map

• The camera automatically focuses on the next locations when leaving a place.

• Added a line in the Welcome box to indicate that you can fully rebind keyboard and gamepad controls: everybody has their preference, so use it!

• The default volume is lower (Sorry for your ears! But the music is incredible, right?)

• Put a cap on the default FPS, the CPU usage on high-end computers was extreme

• Fixed localization bugs in German and Japanese (thanks for reporting!)

• I fixed a bug with the rotation kicks. Thanks for spotting it! Fitting into tight spaces should be much easier now.

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What’s NOT coming

Before telling you more about the next demo, I’d like to comment on some interesting feedback and explain to you why we won’t change them for now. In short, we’re a tiny team; we only have a few weeks left to polish everything before release, and we must focus on balancing. If the game is successful and we can expand it for the years to come, they could become high priorities, but for now, these aren’t planned.

• PVP mode: I love the idea, but it requires a considerable effort to adapt the game’s flow, code, and UX to several players at once

• Placing the last reserve tile: It’s not that easy to do in terms of flow and is more intuitive this way for most players, so we’ll leave it as such for now. Maybe a tech card later on?

• Undo button: again for technical reasons, it’s impossible to cancel a single piece and all the effects that might have triggered since (such as un-transforming squares)

• Being able to check the map while selecting cards: this isn’t easy since the grid and the map are on separate scenes (recreating the map in a menu is also really complex)

• River Castle connecting to rivers: well, that’s not how a moat works! And better reason: there are so many possible cases that it’s not really worth the effort; we preferred creating more buildings!

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What’s in the next demo, then?

The upcoming demo will be available shortly. It will still contain only the first Act and first boss of the game but with double the cards and other exciting novelties.

In the next demo, you’ll have a peek at the meta-progression with a limited number of challenges you can complete to get points and spend them in the progress tree to unlock new cards & mechanics. Unlike the first demo, you can choose when the river unlocks and which cards you want to add to the pool.

If you play the demo long enough, you’ll even be able to play with the second faction: The Republic. Being more of an economy-based faction, The Republic has a harder time surviving in the early battles, but when you do, you can build fantastic combos with this faction!

Last but not least, this demo won’t have any restriction, you can play and win as much as you’d like (but please promise me that you won’t get bored of the game before it comes out!)

Thanks again for your support, feedback, and enthusiasm, I look forward to reading your reactions to the next demo :)