Hello everyone, happy New Year!

It’s time for our yearly roadmap post. The previous year was tumultuous, for both the gamedev industry and us with the launch of Hellcard 1.0, technology changes, and team shuffling. We are now well posed for a productive 2025, so let’s talk about Thing Trunk Past, Present, and Future.

The biggest externally visible event of the past year was the launch of Hellcard 1.0 and Bruja DLC. Both performed well, which wasn’t a given. We launched during a period of many, many failed launches of good games that went under without even making a ripple. After all, in 2024 a whooping 18996 games were released on Steam. That's over 2 games per hour!

Yet we hit over 2000 concurrent players, making it our biggest launch yet! And then soared to over 5600 concurrent players for the Bruja DLC launch.

We are now crunching numbers to see if making DLCs is a valid strategy moving forward. Adding one more class to Hellcard would be awesome, but with our limited manpower, we wouldn’t want to delay other projects unnecessarily.

We also have been polishing and balancing Hellcard, with more cards and complete rework on the Tinkerer class. As a result, we have recently hit an Overwhelmingly Positive rating in recent reviews, which we are super stoked about.

We have also been working on console ports; you can expect more news in that department shortly. The workload was shared between us and an external porting company, which allowed us to learn a lot. In the future, we are going to develop games for consoles and PC at the same time. This should save a lot of time since the work won’t have to be duplicated. It will also make the codebase tidy and organized.
On the team front, there have been changes as well. We took in three interns last year and offered each of them to keep working with us once their internships ended. We are 14 people strong now.

Sadly, Matt, one of the founding fathers, decided to take a more passive role in development, mostly due to burnout. He remains in an advisory role but doesn’t work on any specific project, for now.

Last, but super far from least, after 10 years, we managed to compartmentalize the development. Until now, each one of us has worked on all current projects. We had issues with delegation - team members would consult everyone else about most decisions. While this approach was great for what we call visibility, meaning everyone knew everything going on, it’s detrimental to efficiency. And it put unnecessary strain on the team.

For the last three years, we have been trying to isolate the bureaucracy of running the company and ongoing projects from each other. And on the project scale, learn how to delegate. We are now confident this new system is working.
First of all, we signed an unannounced project with a publisher. It will be our first UE5 project. That’s all I can say at the moment, though ːarchduckː It will be part of the series and Supporter's Pack, of course.
We are looking for funding to expand the Book of Aliens team. The environment is adversarial, to say the least with studios firing devs en masse and investors scared. We have a couple of options that we will continue to pursue while continuing to work on the game. The core Book of Aliens team is small now, we can iterate prototypes and design but we will need more hands on board before moving into preproduction.
We are finalizing the modding support update for Hellcard. This completes the Hellcard’s roadmap, encompassing all we had planned at launch. We even have added plenty of unplanned content along the way, so there is a non-zero chance that’s not all ːarchduckː
I know, that’s a name you haven’t heard in a long time! In my spare time, I have tinkered with the Book of Demons. Specifically, I remade it to work without path-bound movement.
There is a story behind it, too. One day I woke up and remembered a negative review from 2018 (these tend to burn into your brain when you are a green dev with starry eyes). Someone wrote that the game was “shit on rails” and that “devs made it on rails because free movement would be too hard”. Which was funny since path movement and mechanics were super complicated to implement.
I wanted to see if it would work and if I could rewrite the game secretly to surprise the team. Not only did it work but it’s also fun. Not sure if we are going to do anything with that, though. The changes are too fundamental to be incorporated into the core game’s code.
We will release the modding support update sometime early this year. This should allow anyone to add new classes and cards using pre-existing mechanics. We expect to spend at least a month fixing issues with it and supporting modders (assuming there will be modders ːarchduckː). This will finish the content roadmap for Hellcard but doesn’t mean there won’t be more content at all. If adding future classes as DLC proves feasible we might add one or two.
The work continues. Since we are fully transitioning to Unreal Engine with all future projects, we decided it would make sense to develop a smaller (or maybe simpler is the correct word here) project on it first. That way we will have a better grip on the tech before diving head first into Book of Aliens, allowing us to ensure the the proper quality you expect from us in both games.
All in all, everyone is excited about the future, doing what they want to be doing and work is progressing very quickly compared to previous years. So, I dare say, it was a year of hard work but it seems to be paying off. This year will tell!

As Always,
Stay Safe in Paper Dungeons ːarchduckː
Konstanty

It's been 1.5 years since I posted the last dev update here. And only a couple of dev updates since I pledged to try and post one update every couple of months ːarchduckː I guess we now know that might have been a bit overambitious commitment to make on my part.

Let me bring you up to speed with what happened during that time. And boy, did stuff happen!

We have been tackling the project from three angles: art, tech, and design. What makes this especially tricky is that these three are interlocked, so there are plenty of unknowns with each decision. This leads to uncertainty and this took a toll on the team. After the exceptionally tough years during the pandemic lockdown, we had more than one team member burnout.

And by burnout, I meant not the "I can't connect to my muse" state but rather the "dark bottomless pit with no escape" kind of affair. It's much better now, thank you. We have found the mindset that allows us to move forward. Remember everyone: self-care is important and should come first.

This is one of the reasons for the radio silence - even though work was progressing everyone felt like we were not moving ahead despite the great deal of work we put in. The expectation to deliver news was crushing at times.

This is also why we have decided to be much more open about the development (as you can see from this rather personal post) and plan around the unknowns. We believe that most of that expectation was ultimately in our heads since the community was nothing if not understanding all this time. You are awesome, by the way.

So, after that heavy and long intro, let's get to the stuff we worked on during the project so far!

As I mentioned all three aspects are interconnected. Art is directly linked to the engine. Our engine, CUG, is primarily 2D. As we worked on Book of Aliens prototypes and Hellcard we came to a decision that our games could benefit from a switch to 3D. Our current art asset production pipelines already included 3D models that were rendered onto 2D sprites and manually imported to the engine. And they put into pseudo 3D hierarchies that imitated 3D. Not the most efficient way to do it, but it did have some benefits. If you are interested in how it worked I did an Imgur post on it here[imgur.com].

The initial artstyle you all know was designed for a 2D rendering with no dynamic lights, free 3D camera, or effects like fog.

Models from the above picture have many jagged edges and, in some cases, are flat since they were designed for a fixed camera.

We had to reinvent the textures, how the paper meshes are built, and everything else for it to work in 3D.

This process is still ongoing, but I would like to show you one of our mockup maps in 3D:
As you can see the scale is smaller, and the map is being unfolded as it is being explored. That's one visual effect area we are planning to explore and a topic for a whole other post.

Please don't be reading too much into how dark/lighthearted it looks. This can be easily modified with shaders and texture design. Since then we have been preparing assets to be used in the prototypes and the final game.

And a short peek of an in-engine tile visual exploration state representation (which I like a lot):
As you can see above this test was done in-engine but with the older design of a tile. A much larger one.

We have decided that ditching our old, trusty engine is the best way forward. This would allow us to free manpower for doing actual games not taking care of what's underhood. Also shifting to 3D would be an insane amount of work, unfeasible for our team.

It took the team almost a year of careful consideration and research. Such decisions are not taken lightly since we had to adapt our whole tech stack to the new tech. The wrong choice here would cost us dearly in the future.

Eventually, we decided to move to Unity. Yeah. This was around 2021. It seemed a better choice being indie-friendly with a huge community. Not without issues, of course. But the good stuff outweighed the bad. We worked out pipelines and started churning out assets even as the mechanical design was still undergoing. The team was learning the intricacies of the engine, new prototypes were made in the new engine as well.

And then the whole Unity meltdown happened. For those of you who don't know Unity suddenly decided to change monetization models from a subscription to per-install pay. This in itself wasn't a huge problem, we were pretty confident they would have to backtrack and rework this into something feasible. However, this meant Unity just can't be trusted with long-term development and support. Not to mention Unity kept sacking engineers and hiring marketing people instead. Which didn't bode well for the future of the engine.

I won't go into the details but we have decided to switch to Unreal Engine as a result. We didn't post a piece of dramatic news at the time, since the decision wasn't emotional. It's a cold calculation. We can't be left with a dead or unusable engine in 3 or 7 years. Or worse yet, one that forces a monetization model on us and our community. We intend to make a series of games here - and at the end of this journey we want all of them to keep working and be available to the players ːarchduckː

This shift to yet another engine comes with a steep price tag - we have to redo much of what we have already created. The team has to learn the new engine all over again (not that we are complaining here, learning new stuff is exciting but it does slow you down). This will take time as we will be creating smaller test projects for GFX (like the one with the rotating tile above). We are also considering making a smaller and easier project on the new engine before moving full throttle ahead with writing the code for Book of Aliens. The more dry runs we make first the better and less buggy game will come out of it.

It has an upside though - we got an opportunity to revisit the assets and designs and improve on them. With Unreal we are also confident that we can make the game perform better and make it look better. And, who knows, maybe one of these smaller games will turn out to be fun enough to share with the world ːarchduckː

Here is where it gets really interesting. We have come up with several completely different designs for the core mechanic. Including a sudoku-based one. Yes, you read that right! That one didn't make it into the final selection though.

Some prototypes were very basic in the visual layer, focusing only on the raw mechanics, like this one:
As you can see both soldiers and actions are cards in this one and there are no tiles (blasphemy!).

Others utilized actual art and were playable from start to end with a whole campaign implemented (we often overdo stuff, I know).

Over time we concluded that we expect two things from tactical shooters and UFO games that are difficult to mix: opportunity to plan our game and a bit of chaos to spice things up.

That's why our designs explored mechanics that mixed these two ingredients in various proportions. As a result, we ended up with not one but two games. We want to finish prototyping the second one and then we will decide which one is going into preproduction. And the other one may also get made at a later date. That's a huge benefit of all that time we have spent on art style. We can adapt it to new ideas quickly and without changes to base assets.

This also is a topic for a whole other post though.

This is where we are right now. A better place, and excited about the stuff we are working on. The team is small, and the task is huge but I hope the glimpses I have shown you here give you an idea of how much work went into the project already. And what it can become.

I will be posting new stuff as it comes. For the foreseeable future, though, we will be learning Unreal and adapting our workflows. This isn't a particularly interesting topic to write about, certainly doesn't come with a lot of cool screenshots. So maybe the next post will be more about art and challenges we faced when adapting our 2D style to a 3rd dimension? Let me know in the comments if that sounds like something you would like to read about.

Stay safe on paper tiles,
Konstanty