Hey Keepers,
today is a special day, because we celebrate the two year anniversary of releasing Dome Keeper. Not only that, but we also just hit 1.000.000 players, which is an insane milestone we could not have dreamt of back in April 2021 when we made a small game in 3 days for Ludum Dare 48.
Back then we were hobbyists, just following our passion while working full time jobs. By all means, Dome Keeper has been a life-changing experience for us. You, the players and our awesome community are at the heart of that. From the first larger playtest in September 2021, over the many updates and patches toward the release of “A Keeper’s Duty”, you’ve played a crucial role in making a fun game. Thank you!
Celebrating two year anniversary
Let’s celebrate together! The lovely Jarvs is back and we’ll do a stream today at 17:30 CEST over on YouTube and Twitch. We’ll hang out, chat with you and play the game. I’m most excited to share an awesome thing though, reveal in the stream. It’s not inside Dome Keeper, no new content or plans, but still something super cool game related. Join us and let’s celebrate!
We'll start with one thing we are so happy about. At Gamescom 2023 we gave away Drillbert plushies to people who drew Drillbert. The result was a vast amount of amazing drawings. The breadth of what we see here is simply fantastic, we love it! Check out the full collection via the link below.
https://drillberts.bippinbits.com/
So many updates!
I’m a bit sentimental looking back on all of these. With each update we not only added new content, but also worked to improve the balance and fix a lot of bugs. There were plenty of hotfixes and patches in between, but these were the most important updates:
Release
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3307354336740716276
Halloween Update
bringing the cosmetic skeleton suit and pet.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3409813763388467185
The Assessor
brings in the second keeper, complete with its own full OST.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3428955345103485749
Caves & Critters
added caves into the mines as well as small creatures living there, bringing a bit of variety to the underground experience.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3496511138517853772
Hard pressed
adding the scarab and stab monsters, the Miner mode for prestige and a own world background for prestige.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649634951896445163
Springloaded
bringing 3 new gadgets with Spire, Autocannon, Prospection Meter.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3668782792567448910
Drillbert Mode
announced as April Fools, while doing a switcheroo and actually adding Drillbert mode to the game!
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/6384455987842263498
Re-Assessor
reworking the Assessor and changing the mechanics significantly. The old Assessor was definitely an “aquired taste” and the new one proved much more fun.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3716076292751694859
Mod Support
enabling Steamworkshop mods. Raffa in our team made the first mod as an example, the Hydra Launcher.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3649653272173229011
Double Dome
adding Tesla and Artillery dome to the game.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3731852209660535303
Merry Christmouse
adding mouse support to the game, a much requested feature. Also came with a christmas skin for the assessor.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/3869217710016267898
Lunar New Year
adding a new cave with a special pet.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4062878364658405866
A Keeper’s Duty
adding Guild Assignments, the Droneyard, 11 new gadgets, Supplements for gadgets and weapons, a new world and 5 new monsters. It’s a bit crazy to list this, maybe it shows how huge that update was comparatively.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1637320/announcements/detail/4396159337027279925
As you can see, we progressively made larger and larger patches that naturally needed a bit longer to develop. To be honest, the pace was sometimes a bit grueling, but it was also so exciting and fun to see you all get hyped and play the game a lot. Very motivating!
v4.1 in October
Since the release of “A Keeper’s Duty” we received a ton of balancing feedback. We also saw some new exploits for prestige, and how a countermeasure wasn’t effective.
Right now we are working on a patch that aims to improve balance across the whole game. Many bugs will be fixed and it will also take better care of a few exploits.
With the big balance changes, we’ll start season 7 for prestige. I’ll also clean the leaderboards of season 6 of any obviously cheated runs.
We are also hard at work to bring back full mod support, that broke due to the engine upgrade from Godot 3 to Godot 4. The way many mods worked simply was not supported with Godot 4 anymore, and we are working on workarounds and new ways of modding so we can see more cool mods in the future.
What’s up for 2025
The next big thing for Dome Keeper is MULTIPLAYER. It is by far the most requested feature and finally after adding content for two years, it is time for multiplayer. A Keeper’s Duty was our last big content update, at least for now, and we’ll finish development of Dome Keeper with a bang, i hope.
So how does the multiplayer development look like?
We can differentiate two parts here: split screen local multiplayer and online multiplayer across two or more machines.
The very first test for local coop back in Dome Romantik times.
Local multiplayer is relatively easy to do. It needs a huge refactoring in the code base, but it’s doable. I already implemented local coop last year. It’s playable, but needs a lot of tuning.
The challenge with online multiplayer is much greater, as the game is so far not built to support that. That means rethinking the whole game on a technical level. Usually developers decide at the beginning of a project for or against multiplayer, as such major changes get increasingly harder over time (often prohibitively hard). We still want to take a stab at it and see if we can get it done.
This also means it will get quiet on the development side at least for the rest of this year. We got some implementation to do!
This is also a big reason we want to fully enable and foster mods - more on that in the future.
So how will multiplayer look like exactly? Well, we'll share details in the future. We got plenty of feedback over the past years and lots of our own ideas too. That should be a lot of fun!
So, who likes fun?
Ok, to wrap this up, here are some fun facts!
Fun Facts
- Drillbert was originally planned to be a tunnel digging machine similar to what you see in real life. Anne had the great idea of making it into a likeable animal instead. In the code it is still called “Drillbot” though.
- Dome Keeper’s jam version was called “Dome Romantik”, as a pun on “Dorfromantik”, which was very popular back then (and still is a great game from super nice devs).
- the biggest influences on Dome Keeper are Kingdom and Into the Breach. Most people expect games like Motherload or Steamworld Dig here, but i never had played them before making Dome.
- Dome Keeper inspired some other devs to make related games, like the recently released Feed the Deep. We are really happy about that and see it as a big compliment.
- There are 320 upgrades in Dome Keeper, with 35 supplements inside 37 tech trees.
- in june 2021 we celebrated the big milestone of having 100 people on our discord, for which anne made a special graphic. Later our composer Cameron got into the habit of making celebratory tracks for the next discord member milestones.
- i wrote a post-mortem of the game jam version of Dome Keeper
- As April fools in 2022 we announced to rename to “Dome Romantic” and switch direction more into a “The Sims meets Space Mining”. It said Build your bachelor dome and get to work in the mines of alien planets. Improve your mining skills, get elegant furniture and expand your dome. When everything's spiffy, invite your hot neighbor over for dinner, because it gets lonely fast in the domes. Don't forget to buy some curtains first, it's a glass dome after all. Cameron even made a track for that.
