My name is Allan, I'm the lead developer of Soulstone Survivors and today I wanted to have a chat with you. This November marks a very special time for us here at Game Smithing, as Soulstone Survivors celebrates 2 years of Early Access ːsssloveː, and on top of that, our recent reviews just hit the amazing mark of 95% positive on Steam which is the best gift we could ask for! So to start, I wanted to personally thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all the support you have given us so far!
As a little thank you, we have prepared a couple things to share with you today that we hope you will enjoy!
First, it's a long time coming but today we are finally sharing our new Content Roadmap!
PS: You can also find the localized version of the roadmap in our game page, in all the languages we support.
Now, while its certainly great to have a public roadmap to give you all a better sense of what to expect from the game moving forward... there is only so much we can show in the roadmap itself. We got a ton of stuff in the works, some of which we have been working on for quite a long time in the background and while we ourselves are super excited about it... we want to get you excited about it as well! With that in mind, starting here and now, we present to you our first...
Content Sneak Peek #1
Over the coming weeks and months we will be sharing small videos to showcase all the new stuff we are working on in secret for a while... I know some of you might feel like all we do these days is work in new characters and you want to see something different... so to begin with we prepared a little something for you:
[previewyoutube=Wd_acmFQYgs;full][/previewyoutube]
You might be wondering... is this another regular map? Is this a regular boss?? What else is coming??? When will this be released???? To find the answer to all of these questions... keep an eye out for out next Content Sneak Peek video! We plan to release those regularly moving forward as we prepare for what will be, BY VERY FAR, the biggest update the game has ever seen!
The journey so far
I also felt like this was a great time to reflect on the journey so far. When Soulstone Survivors came into Early Access on 7th November of 2022, our team was mainly composed of 3 people, Alex, Gama and me. For most of the time we still had our old jobs and we were working basically all night to get a cool game done. At that time we were also VERY lucky to have the amazing help of our friends Fernando, Tiago and Aruan, which were instrumental to get us to the finish line when we did. At that time we were still unsure of how the game would be received, what people would like, would NOT like... but we had built in our heads a plan for what the "full release" of the game would be, which then became our first public Roadmap (added as a thumbnail below, because its huge haha you can click on it to view its details):
As you can see, our vision for Soulstone Survivors was always for it to be a deep game, with tons of skills and ways to build your character, this was the pillar we were building the game upon. We wanted to add a lot of skills, characters, weapons, we knew we wanted to try playing with new game modes... but, we didnt want to promise anything we would not be able to make with our tiny team. So while it was already a lot of content to develop, we kept it simple, comfortable, something we thought "yeah we can do this over the next year if we really put our all into it, hopefully with the game release we will be able to support ourselves and get there".
Then we released into Early Access, and we couldn't believe the reception the game had right from the start. There were literally thousands of players playing the game simultaneously, tons of people joining our Discord, participating in the Steam forums, interested in the game and sharing their experiences... and we just couldn't believe our eyes. We felt honored, humbled, overjoyed... and a minute later despair haha there were so many things to fix, to improve, to add... and while it was a TON of work, literally sleeping once every 3 days for a few weeks... we were just super excited to do it. Once the fires settled a little bit, we released a lot of hotfix updates and even some new content, we took a step back, a deep breath, and thought "what comes next?"
We had our plans of what the game could be, of what we could build with our little team... but we also had all of these other cool ideas we dreamed of implementing, and you guy also had so many great ideas we knew would make a huge difference for the game, so we had to make a choice. Either we stick to the plan to hit full release around a year after the start of Early Access and deliver a pretty cool game, or, we could listen to you, to the community, and to our own hearts and aim to make Soulstone Survivors the best game it can be. I can safely say this was a pretty obvious choice for all of us.
We immediatelly started hiring new developers to give us more hands as we had a lot of ambitious features and goals to tackle, and thats when we really started working on a lot of the features that you find in the game today, such as Character Ascensions, Character Skill Trees, major reworks on skill types... ah, way too many to mention!! Sometimes I think of what might have been... if we had stuck to the plan maybe today we would have the game fully released, we might even have a whole new game pretty much done (I'm looking at you Rogue Soulstone), but then I remember everything we added to the game that wouldnt be there... remember all the messages of support, of players thanking us for adding this or that... I look at the game we have today... and I know that we have made the right choice.
There is still a lot of hard work ahead of us till get the to the full release and more work after that as well, and every day I feel lucky for this opportunity to work on a game I love, with an amazing team, the best community, and all the amazing people we met along the way. Here's to you, to Soulstone Survivors, and for all that's still coming!
I hope you have a great day, and I'll see you all in the next one!
~ Allan and the Soulstone Team
