A big thank you to everyone who's played Neophyte so far! An extra thank you to those who have filled out the feedback form. I wanted to make a small post about the future of the game.

Neophyte's Future

I think the game has a decent foundation that can be expanded with more spells, emblems, and enemies. For the first small update, in addition to fixing some bugs, I want to focus on balancing what's already there while adding a few emblems and 1 or 2 spells that are more melee-focused.

Challenge Mode

At some point I also want to add a tiered challenge mode similar to Slay the Spire's ascension system where novel modifiers are unlocked one-by-one to gradually ramp up difficulty.

Here are some potentially interesting challenge ideas:

• Traps: At the start of each round of combat, a manually generated layout of traps is randomly chosen from a pool and placed in the room. Like enemies, traps deal more damage each level. I think this may be a good and relatively lightweight alternative to making multiple rooms.
• Elite Enemies: Some enemies are promoted to elites at the start of each wave similar to The Binding of Isaac or Diablo 3. Elites will have increased life and power as well as a unique modifier (e.g. fires projectiles upon death, summons skeletons, gains attack/movement speed at low health, etc.) denoted by a change in colour. For balance there will be an elite "budget" that increases every level with harder enemies consuming more of the budget.
• Jinxed Emblems: Whenever choice altars hold emblems, they each show a different symbol which corresponds to a stat that will be reduced if that emblem is chosen. This would another dimension to emblem selection.
• Curses: Every few levels, choice altars will include a selection of curses from which the player must choose. These will be sort of "anti-emblems" that grant unique negative effects.
• Final Boss Fight: This would happen after level 10 and I really like the idea of it being the "true" ending. That being said, it would be a fair amount of work so this would probably be introduced in a separate update after the challenge mode has been implemented.

Quarterly Made Games

As I said on the game's page, I made Neophyte as part of a new Hong Kong based game developer collective called Quarterly Made Games. The goal is to complete something every 3 months but in a low stakes, low pressure environment. Some of us just need a shared space and deadline to stay motivated and get things done. It's very new and my friend is still getting some of the social media stuff going so I'll post more about this in the future.

Since updating Neophyte will take up a big chunk of my free time, I'll try to make a much smaller game (closer to a prototype) this quarter.