Devlog #6: The Demo vs. the Early Access Release

Now that there’s we’re counting the days before our Early Access release (April 24th!!), let’s talk a bit about what has changed between the demo and the Early Access and also talk a little bit about the roadmap for the future! You know that we’re adding more content, but we’ve changed a lot more since the demo, and we want you to be updated so you know what to expect.

Something important to note is that we will be taking down the demo when we release!

Something really big and important is that we’ve changed how Sparks interact with buildings. Instead of being able to interact with buildings on their left- and right-hand side, we’ve changed it so that Sparks can now only interact with the right hand side of the path.

We’ve seen some of our players already talk about how to build The Perfect Base and this will change things a lot. The Spark Traffic system is not set in stone! We’ll continue balancing and figuring out what kind of late game builds we want to encourage and discourage.

With this change and other tools that you haven’t seen yet, we’re sure that it’ll change how you think about building. We can’t wait to see what you all come up with!

Previously, you could send us feedback via our Discord, the steam forums, or even by email at Feedback@massiveminiteam.com. We’ve added a new way, and now you can now send us feedback and bugs directly from the game! You can open it via the in-game menu, or directly by pressing F8.

We’ve been squashing world generation bugs and making it better. We’ve changed how waypoints are placed so it should be always useful and there isn’t two that are too close to each other, and there’s more ancient bases and now they spawn in a grid!

It might sound like a small change, but this will make a difference on how you look at the map and how you build your bases! The aim is to create something that you can replay a lot without giving you bad seeds, and still have lots of very interesting challenges each time you start a new save.

! So it was always a very temporary thing. We realized as we were finalizing the demo that the game wasn’t really telling you just how much future content we were thinking of having in the final game, or how we were planning to pace the game. That’s why we very quickly implemented the Spark Keys! We have a lot of content in mind and we wanted you to know that what you’ve seen in the demo is only a small amount of the game.

So now, they’ve been replaced with a new feature, Monument Quests! The monument now handles a lot of things related to the player and related to the shrines. So for example, instead of unlocking the Spark shrines individually, you’ll be unlocking them in the Monument. With the villager quests and the monument quests, we hope to create a more open ended progression that’s a lot of fun to go through and explore.

Instead of opening the build menu every single time, we’ve streamlined the build mode so that it’s much nicer to build the same type of building over and over. Basically, you now have a history of the 5 previously built buildings that you can quick access, and you open that history first before you open the buildings menu. It’s not perfect, but it’s better and we’ll continue working on the UX to make sure it’s as good as it can be.

The current changes are a bit hard to imagine via text, but we feel like it’s a lot smoother now to build things repeatedly! You’ll thank us when you explore the mountains.

We heard that some of you find the mouse & keyboard inventory shortcuts annoying, so we went back to the drawing board. To be honest, designing the controls for this game has been pretty difficult. As a genre mix, we have different conventions pushing and pulling us towards different directions. It’s very clear to see which genre people like when they give us feedback!

You asked for a minimap and we now have a minimap! We had a lot of internal discussions about it because we wanted navigating and exploring the world to be part of the game, but we ended up seeing that it was more annoying than we wanted it to be.

We also added a lot of quality of life features to the map itself. We changed the map controls to some player feedback and have made the map marker much better. You can now mark important landmarks on the map!

The callback has gotten a round of improvement so it’s easier to call back a single Spark. Maybe you accidentally threw a Crafty on a path when you didn’t mean to. Or you just want to micromanage combat more and call back a particular Stumpy before the Beelephant attacks it? Well, either way, it’s now much easier and smoother.