State of development

This was the September 2024 check-in. The new features and the feedback from players had taken the time that would have gone into smaller updates.

On the list:

• Abilities
• Talents
• Quests
• New bosses
• Left-handed and right-handed play
• iOS

The screenshots from the original post were served through the old site's image optimizer, so they are not copied here. The game page has the art that is still in the repo.

Abilities (in testing)

Ranger Quest is mostly an idle game. Players asked for more to do, so abilities were the answer: 16 of them, 4 per class.

Level a hero and class-specific spells open up during an expedition. Some slow enemies, some fire more than one projectile, some call in help.

Because the batch was large, abilities stayed in testing. They change the balance of the whole game. The plan was to ship them in the next update, inside two months of this post.

Talents (in testing)

The roguelike side needed more picks. Every 7 days you choose a talent: heroic bonuses, passive upgrade bonuses, ability modifiers, and others.

A run can go a different way depending on how you play, especially once talents sit next to items and the class spells. Talents were in testing for the same balance reasons as abilities.

• A unique talent pick every 7 days
• Heroic upgrade talents
• Passive upgrade bonus talents
• Ability modifier talents

Quests (in development)

Daily and weekly quests were next. An event system already tracked expedition achievements and showed some of them when you lost. Quests give that system a job: tokens and experience for slaying goblins, casting specific spells, and the like. Quests are synchronized, so friends should see a similar list, aside from quests a player cannot complete.

New bosses (in testing)

Three new bosses for the Goblin Glades were in balance, and the first two bosses were being rebalanced at the same time. Fights were meant to pick up once projectile changes, talents, and abilities stacked.

iOS (in testing)

iOS took longer than I expected. Tablet support had been thin, and the iOS work improved scaling and where the interface sits, so more tablets and iPads were usable.

A large rework covered more than one platform, plus cloud saves and Game Center. Testing on iOS was underway, with a launch planned alongside the rest of this batch.

When?

I estimated two or three months of work still, from the end of September 2024, before those features shipped. It was a large update, with a lot of rebalancing, and I wanted it to feel right before it went out.

At the time the remaining work was balancing, quests, new boss animation, and testing.

Ranger Quest is the game page. The press kit is the one to link. The 1.0.2 notes are in v1.0.2.

See Ranger Quest