Hello, GenFans. We haven’t done very many of these, but since 2022 has been such a wild year, we wanted to give you a peek behind the curtain. Here's a bit of what's coming in 2023!
State of the Game
We launched Genfanad in late September and we had a surge of interest, spiking to hundreds of players playing at once and multiple streamers covering.
Thousands of players have tried out the game and there was a large burst of initial interest, but over time the reception has cooled both due to changes we’ve made and the game’s core fundamental mechanics. Players were attracted by the retro experience and the humorous tone, but similarly were discouraged by overly grindy mechanics and the lack of a solid core gameplay experience.
We have heard the player base response and are taking steps to address these issues. Those in our Discord have gotten some sneak previews, but this blog is going to explain exactly what we’re building to address these concerns and make the game significantly more fun to play.
One of the core concepts behind Genfanad is exploration, and we have developed weekly updates since release and will continue iterating on the game in a weekly fashion. While the current state of the game can be considered “Early Access”, your feedback is critical for us to figure out whether we’re going in the right direction!
Exploration and Discovery
Genfanad was built with a goal of rewarding exploration. Our original plan was to have weekly updates that evolve the game and require people to expect change, but over time feedback has shown that this did not hit the right notes we were going for.
We want to make exploration more tightly integrated into the gameplay, and we have some fun ideas on how we can do so! We are building these higher level systems to allow us to reward players for things that they are already doing, as well as giving players the ability to play in different ways.
The first of these mechanics will allow players to encounter rare spawns scattered across the map. These spawns would give a new currency that can be spent on various in-game rewards. Players can either encounter them while playing normally or proactively seek them out.
The second such mechanic is tied closely to gathering skills, where special, bonus-giving gathering nodes spawn over time. Through this, players get even larger bonuses if they can gather other players to harvest those resources with them!
We have other ideas on how these systems will expand over time, and we hope players have as much fun using them as we did building and testing them.
CLicHe and You
Since our very first trailer revealing the crazy boss throwing someone out of a window, the antics of the CLicHe corporation have clearly been a hit with players. The spin of corporate adventure in a wacky world is a concept that resonates with lots of people, and we want that to be more clearly felt!
The departments in CLicHe, as in all corporations, are very devoted to their missions. So much so that after the third completely innocent murder of a company intern, the boss decreed that competition across departments would be done solely through a more disposable resource: Adventurers.
Collectively, these corporate departments, represented by various NPCs in game, will compete with each other on a seasonal basis. Players can get … recruited … to various organizations, and different actions that they take in game will be rewarded! These actions might be as simple as collecting some resources or clearing some monsters, but who knows what they’ll think of next!
Individually, players will get rewarded through a Performance Review system that will allow them to compete with other players for rewards. Players who belong to the “winning” department will get a small slice of a big pie, but someone who’s holding up a department single-handedly might get even more rewards.
And to tie everything together, CLicHe will be introducing the concept of an Adventurer’s Corporate Rank. This rank lets players start ascending the Corporation’s maze-like internal hierarchy, growing from intern, to assistant vice president of bringing coffee to interns.
It’s a prestigious position.
From a gameplay perspective, the Corporate Rank is a representation of a player’s progress through the game. Your Corporate Rank grows over time, and higher levels would unlock rewards including exclusive quests, better rewards from their performance review, access to special shops, and more.
Reworks, Improvements, and Expansions
Separately from new gameplay systems, there are many imbalanced parts of the game that we are working to address. The following we’re listing here will have work devoted to them in the near future!
The most obvious of course is combat balance. We have taken passes at some low level monsters, but there is still a lot of work to do in that area. The most obvious issue is the diminishing returns on the Strength skill, and we will be addressing that with combat formula changes. This is a larger project than might be expected, as we have to change all NPC and equippable item stats to make sure they’re still at a reasonable level after the change. (It will take multiple attempts after the fact too!)
On the other hand, we will also be taking a look at the Ranged skill. There’s going to be a large mechanical change regarding how the inventory works, and Ranged combat will be affected by that change significantly. As a whole, it’s likely that Rangers will deal more damage and continue to be able to kill monsters quickly, but will not be able to stay at monster camps forever.
On the third hand, our current Magic mechanics— both Sorcery and Evocation— are pretty much placeholders. We are planning on releasing multiple revamps to the card and spell system, pretty much remaking all the spells currently in the game. This change will also introduce the Magic University.
Separate from Combat, we are also going to be taking a look at the Cooking system to increase the variety of foods that players use. Similar to forging, we want to make sure there are tiers of food and different varieties of food in each tier, so that different players will each want different types of food. The goal of this is to make sure there’s no “one best food” for every situation, letting players make more varied decisions on what to bring to combat situations.
Finally, although we have built multiple quests in the game so far and players found them enjoyable to play, the rewards are lacking. We will be taking a pass at all released quests and making sure each of them has an interesting and relevant reward. An example of a good quest reward is the Popcorn recipe— a unique small reward that fits thematically with what the quest is doing. Unlockable recipes, map shortcuts, or even new areas for questers are all on the table.
And finally, we did not forget the promises of unlockable cosmetics. Those are still coming, we promise!
In Summary
We thank everyone who has been sticking with Genfanad and hope that these mechanical changes make the game more fun to play for everyone!
It will take us some time to complete this work. We expect it will be at least a few months before these systems are fully brought online. But overall, we’ll be building and releasing them into the game as soon as they’re ready, and we’re going to be iterating and refining them fairly regularly as well. We’re aiming to continue to release weekly updates that incorporate this work, so watch out for what’s coming soon!
If these development blogs are something you’re interested in seeing, please let us know on our social media or in our Discord!
Until next time— happy adventuring, Genfanatics!