Lordmancer II dev log. Chapter 5.

How long are we from the next build and when will the game be launched?

Developing a game like any other startups is a process of testing hypotheses. First of all, we need to find a proper gameplay which maintains a good retention rate of players. Also, as Lordmancer is a free-to-play game, we need to “force” a proper amount of players to pay for some features. By “forcing” I mean make them pay with a gratitude in a way which does not ruin the game balance for other players. Both tasks are needed to be solved before we start spending money on marketing. Otherwise, we just “burn” the budget.

The current demo version of the game has quite a good retention rate for the second day (it means the percentage of players that return to the game on the day after their registration). But the retention rates for the day 7 and 30 are still quite low.

These types of retention depend on different aspects of the game: graphic art, user interfaces, tutorial and on-boarding, game balance, storyline, expanding game content, goals, social mechanics, etc.

Once ICO finished we made a revision of all existing game features and selected a set of critical ones to be improved to maintain a long-lasting gameplay.

This set includes (but not limited to) the following ones:
- UI and UX improvements
- rebalancing the game in order to make battles (the core gameplay) more exciting and managing hero army deeper;
- creating a more complex resource and equipment system including crafting and enhancement which will lead to a long-lasting hero developing and trading activities;
- more detailed tutorial and initial quests.

We are planning to release the next update (1.56) approximately in the nearest 10 days and it will contain:
- a completely new item system;
- a reworked new game balance in PvE;
- tutorial quests recreated almost from scratch;
- a lot of minor changes and improvements that lay a foundation to further changes like crafting, looting resources and new clan activities.

Also, we have developed a process which allows us to deploy game environments on new servers just by running a couple of scripts. It is needed to maintain a stable game environment and organize tests in a more effective way.

Once we publish version 1.56, we will pay for user acquisition to test the improvements. And when tests are done, we will decide our next steps and timeline for launching the game and the Lord Coin trading. Implementing build 1.56 took a little more time that was expected, but we were managed to test a lot of changes internally and we hope that their final version will show better results.

So by the end of March, we will have data regarding the new game balance and it will be clearer when we can launch the game on the first markets and start trading for Lord Coin.