Spring Development Update

Hey Crafters,

In April, we unveiled Spellcraft publicly for the first time and openly invited anyone to play in Preseason 1. Immediately following the event, we posted the first of what we intended to be a long-running series of “dev blogs” — updates to you, our community of players, regarding our plans for Spellcraft’s development. In our last update we signaled our intent to run another Preseason event, Preseason 2, during Steam Next Fest on June 19th. Well… we didn’t participate, and so we need to reach out and explain why.

Developing games can be a twisty road, and we’ve been developing what a player would reasonably consider “Spellcraft” since 2020. We began testing with external players that same year when we believed we had something that started showing signs of “fun”. You see, we follow a process we call Alpha Driven Development, which means we try to get games into the hands of players as soon as we can to validate that what we’ve made is something that players love.

Preseason 1 was the first public reveal of Spellcraft, and while we’ve tested Spellcraft with real players over the last two years, it was its first reasonably “real-world” scenario. We saw a community of players (you) form, played a lot of games, and enjoyed this version of Spellcraft for what it excels at — a competitive online game that is different from what you’ve played before, with a high skill ceiling and a lot of time for theory crafting.

However, competitive online games like Spellcraft need a consistent number of concurrent and active players to maintain healthy competitive matchmaking. While a number of players really liked what they saw in Spellcraft, our Preseason 1 did not meet our expectations for a long-lived and healthy competitive game.

At One More Game, our mission is to build games players love, and we believe the best way to do that is to do it alongside them. That’s why we follow Alpha Driven Development and why we chose Steam Next Fest as our next milestone deliverable — they aim to connect developers to players — and that’s exactly the kind of program we love to see. Unfortunately, a game can only participate in Steam Next Fest once, and Spellcraft isn’t ready for another larger-scale test.

Thank you again to those of you who joined us in Preseason 1 and are excited to play again, or those of you who heard second-hand about Preseason 1 and wanted to experience Spellcraft for the first time. Your feedback and play have helped us immensely in developing Spellcraft’s future.

Jamie Winsor – Game Director