Major Intel Acquired, Wizard Boys (and girls)!
Good afternoon! Sorry it's been a minute since our last update. A lot has been happening behind the scene and I've been waiting for all of our ducks to be in a row before giving you the details.
First, I have a large announcement in terms of the people behind the project!
Wizard Boy x Oro Interactive
Secret Agent Wizard Boy has been signed on with Oro Interactive, the fine folks that published Super Battle Golf, Machine Party, Roadside Research, and several other games you've likely run in to! Oro was interested in coming alongside Wizard Boy for the next leg of its journey, and Evan and I felt like we would really appreciate the help of smart and experienced people to bring Wizard Boy to its fullest potential. Note - if you're worried this will affect the direction Wizard Boy, not at all! The Wizard Boy development team remains the same, and Oro has graciously given us complete trust to continue the project in the same direction we were heading before they came on, just with all their extra tools as well.
But what is the next leg of the Wizard Boy journey. . .?
The Next Update Will be Huge. . . and 1.0
If you're been following along with our dev updates, you'll know that we've been working on a large change to the Wizard Boy world for many months - the "real castle" if you will. While this has been happening, we've also been slowly filling out many other pieces of the game that we've been intending to put in as well. This has cumulatively made all the strings needed for our 1.0 release come together pretty much at the same time. At this point, we have a pretty set-in-stone goal of what our 1.0 looks like and all the content it will have, and we've decided to save all of the new content for one huge 1.0 update. This update won't really be an iterative update like all the other ones have been - it's essentially a fresh start for the game, just with everything you already love in tow as well.
First Up - the New Castle
Since I've talked about this several times before, I won't spend too long, but suffice to say we have a completely new castle that Wizard Boy will take place in which is much grander in scale and complexity to the existing Early Access castle. It's difficult to explain in words, but this new castle essentially enables us to see the game as an explorative sandbox in which you investigate clues and find secrets, whereas the old castle was just too small to be able to truly do that. We've done a lot to give you reasons to keep poking around because there are layers of depth to each room that you won't find from a single pass. We believe there are three cores of what makes Wizard Boy fun - goofing around, collecting interesting things, and finding secrets. We've gone far out of our way to consider these specific ideas in the design of the new playspace, and after now going through something like 5 iterations of it, I think we've pretty much hit it. (For you that played the beta version of this new castle in the last update - in all honesty, we've pretty much completely redone it from scratch two times over again. It's completely different from that version now.)
The new castle will essentially be a whole new game to experience, just with some areas, spells, and characters wrapping into the new playspace as well.
Clues and Mysteries
As stated, we've been working on giving lots of reasons to want to keep exploring. As you dive deep into the castle, you'll find clues that hint at different secrets and rooms to continue on. The deeper you get, the closer you get to figuring out how to stop the evil Grumblemort! Wizard Boy is remaining completely non-linear, but this clue system gives us the ability to point you guys in the right direction for finding progress-necessary items without asking you to just wander aimlessly until you happen across the exact right area to be. It's also just really neat.
Many, Many Things to Find
When we let some of you play through the first version of our new castle, the feedback we got was "finding the hidden items to collect was really fun, please keep that." It really highlighted that it's important to give players something to find if they've gone out of their way to go somewhere. With that in mind, although that exact system has been removed, we have matured it into an integral part of the our design philosophy - give players cool rewards if they go out of their way to explore, and let them track how many of those things they have.
Soooo, how about some of these?
New Spells
We've about doubled the amount of collectable spells in the game, up to now a total of 12. What are they? You'll have to go find them! I don't wanna' ruin the surprises. But have you ever wanted to teleport. . .?
Costumes
Wizard Boy (and his new companion Wizard Girl) has a selection of fits to wear! TBH most of these are really cursed because that's just where our brains go. Have a look at a few.
Believe it or not, these aren't the worst of it. But we'll save all those for you to find!
New Upgrades
New upgrades, potions, and the like have been added! Like this really important one here.
(Look, I just don't want to spoil everything so you can be surprised when you find stuff on your own)
I'm Scratching the Surface. . .
There is legitimately so much more I could say here, but I kinda' want to keep it a secret so you have something exciting to find on your own. But suffice to say, this is going to be the biggest and best update to Wizard Boy we'll ever have (that includes the initial release). I really hope you'll join us when it launches. . . well, I won't say that either, but keep an eye out!
- John
