Greetings, Tacticians!

We just released a our second early access major update for Skygard Arena!

As mentioned in our recent Dev Blog about our roadmap, the goal of this update is to significantly improve your experience during your first playthrough of the single-player campaign. To this end, we have changed the level design of several missions in the first half of the campaign, adjusted the associated rewards and reworked many dialogues to offer a more immersive and compelling story.

The full patch notes are below.

We hope you enjoy the update and invite you to give us feedback through our Discord server!

Also, if you have enjoyed your time playing Skygard Arena, feel free to leave a review - it helps us a lot!

Cheers,

The Gemelli Games Team

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• Chapter 1 now includes 3 missions
  - Players now play both Na Jima and Daerio in the new mission 1
  - Players now play Na Jima, Daerio and Jorn in the new mission 2
  - Merged both teambuilding tutorials into a single one after mission 2
  - The finals of the Tournament is now a battle against the 3 Champions of the Silver Kingdom (Vallya, Aiden and Seraphine) using the rules of the Arena mode.
  
  
• Chapter 2 now includes 3 missions
  - Merged several missions against Champei and / or Forest Sprites into one single, improved mission 4 At the heart of the forest
  - The mission The Traitor remains the same and is now positioned as mission 5
  - Decreased the difficulty and improved the user experience for mission 6 An Ancient Rage:
  -- Ultimate orbs do not change position between each phase of the fight, allowing players to better plan their moves.
  -- Forest spirits’ HPs: 60→50
  -- A dialogue is now triggered between each phase of the fight
  -- In case of defeat, a dialogue with some tips to complete the mission will be displayed.
  
  
• Chapter 3 missions remain the same with 7 missions, except for the following adjustment:
  - Reduced the difficulty of the mission 7 A Kingdom at War:
  -- Enemy reinforcements now arrive one turn later
  -- Reduced health points of enemy soldiers to 120 and officers to 150
  
  
• Added gameplay tips to the Camp’s loading screen
  
  
• When building your team for a mission, the music no longer changes abruptly and the game keeps playing the music of the previous firecamp.

• We have written new dialogues that aim at better telling the backstories of each Champion and their motivations
  
• We have also removed some inconsistencies and simplified some parts of the story to try and offer a more coherent and immersive narrative
  
• As we don’t plan to release additional chapters for now, we also reworked the story of Chapter 3 to provide a proper ending to the game
  
• We reworked the setting of several intro scenes
  
• We added a sound effect after each dialogue

• Added a glow around any pillar that can be captured
  
• During the Redeployment phase, abilities in the spell bar are now greyed out as they can not be used before redeploying this Champion
  
• Improved the hit animations of Chekmate (Daerio Renegade)
  
• Improved the 3D model of the final boss in the last mission of the Campaign

• Fixed some issues with the timing of some of Aerica’s actions when playing against the AI.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused health bars to be displayed improperly when casting certain spells
  
• Damage dealt by Shooting Stars and Constellation (Na Jima Skirmisher) on a Champion affected by Soul Bond (Raine Life Mage) are now displayed properly
  
• Fixed a bug that caused damage dealt by Constellation (Na Jima Skirmisher) to be displayed twice
  
• Soul Bond VFX now disappears properly when the status lapses
  
• Bu Shin’s ultimate jauge is now displayed properly after casting Thunderstorm

Dear Tacticians,

First of all, we would like to thank each of you who have played Skygard Arena in early access! Overall, your feedback so far has been very enthusiastic and your suggestions very relevant. This means a lot to us and motivates us to work as hard as possible to further improve Skygard Arena!

The goal of this post is to share with you a couple of things:

• What we have learnt from the early access release so far;
  
• Our development priorities and what the roadmap looks like for Skygard Arena in 2025;
  
• Some very exciting news: we have signed a partnership with a China-based publisher to help grow Skygard Arena in Asia!

Let’s dive in!


As mentioned, it has been a joy to read so many positive comments after the early access release of Skygard Arena, be it on Steam, Discord or Youtube. This is our first game and a passion project that we’ve been working on for years, so hitting 88% positive reviews on Steam as we are writing these lines is truly heartwarming.

We have also been thrilled to follow a few community tournaments, with some very original strategies and very close duels!

That being said, as you might have noticed, the sales of the game have been underwhelming so far.

We have spent a lot of time thinking about this and trying to pinpoint the reasons for the lack of significant commercial success so far. Going into every reason would take up a whole other post, but one clear conclusion stood out: just developing more content (new missions, new Chapters…) - as originally planned - is not going to significantly change the trajectory of the game.

We’ve looked at many data points and one stat that stood out is that the median playtime currently stands at 1 hour and 30 minutes, which is below our objective. To us, this means that at the moment the first 2 hours of the game are not compelling enough to hook most of the players into playing further. This contrasts starkly with the feedback we get from players who have put 8+ hours into the game: they really like the challenge from the later part of the campaign and all the strategic possibilities offered by the game. They often end up playing over 20 hours, including in PvP.

We have also observed that 70% of Skygard Arena players only play the single-player campaign, 5% of players only play in multiplayer and 25% of players play both modes.

Based on these lessons, we have decided to focus on 3 core objectives:

1. Improve the first playthrough of the Campaign (especially the first 2 hours), across all dimensions: gameplay / missions, story / writing and progression;
   
2. Add replayability to the single-player PvE Campaign, through the upcoming Quests Update ;
   
3. Reach more players to make the multiplayer experience more compelling, by translating the game in more languages and executing a better marketing campaign for the 1.0 release later this year.

In any case, rest assured: we are absolutely not giving up on Skygard Arena and we will do our best to create the best possible game and reach as many players as possible!


Based on the objectives mentioned above, and taking into account our current resources in a tight funding environment for game studios, we have landed on the following development roadmap.


Our main goal for this update is to improve the quality of the first playthrough of the campaign, especially the first 2 hours.

To this end, we have changed the level design of several missions in the first half of the campaign and merged some tutorials. This way, we have both improved the early missions and shortened the time before players get to the more spicy missions (boss fights for instance!), which should lead to a more interesting campaign.

We have also adjusted the rewards given after each mission. Our goal is to give more synergistic Personas and Artefacts early on, to offer interesting teambuilding options to players throughout the campaign.

Finally, we have reworked the story and the dialogues inside the game, with the following objectives in mind:

• Share more information about the backstory of each Champion, their beliefs and their motivations, especially when chatting with them in the camp;
  
• Make the overall story easier to follow and remove some inconsistencies;
  
• Provide a proper conclusion at the end of the 3rd chapter of the campaign.

We hope you enjoy this revamped story and welcome your feedback!

As usual, the update also comes with a bunch of visual improvements, quality of life upgrades and bug fixes. The full patch notes will be published on Thursday when the update goes live. Stay tuned!


Have you ever enjoyed a mission so much that you wish you could play it again with slightly different conditions and a higher difficulty?

Well… we’ve got you covered!

This update - planned for April - will add Quests to the PvE Campaign. Quests will be mission-specific challenges that will put your tactical skills to the test: defeating a boss without losing a single member of your team, completing a mission with / without a specific Champion or Artifact, or before a certain turn limit…

If you think of mission-specific challenges that would be cool, feel free to drop your idea in the comments or on our Discord server!

And we promise you… achieving all the quests to 100% the game won’t be an easy feat ;)


We believe adding more languages to the game is critical to reach a more global and larger audience. To this end, we will be adding Chinese and Japanese localization to the game, with potentially other languages on top.


To celebrate the global launch, players will be able to battle in a new PvP Arena and a new Champion will join the fray! This will bring the game’s content to 10 Champions, 20 Personas, 80 spells and 80 artifacts, allowing for new team compositions and even more combos.

If you have played the Campaign, you might have an idea of who that mighty new Champion might be…

Finally, we plan to make balancing changes throughout the year and to organize PvP community tournaments at various points during the year, including on the back of the 1.0 launch.


We are thrilled to announce that we have signed an agreement with SpaceJazz Games for them to publish Skygard Arena in China & Japan!

SpaceJazz Games is a Shanghai-based indie publisher and marketing specialist. They have a strong track record of marketing games in China, having worked on titles such as Temtem: Swarm and Citadelum.

SpaceJazz Games will handle localization of the game in Chinese and Japanese as well as local marketing activities to reach new players in these countries.

We are super excited about this partnership and thrilled to be able to share Skygard Arena with many players around the world!

We hope this post provides a good overview of where we want to go with Skygard Arena and why. Any question, let us know!

Thank you for your support,

See you in the Arena,

The Gemelli Games Team