Hotfix 0.1-1602
- Fixed crash when reaching the level cap with upgrades being held
- Auto-XP now properly benefits from XP bonuses

Greetings Wildkeepers!

Coinciding with our Early Access release, we're also offering the full sountrack as DLC.

It's only $4.99 USD and you can even get it at a discount in a Bundle with the game.

And as we add more songs to it, you'll automatically get them!

Daniel Keating, our composer, did a great job of finding a style that is dynamic during gameplay and reminiscent of JRPG games like Final Fantasy. We couldn't be more pleased with the results.

Get it here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3618440/Wildkeepers_Rising_Soundtrack/

I hope you enjoy it.

Sergio.

Greeting Wildkeepers!

Wildkeepers Rising is AVAILABLE NOW!

It's been a long but exciting journey for us, and we can't wait for you to play the game, experience all the new enemies and Guardians that we've added to the game.

But we're not done yet. Please check out the Roadmap for the next few months, while we work just as hard to finish the game:

Sergio.

Greetings Wildkeepers,

The time for you to team up with your Guardians and defend the realm is quickly approaching.

Our Early Access release of Wildkeepers Rising will be available for purchase on Monday, March 31st, at 7:00 a.m. PDT/10:00 a.m. EDT.

Initial content includes:

- 3 Environments with quests

- 24 Guardians

- 3 Playable characters with a 4th coming soon

- 32+ Enemy types

- 3 Bosses

- Localized in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean

- Fully configurable controls, both keyboard and gamepad


For the first week, you can pick up the game for $9.99 USD, at a 10% discount.

And, if you have already played the current demo your progress will carry forward.


The demo will switch on Monday, March 31st and be much shorter.

We look forward to getting the game into your hands.

As always, please join our Discord[//] to discuss everything Wildkeepers Rising.

Lyle.

Greetings Wildkeepers,

Next Fest just started and, if you're coming from there, then be welcome, friend.

We've been very pleased with how the demo updates have been received, and we're working around the clock to add more content to the game as we prepare for Early Access release on March 31st.

In the meantime, Lyle recorded a stream playing the game that we're posting on the Steam page, but you can also watch in its entirety here:
Besides that, if you're in the mood for watching some Wildkeepers Rising, here are some of the new streams from the last few days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25XSmm6mJ-Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnjFK2TfADU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UfoKO94sHc

As usual, let us know what you think of the demo in our Discord[discord.gg], we're always happy to talk about the game.

Sergio.

Greetings Wildkeepers,

We're beyond excited to announce that we're planning to release the game on...well, I'm not going to say, you will have to watch our brand new trailer here:

In the meantime, check out the demo, which is a big chunk of the game and should give you a really good idea of what we're building. And if you have any comments, let us know on Discord [discord.gg]- we respond to every message!

Sergio

Greetings Wildkeepers,

It's a week before Steam Next Fest begins, and we come to you with a major update to our demo.

We've been working hard to identify the key areas of the game that needed improvement and designing and implementing solutions. Your feedback has been invaluable in this process, thank you to everyone who played the Playtest and then the Demo, and filled the feedback form or reached out to us on Discord[discord.gg]. We take every comment very seriously.

Overall, we're extremely happy with how the game has been received. At the same time, we found opportunities to make it better:

• We wanted to make levelling up more exciting, adding more variety and opportunities for synergies (I should write a full post about synergies, as they are super important for this style of game, and hard to describe concisely)
  
• Sigils felt a bit too removed from the upgrade loop, as you had to find chests to collect them, but they add a lot of interactivity and decision making.
  
• The narrative wasn't successful creating the magical world we intended, and some of the dialogue was feeling flat.
  
• Honestly, the dash just sucked.

We've taken steps to address each and every one of these in our latest build. These are the changes that you can expect, compared to the alpha build:

1. The upgrade options have been redesigned. Each Wildkeeper and Guardian has a unique set of options that match their strengths, and move away from simple "more damage" stats.
   
2. Upgrade options now enable you to specialize your characters even further, based on your choices.
   
3. Sigils no longer come out of chests. Now you get them automatically at three level thresholds: level 1, 5 and 10.
   
4. Team upgrades are also not offered during level ups. This was leading to confusion, so now all upgrades are individual. Instead, team upgrades have been moved to chests, so you can (optionally) go find them to make your whole team stronger.
   
5. We've added a ton of new sigils and significantly improved the presentation of the existing ones. They are still categorized as either Weapons, Bonuses or Arcane (these are total game-changers).
   
6. We've reworked the tutorial mission so instead of being expected to lose, now you immediately get to pick an upgrade and a Sigil, and go on to win the mission.
   
7. All the dialogue has been rewritten to make it feel more like a heroic adventure. Note that this is still just the beginning of the story, and we're not fleshing out all the cutscenes just yet. This will happen during the Early Access phase.
   
8. We created an original animation with hand-drawn illustrations to introduce the story with music and a voice over.
   
9. The dash has been reworked for both Korin and Ophelia. Their dashes will feel quite different, but they're a lot snappier and can be upgraded.
   
10. Every Guardian in the game has been reviewed for improved behavior and more polished effects.
    
11. We added a couple of new enemies and adjusted all the missions. We also added difficulty options for those of you that want a challenge.
    
12. There are now 80+ achievements for you to complete, each with desirable rewards.
    
13. A second music track has been added to the Everglades map.
    
14. Many other balance and polish adjustments.

If you've had a chance to try the Playtest or the Alpha Demo, the new update will reset your save. However, the Beta Demo saves will actually be valid all the way to the full game when it comes out in Early Access.
It would take several hours to play through the demo content once, and we feel it's very replayable.
Just today, we were playing the build ourselves for over 4 hours straight, and having a blast. There were some incredible combinations of Sigils and Guardians, and some simply hilarious moments. We can't wait to hear what you think.

So grab the demo and take it for a spin. The use the feedback form or join our Discord to tell us how to make it even better.

For the ancient bond.

Sergio.

Greetings Wildkeepers,

Today we have good news for you all.

Due to the success of the Alpha Playtest build, we've decided to switch it over to a demo, so more people can find it. If you're one of the almost 2,000 participants in the playtest, you can continue where you left off, though you'll have to re-download the game as a demo.

It's worth saying again that the saves from this version will be reset before the Early Access release.

You can find the demo here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3184800/Wildkeepers_Rising_Demo/

For now the demo will be the same build as the playtest, but we're working furiously on many improvements, and we can't wait to share those with you very soon.

Sergio

Greetings Wildkeepers,

After a bit over 2 weeks, we're about to close the Alpha Playtest. The results have exceeded our wildest expectations. Almost 2,000 people took part in the playtest, with an average playtime of over 1.5 hours, well over what's typical for a demo in Steam!

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who played.

We collect some anonymous data to better understand the balance of the game. Here are some of the results we got, which we thought were really helpful.
First, let's look at how easy or difficult the game is. This is a very popular topic, on both sides. Excluding the tutorial mission with Korin, which you're expected to lose, here is the data for mission success rates:

Only about 5.7% of players had to repeat the mission with Ophelia and Grampth, which is a reasonable result. We weren't sure about requiring success in that mission, but we felt it helped keep the story more cohesive. The first real mission, Monoliths has a completion rate of 39% - again, pretty good as this is the first real test of skill.

The rest of the missions tend to be in the "maybe it's too easy" category, except for the Rescue Reeza mission, which is unquestionably too hard. Results for some of the later missions (anything after opening the bridges) will be skewed toward players who have played longer and have more skills and possibly upgrades, so that also needs to be considered.

We were surprised that many more people preferred playing with Ophelia over Korin:

I'm sure part of that is due to Ophelia being generally more successful (powerful), with a win rate of 78% compared with 67%. Anecdotally, we've heard of some players who have done really well beating the boss with just Ophelia and no Guardians. While we don't directly recommend it, we're glad the game provides this option.

We were very curious to find out who your favorite Guardians are. According to the data, this is who you picked:

And sorted by pick rate %:

Now, obviously the Guardians who are available at the start of the campaign will be seen by more players, so that's why you see the drop in the first chart after Grampth. Out of those, Grampth seems to be the most popular, with a pick rate of 40%, followed by Smack at 31%. Interestingly, if everything was balanced perfectly you'd expect to see a pick rate of 33%, so that chart looks reasonably good. And I don't blame you for choosing Reeza a whopping 65% of the time - she's awesome!

Besides the data, we also had a survey, where we asked you to choose your favorite Guardians directly. Out of the few people who replied, the most popular was Nipper, followed closely by Coal and Murkle. Interestingly, Grampth and Smack weren't as popular, so maybe people picked them because they're very effective? Definitely food for thought.

We have lots more data, things like Sigil pick rates, currency spending, Guardian win rates, etc, but we felt this was the most relevant information, and we didn't want to fill this page with charts 📈

A number of content creators were also kind enough to stream the playtest. We learn a lot both watching the footage as well as listening to the comments, often very insightful. Here are a few of our favorites (heavily edited for lack of space, please go to YouTube to find many more wonderful playthroughs of the playtest):

An unusual thumbnail 😅
And if you speak German or Japanese (we'll localize to many languages, including those, before full release):
Lastly for today, I want to go over some of the most common feedback we've heard, either through the form (thank you if you filled it out) or through our Discord[discord.gg].

Overall, we're really pleased with how the game has been received. It seems you really connected with our vision to take the Bullet Heaven genre further by adding the Guardians and some ingredients from RPGs. Thank you all for your kind words, it really means the world to us.

Of course, there are many things that we're already hard at work improving. Let's talk about a few of them.

• Level Up: Some of you mentioned that stat upgrades are not very interesting and we agree. We're reworking the Level Up system a bit to make it more varied, and incorporating Sigils in the mix to add more build possibilities and synergies.
  
• Story: Our goal is to create an immersive world, and we felt that having a bit of story helped make it seem more alive. We do agree that the cutscenes in the playtest didn't reach the quality that we wanted - part of that is they were missing lots of animations, which is why Ophelia is always pointing her bow at everyone! Moving forward we're going to re-evaluate what we can realistically deliver and we'll likely delay most of the story cutscenes until full release, as we don't think story is a good fit for iteration during Early Access.
  
• Dash: Yeah, the dash in this build doesn't feel great, and you don't really need it. We already knew that, and we're fixing it.
  
• Lots of other little things, like balance issues, missing polish, UI confusion and quality of life suggestions. This feedback is gold for us, we have a long list and we're checking it twice.

I think that's it for today - this is already long enough.

We couldn't be more excited to continue to work on this game as we get closer to our spring release date. In the meantime, Happy Holidays to everyone and thanks again for helping us make Wildkeepers Rising the best it can be.

Sergio.