Impressions, Feedback, and Upcoming Plans

Firstly, we'd like to thank you all for giving Mahou Arms' Early Access such a warm welcome! Whether you only just learned about MA or have been a patron since 2018, I cannot stress how much we we deeply appreciate your support. We're super excited to finish MA ASAP, and this launch has been super motivating.

In this post, we'd like to address early impressions of the game, feedback, and our upcoming plans, including our high level production schedule and scope for the project.

Addressing First Impressions & Feedback:

We've been watching streams and checking feedback daily and we're happy to see a generally positive reception for the game. That said, there's a couple of topics that are frequently brought up as being issues or poor experiences. In this post, we'll list a couple of them and give a time frame for when we expect to improve them.

Immediate Improvements:

• Impact Sound Effects are Bad: We've contacted a sound design contractor for a quote on new sounds. New sounds should be implemented in 1-2 months.

Next 2 Months:

• Lack of Tutorials and Input Remapping: We're going to implement popup tutorials (which you'll be able to turn off) and an input remapping screen soon. For Input Remapping, Mouse and Keyboard will be supported first, while gamepads will have a couple profiles to choose from. Exhaustive Gamepad Input Remapping will be implemented sometime in the future, though we don't have a date for that yet.
• Enemies Feel Too Much Like Damage Sponges: This will be addressed by making the player deal more damage with a higher style rating. Globally decreasing enemy health as a fix leads to a lot of poor experiences (killing enemies with the first hit in a combo), so we're hoping style-rank based damage-acceleration will mitigate this and encourage skillful play while resolving the main damage issue.
• Too Easy to Gain Style: The style rank is a brand new feature that has not been balanced yet. This will be balanced and become better over time. 
• Enemies Are Too Easily Stunlocked: There are a couple of approaches we are going to try for this. What solution we go with will depend on testing.

First, we're going to try making the player more vulnerable  to attacks from other enemies during a combo. This will likely include a combination of: reducing player movement during attacks, using enemy weight to dictate how much the player can push them during an attack, and making the enemies' attacks' tracking more accurate, especially over subsequent shots.

Second, we'll try giving some enemies stunlock-detection AI, where they can try dodging or teleporting to a nearby location if they've been stunlocked too long. 

• Probe Randomly Shoots Balls With no Telegraphing: This attack will be replaced by one that has a more obvious charging state and projectile. We're not sure what form the projectile will take, but a user on our feedback channel suggested a larger, homing ball that explodes when shot by the probe's laser, similar to Unreal Tournament's Shock Combo, which we're willing to try out.
• No Attack That Allows Amelia to Hit Diagonally from the Air: Divekick to Normal Amelia will be added  (Heavy Attack while in air).

Next 2-6 Months:

• Lack of Content and Enemies: This will be improved up until release, but the most important part for mission content (game width, as opposed to depth) requires us to work on a horizontal slice for the rest of the story missions as soon as possible so we can pace out the missions for the best intensity curve. For this period, we'll be heavily focusing on new enemies, bosses, a new character, and a horizontal slice of the game.
• Broken Progression Loop, Not Enough Saves: We need a home base for the player to come back to between missions to address this. We'll reveal more details on this soon, but think of a kind of XCOM-like base building component.
• Zombies are too Easy: Try explosive zombies.

Next 6-18 Months:

Lack of Depth: We'll be working on until release, but here are some of the proposed mechanics we're adding to help add depth to the game:

Utility Skills: Right now, if L3 (Q on keyboard) is pressed, the character sends out a "ping" that scans the environment for enemies and collectibles. In the future, this ability can be upgraded to deflect projectiles and maybe stun enemies on successful deflects. Other ideas would include skills that launch missiles, lasers, throw grenades, or suck enemies towards a black hole.

Weapon Mods: Mods will make make weapon bullets consume MP for secondary effects, such as breaking shields, freezing enemies, and bullets that explode after a period of time.

MP System: Utility skills and weapon mods will consume MP.

Ignite System: Devil trigger. Details TBA

Character Switching: Switch character in the middle of a combo

Ability System: Gives secondary effects to certain abilities, like stealing health on a perfect dodge, etc.

Undetermined Production Timeline:

• Customization: Character skins, hairstyle swaps, and accessory swaps
• Charge Attacks

Intentionally Delayed Until Release:

• Combo / Command List: We're deliberately delaying this since a lot of attacks and inputs get tweaked throughout development. Every time a change happens we'd have to spend time updating the list and the tutorial text for the list, which can be a poor use of development time for our tiny devteam. This type of list cannot be automated.
• Chinese/Japanese Localization: Simplified/Traditional Chinese and Japanese are confirmed localization targets. It's most efficient to translate all the narrative at once when it's done though, so while we might translate UI / gameplay components, narrative translations will happen later.

Onwards!

This post is already very long, so the next one will be a high level roadmap of what we're working on at what point in time for the Early Access period of Mahou Arms. Please note that re-scoping will happen throughout development, so it might not be completely accurate, but if it changes drastically we'll create a new roadmap.

We're always open to feedback, so if there's something you'd like to mention, don't hesitate to post on our discord, Patreon, Twitter, or anywhere on the Steam Community around Mahou Arms. Thank you for reading!

Cheers,

Dischan