So here we are. One million gameplays since launch. A number I never dared to think of reaching with Incremental Adventures! TLDR; Thanks you so much for everything so far, you have all been amazing! So I figured I'd write a little dev diary kind of thing, to reflect back on the past eight months. The development of Incremental Adventures started a little before the original release as a simple side project in a week or two off. Never having any intention of actually going live. But you know, I liked it a bit more than I originally expected. So I figured maybe some others might enjoy it for a bit, so I decided to upload it to Kongregate. I would have been happy if it ever reached 10k gameplays, but it got a bit out of hand from there. It probably took about a week to reach that milestone, and those numbers just kept growing. It took around two weeks before it was played 100k times and I am still amazed by that to this day. But that didn't come without issues. As I vastly underestimated how many people would see, let alone enjoy the game. It wasn't much longer than a few days before people "broke" both the balance and the number limitations. Luckily both of these things could be resolved relatively quickly, but I got lucky to have break_eternity as an option there. After those initial hickups, it got to a point where development felt much better in line of actually being able to expand upon the game, rather than having to fix core issues that sometimes felt like way too significant changes to players (and rightfully so). This is where the first version of Armory was released, aimed to further expand upon the class system and add a side mechanic with gold. Now I don't recall the exact order of everything that came between armory and ascension, but many additions to autobuyers were added, serveral new gameplay unlocks were added and a ton of minor stuff. A lot of changes were directly inspired by player feedback, which really has been an eye-opener for me. I've been doing professional software development for quite some time now, but the feedback and input this community has provided me has been far more useful than anything I've seen before. And not just that, people took the effort to write guides, calculators and even a QoL plugin! So, about three months in, the initial content got to a point where it was relatively polished, but lacked a proper "next level". Ascension was the logical next step there. Now the first version of Ascension was much smaller content-wise than it is today. It was extended with several additional unlocks, the allstats balance was adjusted quite a bit from the original release and of course trials were released about two months after. Recent updates have started to take quite a bit more time than the early day updates. As you might expect with the increasing amount of gameplay phases, smaller changes have a much more significant impact to progression than they used to. Where development used to take most of my time, testing has surpassed that these days. A bigger example of that being the recent ascension balance changes (which I think worked out pretty well). In any case, I do still feel that the game is lacking some crucial aspects. The early game gets too complicated too quickly, and is not well enough explained. The early game balance could be better as well, but that might be close to impossible to adjust without overthrowing the late game balance. Maybe that's just me looking at the game for months now, where its flaws become more visible than its appeals :). But I do feel that I would do some of it better if I had started with the knowledge I have now. I never expected to become a game developer. And it's fair to say that if it wasn't for you all, most of this game wouldn't even exist. But it's been such a joy so far! Seeing people talk about the game, the strategies they come up with and enjoying the content I've created has been an incredibly rewarding experience. So thank you for everything so far! And I can tell you the future holds more to come :) But it's too soon to provide you with proper details there yet. Cheers, Gniller

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