Hey everyone!
My name’s Tatyana Dyshlova, and I’m one of the co-founders of FuzzyBot Games.
Last month, we released Lynked: Banner of the Spark in Early Access (!!!) and—ever since—our focus has been on building and improving the game alongside our community. So, for our second developer update, we thought it’d be nice to check in on how that’s going, specifically digging into:
- What we’ve learned (a big THANK YOU to everyone who’s provided feedback so far 🙏)
- And, based on that information, what we’re working on next
Before we dive into the details, here’s a high-level roadmap for Lynked which covers our planned beats through Early 2025. This is a snapshot of what you can expect from the game and team over the next few months as we work to address your wishes, frustrations, and ideas. To understand what’s informed this roadmap and what else will be included in each beat, keep reading!
WHAT WE’VE LEARNED
Your feedback during Early Access has been invaluable, and we use a number of different tools and techniques to capture it—including in-game telemetry, reports submitted to our Player Support Team, posts made on our Steam forums and in our Discord server, commentary from livestreamers and their chats, mentions we see shared across social media, and (last but certainly not least) the reviews you leave right on this platform.
Over the last four weeks, we’ve been pouring over all this data, looking for popular topics, themes, and trends that will help guide our production priorities and creative resources to make sure we’re delivering on Lynked’s gameplay promise.
Here are our takeaways!
What’s Working Well
- Visuals and Atmosphere: Based on your feedback, it seems like we’re generally in a great place vibes-wise. You like the game’s colorful, vibrant art style as well as its collection of playable and non-playable characters alike.
- Co-op Play: Many of you have called out Lynked’s cooperative multiplayer as an overall positive. More often than not, you think it’s a fun and seamless experience that adds layers of replayability and social enjoyment on top of an otherwise solid core loop.
- Combat System: On the flip side, we’ve seen a lot of notes that Lynked’s in-game combat system feels pretty good—that it’s smooth and engaging, provides satisfying combos, and offers a variety of weapons and upgrades that allow for diverse play styles.
- Variety of Activities: Beyond combat, you seem to enjoy additional activities like fishing (!!!), catching critter-bots, and town building, all of which add depth and delight.
- Building and Customization: Speaking of town-building, you also seem to really like the game’s broad options for decorating houses and personal spaces.
- Unique Genre Mix: We’ve seen quite a few comments about Lynked’s combination of hack-and-slash combat vs.cozy town-building, noting that it feels like a good mix of some of your favorite genres and games. (Whoever said that Lynked is “Animal Crossing x Hades,” we love you forever. That is a compliment we not only intend to earn, but also one we’ll take with us to our graves.)
What Could Be Better
- EA Bugs: As an Early Access title, we’ve had our fair share of bugs— including crashes, unresponsive controls, and inventory glitches (some of which have been fixed, and some of which still require attention and resolution).
- Performance Issues & Crashes: We continue to receive reports regarding optimization-related problems, such as frame rate drops and high CPU usage, especially in multiplayer.
- Difficulty Balance: This is an area without clear consensus, but we do know some of you feel the game is either too easy or too difficult, particularly in missions. The lack of a difficulty system, which could offer more challenge (or accommodate different skill levels) is often mentioned in tandem.
- Gameplay Flow: We’ve seen comments and posts about delays in loot drops, limited interaction range with items, and slow harvesting mechanics disrupting overall pacing.
- Controls and UI: We’ve also seen comments about Lynked’s counterintuitive controls and inconsistent button mappings, which some players find confusing or cumbersome.
- Repetitive Missions: Some players have expressed that, over time, missions can become repetitive and feel like they lack depth (and that they desire more variety in enemy encounters and mission objectives).
What You’d Love To See
- Difficulty Scaling: Option(s) to increase mission difficulty with better rewards.
- Mission Replay Option: Ability to replay missions with varied rewards.
- Improved Controls and UI: A more intuitive controller mapping and smoother UI transitions, like using ESC consistently for menu navigation.
- Enhanced Gameplay Mechanics: Auto-loot, replayable missions, and an evasion mechanic.
- Enhanced Combat Variety: More abilities, weapon options, and mission objectives to keep the combat experience fresh.
- Enhanced Pet System: Functional pets with skills like auto-loot and health recovery. Requests to deploy bots as pets or companions to assist in combat or provide utility functions.
- Expanded NPC Interactions: More engaging and dynamic NPC interactions.
- Streamlined Harvesting: Bulk harvesting tools and faster interaction for crops.
- Improved Multiplayer Systems: Shared loot in co-op and a clearer interface for multiplayer. Town permissions to enable safer usage of public towns.
- More Customization: Expanded options for character, house, and pet customization.
- Optimized Performance: Improvements in overall performance, responsiveness, and stability (particularly in multiplayer and across multiple specs).
- Frequent Updates and Fixes: Continued bug fixes, quality-of-life updates, and new content releases to enhance the game's longevity.
- Additional Game Content: More mission types, environment diversity, and story elements to increase replayability.
- Additional Feature & Platform Support: Steam Deck, Offline Mode, etc.
WHAT WE’RE WORKING ON
November 2024
This month, we’re looking to drop our first Quality of Life (or “QoL”) patch. For Lynked, QoL patches will typically be smaller in scope, but the trade-off is that they’re easier and quicker for us to implement. So, while our November patch won’t include any new content, it will include some minor fixes, optimizations, adjustments, and additions that should improve your overall in-game experience.
Here are the highlights:
- Offline Mode
- Shared multiplayer loot
- Improved Sprint options
- Upgraded Minibosses
- Expanded Bot-o-Pedia
- Combat and Town tuning
- Continued bug and crash fixes
- Continued performance optimizations
- And more…
December 2024
Next month, we’ll be releasing our first major update! This update will be larger in scope than our November patch and will include new content, systems, and features (in addition to continued fixes, optimizations, and tuning). It will also be Winter themed, which means you can expect a feast of festive items to collect.
Here’s a first look:
- New Unibot Event NPC
- New Weapon Core
- New weather system
- Multiplayer ping system
- More customization options (including holiday decor and weapons)
- Improved new player experience
- Continued bug and crash fixes
- Continued performance optimizations
- And more…
Early 2025
As we head into the new year, our exact production calendar becomes a little more nebulous (since we’re still in the process of building out our long-term plans as well as designing / testing out corresponding content). That said, you can expect us to continue to release QoL patches and 1-2 major updates in 2025 before our worldwide launch. We look forward to providing more information in the near future, but until then…
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon:
- Official pet system
- Lunar New Year-themed freebies
- Official Steam Deck support
- Additional language support
- And more…
To Be Determined…
Beyond what we’ve listed here, there are also a variety of other features, systems, solutions, and improvements we want to implement based on player feedback, but that we haven’t slotted into our roadmap just yet. While it’s our hope to be able to check each of these off our development checklist as soon as possible, we don’t have any estimated dates to assign to them right now. As a result, we may be able to get to some during Early Access, but others may come after our full release. (We’ll, of course, keep you posted!)
Here are a few top items on our backlog:
- New biomes
- Difficulty scaling
- Streamlined harvesting
- Replayable missions
- More favor types and status effects
- Additional multiplayer systems
- And more…
If you’ve made it this far: We salute you! And we hope this update has shed some useful light on what we’ve been working on as a team as well as how your feedback impacts and influences our design decisions. We look forward to sharing even more of these kinds of updates—and another roadmap!—with you early next year.
Speaking of feedback…
If you haven’t already, we’d love for you to take our Q4 2024 Community Survey!
As noted earlier, your reviews, replies, and reports have been incredibly meaningful, so we wanted to give you a more direct and dedicated space to share your thoughts. Your responses will help us better understand our community and, more importantly, identify the areas of the game that could use our attention. (PS - This survey is open to EVERYONE, too—even if you haven’t played or purchased yet.)
Thank you so much for your support, enthusiasm, and candor! Game development is hard, but we feel so lucky to be creating Lynked: Banner of the Spark for and with each of you. Here’s to many (many) more months of brawling, building, and befriending.
- Tatyana Dyshlova and the FuzzyBot Development Team
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