Hi again! I’m almost ready to announce the release date (look out for that tomorrow!) but until then, I want to talk about some of the extra features I’ve brought into the Elementalist this past week.

So, first things first: The Elementalist is not a very long game. I did a complete test run this week and I reckon that a first-time player could likely get through the whole thing in about one hour. For $4.99, I think the price reflects this length, and I am immensely proud of what I believe to be the quality of what’s there, but I can understand why the game only lasting an hour might be a bitter pill for some to swallow. Here are some things that might help to alleviate that!

First of, endless mode! I believe I’ve mentioned it on here before, but the Elementalist comes fully packaged with an endless mode which removes the score caps on levels and lets you play through any of those of the campaign trying to get the highest score you can!

Higher difficulty settings! You can tweak the difficulty of the Elemntalist down to some seriously minute levels, so you can make the experience easier if you’re having trouble, or crank it right up to maximum. In the endless mode, the difficulty will act as a multiplier for your score, so playing on a higher difficulty could end up being beneficial!

Lastly, you can reset your save file to try the whole thing over from scratch and experience the story fresh. These aren’t the only features that people have used in past to give players something more beyond a game’s brief length; you don’t see it often today (with a few notable exceptions) but often you could play whole alternate campaigns after the credits rolled. These were often quite efficiently designed, reusing many assets from the first campaign, and are pretty ingenious solutions in their own right, but take a lot more work to implement than the minor additions I have made. Maybe these, among other things, could become features in future releases, but for now I think that I’ve done plenty to give the player some fun post-credits, and made the actual bulk pretty substantially fun to play.

So! Thanks for reading! As I said, stay tuned; tomorrow there is gonna be a pretty big announcement coming, so keep an eye on my Twitter or here on itch.io. Until then!