Sunderfolk Closed Beta to Launch

Hey Guardians!

Our Closed Beta officially ended on February 4th, 2025, after a month and a half of testing! 

During that time, we’ve received over 1200 feedback submissions, and had 1600+ members join us in our closed beta Discord server! 

Now, we’ve used that information to make Sunderfolk even better and ready for release! Check out some of the upcoming changes in store for launch day, and join us in counting down the big day!

Some Implemented Changes:

Pacing

Many small changes that add up to a major impact on the speed of play. These changes help to streamline the pacing of gameplay: 

• Pulsing animation on the tile of Heroes that haven’t played yet this turn. Hurry up and take your turn!
• Movement and attack animations speed up when multiple monsters of the same type take their turns sequentially. This resets when a new monster type takes its turn.
• Increased the move and attack animation speed of most characters.
• Improvements to missions and Monsters to increase pacing
  
  • Tower Defense: Stun Bug now only attacks 1 target, not 3.
  • Minecart Mayhem: reduced number of webs
  • Lost in Swamp: re-arranged starting Oozes, increase NPC health
  • Oozes’ Fate Cards no longer spawn additional Oozlings
  • The Fungal Vale: changed Oozes to Redcaps
  • Shadowshard: moved barrels closer to teleporters

Settings

Added more settings to allow you to remove UI and Narrative friction:

• Setting to let you Auto-Skip Narrative, Tutorials, and/or Cinematics
• Setting to let you Auto-End your turn instead of needing to press the End Turn button
• Added more configuration options for the “Hold to Skip” feature, allowing you to skip your actions without looking down at your phone.
• Added Exit to Hero Select to make it easier to add new Heroes to existing campaigns

Difficulty

Improving the Difficulty curve to be more consistent across missions, while pushing to distinguish Brightstone and Challenging as more distinct difficulty modes. 

• Easier Brightstone Difficulty mode
  
  • Invincible NPCs
• Harder Challenging Difficulty mode
  
  • All Monsters have Frenzy and become more powerful when they are:
    
    • Attacked by a Hero
    • Unable to attack for the round
  • Stronger Monsters
  • More Elite Monsters Spawns
• Shadowstone Difficulty Unlocked Automatically

Heroes

After analyzing data and going through your feedback, we've made some balance changes to some Hero spells.

Arcanist

Arcanist is in a good spot; they've received balance tweaks to some spells.

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Bard

Bard has some room for some extra power, so they received some damage and movement increases.

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Berserker

Berserker's in a good spot; touching up some under-loved spells.

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Pyromancer

Pyro has a lot of power, so shifting some of that power around.

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Ranger

Ranger has some room for some more power; they received some upgrades.

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Rogue

Rogue is in a good spot; made some changes to reduce player confusion.

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Town

• Re-organized building upgrade rewards to more closely match the building theme
• Added a new Market Shop that exchanges Favors for certain Trinkets to create an outlet for excess Favor items
• Rewrote and added extra text to better describe certain building upgrade rewards
• Level-Up celebration now happens soon as you arrive at Level-Up
• Tavern Meals are now weighted, making it more likely newer unlocked / better meals are more likely to appear

UI/UX

• Added a skip remainder of turn button in combat when taking your turn
• Implemented corner cutting on movement & targeting to help improve the ease of drawing your path
• Improved tablet UI support
• Better telegraphing for unique mission mechanics and rules:

Other 

• Improvements to disconnect handling and flow
  
  • Removed the QR code which blocked too much of the screen when players disconnected
• More places where the game saves in Town
• Added in slide animations when stepping on Slime
• Lots of improved VFX, animation, and audio!

Just The Sunder-Start

Now, these are just some of the changes we’ve made for launch, and this is just the beginning! If you don’t see your feedback implemented here, we are planning post-launch patches that will include changes that we couldn’t add for our launch day. 

Thank you all again for your feedback, bug reports, and for joining us on this first step into Sunderfolk’s journey! We can’t wait to show you everything! 

• The Sunderfolk Team

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