Greetings, keepers! It’s been just a bit over a week since we released the V2.6 Mod Support Update, and we’re thrilled to see how much you all have enjoyed it so far! We’re grateful for all of the feedback we’ve received so far, it’s thanks to you all that we are able to continue making Dome Keeper as good as can be! And, we can’t wait to see what sort of mods our amazing community will come up with going forward.
We suspect that you might be interested in knowing a bit about what sort of content we have planned for the future of Dome Keeper, so let’s dig into it!
Multiplayer
We know this is *the thing* that everyone wants, and it’s the same for us!
We did quite some planning earlier this year and started proper development on Multiplayer last month. I’ll share our current plans - please keep in mind that plans can always change, and there is a lot of uncertainty in how well development goes (as multiplayer is tough, especially when adding it retroactively.)
As a first step, we’ll implement local multiplayer with a coop mode for 2-4 people. Right now our goal is to have that playable for Gamescom this year, which is at the end of August. There we can get some first hand impressions of how people enjoy and play with coop mode. I expect we’ll learn a bunch there, and give us the feedback we need to continue iterating on the mode. If everything goes super smooth we might have a second game mode by then, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Please note that multiplayer won't yet be released publically, as we'll continue refining it after Gamescom.
Anyway, more on that mode in the future!
What was last years april fools will become reality with the second multiplayer mode. Well, not exactly this, a lot less romantic, but it similar.
In the meantime, we are getting some outside help with porting Dome Keeper from Godot 3 to Godot 4, Godot being the game engine we use. With Godot 4 we expect that adding an online multiplayer on top of the local one will be a bit easier. Here is where a lot of uncertainty lies - we are sure we can make a local multiplayer, but online can be sooo tricky.
Apart from multiplayer, the upgrade to Godot 4 will also make porting to consoles easier.
We can’t yet say when we can release multiplayer as we’ll only release it when we think it’s fun and done, and we can’t plan for fun.
Double Dome
Apart from multiplayer we are also working on some really cool content, hooray! We’ll actually add two new domes this year: The Artillery Dome and the Tesla Dome. In typical Dome Keeper fashion they play very differently compared to the already existing domes.
Artillery dome closeup.The Artillery Dome is centered around having a big mortar that is extremely powerful, but a bit slow. It requires good timing too, as its fire is indirect. In addition, the Artillery Dome sports an anti-air machine gun, making it the first dome with two weapons. Twice the weapons, twice the firepower!
The Tesla Dome on the other hand has perfect control on where and when its shots hit, as you aim with something akin to a reticle. If you can time your shots well they’ll hit even harder, and there can be an electric field that retains after you shot, which damages and stuns approaching monsters. With some upgrades you can even nurture these fields to a very large size.
A lot of work happens behind the scenes. On the left you can see the first design for the tesla dome that we eventually scrapped. On the right is the new design with a very sophisticated weapon animation.
Fun fact: the Artillery Dome is actually based on two of the domes I had planned for the original Dome Romantik release. Those domes were planned but never made, as we had a big change of plans with making Dome Keeper instead of Dome Romantik, but their time has finally come.
Artillery dome in its natural habitat.The double dome update will hit in Q3 this year, and we are really excited for it!
Far Future
But wait, there’s more! We’re doing some early work on more cool stuff - it seems we have too many ideas and too little time to make them all reality.
We’ll share some of the things now, but please be very mindful of the fact that all this is in its very early stages and could be canceled if we think it’s not fun, too big for us, or if outside circumstances dictate it.
We got ideas for two new game modes. One is “Colonization”, a proper peaceful mode without monsters, centered around terraforming and colonizing a barren planet. It is a much longer experience than the miner mode in prestige runs, and comes with a lot of neat visuals.
This could be your very own utopia!The other mode is “Migration”, which we wanted to have in the initial release of Dome Keeper. Back then we realized it could be a much larger mode than we anticipated, and that we couldn’t do it justice if we only had spent some weeks on it. The idea here is that you jump from planet to planet in a run, instead of spending a long time on one planet. You’ll get very strong upgrades by recovering relics, and the planets will each come with their own modifiers posing new challenges to your build. This mode is also really well suited to support a roguelite mechanic that really has no place in the other modes. We know a lot of you really want one, and it’s the same for us - a proper campaign mode.
Both modes feel very rich in areas we could expand on - having a bit of farming in colonization mode, where you grow things inside of the mine and in additional domes on the surface. Migration on the other hand could also get some added story touches, or even a light mission mechanic. It’s also exciting to think of the possibilities mods have to expand both modes.
Just to enrich the base game, we also got a bunch of new monsters on the bench, ready to be released into the wild together with a new world. It’s not sure when we can release this, as our hands are really full with the new domes and multiplayer right now, but the monsters are designed and drawn already.
One of the new monsters we’ve been working on: the Tormentor!On the other hand we are not forgetting the things that spice up your runs: caves and gadgets. We want to add more here and are currently gathering ideas around those. Additionally we’d like to expand bits we already have, like underground plants becoming gameplay relevant.
Making more Dome Keeper
As I said, we have many more ideas than we can make. In order to realize them, we have expanded the team by hiring Raffa and Fio. Raffa is an expert in making things look awesome and really juicing it up, as you can see in the Artillery Dome footage or his Hydra Launcher mod. Besides that, he is also a very good engineer, taking care of performance issues and digging deep into the engine.
Fio on the other hand is key for us to make use of the telemetry data. We have a wealth of run data already, but haven’t been able to spend a lot of time yet on analyzing it and drawing smart conclusions. Fio is about to change this and will tell you a bit about that in another blog post. If you love charts, this is gonna be a treat!
This is the kind of insights we get from telemetry. You can see that there is a clear difference in winrates per world on relic hunt. This is due to the different monster compositions, suggesting where we can rebalance some of the monsters.Soundtrack update
You might remember that we made an update to the Pioneer Pack a while ago. We renamed it the Engineer Gear Pack and added two new songs to it, to match with the Assessor Gear Pack. We wanted to make sure that the songs would be playable outside of the game as well, but it seems we might have promised a bit too much. As it turned out, there were some technical limitations in the Steam backend we weren’t expecting that wouldn’t allow us to release the tracks as a separate soundtrack along with the in-game items. But, we have come up with another solution that we hope you’ll like.
We have decided to add the tracks from these two packs to the Dome Keeper Original Soundtrack in the Steam store. That means that everyone who has the OST will be able to listen to these four tracks for free, but only outside of the game. In-game you'll only hear them if you got the pack they are included in. (The OST is included in the Steam Summer sale, by the way!)
We know that this isn’t a perfect solution, we tried our best to make it work as we initially intended and we apologize deeply to all of you who bought the packs specifically for the sound files.
That’s all, for now
Well that’s all we have to share right now. To summarize: we have quite a lot planned for the future of Dome Keeper. Enough to certainly keep us busy for quite a while making Dome Keeper into the best game it can be, and we can’t wait to release it all and see what you think!
As always, we’d love it if you’d join us over at the Official Dome Keeper Discord server: Bippinbits - Dome Keeper.???? Thank you for all of your support - it’s the only reason we can continue to work on and expand Dome Keeper. Stay safe, Keepers!
Love,
The Dome Keeper team.
Goofball
