Project Thea is out in Early Access and we are about to hit our first big update, so I decided this is a good time for some early reflections and future game plans.
Our next steps:
The good news is, the overall feedback is good, and we hope to improve it as we add content and features. With that in mind, our first big update brings Meta Progression along with many QoL improvements and some extra story elements.
With Meta Progression finally here, we are hoping to improve the replayability aspect, as with every playthrough you will be able to customise your starting setup. This allows you to add things like additional party members, specific slot items, cards, resources, or even extra abilities for your PC.
The way this works is that you are awarded Destiny Points for achieving certain things in a single game (lost games also give points, but not unfinished ones), such as reaching Core tech levels, exploring more map areas, going through POI events, or completing story elements. Once we gather more feedback, we will of course be able to tweak and expand this list.
The points you gather can be spent when starting a new game. You can unlock additional slots and then choose which elements you want to add to your playthrough.
We designed this system so that even your first playthrough should earn you enough points to add something meaningful, while more advanced bonuses require a higher investment.
Destiny Points collected across playthroughs remain on your profile, so even when we add new options, you can continue to use them. These points will also carry over from Early Access into the full release.
One thing we want to build on in future updates is increasing the challenge of the Hard and Extreme difficulty settings, so that once you learn the game on Normal or Easy, you can really feel the added difficulty.
Reflections:
Before I finish, I would like to take a minute to discuss the launch and our thoughts on it. I think it is honest and fair to say that it could have gone better, especially in terms of sales, and let’s face it, when you are a self funded team, that does sting.
Many factors could have contributed to the slow start, with visibility being the obvious culprit as it is for every game, and this time it hit particularly hard. The major changes to the genre, art style, and gameplay likely played a role, and in hindsight we should probably have stayed away from putting Thea in the title, as I think we disappointed some fans who were really just expecting a Thea 3. Time and resources are always a factor. We had to make big changes to our design, and ideally we would have needed more time to work on this new direction, but time is money.
While we are absolutely not blind to these shortcomings and are actively addressing them, visibility and reach are things we sadly have much less direct control over. Because of that, we can only hope that our improvements will help the game reach the right audience in the end.
Overall though, we believe in the game and hope we can still surprise our fans in the months to come. Fingers crossed.
Future plans:
We plan to have the next big update by the end of January and it will entail building outposts. Once an area is explored, we want the player to be able to gather resources from the city screen without having to physically travel back to that area.
Specifics of the mechanics are of course still work in progress and we will share more details soon.
And of course, this is only the next update. We will continue to listen and enhance the game in the months to come.
General Roadmap
For reference, this was our general roadmap, and as you can see, some things have already been addressed in the latest update, while others were shifted around a little, but these remain our general plans for Q1 2026.