40k Players and a Roadmap

Hey all,

It's been 2 weeks since the last update and want to start by saying an enormous thank you to the more than 40,000 players of the demo so far across all platforms. FORTY-THOUSAND.  Honestly, that number just boggles my mind and leaves me almost lost for words, so just, thank you.  

An extra-special thanks also those who have been providing feedback via the in-game links, comments here on Itch or on Steam - due to all of this I've been able to prioritise some key changes and I'd like to get these all wrapped up before the next demo update. So while it might be a couple of weeks before I have new builds to publish, rather than just dissapearing into the ether I thought it might be a good idea to share the roadmap for what I hope to be working on in the coming months.

The game isn't too far from v1.0, although as always polish, bugs and finalising builds can take way more time than expected so I've left a considerable runway for these once I have the game relatively feature complete.  Also, I just want to add a quick note that I'm working on CoP only in my spare time, so as much as I'd love to create the ultimate-pinball-behemoth-of-a-game, I have to be realistic about what I can do in a reasonable time without burning out.

With all that said, on with the plan:

Septermber 2025

• Ball Rituals: I really want each ball to have more flavour beyond the initial starting bonus, so I've been working on unique rituals for each ball that plays off it's key strength. 
• Gylph balance pass and icon update - I've been wrestling with the visuals for the Glyphs for far too long, so I'm moving to a more pictorial representation of what each one does. I'm still not 100% happy with it so far but it's better than it was, and will revisit later in the roadmap.
• Graphics settings menu - by far the most-requested feature and one I should have had in long before now - this will let you customise your video/graphics preferences to allow for various quality settings and screen resolutions.
• Linux and MacOS versions of the demo for both Itch and Steam
• Glyph Infusions - both the visuals and the balance of these are long overdue a pass
• Mid-run saving - at the moment saving/loading haldway through table is a sure-fire way for things to go wrong, this will get fixed. 

October 2025

• Proper localisation as well as font support for Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic-langauges
• Bonus Table rework - Bonus Tables will be changed to include one large centre bumper that requires hitting several times to break. Upon doing so, the player will gain an extra Blessing. Also, the bonus table for the demo needs a serious visual update, I cringe whenever it loads.
• A thorough balance pass of blessings, curses, balls, rituals, blockers and bumpers
•  Balls 7 and 8 - 6 balls are now feature complete and ready to go, the plan for these last two are a bit more complex so I've been putting it off because reasons. 
• Table 4 finished. Tables 1, 2 and 3 are all pretty much done, with the exception of a visual pass for 2 and 3. Table 4 still needs refined before I lock down the design and start working on the backboard art.

November 2025

• HUD pass - I want to make sure all the information displayed is done so effectively, there's currently a bit of confusion for some new players so I'm hoping to add some features that make it more obvious what's happening, even when everything is happening
• Audio Pass - I've had some insanely good feedback on audio from a couple of really talented, clever audio folks so I'd be insane not to implement as much of that as possible. Plus, a lot of events in the game still don't have basic audio hooked up, or they reuse previous audio SFX, and it's starting to grate on me.

December 2025

• Steam achievements
• First Submission Builds for all platforms (more on this in a future post....)
  
• Balance pass
• Beta tests
• Bug fixes
• Press and Content creator outreach (even now, please get in touch if this is you!)

Q1 2026

• Bugs, Polish, Marketing and...
• !!! LAUNCH !!! 

(The Cheater Ball ritual will deal damage based on how many Spare Balls you have)

I'm hoping to be able to confirm the launch date within the nextcouple of months, depending on a few factors but as you can see I'm planning on giving myself plenty of leeway for things taking longer than expected, new features that just absolutely have to be added when I hear them, or just generally time that I can walk away from CoP for a week or two if it just stops being fun to work on. 

Anyway, I hope this is of interest to some folk, as always please let me know any thoughts and suggestions - I revisit the comments and feedback regularly so there might be some more changes coming that aren't mentioned in this roadmap, as I'm still testing out some of the suggestions made.

Happy Flipping!

Kenny