We've finally ripped the bandaid off by committing to the recent release date, a somewhat arbitrary goal to hit but one that felt important of else I'd find excuses to just keep avoiding releasing the game at all.
Get the baseline features in place and feeling decent, then release to Early Access when the majority of the rest of development would be adding content, a simple plan and now we just have to pull off the "add content" part. Of course, along the way we've also hit a lot of "I'd like to add this" or "I'd like to polish that" or "This feature isn't cool enough", so there's definitely a bit of polish left to do as well.
The first major content update will probably actually take a bit of time, as recently I realized I wasn't satisfied with the Survival Mode menu, it seemed a bit bland and uninspired and it dawned on me that this "Mission Mode" idea we had occasionally mentioned has no reason to be a separate mode. So we will likely be spending some time working on the new fancier level select screen that will act as a hub combining the various modes into one in the future.
The new level select is probably the most major "wasn't in the original plan" change the game will have, but most of the idea is just to add a layer of needed "cool factor" to progression that the game doesn't currently have. It's an additive change, so don't worry about getting less content.
We'll have a more detailed dev log for this later, when it is closer to done.
In the mean time, we'll likely continue putting out smaller bug fix/polish updates until that content update is ready, notably there's a few known issues with the music system and the gauntlet generator that we'd like to shift as priority issues to fix soon.
As for the actual main content of the game to add (gauntlets, arenas, and characters), updates will include additions of these in the order they are meant to be unlocked. We will probably work on them somewhat out of order, but they'll only go public at the right time. This'll likely causes down periods where not much content comes out, and then larger bulk updates as we hit chunks of finished content. The actual order of levels is already decided, you can probably expect a new arena coming out if there is a long delay between updates or something.
The somewhat silly result of pre-planning the content like this is that after just 1 more gauntlet we'll be forced to make the next arena before we can share the next one after that. And 3 more gauntlets before the next player character.
At some point I'll update the Roadmap page to be cleaned up and include better info now that the full picture of the project is becoming truly clear.
More places you can keep up with development: