First up: Challenge Island Down

I think this one turned out a little more successful than the last, and even sprung up a lot of discussion, which is awesome! I especially love that people were able to find a few different strategies to pull off the final difficulties.

We actually tried turning on Dark Knights to test last week and it turned out…they didn't work. So that's kind of funny.

New Challenge Island coming up next week!

First Impressions Update!


There's a lot of stuff that went into this update, and a lot of it you might never see again as an existing player.

Why are we working on first impressions? Well we're trying to gear up for other platforms. Games are a business and all that fun stuff no one wants to hear, and if we're going to keep working on the game we need to keep earning money. We've had recommendations to double prices and pinch harder on the existing audience, but none of us are comfortable with that, frankly. So instead we're working on spinning up some new platforms for the game (namely web and mobile). We hope spreading the game around to more people will solve that issue for the time being.

All of which means we wanted to start looking at our tutorial and HUD, which are very, very common complaints about the game for first-time players.

We also want to be able to keep platform parity with everything, so everyone always gets the same updates, which means one code base.

On top of which: we want to keep the updates rolling on Steam, so this isn't a 'goodbye' post or anything. I just wanted to lay out some explanation for why we're working on what we're working on right now.

There's new Doceo art for the tutorial!
[*]Higher res art!
[*]A smoother, more luxurious Doceo. There's a new HUD
[*]I don't like taking features away, but we couldn't find space for the quick travel that made sense anymore. Fast travel was created in the hopes of fixing our tutorial drop we saw between islands 1 and 2, and it…didn't end up helping, it turns out.
[*]Instead we decided to bring the map functionality out much more.
[*]Greater emphasis on the Buy Multiple button.
[*]Toggle the Quest UI on/off with the Build button.
[*]Notifications for star points, chests, and when you unlock a new island!
[*]No Save button (it was a weird throwback from our first web days). Autosaves are happening every few minutes, or after defeating a boss, or after making a purchase, or after prestiging. There's also still the "Save and Quit" button in the settings just in case. Tutorial Tweaks!
[*]Some slight adjustments to the existing tutorial to hopefully help players get through the early game better. Social Link Buttons!
[*]Finally added them. New "News" screen art!
[*]So many more pixels now. Android Test? It's close! Thank you to everyone who signed up and I'm hoping….next week? Ish? After playing the game more with the old HUD we found it was hard to click on buttons so we wanted to try and get that updated before finally getting more people to play the game. Next Week A new Challenge Island!