Apologies if I missed this, but can the single player be played offline? Or is a connection required? I have a jillion games to play, but this sounds interesting...
morpheus: Thanks! Glad to hear you're enjoying it!! --- Machiknight: re: exit for in-game help, we'll add it to the list of stuff to do. re: canceling PVP games - they'll time out after a week of inactivity. We've talked about what to do re: dropping non-responsive games, but haven't really come to a great solution yet. We used to have a shorter time-out period, but people said, "If you're making a game for a busy person, requiring a turn within a day is frustrating," and they were right. We do get plenty of players who do turn around turns in 4-5 days, but do so consistently. So... ? Yeah. I dunno - We were thinking that maybe you could "nudge" a player once a day or something, and if they don't respond after a few nudges, the game gets cancelled. It's sort of a hybrid - if one player wants "fast", and the other player wants "leisurely", it lets the "fast" player get out. Not great, but maybe better. Will keep thinking about it. re: resting - I believe what 'rest' is looking for is five hours of uninterrupted inactivity. It may be less - at some point I think we turned it down to about three hours. But that means that you're not playing the game, and there's less than some very low threshold of movement. It's worked for us & the soft launch/beta players, but we know there are some folks that don't fit that mold. If you've got an unusual sleep pattern or something, drop us a note at support, we'd love to hear about how to fix it. There also is a persistent bug where every once in a while for some reason, rest events don't register. We're still looking into that, but it's fairly rare, and I've *never* seen it happen two days in a row. So if you're still stuck w/out rest, also please drop a note to [email protected] and we'll look into it. re: Reward Tiers - each day, you start at 1. You can progress up to 5 the more fights you win. The higher the tier, the better rewards you get. At 1, you'll get small amounts of Fuel & XP. At 5 you can win new cards, rare charges, significantly larger XP/Fuel bonuses, etc. I think 5 is the only tier where you can actually find new cards. re: FAQ - yes. Absolutely. re: replays - the original hope was that we'd be able to do a full-blown uninterrupted replay of the whole fight after it was over. It would also have included "emotes" acted out by the characters, and speech balloons with any chat content you'd had during the match. Two things have pushed this off - 1.) We'd need about 5-10x more varied animations than we have right now, and 2.) emotes. Other than that, it's still very possible. Thanks so much for all the thoughtful feedback! We'll do our best to make improvements. --- tensider: Glad to hear you're enjoying it! re: beacons - no one else but you can see beacons, so you don't need to worry about that. We should find a way to make that clearer in-game. Beacons attract your in-game character to your real-world location. So if you go to a museum or something, and drop a beacon, your in-game character will go to that place and search the museum. Basically, it's a way to have your real-world location matter in-game, but we needed a way for players to have some control over what locations they wanted used (because of stuff like "this is my house" - even though we're not showing it to anyone, and we don't store it once it's out of the adventure mode feed). re: steps - yes, though it's really not as clear as it could be. Basically, steps trigger two types of events - Milestone events, which currently don't do much, and they differentiate between whether you get a "Search" or "Explore" events. Those two events are tuned quite differently re: the kinds of rewards you get and whether they're more "find stuff" events or combat events, but it's clear that those differences need to be either more different, or communicated way better. re: AI symbols - ha. One of those things I've stared at for so long, I totally forgot that it doesn't make sense to anyone else. Click on the AI player's profile, and an explanation of the icons should appear. The short version - red burst = "savage"= +3 damage to their attacks (this one's brutal). Green cube = more health. Blue = more shield. re: adventure text - we're constantly adding more text, so hopefully it'll evolve enough over time. --- Torian: re: island - hopefully! The step count stuff will still work, and whether locations register or not will depend on whether locations are registered in Google. What we do is take your coordinates, and ask Google what's nearby, then those locations are prioritized by how likely you are to actually be there (so a "tax accountant" is a way lower priority than a "restaurant"). But if the locations are in Google, they'll show up in-game. --- Duranki: The single player still does need an internet connection. We're considering revamping the game to not need it in SP, but it's not a small change. All the location-based stuff would need to get turned off (which is not that bad), but the combat all occurs server-side right now, and we'd need to make fairly big changes to get that to run on the phone instead. --- Thanks, all! If you're enjoying the game, PLEASE consider leaving us a review. For a very small team w/ almost no marketing $$ and no visibility, every little bit makes a huge, huge difference. Or tell your friends, and get them to join your party in Adventure Mode. Your stats in AM are a combination of the best stats of all your party members. You'll also get a reward every time a party member gets to a new reward tier. Woo!
Very much enjoying the game. More story and flavor is needed for it to stick. Also curious about evolving to deck building? Right luck of draw seems to swing games ever so often. Evade I think needs a bit of a buff. But I do find myself using shield and attack and I see how using one over the other has helped.
Mr. Bigglesworth - totally agree re: story + flavor. Will be working on it. re: Evade - let me know what you think after playing for a bit. If it gets too strong, games go on forever as people just jump from short to long range & back again. One thing that isn't obvious, weirdly, is that a solid strategy is to jump to midrange to nerf your opponent's ability to defend. I get what you're saying is Evade's *not strong enough* for how you're currently playing, but it isn't meant to be a guaranteed defense - it's meant to let you change the range & not get immediately hammered by doing so. Thanks!
Another one of my esteemed opponents! It's funny randomly running into two of you guys through the game itself. This game needs more attention!
I have run into this problem haha, I have one game that was pretty much purely defensive for like 20 turns. I have to ask: What are your guys ideas for the future of this game? I absolutely love it, and can see lots of potential for the future and would love to know what your plans are!
Question: In the game lore it says the weapons don't kill since there aren't many people left. But if there are different groups that are fighting each other wouldn't they possibly come up with different weapon ideas? Or there would have to be at least one group that didn't care about other life and would be like Negan from TWD. I get that you guys did this for a specific reason. Since you got rid of guns very early on and what not. But it just confused me a bit is all.
W&B - yes, there would definitely be other factions that came up with different ideas. This was 100% just a resource limitation on our side. Not enough time & $$$ to do all the different animations & character types we wanted to. The characters in the game, you'll notice are solar powered, via the panels on their backs. The intent of the armor panels opening up & glowing was that for moves that require extra power, the white suits (which are white to minimize the heat the user endures) open up & have additional energy collectors under the top armor layer. You'll find some scattered references to the Ghosts and Nukes. There's a lot of story there, but not a lot made it into the game that's there now. If we can, we'll try to add more. Eventually, if things go well, we'd love to have the different factions selectable in-game. The Solarians are balanced. Nukes would be hard-hitting but low speed, and the Ghosts the opposite. Basically, it'd change what kinds of Range & Power cards you get. Ideally, then, you'd have some sort of global map that starts to get controlled by the various factions that depends on your real-world location/activity, etc. This is something that'd be a *long* way off. Like, the game would have to do quite well for us to have the resources to do that, and we're definitely not there yet. Other things we want are additional character stats and a more robust persistent narrative. Most of it is essentially "combinatorial" - we're looking to get some more linear, structured narrative into the game - you'll *likely* see that in an update at some point soon. But the other thing I really want is for your decisions & your activity to shape your character beyond just the rewards you can get (which, right now, are quite limited). The goal is to have a more D&D-like character stat system, and based on what you do you improve those stats, and then you see specific content in Adventure Mode that unlocks based on your stats - the ability to negotiate, instead of fight. Scavenge other locations. Risk based on your characters' abilities, etc. Unfortunately, right now, we're a very, very small team. I'd love to work on it more & potentially hire our artist again, but we're really resource-limited. So lots of big ideas, some of the infrastructure to start building them. But it'll take time.
Lore I think it's important to get the lore out there ASAP to get people emotionally invested. I want to see this game make it so you guys can implement everything. If you made lore findable in the events, like emails, books, data disks, etc, ala bioshock (and many other games) it would go a long way towards building that emotional investment!
Really good game, fast action and interesting strategy card ! i can't find help about beacon, someone can explain ?
Beacons are locations that google maps is picking up like a school or library. Going there seems to trigger an adventure. It is just for single player side of game.
Mostly because we found if we just used peoples' location without asking, it was really uncomfortable. Even for us, when we were just playing on our own while testing, and we knew that we weren't ever going to be doing anything weird with anyone's data, it was just kinda... strange, if the game knew where you were and was using your location behind the scenes. So we tried keeping things more general, but when they're more general, it doesn't feel *like* anything. So we wanted to be as specific as possible, but that meant getting permission from the player to use their location. That's why we ask - if you don't want a specific location used in-game, just decline the beacon, and all that information disappears. I think maybe in the future, it'll be nice to have an option to just auto-accept all beacons, but at least at the start, we wanted to make sure people were comfortable with how we were using location, because it can be kind of a sensitive thing. Thanks!
Also, one favor! If you play a decent amount, you'll start seeing a lot of repetitive text. It's a little difficult for me to tell, because I can't see what you're seeing, since the Adventure Mode text is generated specifically for you. But if you can let me know what kinds of things you're finding repetitive, and what kinds of things you want more information about, or what catches your eye in a good way, that'd be super helpful, as I can fix those things up and add more content pretty quickly. Thank you!
I for one leave all location and motion based services turned off (I turn GPS ONLY when I need directions) because they are a battery hog-and always-online games already draw a lot of power-just my 2 cents.
So, turns out one of the critical bits about beacons was buggy, and hasn't been appearing at all for the last few days. So some of my previous explanations may have sounded kind of insane. But they'll be back sometime today. You'll start to see green "map events" in Adventure Mode, and some things should start to make some sense.
I totally get that, but the way we use location, it's not on all the time. It pings every few minutes passively, so it doesn't consume much battery compared to the kinds of location-based games you might be used to.
So, There is something turning me off to single player. I feel like the balancing is weird. I feel like tiers 1-4 I can fight through without too much stress then tier 5 starts bringing out guys who get +6 to damage, and +50 combined hp. It's a little frustrating to get to tier 5 with a good amount of health, only to get smoked in like 1 maybe 2 fights. Especially since it seems like being tier 5 is the only way to get new cards. (Besides 10k fuel) For those crazy fights with powerful foes, the rewards seem REALLY light also. If I fight a guy with those crazy stats and BARELY survive, I get maybe 100 fuel and 200xp. As to the cards, I like the variety, but I feel like there is a huge missed opportunity to add to layer agency and variation. I understand this isn't a "deck building" game, however if there was the ability to purchase card charges with fuel, that would add a ton of customization to the game, that I know I would love. Also a question about card charges: I get a cool card charge from winning a PVP fight, how does that work? If i have 20 pvp games going, and it comes up in 1 of them, is that it? Or does it only come up when fighting that opponent? It feels odd. It also kinda sucks to have such a huge amount of cards that you barely see because you never have any charges. Getting kinda tired of a hand full of jukes and focus.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Balancing the difficulty curve & rewards is definitely a tricky thing - the reward tiers are interesting because the modifiers that get applied to NPCs end up being based both on *your* level and the reward tier. It's also a little tricky because right now, "savage" is the killer mod. If you get savage/savage/savage... goodbye health. So I think we need to take another look at that. If you get a "defeat card" from an opponent, yeah, it's a one-use charge. Those cards are will often completely turn the tide of a fight, so they're intended to be really sporadic. re: other card charges, though, I hear you, and I think we can fix that pretty straightforwardly by tweaking the drop rates of higher-rarity charges in both Adventure Mode and in card packs. We should be able to get to that either today or tomorrow. Thanks again for the feedback - this is the kind of feedback that's next to impossible to get when we're playing it "in-house", because once you've played a game for a year, it's hard to "feel" it the same way as someone coming to it fresh. So I really appreciate the perspective, and it'll directly help us make the game better.
