iOS RELEASE WED 2/22 Chief Puzzle Officer is a fast pace action packed multiplayer Match-3 RPG where players team up to build the richest and strongest MegaCorp. How? By defeating any other teams that dare to stand between you and that sweet sweet in-game cash, of course! Matching Gems is Serious Business Release Trailer! Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel FEATURES: Lightning Paced Match-3: Dominate Every Board to Achieve Victory 4P Co-Op PvE Multiplayer Guild Wars 3v3 PvP with Opportunity to Play Guildmates' Decks No Energy System for Core Game Modes Deep Deck Building Choices - Leader Skills, Items, Executive Moves! Upgrade Your Megacorp Headquarter Buildings Together - By Playing The Game Guild Card Shop: Adding Powerful Cards to Your Deck for Free* *If you play blue+green, and your Megacorp loves to buy red cards - maybe it's time to find another Megacorp Beta Date Set for November 15th!. Chief Puzzle Officer - coming Q4 2016! Follow us on: Twitter Facebook EDIT 9/4: Executive Cards on Post #4 EDIT 9/6: Updated Battle UI + Feedback Request on Post #7 EDIT 9/14: Chapter 1 Story Snippets on Post #26 EDIT 11/10: Major Update - New Beta Trailer + Beta Date Set! (WIP for next few days) EDIT 2/17: iOS Release date announced!
Let's take a look at some of our Executive Cards and their active abilities that lets you gain the advantage! Chief Science Officer! His chemicals are strong, but are they stable? NOPE. Destroy 8 random tiles in your quadrant. Sometimes you win sometimes you kaboom. Chief Hacker Officer! He lays low behind the scene but his impact will be felt! Change 7 non-blue tiles into blue tiles in your quadrant. So h4x! Chief Nurse Officer! She's kind of clumsy, but she'll patch you right up! Heal 20% Team's Max HP. I mean, she is a nurse you know?
Got you both SwissHiFi and Gamer's Apprentice 1998 - thank you for your interest! Is there anything else you guys want to see us cover? What would interest you? In no particular order, these are some of the content we are considering leading up to beta signups later this month: 1) GIFs to show interesting boss mechanics 2) GIFs to show core mechanics like playing an item on the board, using an item on the board, activating an exec. 3) More artwork 4) Reports and sampling of UI-redesign (Alpha used a lot of, alpha stuff!) 5) Developer concept material on game features (for example, Guild Wars, from Napkin Sketch->Wireframe->Mock Up->Iteration Process) 6) Game Design rationale on why we designed the way we designed. Why no energy system? Why allow people to play guildmates' deck? Why is real time Co-Op the main modes? 7) Soundtracks for different parts of the game Anything else you can think of - if there is interest - we're happy to slot it as part of our progress updating process!
UI UPdate - Which One Do You Like? WIP Battle UI Re-Design Which ones do you like more? Why? Direction 1 Direction 2 Next things being re-designed is the notion of how Items on the board are better presented. Maybe we use category icons (A fist for damage, for example). Either way, we'll reinforce causation between card and effect. And then we'll start replacing placeholder art objects with final polished objects - we got some awesome looking thing in, just want to lock down the board UI direction first.
What Will You Do? Time is running out. All your teammates are trapped in other quadrants. Will you be a hero and destroy the bomb? If successful, team takes no damage. If you fail, team takes big damage. Or play it safe and get away from blast radius and team just takes minor damage? You decide! GIF Link Also taking closed beta sign-ups now via this thread!! (Can someone teach me how to embed GIFs in a TA post please?)
Just an update that we put the same question up on A/B testing sites, filtering for users that "Play Mobile Games", and received 64% votes in favor of Direction 2. So we shall be going with that!
I LOVE match 3 games, especially ones with different mechanics thrown in. I have a lot of experience with these types of games and I would love to be in the beta.
Got all three of you - thank you for all the kind words! And yes we certainly didn't want to make another Match-3 that was just another candy crush, or another puzzle quest, or even another puzzle & dragons. We think the Match-3 genre's gotten really stale, and it's time to shake things up! So we started with the concept of a tactical board - where you can roam around, and play together with other players at the same time without feeling like it's multiple single-player games (which is unfortunately the multiplayer of a lot of current Match-3's). Then we wanted to mix in some card elements in a made-for-Match-3 way - so we have cards that becomes items on the board that you can interact with. And finally we put in executive moves (active abilities) to achieve a balance between random and control. Really happy with where we are at from a battle mechanics perspective. Can't guarantee it's going to be the best Match-3 you ever play (but hope so!!!), but we sure can tell you it will be different.
This is looking so good!!! Please, count me in. I have a question: will this game have a gacha system? I'm sorry if you already said it somewhere!
Counted and thank you for your support! Yes, the game will have a Gacha system - we think the thrill of opening up booster packs has a place in our game. But we all know that a Gacha also has its own problems. If there's a certain card you really want, and you keep whiffing on it - that's not a good experience. I certainly have gotten mad/sad before in those situations. To address that, we introduced a Guild Card Shop that you (your guild) can buy any card you want from the base set - even the most powerful 5 star cards - with no RNG involved and bought specifically with a currency that you only earn by playing the game. The Guild Card Shop is not meant to replace personal card collection. It's to make sure you're never in the situation of 'man I can't possibly make a blue-green item-stealing deck because I'm missing those two crucial core cards". Also since it's a guild-based purchase, it's pooling resources together so maybe not everyone will have all their card needs satisfied right away - but in a way we think that kind of planning is part of the fun of running a guild. At the time of Alpha testing, a guild of what we consider 'average' level of activity will be able to buy and max out about 1.5 cards a week. Some guilds will choose to buy more cards and level them less. Some guilds will choose to spend more (or less) on building upgrades and temporary player buffs instead of on cards. And some guilds will simply play more or rank higher on Guild Wars to have more currency to spend. But no matter what, you will see a theme of 'let's not screw the unluckiest guy' throughout our design. For example, events do rely on the concept of drops - but every event has a progression reward tied to it. If you are able to clear moderately difficult content and you put in a reasonable amount of time - you shouldn't walk away empty handed. Maybe you won't walk away with a jackpot full of loots like the lucky guy, but you won't walk away with nothing. Let us know if you have any feedback regarding our design of our Gacha / Guild Card Shop!
I just want to say that.... I can't wait to start playing. This idea is seriously amazing! I'm really not good at giving feedback, but I'll try. I think you could explain a bit more about the concepts of the game. Is the Megacorp the guild? If so, why is it called "Guild Card Shop" and not "Megacorp Card Shop"? Also, what exactly are executives? What differences them from other cards? Regarding the Alpha Gameplay Teaser... it's quite confusing to watch. There are too many things happening and the girl with the chat bubble is talking too little. Please tell me if you're planning on doing a more in-depth video of the gameplay! As a final comment, I think it would be a good idea to make a wiki for the game. Of course, in case the game itself doesn't have a menu or something where we can see the stats/art of the cards. Other than that, it's looking really good! Would love to see more artwork
Whoa, I just noticed where you came from. You came all the way to TouchArcade and made an account to join the community - man that's awesome thank you so much for your support! =) I'll answer all the Qs in next post. To provide context for others - this morning a certain other influential mobile midcore gaming site wrote a "Coming Soon" article about our game. I was just back on that site reading the chat messages and noticed ESPUMA's from there. Can't link to another website from TA forums (or at least don't think I should), but you can see it from our Facebook and Twitter! Really brings a giddy smile to my face
1) MegaCorp is the guild. The story of the game is to build a massive business empire, so a lot of functions uses in-theme names. Like Guild is MegaCorp. Guild Wars is Hostile Takeover. Gacha is like a HR Agency. I'm so bad at constantly going back and forth between the terms. But yeah, it should be MegaCorp Card Shop, sorry for the confusion! : ) 2) We have two type of cards, Executive and Staff(Item). They don't take up each others' slots and are both used to build your deck, but have very specific differences. Executives: when equipped to a deck - these guys are your active abilities. The ability is on-demand, you can use it anytime even when your swap timer isn't full yet (i..e, not your 'turn'). There is a cooldown between using consecutive executive moves per player, and once you're out of charges it's not very easy to get them back (if you play FFRK, think the Roaming Warrior concept). Each executive also comes with a leader ability - but only the executive set as the leader has that on. My favorite one from Alpha is the exec that gave 3-chains+ more damage. I like big numbers and this leader skill lets me justify roaming around the board looking for big chains even if I'm not matching as soon as I have a turn. Staff/Item: when equipped to a deck - these guys are the cards played onto the board as you make matches and gain mana. One key thing to understand from our game is that other than executive moves, everything else always goes on the board level first. So you matched some gems and you played a card. Whatever the effect of that card is - it doesn't go off until someone else matches it again with gems of the same color. If your team matches the item, then boom off goes the effect. If the enemy team matches the item, then the item is simply destroyed. (some items will go off on their own after a countdown). Also, your deck's stats come from these Staff/Item cards - such as your HP, your red gem attack damage, your blue gem attack damage, etc. Item effects ranges from super straight forward like a big direct damage to fancy buffs and other cool things. So both types of cards are very important! 3) We absolutely plan to do a more in-depth gameplay trailer as we get closer to beta. The alpha teaser started out as a video to show alpha testers "players and enemies are on the board", and through one iteration after another became a teaser video. 4) The wiki is a great suggestion - we will first and foremost try to explain everything in game. For example, longpressing/longtap on a card, item, or exec will show what they do. Functions in game menus have a little (?) button next to them to bring up the Help Menu. But yes, we plan to work with the community to create wiki and game guides. Perhaps the website you came from would be interested in doing those, we'll see puhaha. Next post will show some examples of what I mean with Executive Moves from the Alpha Build and later tonight will upload some more art.
Here is an example of an Executive Move sequence to give you a better idea. Using Alpha Build again, excuse the graphics Screenshot #1: The generic battle state. Notice how you have a shiny button on the bottom right? That's the button that lets you choose an Executive Move Screenshot #2: Tap the button, now you get to choose from one of the three executives this character, GM Tanshui, has equipped. Screenshot #3: If you longpress/longtap, you can see the effect of the Executive. Like this one here destroys 3 rows. Actually, it destroys the row you are on + 2 random rows in your quadrant, and if an enemy target is on one of the rows you destroy - you deal 1.5x damage to that target. But we didn't write all that out for Alpha When you use an Executive Move, all your teammates will see that show up on the Highlight Cam, which is little live action camera that shows up on the bottom right hand of the screen. The Highlight Cam also shows players who did a massive chain combo, killed an enemy, and cool stuff like that.
