I love the concept of selling completed collections and recollecting them again, however I already spent many hours grinding and have already purchased EVERYTHING. So what am I going to do with the coins that I get from selling my collections?
Yeah, we're aware this isn't ideal for those users who have already bought everything although there will be a bunch of new stuff to buy in the update. Kinda tempted to create a solid gold suit and ship, make it pricey and give them their own achievements for unlocking...as always though it's just tough trying to keep things balanced and the majority of players (both experienced and new) happy
Yeah, I understand the struggle of trying to appease everyone at the same time. But I do think that the game needs some kind of money sink added, especially if we'll soon be able to sell our collections multiple times, because trust me I WILL be 3 staring all of my collections. So perhaps you should add some sort of purely for bragging rights ship and suit that cost a preposterous amount of coins. It would just give those of us who have already done almost everything in the game one last long term goal to achieve in order to claim that we have the illustrious "100% file" that we all crave.
Yeah, I think at the moment that's going to be our plan. If we get the chance to do another chunky update down the road we would like to add an extra depth and to make that work would need new types of boosts and possibly even better upgrades or consumables like smart bombs or something so there would be a lot more to spend money on. It's all a bit tricky but we shall see how things go!
Oh yeah, worth noting that we are aware the iOS update 8.2 might be causing the game to crash We have a fix in the works (which we shouldn't really need to do as it's not our game that's at fault here...) but we'll still need to go through Apple's submission process which could take a while *sigh* Hopefully we can sort this ASAP although it's a shame it's happened now as another week or so and we'd be ready to submit the content update.
I really like the idea of selling the collections but i think that to limit the selling of the collections to 3 or 5 times is a bad idea.Why not make it limitless. this way the game could be played forever and enjoyed you could could also add the possibility to buy or skip the missing at a high price because some missions are really hard and the get repeated often one after another. other than that great game!
Hi Shiatama, One reason for limiting the collection sales is that some people like to have closure on a game. Being able to have all their collections with 3 stars is essentially the game thoroughly beaten. Not sure the game has enough content and longevity for people to want to go through the process any more than that!? Saying that if the update does well and we can afford to do a much bigger update in the future then we'd possibly change this to unlimited sales as we'd no doubt introduce a whole bunch of extra ways for a user to spend cash. It's all a bit of a balancing act!? We've also been talking about mission skips a fair bit this week. It's certainly possible but at the moment it would involve a bit too much work for this update. I think if we were a bigger team a lot of this stuff would have already been in the game but alas you just have to draw the line on features at some point or you never finish!? Still we're still super proud of what we have created and we're just happy that so many people have enjoyed our creation
For those interested Code Monster Dan wrote a little bit of info regarding the random name generator we've created for the Collection Auction stuff. With some of the names generated on an early pass shown in the attached image....also why isn't the "Museum of Wet Antiquities"a real place? It should be a real place! ------------------ As you might know, we've added a new feature to the next version of Deep Loot that allows you to sell your collections so that you can start them again (and also earn some coins). We thought it would add a bit of fun to put a simplified auction system in and also that it would give us a chance to add some potential comedy names for the buyers in the auction. The names are generated from a text file that contains words that can be randomly put together. This means new potential name combinations can be created without having to alter the code. The text file is formatted in a very specific way that means it can be treated a little bit like a simple programming language for making random names. There are a bunch of different categories that names can be drawn from which includes male names, female names, companies and organisations. This is mostly for variety in name types. Within each category is a list of things that I call 'roots' which are phrases with replaceable words in. An example might be: Dr. \firstName \lastName So in this example the 'Dr.' is left as is but the \firstName will be replaced with a word from a list of firstNames and \lastName will be replaced with a word from a list of last names. Eg. Dr. Leela Wells Dr. Erik Valiant Dr. Dana Cross Etc. And we have a load of these roots in each category, and a bunch of different replaceable word types including things like \adjectives \numbered etc. e.g. King \firstName \numbered \adjective \noun industries Museum of \adjective \noun This makes for a very flexible system that we can tweak as we go, removing roots or word types that don't always work and adding more should we need more variety.
Hi Baron, I see your point and am happy to hear about considerating the mission skips. i look forward to the next update
Thanks Code Monster Dan! I love these kinds of behind the scenes posts. I've been very impressed with your code thus far especially the way the game can stitch together the pre-made locations with the randomly generated tiles in between. Keep up the great work, I can't wait to see the update content.
Dan says thank you for the compliments! The tech behind the world generation is ridiculously complex. Not many other games we know of can generate a world on the fly with no load times!?! Once things calm down a bit and Code Monster Dan has some free time(!) I think his plan is to write a series of posts about the tech we used and how we dealt with a lot of quirks in the development software. I expect it will be a bit more complex than his above posts but hopefully they will be of interest to some people out there Oh and we'll do a stats post at some point too which will show just how many downloads from various places, stores and how much cash we've generated from IAP's. Basically stuff a lot of devs keep hidden for some reason. Right. It's Sunday. I should be be doing something other than work!? I'll pop back on here when I have some more juicy gossip or something to say
Which level was the power source on? I'm stuck on the "source smash" mission, and have been for a while. I've completed several hard missions, but this one has been my most tricky mission despite it being labelled an "easy" one. Is it a rare find? Or is it just as common as other sunken and special locations and am I just missing something? It may seem trivial, but which boat were you using when you discovered the power source? I'm using the ghost ship currently.
Search for "power" in this thread the dev gave a hint (the brown zone). I don't think the boat matters.
Hey guys, sorry for being so quiet lately. November proved to be a long and kinda frustrating month and we had to take time away from the update to sort out a bunch of admin and deal with some freelance work to keep our bank manager happy!? Regarding the update, it's pretty much done. We're into full on test / polish / bug fix mode at the moment which include... - Tons of testing to make sure the update will not mess up old save games - Making sure the new missions are balanced properly - Making sure all the new collections can be completed fully - Making sure all the new achievements unlock properly - Making sure old achievements still work nicely with the new content - Balancing the Auction Offers for when selling collections - Double checking all the new text for spelling / line-wrap issues - Sooooo many other boring little things.... Unfortunately being such a big game all of this is taking time but it will hopefully mean that when the update eventually rolls out. Things will work A-OK and hopefully wont have the kinds of issues we saw on the initial release. Here's the list of new content for the update as it stands: x7 New Achievements x7 New Suits - Two of these have special criteria to unlock x5 New Ships with New perks - One of these has special criteria to unlock x50 New pieces of special loot - Spanning x7 New Collections x23 New Missions - Spread across Easy / Hard / Pro TONS of new locations & easter eggs to find across the various depths Ability to sell completed collections Ability to 3 stars collections - Each completion earns you a star As you can see there's a fair bit in this update, I'm especially looking forward to seeing if people like the new location easter eggs as I'm particularly chuffed with a couple of them Regarding time scales. We're pushing real hard to get things done by the end of the week and submitted to Apple early next week but this does depend on whether or not we encounter any big issues...keep your fingers crossed for us! Again, I apologise this has taken so long but as mentioned it's been a bit of a long few months for us and we really don't want to release an update that could cause problems for those fans who have already spent so much time with the game. We hope you understand... I'll try and check in again before the end of the week to let you all know how things are going! EXCELSIOR!
Hooray! The update sounds like an amazing addition to an already great game. Can't wait to play it, though I don't mind waiting for a game that doesn't erase the hours I've put in (so take your time!). Again, super excited. Thanks for keeping it updated!
Friday update time! Good news is the content update is pretty much done. Hoorah! Bad news is that all the new content has flagged a bunch of issues. Boooo! Basically we've spent a solid 2-3 days testing everything but have discovered two things that need to be dealt with before we're happy with the update. Firstly with more missions we have discovered some weird issues with the mission system. These are being worked on as I type this and although not game-breaking bugs it would cause massive confusion / make mission progression far less fun. Secondly now that you can sell collections we realise the scrolling on that screen just isn't good enough. We already new this was a little problematic but by adding the new feature it becomes much more of a problem as you need to be able to stop on collections quickly and easily. This is high on our list to sort out early next week. So where does this leaves us? Well, we're tantalizingly close to completion and we still hope to submit the iOS build to Apple next week. Whilst that is being approved we will finish the Android update. This is cutting things really close to the holiday break (basically Apple shut down from the 22nd so no apps / updates will be approved until the new year) but we're still hoping to get this thing out before Christmas. We'll know for sure if this is the case next week and I'll be sure to give you all a heads-up on the status of the update. Again, I apologise for the slow progress and both of us here at Monster and Monster thank you all for being so patient / awesome. We're really looking forward to sharing all this new content with you soon!
