Universal Idle Realm (by Eat the Moon)

Thanks Choud! I got your support message and responded. I'll post the same information here as well

Thanks for your suggestions!

I currently don't have any plans to let you move buildings, but this could be a great feature to add in the future!

As for a screen that shows all of your buildings, the next version of the game will have a new Building Management screen that can be accessed from the Town Hall, once it is unlocked. The next version of Idle Realm will have realm upgrades and realm leveling up, which will let you unlock new features as well as extra bonuses, and this is one of those upgrades.

The Building Management screen will show you all buildings that you own as well as their current level. You'll be able to tap an Upgrade button for each building right there, or use the Upgrade All button to get all the buildings in a group. You can also demolish or mass demolish structures (useful for getting rid of all the campfires you build at the start) Here's a picture:



A new player will probably not have the need for this screen so early in their game, which is why I locked it behind a later Realm Level. But for all current players who have been playing for a while, when their current game ends and they can start spending Victory Points to earn upgrades, they will be given extra Victory Points as a reward for playing the earlier version of Idle Realm.

I have also thought about adding the terrain type to the building information screen, but I might not be able to sneak it into version 1.3. The forest/tree land tile, however, has been updated to show leaves on the ground, so it should be easier to determine what land is usable. I have heard players say that they demolish the lumberjack hut, forgetting it was a forest tile, when they were hoping to place more farms, so this should help with that. Here's the new forest ground textures in play:



The grass with the berry bush is just a grass tile for building purposes. In the early builds of the game, grass would give you hay 60% of the time and food 40% of the time when you tapped on it. I didn't like the random aspect of this, so I just added the berry bush to make it 100% as a tap resource. If you're looking to build more farms, they can be built on grass or berry bushes, in case that helps

 

Whew! Just wrapped up campaign map loading and moving between island maps with official code, instead of hacky prototype code. Island maps are loading up, objectives being set up, hazards spawning ... now I need to push through with more tests on the objectives and make sure they are all working with the new system before diving down into the map editor and creating a ton of maps.

The first 5 islands that you visit will be marked as tutorial islands, which will be smaller and let you focus on learning how to deal with or interact with some of the new map objectives. This means that there are limited starting areas and limited, well, everything. There is no tutorial dialog or anything special for these maps, they are just smaller and easier. I haven't decided if Island 1-5 will ALWAYS be these tutorial maps, or if you beat an island, you start getting the normal map layouts for that island.




As you can see, this map is WAY smaller than the typical maps in Idle Realm. In fact, all future maps will be smaller just for the purpose of letting you crush the islands and move on quickly. Some will still be large, but probably not as large as what is currently in version 1.2.2. Only these tutorial 1-5 maps are this small. The rest are probably twice the size, if not more.

If I leave them as tutorial 1-5, then you could start on Island 1 and play through Island 5 fairly quickly and grind some early Victory Points, which means that I'll need to set the VP rewards for those islands lower than normal. However, if I convert them to normal maps, I can keep the VP rewards the same and it just eases the player into how things works. When the player ends their campaign and starts a new one, they'll be hit with the larger, more randomized maps, which I think would feel better.



The realm upgrade for picking your starting island when you start a new campaign has a UI now. It's very simple: Every 5 islands you reach, you unlock the ability to start on that one. I originally was going to require you to unlock the feature first, before remembering which islands you seen, but that was an awful idea. The game will remember your highest map anyway, so once you unlock the feature, you'll be able to jump ahead immediately ... assuming you've reached a higher island that supports starting on it The general rule is that is the island number ends with a 1 or a 6, you're good. So, 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, etc. As a side note, islands 5, 10, 15, 20, etc are more difficult maps due to hazards and other special things. So, once you beat a map that is a multiple of 5, it's like beating a mini-boss and you get a save point.

Lastly, I modified the build screen to use less text and show what a building provides in a way similar to how the new Building Info screen already shows its data.



Due to some of the higher tier buildings having 5 resource requirements in the old structure database, I can't make these any smaller. But once people have migrated over to version 1.3, I'll probably hit this screen again and make it more compact, as the 1.3 building requirements will use less resources for some of the buildings, hopefully letting me squeeze it in smaller. 1.4 or 1.5 might add terrain icons on this screen as well, so you can see what terrain the building needs, but that is not for 1.3!

 

Lots of stuff got finished today! Traveling between islands is working great, and more of the objectives that I added have been tested out. Threw in some new art that came in and modified a few more things.

But what is the world am I looking at? Is this the same island? There is some crazy stuff going on, that's for sure. Here's a picture as a tease, because sometimes it's more fun that way. Back with more information in a couple days!

 

More work was done on the server infrastructure as well as various UI pieces. Today, I'll be showing off the changes I made to the world map, some of the hazards that will exist on maps, as well as two types of map objectives.

First off, the world map update:



Here, I opted to allow you to toggle the display of base domains on and off. The current 1.2.2 maps are quite large, so showing this data wasn't exactly helpful. But with the 1.3 maps being smaller, showing this data works. You'll notice that there is blue (yours), red (enemy) and green (friendly tribe) domains. With version 1.3, friendly tribes are introduced that will require your assistance with a specific objective. Since they take precious domain away from you, it is good to be able to get a lay of the land and know at a glance what you can take. I also got rid of the enemy base icon and it uses the enemy icon as well. With base domain displayed, you'll be able to tell where the bases are pretty easily.

Next, the hazards!



First up is the Heat Wave. This hazard will slowly dry out the land that is on the map, hitting a random piece of grass or forest every 10 minutes. Forest will turn into Dead Forest (still functions as a forest tile), Dead Forest will turn into Grass, and Grass will turn into Sand if it is next to water, or it will turn into Dirt. Buildings that are using the terrain will prevent it from being targeted, so claim your forests and grass tiles ASAP! Over time, this hazard will make it hard to expand your empire, so you need to complete your island objective quickly and move on.



Next, we have Flooding. This does what you might expect, it floods the world. Flooding starts on the left side of the map and travels to the right. There are safe spots specified on the right side of the map that won't be hit by flooding, so you need to build a base over there. This is a hazard that will end your campaign early if you lose all of your domain generating buildings, so don't let time slip away from you!

I'm taking a different approach to Idle Realm that most idle games don't do. I'm introducing timed based elements that can actually cause your game to end. These are not too crazy, as they trigger every 10 minutes and usually affect once piece of land each time. On the larger maps, this will take a few days before it ends your game. However, the hazards do activate while you are not playing the game, so you could come back to a game over.

Onto map objectives!



Some islands will use the "Research" objective in order to beat the map. You'll have an object (obelisk) in your base that you can't get rid of. The purpose of this objective is to spend your knowledge points on researching it. Granted, you could start your map, build up tons of camp fires and complete the objective easily the first time this pops up, for later islands when it comes back, you will require a lot more knowledge as this, like other objectives, scale based upon your island number. You'll need to make a decision on what you need to research (obelisk or base upgrades) before you log out.



Another type of map objective is the manufacturing colony objective. You'll be told which resource you need to manufacture and a goal per second for that resource in order to complete the map. In this case, you need 32 blacksmiths with 32 lumberjacks and 32 mines in order to complete the objective. You can also use less of these buildings if you upgrade them or are using realm upgrades that help you. As the island number increases, the amount of the resource will increase as well, to the point where you will need to be leveling up your realm upgrades to even have a chance, or really plan out your infrastructure and building choices (like a puzzle)

These objectives, and the others that were created, are meant to dynamically increase in difficulty, challenging you to plan things differently based upon the map that is tossed at you as well as leverage realm upgrades and leveling them up. You are expected to play several campaigns, leveling up your realm each time, and progressing further down the island chain.

That's it for today! More to come soon!

... This update probably won't be done in October like I planned. It might be the first week of November instead. I'm pushing as fast as I can!

 

Whew, today I rebalanced the entire 1.3 upgrade and building database, which was a pretty crazy task as always. This was just the first pass, as now I need to run through the game and speed it up, to make sure the resource requirements and time required is feasible. If this was a normal idle game, I could balance it a lot easier with as there wouldn't be restrictions on land use and the amount of land.

The reason why I had to rebalance all of this data is because of the new research tech tree. In version 1.2.2, the tech tree is all over the place and hard to follow. But with 1.3, the buildings unlock in a more structured and nice-flowing way. Basically, research buildings are the gates between new upgrades. The new tech tree was shown in a previous post several weeks ago.

The spreadsheets that I use have columns for listing out how many storage buildings or research buildings (and their levels) the player might have. For the research cost, I calculate the total knowledge being generated by normal buildings, and I attach a minute requirement to the research. For example:



Here, I specify that the Town Hall research (aka Settlements) should be completed when the player has roughly 3 Campfires and 2 Schools (Level 1), as represented by the CF and S1 columns. The KnowledgeGen column is auto-populated based upon the numbers I filled in by reaching into the building spreadsheet and pulling out the knowledge per second of each of these buildings and multiplying by the total of each building. Then, I state that with those buildings, I want it to take 10 minutes to upgrade. With maths and magics, we arrive at 138K knowledge as the requirement for the Town Hall research.

Naturally, if the player has 10 School (Level 1) buildings, it would probably take 1 minute to research it.

The Level 1 House is expected to have only one Campfire, and I want it to take 2 minutes so that it falls under the "free research" grouping.



The same applies for building costs. In this example, I expect the player to have only the Town Hall for storage when they first build the House, which provides 1K storage. For upgrading to the Level 2 House, I assume a normal player will have 5 Warehouse (Level 1) and 5 Silo (Level 1), which provides 26K resources. What isn't shown is that for each resource that is used to build the building, I specify a percentage of the total resources to use. The idea is that when the player is maxed out on resources, by using the percentage cost, I can state how many of said building the player can immediately build. Of course, if the player has more storage than I specify, they can build even more. But if they have less, they will have trouble ... so they need to build more.

I also show an estimate of how much land is used by the storage, and how much land is available from the Town Halls owned. If I set a requirement that would use up almost all of the usable land, it would be pretty hard to build it as there needs to also be free land for the resource generating buildings as well.

To aide with testing this new data, I have debug buttons in the game to push the game forward 1, 5, 10, 60, and 360 minutes at a time. I start out the game and need to tap, but once I get past the tapping section and into the idle section, I simulate the time passing by. Players might scout around the map while they are waiting for research or resources to build up, or just sit with the game open and do something else. Or, they might come back later on to pick up where they left off.

The smaller minute incremental buttons help me to simulate the player in a current session, waiting for stuff. I then use the 10 and 60 minute buttons to simulate coming back to the game after a little bit of time, and the 360 minute button for later that day or the next day. By doing this, I can get a feel for how long a map takes to complete, how long it takes to get things researched or setup.

Also of note, all balancing of the research and buildings in the game IGNORES any boosts that they player might have and any Realm Upgrades that might be leveled that provides other bonuses to costs or production. I wanted the game to be balanced as if no bonuses were in play. I know that there are players who will never use the boosts in the game and I didn't want to penalize them for that decision. The game will get harder, naturally, as the player progresses between maps. When the player gets stuck, it's because the map is too difficult for their current Realm bonuses, so they then level up their Realm much like grinding in an RPG, so they can overcome the hurdle and keep going.

After the initial tests are done with the new data, I'll be spinning up a bunch of new maps and working through the flow of the campaign to make sure the map objectives can be completed in the early game. Then I begin balancing the Realm upgrades and the map flow a little more. All other features are pretty much complete, except for the last pieces of server infrastructure that needs to happen. More in a few days!

 

Not much to share, image wise, but balancing the game is going well. The difficulty is ramping up how I want it and the realm upgrade prices seem good.

The one thing that I have noticed is that the first island you play, no matter what, will always take the longest. Island #1 took me about 6 hours to complete (actively playing for about an hour, with the other 5 hours being time skips, such as closing the game and waiting for a little bit for resources to generate or research to complete).

This falls within my goals for the first island's completion time. Also, when I complete the first island, I have completely roughly 40% of the tech tree. Island 2, 3, and 4 took about an hour each once I started them.

I always wait for all of my resources to be full and for the ship to be 100% full before I start the new island, that way I have tons of resources to start working with on the next island and I ramp up quickly.I tried starting the next island without a full ship and it took me about 100 minutes to get where I needed to be, so either you wait 100 minutes for the ship to fill up, or you do the work yourself it seems. If you gotta sleep, might as well let the ship fill

There will be a little more testing of the balance tonight, but I think all the new features are wrapped up and balanced as well as they can be for right now. Time to wrap stuff up with the server and next week, if all goes well, a new build will be submitted to Apple!

 

So, it's an interesting thing that happens. Starting a new campaign, you will always be able to idle and take your time. Once you beat a few islands and get to an island number that is a multiple of 5, you get the timed hazards. You can only start on an island that ends with 1 or 6, with the Island Cartography upgrade (lets you start your campaign further along in the island number, as long as you reached that island before). Most islands still feel like you can handle it in 4-6 hours of "idle" time, as long as you log in and play 4-8 times in that time frame.

Now, when you hit an island with a hazard, you have already beat 4 islands before it, so your research is carried over and if you waited for your ship to fill up and had max resources, you could start off on the hazard island with a lot of resources. I did cap the hazards to only hit a max of 20 times if you are gone for a while, or 200 minutes worth of hazard, even if you were gone for 3 days. I don't want to penalize players who are away for long periods of time.

So, in your case, logging in once or twice a day should still be fine. In theory, your first log-in should last 5-10 minutes and you should hopefully have your infrastructure set up. When you return later, you'll be maxed out with resources and you just build what you need. Depending on the map objective, you will need to plan what buildings you need to build in order to achieve the goal. I think you could probably survive almost a week with the hazards in play, by logging in 1-2 times a day. If not, I'll try to make it so 5 days would be the max.

I had two things I was going to do with hazards to help the player stay alive. One was the 200 minute limit if you have been gone from the game, so that the hazards don't just destroy everything. The other was to get rid of the limit and introduce a timer that told you how long until the game would end, with your current state. For example, if a hazard would destroy parts of the world, the timer would show how long it would take for all of your domain buildings to be wrecked. If it said "4 days", you might not feel as anxious. But if you logged in an it said 7 hours, you might worry and try to build a new town hall to push the timer back or simply try to complete the map.

I like the timer idea, but I also know that people take breaks for a couple days sometimes and I really don't want someone to start the map, then come back next week and it just ends. Granted, by that time, they should have more Victory Points earned from the previous maps, so they could restart and maybe tackle the map quicker. Still, the hazard limit feels better to ease some of the hazard pain

I'm hoping to have 1.3 out in November! I missed my original goal of October, which also missed out out my Halloween event I wanted to do. But this update is so massive, I'm okay with the delay.

 

Today I was thinking of a way to make the loot boxes better. One of the issues with the Epic and Legendary boxes is that, although they give you more of the high-end resources, the amount earned is still set to your max resources cap. If you are already at max resources, then you receive gold instead, which would be used at the Docks. If you open it at the start of the map, you get so little resources that its completely useless.

Also, with 1.3, the Docks are removed and the gold resource has no use.

To remedy this, I will be using one of the internal features that I added for traveling between islands: the ship cache. Basically, when you travel to the next island and take resources with you, the first issue is that you might be bringing 80k of each resource, but when you start the new island, you only have a town hall, so your max resources is 1000 again. I allow for resources to go over the max, if they came from the ship. I will also allow the same to happen with the loot boxes. This will allow me to award resources, not based upon your max resource cap, but as actual values that work for the boxes.

For example, a common box might only give you 400-500 of a resource, limited to natural resources, whereas the Epic might award 30k of a resource, picking from all resources. I will also increase the Moon Coin drops from the boxes and throw more of the 8-hour boosts into the boxes as well.

My original goal for the boxes was to allow the player to collect them during their game and use them at the start of the next game to give a quick boost and speed up the creation of their base, but they haven't really succeeded in that area. Hopefully, these new boxes will work better for that purpose, especially since you'll be "starting over" more frequently on the various islands you visit instead of the giant ones that were in 1.2.2.

 

The problem that currently exists is that opening them at the start, especially the more rare boxes, is really painful. Sure, you get Moon Coins and boosts from them, but the resources that you get are handicapped by how much resource storage you actually have. So, my original purpose for the boxes failed prior to 1.3.

With 1.3, it won't matter when the player opens the boxes and they will get plenty of rewards. I still think its best to use them as starting boosters, but that's my strategy. Others might use them to harvest boosts, or Moon Coins, and could care less about the resources they give. Some players might open them in hopes of getting some of the resources they need in order to build or upgrade a building instead of waiting. I want the player to decide on their own the best use of them. Version 1.2.2, restricts the player too much with the boxes. 1.3 will open more gameplay opportunities for the player, and that's what I want.

Thanks! I really like the idle genre and, honestly, I feel like I'm creeping away from it by adding all the stuff that I'm adding. There are tried and true ideas and mechanics that games have and I could replicate everything and call it a day ... but I really want to add new stuff and try new mechanics and push the boundaries. Some of this stuff could be a horrible idea, but the few hazards I added really changed how I approached finishing a map, which is what I want.

That's an interesting idea and the rewards for such an option could be bonus victory points or even loot boxes at the end of the map. I would imagine that, at the start of the map, I could provide the player with a difficulty option (easy, medium, hard) with a breakdown of rewards attached to the difficulties.

I actually like this idea and might add it in the future. Can't do it for 1.3, the features are done and locked down, with testing and server work happening right now. With 1.4, I will be adding more realm upgrades to pursue and could probably add this option as well.

 

Yesterday and today was full of server testing, making sure that all of the new features hits the server correctly and returns the correct information. All the testing worked great, so 1.3's features, data, and server infrastructure is now finished!

I also added a small tutorial in the starting section to have you research and use Scouting once, as there were players who didn't know how to do it until they found out by accident. Existing players won't see the tutorial if they finished the entire thing already, as this is really aimed at new players.

In regards to player data on the server, the process I was using to generate a player id would fail if the player uninstalled the game and reinstalled. I have opted to use iCloud's Keychain to save off the data I need, which should solve some issues with players losing their server progress. Sadly, I still don't have the server set up to transfer your game from one device to another. But if you're using the Keychain, in theory, you will be able to transfer your Moon Coins, items, upgrades, current island number you're on and more to the new device. You will need to start the current island over, but you can at least continue in the middle of your campaign, instead of with nothing at all. I'll be looking into making it so the current island and all of its data can be backed up to the server in a future version update.

For the balance phase, I only made one island per "island type", so I could balance how many resources should exist and how much land. Now that all the balancing is finished with the new maps, I have the hard numbers to stick to for all the natural resources and amount of land to use, so I need to generate another 9-12 maps so that there is variety when players replay an island. Each island is hand-crafted this time around, so each map takes about 5 times longer to create than pre 1.3. Basically, for 1.2.2, I would procedurally generate biomes and land for the island, then go in and tweak it with interesting locations and enemy locations.

So, island maps is all that is left! Those are fun, so I imagine it going quick and easy tomorrow Looks like I might be able to submit the build to Apple this weekend!

... oh, and I need to add a new FAQ and Contact tool in-game, as the one I currently use no longer provides a price tier that I'm happy with. I found and settled on new help desk software and will be testing it out tonight.



Oh, and there are some enemies in the game with a special property ... hopefully more to come in future versions

As for more random deep-dives into my game creation process ... here we go!

While working on 1.3, I changed the way I wrote the game code so that I could quickly iterate on ideas without needing to constantly be recompiling and launching my test server for the game. In the past, I would write the client code all the way up to where it would communicate with the server, then write the server code to save and retrieve the data I need and bounce it back to the client, build the server, upload it, then continue on with my code. I didn't want to use that process while working on the 1.3 update, so I created a system to save and retrieve 1.3 data to my device, and continue using the server communication for pre 1.3 data. The benefit of this was huge and when it came time to write the server code, I only had to cut the code from the client and dump it on the server code, changing the code hooks to read from the disk, to read from a database. I'll probably be creating a system to do this automagically for future games I work on and updates to Idle Realm. Should also be able to cut down on some of my database reading and writing with the new system.

 

That's very odd. I grabbed a phone and downloaded a fresh copy from the app store and it appears to be running fine. If you see a freeze, there is a bug that I cannot reproduce where you sit at the loading screen for about 5 minutes. Then the game lets you in. This is a timeout issue when communicating with the server (I think?), as normal timeouts for web communication is 300 seconds, or 5 minutes. I think you can even hear nature sounds playing while you're waiting. Typical logins shouldn't take more than 3-4 seconds, longer if it needs to download anything (but it will show a download bar if that's the case)

I am investigating the server connect code on the client and the server to see if I missed a timeout somewhere. All of them should be set to about 10 seconds before it retries. So, best I can offer is to try again and let it sit on the screen for 5-6 minutes and see if it logs in. Most times I have heard about this happening, it resolves itself after the initial login. This has been on my list of bugs to tackle, but it's been incredibly hard to repro

In regards to your question, it should not be affecting things. All 1.2.2 games are currently connecting to 1.2.2 servers (I have 2 up right now). The only time the game tries to connect to the test/review server is if its version is greater than the server it connects to, in which case it falls back on the review server. This is how I can go through Apple review without affecting anyone, as well as work on 1.3.

The same goes for all the new art and data file updates. Version 1.2.2 uses a manifest that pulls files that the 1.2.2 manifest knows about. The 1.3 manifest is different, so my files shouldn't be downloaded by any 1.2.2 clients.

 

Glad to hear that it started working and thanks for the device info as well!

 

To aid with trying to troubleshoot where in the loading process the game stalls for some new users, I added some loading text to the bottom of the screen to let players know what the game is doing (loading files, getting player info, etc). The hope is that if the stall happens in 1.3, the text will let me know where it happened and I can dive into that spot. I'm still convinced that it is upon initial connection with the server, but I just can't reproduce it on my devices.

The new support tools that I added to the game work for showing the new FAQ section as well as chatting with support (me). However, there is a bug where when the player starts a new chat conversation, the game crashes. The chat persists and the player can return to the screen and see their message, get responses from support, and reply with no more issues. It's just the initial creation of the chat that has the error. Sadly, since I didn't create the support tool and don't have access to the code, I can't fix the issue on my end. I know what the issue is and sent the support tool team a message with the error and instructions how to fix it, but there is no timeframe for when that will be addressed. I really like the in-game support chat feature, but I might need to deactivate it for 1.3 and use old school email until it is fixed.

Either way, I should be submitting version 1.3 to Apple on Friday, hopefully releasing during the weekend or on Monday/Tuesday!