you have to realize tricket, this is expected backlash from player A who invested dollars in your app only to find a short time later you gave it to player B for free. it doesn't take Nostradamus to predict that will piss off a good number of players including those who'll now think twice (like diegohostettler) about paying for your next game. i'm a little miffed myself and giving it away could work as you hope and attract more players but it could also be that proverbial shot in the foot.
Absolutely. It's why I posted even before the free promotion went live that we were sorry we had to do it, and offering free in-app currency for anyone who felt annoyed. Apple doesn't actually even *let* developers give refunds, so there's literally nothing else we can offer.
Tricket dont worry about the free promotion thing. Geez some people get all crazy, I mean at least you all didnt turn the game freemium.
Thanks, Amenbrother (and also those of you who have messaged me privately). I do just get discouraged sometimes, because all we're trying to do is make a good game for people, without resorting to Zynga-style practices. Things like the FAAD campaign actually cost us money (this cost us $1,000, for example) ... so knowing that if we do nothing, we'll have to quit, and if we actually *pay* money to make it free for people, people will get mad at us ... just discouraging. Not trying to have a sob story here -- if we fail, we fail, and so it goes. But sad when we keep trying to do our best for everyone, and still end up making folks upset.
Sharing Levels Hi, all, I realized that I haven't mentioned one of the new features we're getting in (first for iPad v1.4) -- direct sharing of levels in-game. Basically, while we liked the idea of e-mailing levels, it turned out to be kinda clunky. So now, from Tom's Travel Agency, in addition to your own levels, you can tap to see "Best Shared Levels" and "Newest Shared Levels". As the "Best" implies, you can "Like" (or later "Unlike") any level you see. Then just tap to download it, obviously. To share your levels, there's a new "Share" button in the editor, which will upload the latest version to our servers. You can re-share the level any time you want as you update it, and it should show up as "Updated!" for people when they scan for levels. Only you can edit your level -- right now you can't edit anything you get from somebody else. We may make it so you can "copy" a level later, but it started getting too confusing for the first-pass behavior. Anyway, it should make trying out other levels a bunch easier, and we hope you guys like it! I'll attach a screenshot here if I can. I'll transfer over existing levels that people have sent us in the meantime, as well.
Awesome game, with a few minor niggles I really like this game. It is an excellent combo of Kingdom Rush style, with the card-building. Very unique and well done system. As for my comments, here are a few of my impressions: a) Combines can be overly punishing. Needs a warning that you will be deleting your only Level 2 barrack, or whatever. The combine also eats 4 cards and is very likely to give you a card that you won't use. It takes some discipline to resist using it, as you can easily hoze yourself. b) The enhanced level 1-3 buildings are disappointing. I can pay extra to get a L1 archer with a mage, but as soon as I upgrade to level 2, the mage disappears! So I either keep at level 1, or not use the card. It isn't a satisfying path. In some cases you get to keep your upgrade, such as the melee dude with the Mage Circle and Artillery that Ive found so far. Sure they become outclassed as the game progresses but at least they still remain functional. b2) Similarly, level 1-3 buildings with boosted stats seems like a waste. A 75% cost mage Circle L1 would be awesome! Instead I combine and get one that has 400% crit and some other stuff. It maybe costs 200 points to include it, and it costs 325 gold to drop it. Soon as I upgrade it to L2, I presume that I LOSE all the specials. The alternative is that you could 'stack' a building to be ridiculously powerful by keep L1,L2,L3 upgrades. Surely there is some middle ground here. c) No stats. This is by far the worst issue. Dragon Tower is overpowered? I guess, but until I extensively try it out, I have no idea. I have no clue how much harder the long range tower hits. Does it hit harder? The longer range is obvious, but other stats are not. ESPECIALLY when you may have boosts/modifiers on your other towers. Its hard to compare and get a feel for tower stats. Upgrades: What does going from a level 2 to level 3 archer tower actually DO? No idea. Should I upgrade my 400% crit level 2 tower to a level 3? Speaking of crit...what does 400% crit mean? 400% crit damage off of some base unknown crit chance? 400% of the normal unknown crit chance...so that its 4x some % instead of normal? Crit hits for 2x dmg? 3x? Who knows? Upgrades#2: What happens when I go from rank 1 Freezing Crystal on my Radiant Archer tower, to rank 2? How do I know its worth the gold? Is it +1%? +20%? Who knows? TLDR: It is very difficult to make deck building and ingame decisions when you just don't have much hard data to go off of. Question: Whats the difference between playing Master level on an earlier level, Normal midlevel, or Easy of a late level? As far as loot and gems? Is one superior, or different? i.e. Master early = more gems but crappier card drops? I do want to end on a positive note: This game absolute rocks!
Hi, Joe! Glad you like the game overall, and sorry for the various annoying bits. I think we agree that one of the biggest items to polish is getting the player more information, both in and out of the game. Some of that we plan to enhance once the builds with built-in video stuff are in: we can record various parts of the game (with voice overlay), and then link those videos to help buttons. That's good for things like explaining aspects of the level editor, combining cards, and things like that. That still leaves things like knowing exactly how much damage a L3 tower does versus L4. One thing we experimented with early on was a small stat display on the edge of the screen -- if you play Kingdom Rush at all, they have a system like that. At the time, our beta testers didn't find it to be useful, and preferred just having the extra bit of screen real estate always visible. And we've wanted to avoid having a thousand different settings toggles. But that's something that we may want to re-look at -- it may turn out that in wider testing, now that the game is live, more people would prefer to give up a bit more screen space, and get a bit more information about whatever tower is selected.
A thousand different settings = perfect settings for almost everyone. Only one setting = perfect settings for almost no-one. I think a thousand would be overdoing it a bit, though Also please add Game Center achievements.
I'll look at linking those in the next (probably v1.5) update -- doing the thing where achievements are considered distinct for our local game on your different accounts, but shared as far as your GameCenter ID is concerned.
Probably the easiest way to do this is to create a 'manual'. You just click on it from the main menu or somewhere and it opens a book that explains more detailed base stats for each card, broken down by towers and actions(summons,nukes). i.e. Damage, Rate of Fire, Area of Effect, Range, Gold Cost, etc. You might also explain the modifiers. Such as how +Crit works, and how a card with 90% Attack Speed is actually a good thing vs a penalty, etc. That would satisfy the theorycrafters like myself, while keeping the info out of the way for general use. It wouldn't help with the cards that have stat modifiers but they can figure it out.
Yes, I think that's an excellent idea -- I'll add it to our list for the v1.5 items. Meanwhile, it looks like the iPad version 1.4 has been approved, and should be percolating out to the store later today!
Mainly behind-the-scenes fixes for memory issues or various crashes, along with some slight card fixes and things (like "Mage Subcontractor" wasn't working, and things like that). However, even if you don't want to share levels yourself, it does mean we have some extra levels pre-seeded into the system -- if you go to Tom's Travel Agency and look at the newest or best levels, we've added "Stream of Gruffs," "City of Dusk," and "Town in the Center," "Squiggly," and "Devil's Crossing" as levels made by us, not counting the ones from other users, which previously lived on the levels-sharing web page.
By the way, I've really had fun playing some of the new levels that folks have created and shared -- I totally got taken by my own trick of, "Make another path that totally *could* be walkable, and then send down some nasties on it when the player isn't expecting it." I played ... I think it was "Light My Fire" by XenoCrusade, and just about cracked up laughing when that happened to me -- normally I know all the tricks any level will throw at me, since I'm the primary creator of them ... this time, I was blindsided, and it was great! So thanks to everyone who has dabbled in making levels, or just in playing the new levels other people are making ... very neat to see the player-made content appearing!
Additional Paid Content? Hey there, everyone! We had a question for you, since everyone here has been really helpful in helping us figure out how to advance the game. We've added in a few Prestige Levels, and some simpler levels in the Tom's Travel Agency, but we'd love to do a full set of new content, that could have: * A new map * At least one new background theme (like ice, or swamps, or something) * New monsters, with new powers * New cards that come into play for the new levels * Possibly new towers .. in other words, lots of new stuff. However, we can't afford to do that right now as a free update. If we were to look into doing that, and see if we could do it as a $1 or $2 in-app purchase (which would work for any accounts you make on the device), would that be a good thing? Or would you feel cheated that you had paid for the game, and now we're charging you more? (That's a totally reasonable response, by the way -- it just means that we'd have to hold off on new content for now, since we can't afford to do it without charging.) Anyway, let me know what you think!
Sorry for spamming you, everyone. Just wanted to share one more item that made me happy today. Player Abby was using the "defended bridge" cards, and noticed that when she had some extreme versions of these cards, she didn't get the full benefit, because one version ("first 3 will be defended by farmers") would not let the second card ("first 3 will be defended by archers") take effect. So she asked if we could make those overlap, if you had the cards. That sounded like a fun challenge, so today we made it so those cards can overlap -- here's a screenshot of a level with 3 bridges. One becomes defended by archers, one becomes defended by farmers, and one is defended by *both* farmers and archers. After that, I also wanted to play around more, so I made a "First X farmers turn into Brutes." ... so the screenshot actually shows two of the bridges defended by brutes. Anyway, I was having fun doing it, and wanted to share it with y'all.
hey tricket, i wouldn't feel cheated as you usually pay for additional content but i probably wouldn't invest as i've played this game lots, and like it allot, but i'm ready for something else, not more of the same if you get my meaning. simply put, how am i going to learn FTL or play the Hearthstone expansion if i play more of this? (this may be the same reason i can't keep a girlfriend very long )
