Just shipped an Android release with Achievements implemented. We'll test them a little bit on Android and will release on iOS next week if everything's alright. The thing with achievements I'm not sure about is what to do with existing users who already played the game (that's not too many people though). We have two options: 1) Just ignore previous results and start with 'blank' achievements. 2) During the first launch after the update scan saved photos and results and award achievements according to what's there. So, for example, if a player had collected Royal Flush before he will get the corresponding achievement right away. We've already implemented the 2nd way for high score achievements and I plan to stop there just to keep it simple. It kinda sucks not getting recognition for that ААА at the top which might never come again, but suddenly getting bombarded with dozen achievements at the beginning of the next game doesn't look like fun either.
An iOS update with 20 achievements is available now. There are also couple bugfixes in this release. Given that there are not that many people playing the game and since we now have Game Center integration I think it's safe to add a global leaderboard to the game. Although I personally hate global leaderboards (because they only tell me how much I suck). I would rather have monthly or weekly leaderboards, but not sure there is an easy way to implement those via Game Center.
Yes. Buying 'Premium' for 1.99$ will block all the ads. I can't agree on it having too many ads though. We tried to go for the easiest and the most standard thing here which is showing ads between games, but the thing is that you can easily have very very long games once you know what you are doing. And sometimes we skip on showing ads after shorter games. Thus if you were playing aggressively in earlier rounds and had lost a game before reaching certain round you should not see an ad after that game at all(you'll see an ad after consecutive short games though). At least it supposed to work that way and I hope it does . Thanks for your comment though. That made me think that we should've lowered an ad showing rate for the first 15-20 games so people would have less negative experience while figuring out the game.
Loving the game so far! I hit an annoying bug when I first unlocked the 1024 achievement. I saw the game center notification banner. The cards didnt deal and I was stuck. I could still click on the menu buttons but I couldnt progress. When I relaunched the game I was back to 800+ points.
It's now confirmed that we have introduced this bug with the last update. So far it seems like it's happening only in longer games. The fact that it happened on the same round where you've reached 1024 probably just a coincidence but we'll double check that. We'll try to figure it out as fast as we can. Unfortunately, it's a weekend and it may delay update with a bugfix (I'm not sure if App reviews or expedited reviews work on weekends). It's a shame that this happened. We should've tested it more. Thank you for letting us know. Were you able to continue the game after the relaunch?
Yep I was able to continue after relaunch from 800 points. I lost before I could reach my previous score. Just hit the same issue again at 506 points in a new game. This time when I relaunched the game I was still at 506 points phew. Good to know youve found the issue! Any way I can avoid triggering it in the meantime?
We managed to repeat the issue but yet to figure out why it happens. Thus we don't know if it's possible to avoid it.
All right, so we have figured it out and patched it. Too bad we can't deploy a patch to the app store right now and have to wait and go through a review and all that. Hope it will go live on Monday but can't be sure. On the bright side I had time to add couple lines of code and now we should have a global leaderboard for points. There is no way to avoid it in a way that makes sense. I can explain exactly what triggers it but avoiding the bug will just go directly against the nature of the game. In short, to trigger it you need to get some good hands and then get a good hand but not as good as those before. Thus you can avoid this bug by avoiding good hands, which doesn't sound like fun.
Fast work! Fingers crossed it gets approved quickly. Leaderboard sounds good too - will be interesting see what sort of scores other people are posting.
From what I've seen from the bug screenshot you sent me yesterday you won't be disappointed. That's not based on data though. I haven't looked at the analytics for results for a while so no spoilers here. We'll see.
Update with a fix for 'freeze'-bug and points leaderboards is up on the app store thanks to expedited review feature.
I don't know about a better place to ask about this so I start by asking here. How adequate is our standard card pack as far as color blind people are concerned? I suspect that suit symbols are not contrasting enough but not sure if this is really a problem. When I showed the game to a color-blind friend he hadn't complained about it but want to gather more data on this issue. This is how standard card pack looks like:
In response to the above, I’m not colour-blind but it would be nice to see an alternate pack or two. Simpler symbols, maybe some alternate colours and/or a dark background? I really like the current premium cards though, so not too worried. I’m keen to know what the 100pt secret achievement is. Is it just a high score, or something else?
I agree. I would love to have them too. It's rather silly that we have this changing packs functionality and only one additional pack available. Unfortunately, that's not something I can do by myself and at this point, I don't have very strong arguments for the guy who did a graphics design to convince him to do it. This colour-blind research is actually an attempt to find that reason. About the darker background, that's a good idea and many apps actually include some kind of a night-mode. I don't think it's doable in our case due to all those shadows we have for the current level, selected card etc. Yes, it's a next high score achievement. I didn't want to show it because felt it would set the wrong benchmark for the most people. Btw, I'm actually curious, what's your best hand in the game so far (highest score in one round or the one you personally think is your best regardless of the score).
Fair enough on the new backs/dark background. My best hand so far was a straight flush on the bottom and a regular flush in the middle for 210 points. Edit: I just got my most satisfying hand - my first full clearance. Flush on the bottom, straight on the middle, triple fours on top. Lower score, but a better feeling!
Didn't see your edit. Clearance feels very good regardless of the points. The whole idea of saving hands as photos came from this fact. I was so proud of my first clearance so I wanted to show it to everyone and at that time there was no such feature. I even thought about making achieving clearance the ultimate goal of the game until one day I reached it in a very first round .
We shipped a small update yesterday. It removes ad mediation platform so we left with Unity ads only now, which should improve stability on video ads front. Other than that there is not much happening with the game. Visibility is very low and two months after release there are less than 500 people have played it on iOS (much less on Android). I have failed in more or less all my marketing attempts and not sure I know how to approach this situation further. Just wanted to say that there are not likely to be any updates with additional features since there aren't enough people to make them for. That being said I think the game is fine as it is, otherwise, we wouldn't release it in the current form but it's a shame we can't add some form of competitive mode and tweak the gameplay to allow more room for risky moves.
The game is completely free now on iOS. No more video ads and we've removed in-app purchase option. Enjoy playing!
