Well, early access launch week has been exciting for us here on the Rival Books team, and we are so glad that you could share it with us. First off, thank you all for participating both by downloading and playing the game, and also for posting your bug reports, questions, and suggestions in the community forums on Steam. We could hardly ask for a better launch week response. We have tried to answer as many of your posts as possible and will continue to answer them individually as best we can. We have been listening closely and we want to address a few specific points that seem to be a concern for most players.
CARD TEXT FONT SIZE AND ZOOMING
Many of you have reached out to us about the size of cards in hand and the font size on the card themselves. We have addressed both issues and will be pushing fixes for this to the main game as soon as they are fully tested.
REASONS FOR PLAYING
We recognize that motivation for players to keep playing and grinding out wins is important. We hear you loud and clear: achievements, milestones, and rewards that offer a feeling of progression are an absolute necessity. We are currently working on this:
Currency & Unlockables
In an upcoming update, we will be introducing an in-game currency to help reward you for playing. Every time you win a game, you will earn a little bit of this currency, and win streaks will award you bonus multipliers that earn you even more. At first, this currency will only be usable to unlock the bonus “flavour” text for cards in the Chronicles, but we have plans to quickly expand purchasable items to include player avatars and alternate game boards to start offering areas of customization within the game.
Beyond this first set of unlockables, the sky's the limit for this new currency. We have a few other things in the works that we want to offer you, but it’s too early to talk about what those are just yet. We will be ramping these additions up slowly as these are going to take quite a bit of work. We would love to hear from you on the message boards about other types of things you would like to see.
Leaderboard
We’re also actively working on new features to make the leaderboard more rewarding. We know that as the player base grows, it needs to evolve into something more than just a single ranked list. It was never our intent for it to be just that, but the more interesting features are not quite there yet. It’s too early to give more details, but rest assured, we will tell you more as soon as we can.
CHANGES MADE IN WEEK ONE
Below is a collected list of fixes that we have made in the past week. Our awesome devs have been hard at work and we will continue to tweak and fix as many things as we can, as fast as we can.
None of this would have been possible without YOU taking a chance by downloading and playing a completely unknown early access title and then taking the time to send us your feedback and thoughts. We hope that you stick with us for the rest of this journey and that we can deliver a product that lives up to your expectations.
Fixes
- Critical fixes for touchscreen devices
- Critical fix for users behind certain proxies
- Fixed portal animation
- Fixed issue where certain yellow simula were missing art in certain views
- Fix issue where players were shown to take damage at the start of tutorials
- Fixed house avatars not showing correct house
- Reduced likelihood of tutorial steps getting out of order
- Opponent hand count no longer goes negative
QoL
- DLC purchase callbacks
- Show timer for targeted EOT popup
- Compressed some textures and slightly reduced build size
- Speed up time between mulligans and turn start
- Shorten start / end turn animations
- Moved loading screen version info to bottom left so it’s not hidden by steam overlay popup
- Removed the word “drag” from targeted EOT popup
- Faster load time for deck builder
- For streamers: action feed outputs to text files, so it can be used as an overlay in stream
- For streamers: app title changes depending on which scene the game is in (Windows only)
- Added burnt edges to all cards
Currently in open-beta:
- Bigger tooltip in hand
- Sharper combo effect text at all sizes
- Don’t cover snare with spell tooltip
- Tooltip in deck builder (big view)
- Fixed issue where certain red simula were showing as black in the Chronicles
Coming Next:
- Currency for unlockables (story and cosmetic items)
- Game balance
- Larger text!
- Track recently played-against users so you can add them as friends or challenge them
Thanks for reading and we hope to see you on the plains of Aster!
