I’m pretty sure we failed the update, fam. Time to pack it up. Nothing to see here.
So what happened
Ok, well maybe not failed failed, but kinda failed. Does that make sense?
Let’s start from the top. As you already know, we’re building Treasure Tile in small chunks and make these updates freely available. This is actually a really great way of doing things. In a way it gives us a small deadline to work with. It allows us to focus on one specific aspect of the game. And it also makes it easier to follow these updates for anyone interested in our dev journey. Usually they’re concerning a specific feature in the game that we deem important. We had a quest update, a world map update, THE RANGER UDPATE. You get it. The main feature we were focusing on the last update was randomized events.
Randomized events?
Yes, randomized events. You see, the game features procedurally generated maps. There are numerous reasons why we did this, but let’s not dwell on those for now. Point is, the maps are super random. But they used to feel boring. We never really did anything cool with them. They were random but they didn’t feel random, you know? Enter randomized events. These would be certain… events, that would appear on the map as you’re exploring it. The goal here was to create a bunch of these for all of the maps in the current version of Treasure Tile. Something that would break up the grind and give you some extra challenges as you’re questing along. And we thought that would definitely make the game way more fun to explore. Well, it didn’t but more on that later.
So what kinds of events did we add for this update? There were several. The first one was chests, but that was kinda already there. We just updated them so that they would work with the new system. As the name implies, it’s just a chest. That’s it. I mean it has items, what more did you expect? The second one was Empowered Elites. These were special enemy tiles that would be so so so much stronger than the regular ones that encountering them should seem like a challenge onto itself. We also added a few unfriendly shrines that would spawn enemies, trap you into an arena etc. Lastly, we had caves. They we’re special underground zones you could explore and grind away. Nothing super groundbreaking, but they did feel fresh for a while.
Tunnel vision
So where did we fail you may ask. The version came out on time and all of the events were fully functioning. There weren’t any major bugs. Seemed great at first. And just as other people were starting to play the game, we realized the main problem. The events were kinda boring. They seemed cool the first, maybe the second time. But after a while they’d seem pointless. All of these shrines and chests would start to feel like noise. And the main reason for that is that they didn’t have any meaningful rewards. You’d kinda kill all of these dudes protecting a shrine and then… nothing. You’d just go about your day. We were so focused on making the events themselves work that we missed the big picture and didn’t fully incorporate them into the world of Treasure Tile. Essentially we went from a map system that felt boring to a map system that still felt boring, but now there were caves.
Needless to say a fix for just this problem is on the way and the rewards are a-coming. In the next version at least. Feels like there was a lesson to be learned here somewhere. I just can’t put my finger on it.
Thanks for sticking with us so far.