Welcome to another Early access update!
Another week has flown by, but we haven't exactly been slacking! This previous week saw 3 updates, and a lot of tweaking of the various in-game systems based on the feedback we get on Discord and what we see from players streaming and playing the game.
Equipment card levels
One missing piece of functionality from the equipment card introduced in last weeks early access update, was the level requirement on equipment cards. Just as loot you'd pick up in RPG would sometimes have a level requirement, so do equipment cards. This level requirement means you need to level up your deck cards to be able to use certain powerful equipment.
Upgrade improvements
We've listened to feedback about the way cards level up. This was seen as too unpredictable and random and we didn't do a good job of presenting how cards upgrade. So we reworked the numbers a bit so the upgrading appeared less random, as well as introducing an upgrade preview when upgrading cards.
This way, you can more easily choose which card to upgrade based on how the stats improve. Big win!
More gold
Another thing that made the game progression slower - and the entire game less enjoyable for it - was the gold payout from missions, individual games and selling cards. We always wanted the progression to come naturally as you played, but because the rewards were so small and far between, it felt more like a grind than a progression.
Since the game doesn't have any microtransactions of any kind, there's no reason for the grind to feel - or be - artificially slow. As a result, we significantly increased the gold payout from individual games and selling cards, so it now takes fewer games to get more cards than before! In addition, the increased payout from selling cards makes selling the cards you don't need or want a viable way to to get more gold, instead of it hardly being worth anything.
Board improvements
The stun counter was sometimes a bit hard to understand, because it seemed like it would only randomly start to count down on your own turn. This was only related to when the stun was applied, but when 4 cards are stunned on the board - who's keeping track?! So we introduced a small notification on the stun counter to indicate that this counter will only start counting down on the next turn. This completely eliminated the confusion around stun counters.
Balancing changes and bugfixes
In addition to all the bigger changes listed above, we're constantly fixing bugs and annoyances as well as balancing cards. We also introduced a more friendly way of notifying you when there is a new version available, so you won't be surprised when the game server restarts for an upgrade, or miss out on new functionality.
Demo!
Another thing we've understood is that a lot of you want to try out the game before you buy. Even though we're still in early access the game is very playable, so we really want as many of you as possible to get to try it!
We've prepared a demo version that will allow you to play through the tutorial games, as well as play ranked and unranked matches against the AI and human opponents. We're reserving the single player story mode for when you buy the game, as well as the ability to upgrade cards and collect new cards - but this will give you a good taste of what the game is like!
Expect the demo to be out "soon"!
All in all another amazing week for the 3(?) brothers, so stay tuned!