Game Refactoring and Major Development Changes Announcement
Introduction
Dear players, we are very grateful for your contribution to the development of the game and your active support of our ideas. When we launched Egg Surprise, to be honest, we did not anticipate such a result and, sadly, were not prepared for such active growth. We had to adapt to the situation, increase protection, engage in very active content expansion, and generally provide service and support for the project’s servers. All of this led to us lacking the focus needed to promote the game.
We made many mistakes in our actions and want to express our immense gratitude for your patience and faith in our development. Finally, we are ready to openly share our plans for the game’s future.
I will now detail what will be reworked and what to expect in the future, and I ask you to be patient and read this post to the end.
Market Economy
Our market economy concept was to create real item scarcity through gameplay. We did not want to fall into the trap of other clickers, where scarcity is created solely by changing drop rates and creating fake items for purchase with developer funds to convince the community of a living economy. We chose to develop gameplay cycles and will continue to develop the project in this way, but we have addressed all the shortcomings associated with our model and are ready to offer you an improved version of this model.
- From now on, there will be no large stockpiles of "cheap" items on the Steam marketplace and in your inventories. They will all become part of the inventory logic and internal trading system. On the Steam marketplace, you will only trade three types of items for real money: different denominations of in-game currency, Pencoin.
- The internal store will represent a market between players with a model similar to Steam’s, but the fee for trading will be Pencoin. This will be a single currency whose value is directly determined by the market, with no possibility of aggressive manipulation.
What problems does this solve?
- Trading will no longer depend on your country’s currency, which caused inconvenience for some regions. Since all item prices will be determined by in-game currency, they will not depend on your country’s exchange rates.
- The game will offer tools for converting Pencoin of different denominations so that players from regions with expensive currencies can buy high-denomination coins in bulk and then convert them in-game into lower-denomination coins.
What else will change in the market model?
- Now, some crafting and activity results will be income in the form of Pencoin, which will reduce the amount of content we need to produce for updates.
- This will also allow for more flexible item balance management and prevent players from losing focus among hundreds of items.
- We will offer a modified item acquisition format, where players will earn in-game currency with some variability depending on luck for active gameplay (such as clicking), rather than final items. All items will now be obtained through crafting and upgrades.
These are not all the changes, but they reflect our readiness to address current issues.
Gameplay
We have taken into account players' comments that the game is too focused on the market model and does not provide gameplay activities for those who did not come to earn money.
I want to assure you that in the revamped version of the game, we have given immense attention to gameplay and focused on making the process as independent as possible from financial relationships. That is, the game will provide all the necessary tools for achieving any values in the game, but of course, it will require a lot of effort and time.
- The game will be completely autonomous from the need to follow news in our communities, chats, and various documents. All necessary instructions and rules for the game will be placed directly in the gameplay.
- You will see most game activities, such as expeditions, crafting, and various activities, displayed on your screen as 2D visuals.
- You will not need to constantly monitor your inventory for the needed resources and will not have to leave the game window to play.
- We will significantly rebalance the game in favor of previously mentioned development branches: farming, military craft, adventuring, and so on. This will be a full-fledged economic strategy with gameplay features, and trading with players will become an option for those who wish to participate.
In other words, our priority is to further develop Egg Surprise into a complete game, not just a simple player-to-player trading simulator. Therefore, we commit to meeting the definition of a game.
Development Discipline
You have repeatedly encountered issues due to developer mistakes or lack of awareness in the project, and we understand that we were wrong. Our idea is to increase the intervals between updates and ensure a proper approach to testing the product before release.
- Before transitioning to the updated model, there will be several rounds of testing before providing you with the final product. We plan to test the project with the first 10 selected people, then 100 people will get access, and only after debugging all errors will we provide access to all players.
- Future updates and project changes will go through testing stages, and if the product is found to be insufficiently ready, we will not publish an "unfinished version" but will take additional time for development.
- Additionally, our approach to development will change in terms of time planning, with announcements of updates or changes occurring only when the planned change is ready.
We greatly appreciate your trust and hope that in the future, we will make far fewer mistakes.
What Will Happen with Old Items and the Current State of the Game?
Considering your investments, we will offer a fair transition to the new model for all current players, allowing you not only to transfer your current progress but also to receive a proportional amount of resources and a new opportunity to reconsider your development strategy in the project. We still do not have a final solution on how exactly this will be implemented, but we are confident that you will like this format.
What decisions can be made now?
- Conversion of all items to in-game currency at the ratio of the current market value of the item.
- Transfer of all items to the format of game items with replacement of some (non-transferable) items at a ratio to the value in the new currency.
The exact solution will be announced later.
Project Promotion and Advertising
The current situation, due to the game looking and playing like a simple clicker, imposes serious limitations on promotion. People are quite skeptical about clickers given the failures and negative advertising associated with them. If the transition to a full-fledged game format happens, we will be able to more actively engage various advertising channels and effectively attract a new audience.
- Additional traffic will be received from players who have never participated in Steam market trading before; they will come to play the game.
- More advertising channels that previously refused us due to the game’s format will be connected.
- Serious preparatory work will be done before attracting players to avoid losing new traffic as we did before.
Conclusion and Announcement
Ladies and gentlemen, we have long been working towards this decision and considered various scenarios for project development, including artificially increasing the online to be noticed by Steam’s algorithms. But after studying the market and seeing unsuccessful cases of such approaches, we made the only viable decision for project development - to become a full-fledged game and stop exploiting the trading platform as the core of the game model.
We aim to create an economic strategy with a focus on created lore and gameplay mechanics, as well as social activities such as raids, clans, PvP, and more.
The game plans to continue its development in this direction, and there will be a very smooth transition from the current game to the new one. This does not mean that there is no reason to continue playing now; all the values earned will become a good start in the new game and allow you to get ahead of other players in development. But we also recognize the importance of maintaining a balance for newcomers and will offer mechanisms for fair competition and development.
Once again, we express our immense gratitude for your help and trust, and we will do everything in our power!