Hello everyone,
With the full release coming closer, I felt that the current demo needed a bit of a touch.
After 0.3 update shook up the gameplay, there has been a number of valuable feedback from both the Discord community members and my beloved playtesters. There were complements, as well as some criticisms.
Based on these feedback, a lot of the content received minor balance changes, along side a few major ones that changed the gameplay mechanic. There were a few rollbacks as well.
There has also been alterations in the amount of game's content.
Some new gameplay elements got added, and some elements got taken away.
I know it sucks to see content get reduced, but please think of this as a curation to better reflect the state of the game to the newer players.
For those of you who are hungry for new content, or extended gameplay, the full game is actually going to come out quite soon, so please stay tune for it.
The changes on 0.4 are as follows:
Rollbacks:
There were few gameplay mechanics that got rolled back, as I've noticed one problem in 0.3;
Cards lost their importance, and the game became trivial.
In 0.3, the game became very much about queueing the same colors together and stacking bunch of perks. This made the game feel less strategic, and repetitive.
Rollbacks were made to mitigate this issue.
Combos: Combos now once again, trigger based on types instead of colors. Turns out that color based combos make the game quite bland, defocus the importance of cards and their synergies.
Perk Shop: Perks are now once again offered randomly. You need to first pay to see the options. In 0.3, perks were sold directly from the shop. Players could look at the perks that were offered, and cherry-pick the perks that were in their comfort zone. This stopped players from taking risks, experimenting with different synergies, as well as increase the significance of perks too much to a point they overshadowed the importance of cards.
Character Changes:
Both The Hand and The Ape, introduced last patch, didn't deliver something as exciting and diverse as I wished for them to. For this, they have been adjusted.
The Hand: The Hand now starts with a 'LIMIT ORDER' card, which exits the trade as soon as it triggers. Shorting now no longer costs tokens. Trading normally rewards the player with +5 tokens. This will balance out The Hand's previously luck driven early game, and make the gameplay feel less punishing. The new 'LIMIT ORDER' card will also make interesting synergies with other System type cards like 'FLATTENING', that previously was very difficult to properly use.
The Ape: The Ape got disabled in the demo. It will come back in the full launch, with quite a few changes.
Balance Changes:
The previous demo was hard.
Not only was it just hard, it's hardness was only avoidable through stacking strong perks and playing around combos.
Now that I want to bring back power to the cards, a lot of balancing has changed.
Core Cards: Bunch of scaling cards and other 'deck defining' cards such as 'Bottom Fisher', 'Dinosaur', and 'Tribe' has been buffed. Playing around them will be a quite a bit more rewarding.
Obscure Cards Replaced or Reworked: Cards like opportunist that sometimes drop the price, and sometimes lift the price was strong but obscure. Opportunist now simply gives +10% when the price is under $100. Similarly, cards like 'oracle', or 'flock' got reworked into something more straightforward.
Cost to modify queue decreased: Previously, the cost for discarding or moving cards scaled by +2 tokens per move. Scale rate has been reduced to +1 per move this patch, to both lower the difficulty, and encourage strategic queue setups.
Few perks have been nerfed: This was to bring back focus on picking the right cards and do the 'deckbuilding' correctly.
Few events got nerfed or removed: Events that were overly punishing, or difficult to keep track of got a few changes. For example, UNCERTAINTY now only adds two null cards, instead of 3.
Game length decreased to 3 weeks: As the game got harder and the playtime per run got longer in the previous patch, I found that 3 weeks were enough to represent the game in the demo state.
Hard mode removed: Difficulty modes will be introduced in the full launch, but they require the full version of the game to properly present itself. I found it to be unnecessary in the demo build.
Pills changed: A few pills got reworked and altered. The vitamin for example gives +0.01 buff to all cards instead of 80 dollars.
Type selection changed: You'll get to remove a type from your card pool at the end of the first week, instead of adding a new pool. As the combo system got rolled back, managing 5 types at once became pointlessly hectic. Now, you'll only need to go through 3~4 types in the pool at once.
Additions:
There has been a slight addition of content to better represent the full version, while not spoiling too much.
Cursed Perks Added: Cursed perks, which give strong abilities in the cost of certain drawbacks, got added to the game.
Few new events added.
Few new cards added, to replace the cards that got removed.
Few new perks added.
That's it for this patch.
Thanks to all of you who are keeping track of how Insider Trading is developing, and a special thanks to the playtesters especially, who were eager to test out various changes, find broken synergies that required my attention, and comment on the game's direction.
Full release is coming close, and I hope I could deliver you all with something quite interesting.
As always, thank you all for playing Insider Trading and staying in the loop.
Discord: