Hey there! Sven (greenpixels) here.
I'm the programmer for Gamblers Table and one of the two people that work on Gamblers Table.
First of all, thank you so much for using the feedback form to such an extend. We're blown away. Almost 700 of you shared their opinions, suggestions and ideas. And its super interesting to read them all.
I'd love to go over some of the data and talk about it with you. If this doesn't interest you, totally fair! You can skip ahead to "Changelog".
Your Feedback
"Have you played the demo?"
"Woah, a ton of you have played the demo! And even 25% percent say they completed it, which is bonkers! The reason we included the question about the demo is because we wanted to know whether the people that played the demo are more negatively positioned towards the release than the ones that haven't played it - and that does seem to be the case.
We have understood that especially for these of you, the release of Gamblers Table felt underwhelming. When we developed the game and had people play test it, we genuinely thought the additions we made were fun and plenty for a release.
We spent a lot of time thinking about synergies between skills and created polished assets in order to have a visual and meaningful change to game play rather than just a flat number increases. We wanted Gamblers Table to have builds and strategy, but also present the skills in a visually appealing way.
Oxidized coins, visitors, rockets, muscle helpers, burning cursors, intense auras, the thief and more - all of which have distinct visuals. But in retro perspective, we of course understand that by having fewer skills, even when they are more visually polished, the interval between skill points ended up much too long, which does not very much align with the spirit of typical incremental games and makes it feel too long and grindy. (Except when you played oxidized copper coins when it was still 10.000x, but we don't talk about that here - whoops)"
"How did you like the length of the full game?"
"This graph (and most of the feedback) indicates that the game was too short - but ... also too long for a lot. And I think the graph being so split is displaying one of the biggest issues of Gamblers Table as most of you have correctly pointed out.
Gamblers Table is trying to be both an incremental game, but also an idle game - which is super challenging in terms of balancing. The people that are used to idle games expected way, waaaay, waaaaaaaaay more play time - we had several answers where people had the game running for 60 hours and then told us the game was too short. But we also had a lot of people play for 4 hours, saying that the skills are way too far apart and the game ends up too long.
We're still actively talking about how to best remedy this, but we do have some ideas - and you added tons of great ideas aswell. Thanks!"
"Did you leave a review?"
"Initially when I saw this, I was super shocked. Not about the little amount of negative reviews in the form - that was expected due to survivor bias - but rather about the amount of people that haven't left a review at all. I was super pouty at first, but then my wife looked me straight in the face and said "When was the last time YOU left a review on Amazon or anything like that?" ... And yeah ... She is right.
Wanting to have your game reviewed is just a natural thing as a game developer on Steam I suppose. But this feedback form was a reality check and made perfectly clear that most people likely won't - and that it's totally normal and fine!"
"What are your suggestions for changes and updates?"
"This is the section most dearest to me. So many thoughtful, constructive and great answers that genuinely communicated their interest in the game, that they feel very strongly about Gamblers Table and want what is best for the project. As to not leak any personal information I will not share them directly, but this is just a wonderful source for ideas that you will see reflected in todays and upcoming patch notes.
Thank you everyone for letting us know - and we heard you! Below are the change logs from the most recent patch."
Patch Notes
Changes:
"Guided Launch" can now trigger Thief and Visitors, which should improve the idle experience and balance out the discrepancy between active gameplay and idle gameplay just a little. Whether thief is triggered by rocket can be configured in your Tactics tab.
Your tactic configurations in the Tactics tabs will now be persisted and remain across restarts and sacrifices. You no longer have to readjust everything on startup. This one seems so obvious it almost hurts, sorry about that.
The buff window starts much, much smaller now, giving more room for shop items. The dragger between the shop and the buff window is also much more apparent now and better indicates that you can resize the two, since most of you didn't notice it existed. (Did you?)
Hats can now be sorted alphabetically and by rarity
Hats now indicate their rarity by having their names colour coded
Hats added through the steam workshop have the steam logo in the background to better separate them from common hats
The search input and other controls in the hat configuration are now fixed at the top, no matter how far you scroll down
There are now additional sound settings to specifically highlight hint sounds (Visitor, gaining a skill point or the thief spawning)
Removed the "hide cursor" option so lost souls may hopefully return again.
Changed the look of check boxes so they are more apparent.
Helper Focus now correctly displays that it adds "+5" to ALL coins instead of just copper coins.
Reduced Oxidation to 1000x. Yes we know, it has almost gotten to the point of an inside joke that we keep reducing it ... ːcandywhatː And we know that just reducing it is not the perfect solution. Its just the quickest solution for now while we are back at the drawing board.
Changed the description of "Missile" so it no longer mentions "Helper", as Missiles are not affected by Community or other buffs related to Helper. After all, does it really look like the helper on top of it is in control of that situation?
Fixes
The game cursor no longer moves while the game window is not focused.
Connected game pad controllers no longer move your actual computer mouse cursor while the game is not focused.
The capsule machine now correctly scales its volume to the "Soundeffect" slider
Fixed some potential causes for crashes, including not using exclusive fullscreen.
Fixed an issue in which the tooltips of skills that unlock an item in the shop would not display what the shop item actually does
Fixed some issues specific to steam deck like not being able to open some links, send mails and so on. But mostly by not displaying these options as the steam deck does not have a default mail client.
Planned
These changes didn't make it in yet, but I'm at it! ːbrownchickenː
[PLANNED] "Guided Launch" triggers sleeping helpers
[PLANNED] It should be possible to "drag to scroll" in the screen with the capsule machines
[PLANNED] Improve the stat screen by increasing the interval in which an average is calculated
[PLANNED] Add a tactic for "Lucky Echo"
[PLANNED] Add a tactic for "Sticky"
There is lots more of your feedback lined up that will make it into upcoming patches. Thanks again!
Community Spotlight
Being part of a game that enough players are interested in to warrant a community spotlight is just nuts and a dream come true, honestly. It's an honor to display the super cool things all of you have created!
We begin with a wonderful guide by the user Windoki, explaining how to add your own hats to Gamblers Table. Such a cool and well written guide, have a look!
Using the built-in workshop upload tool, you could upload wonderful hats like these!
(This is a selection of some of the ones I really like, in no specific order - but there are tons more of super cool hats in the Steam Workshop!)
View game pageView game pageView game pageView game pageView game page
Here is some wonderful artwork by @saiitagain picturing helpers in various forms!
You can view the full post here!
Or this legendary artwork displaying what PURE MUSCLE does to your helpers by VAVAN-KABAN
View game page
theoneorphan on Discord created their personal tier list for the skills in Gamblers Table. Even shared a link with which you can create your own!
I gave it a shot aswell! Here is my totally unbiased tier list ːtobdogː ...
Also, several people on the discord really wanted to exterminate every single visitor that dared setting foot on their tables:
And for the finishing touch, here is a yarn rendition that landed on our discord and is now one of the emojis there.
This is it for this post. Seeing all of these cool creations was pure joy. Thank you!
If you have any issues or anything to share, feel free to reach out on our discord!
Until next time!