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As you may know, Charlie Oscar is a small development team of 5 – and it took us almost 3 years to go from the concept of Gremlins, Inc. to where we are right now (full release, Win/Mac/Linux). The way we work is through multiple iterations. One of us will bring up a topic (often initiated by someone here in the community), and the others will discuss until either everyone is on board – or we're not doing that feature at all.

This is a system that eats up a lot of our time and requires always-on communication via Slack, Skype, Asana and emails (add here about 20 people with whom we work externally, from sound designer to translators and concept artists, and you get the picture). But this is the system that we believe in: combining the power of 5 brains, 5 points of view, and allowing for immediate change once the dev team's opinion shifts – rather than sticking to some sort of a grand strategic plan.

Early on, one of the decisions that we've made was the decision to develop all of the game's logic on the server side, where we can update the process without pushing new client updates to all the players. For example, in the last 48 hours there's been numerous little tweaks in game logic as we fixed this and that minor issue on the server – tweaks that caused no inconvenience to any of the players since the client remained unchanged. No extra downloads. No problems with the compatibility of versions.

Now that we are in the full release mode, and are able to gather the statistics on how people play, we see that between 25% and 35% of players spend considerable time, at least in the beginning of the game, in single-player challenges and custom single-player sessions. With this data in mind, we were looking for a way to combine (a) the current practice of daily/weekly updates that push the game further with new features and new content; and (b) more comfort for the crowd that is focused solely on the single-player experience.

Unfortunately, there is no way that we can support both online and offline deployment of the game with the frequency of the updates and improvements that we aim to keep, while at the same time trying to support users who will experience all sort of misconfigurations this way. However, we just agreed on another solution that adds offline play to Gremlins, Inc. – see details below:

• we're starting to develop a new product: Gremlins, Inc. – Offline Edition;
• it will be playable offline, and will not have any online connectivity;
• it will feature all the single-player challenges + custom single-player sessions;
• it will be updated only for the purpose of bug fixes/rule balancing;
• Gremlins, Inc. – Offline Edition will launch at $9.99/€9.99 some time in 2016.

At the same time:

• every owner of Gremlins, Inc. will get a FREE copy of the Offline Edition;
• it's possible to upgrade from the Offline Edition to the complete version;
• our main focus remains on adding new features & content to Gremlins, Inc.;
• we will continue to update Gremlins, Inc. (current app) weekly/bi-weekly.

In other words, all of the current owners of this game will receive, for free, an additional game some time later this year, which will be an offline-specific version of Gremlins, Inc. While this version will not be dynamic, and will not incorporate the updates and upgrades that we keep rolling out for the multiplayer version, it will offer the same gameplay with the offline functionality.

Players who do not need the multiplayer functionality will be able to buy the offline version cheaper than before, and to play it whenever they like.

Players who are more competitive, and who are interested in (a) playing a continuously improving project (b) enjoying features like tournaments, multiplayer-focused DLC and evolving UI, will be able to keep playing the original (current) version of the game that offers both single-player and multiplayer modes without any compromises on the speed, and extension, of the updates to the project.

Summary:

Coming later this year –

ːmaliceː Gremlins, Inc. – Offline Edition at $9.99;
ːmaliceː With an option to upgrade from the Offline Edition to the complete game for $5.00.
ːmaliceː Every owner of Gremlins, Inc. receives the Offline Edition for free when it's launched.

ːsteampunkː Gremlins, Inc. remains to be our main focus (single-player, multiplayer, updates, DLCs, everything) and includes the Offline Edition as a part of the package.