Hello you sick nuts,
I was prepared to say that this week, the word "update" means "A progress report" and not "A change in the files" but yesterday I happened to see a stream where the game would refuse to move past the naming screen. And today I found out that this happens to every first launch since last week. Every single one. I guess the mystery of the high refund rate is solved.
Sincere apologies for this failure on my part. I will spend more time playing the updates with all sorts of save states before releasing them going forward. If you have refunded the game because of this, I'll be more than happy to throw a key your way, just reach out to me with a screenshot of the refund request. I might not get to it until next week, but I'll get to it
So what did you update?
There's a been a few minor patches throughout the week, addressing the following:
Enabled achievements
Fixed a crash that would happen if a party bag was clicked during the Grinder animation
Fixed naming screen not proceeding to the tutorial
Prevented the occasional crash that would happen when retrieving an enemy's sprite
That's it? I'm gonna play Minecraft instead
No no, there's more. There are bigger things I'm working on that surprisingly take more than a week to develop. But I can show early screenshots already!
Introducing Adventure mode! This is like Automon 1, but instead of going up, you go right! Truly worthy of a sequel
Some notes about this mode:
Gyms, events, alphas and NPCs from regular mode are all here, although with Events restricted to the ones that make sense - I'm not letting you take the Airport from area 5 to the final boss! Gyms are notably optional, you can go for them only if you think you can beat them and need the badge or the extra EXP
The mandatory encounter every 8 areas is now a ghost player! That's right, we're going asynchronous! Ghost players act like regular NPCs - as in, they will still have the brain to rearrange their team to match yours so there's still uncertainty about what you're about to face. If you beat a ghost, your team gets saved to torment other players
Much like classic Automon, we're back to 1 life! Every fight is a do or die so take your time with the clicks
Also much like classic Automon, the run ends with a boss rush. The difference here is that I arbitrarily inserted a PvP battle between the Pretty Good Three and The Champion. I guess I liked when they did it in Pokemon Clover. Also, not shown here because it will be a surprise to the first time winners, but I'm spoiling it out in the open here - beating the Champion will present you with one more fight against the global Player Champion. Only one will exist at a time and will be the same for everyone until beaten. I even plan on showing who the champion is in the main menu, and give the player a little crown or something when you run into them in other modes!
I want to stress this out as well, that this new mode is as much Automon Arena as the current BR mode, it's not an afterthought side mode or a minigame. Therefore, I won't be releasing this until I can consider it complete, with all features I would expect it to have if it were a standalone game with just this mode. That means sprites for all types of gym bosses, very refined balance, multiple difficulty options, the ability to save mid-run (which is long overdue for the BR mode too, to be honest). It probably won't come out later than October, but I've been wrong about these things before so take this with a handful of salt.
And if this ends up being THE mode that people play then that's where the development effort will go. All new features like items will of course be in both modes, but might have different rules of how they are acquired etc.
Now, the final bit of bad news is that I won't be able to work on the game for the next few days, so the next Saturday update is gonna be pretty thin in content. Maybe I'll talk about how cool it would be if Ladybuff would do a backflip when he attacks. Or share my favourite recipes. Or talk about how wrestling with chickens became the biggest source of inspiration for Automon. Or maybe Automon Arena will win some awards and I'll just gloat. We'll see
For now, enjoy being able to clear your save and do the tutorial properly