Game Developer Conference
Labyrinth was showcased Monday afternoon in the Intel booth at GDC last week. It was selected since it works great on the new Intel graphics chipset.
We also met with Playfab senior management since they had a booth at GDC. We reiterating the need for inventory store improvements, so that we can add bulk card pack opening and mass disenchant features to Labyrinth.
Development
The focus of the next major update includes adding a Hero Store, a balancing pass for cards, and features to fulfill Backer rewards. Mobile optimization is also underway and Labyrinth currently maintains a frame rate of 30+ fps on Android. We are working to hit 60 fps this week. That has required optimization changes to coding and art, many of which will be included in the upcoming PC update. Mobile will be released sometime in a future update.
More detail on what the individual teams have been working on for the past two weeks.
Engineering Team - The engineering team worked on backer rewards including backer badges, extra gold/stardust; hero store functionality and UI; enhancements to the Announcement system; Skybound Insiders integration; profiling and optimization for mobile, including scripts, HUD, shell, controls, materials, card engine equations, and fixed bugs caused by optimization; serialization for migration; fixed game logic threading issues; and improved the build system.
Art Team - The Art team worked on effects for Aether blast, Annul Spell, Stone Rain, and others; sculpted models for the low poly Pirate, Securitron, Zombie, and Wastelander hero; concepts were created for a boss and hero skin; art optimizations for mobile were done for Celestial Giant, Giant Queen and Minotaur levels, Defender and other minions, rebuilt prefabs to reduce drawcalls, and created a single drawcall room; and skinned mine worker (that's not as gruesome as it sounds).
Audio Team - The Audio team did a sound pass on minions.
Design Team - The Design team worked on card design, including card fixes, adding more cards including a few more Legendaries, and design work on the Queen's attendant.
Deck Building & Balance
Since the New Years Update on January 5, we have been collecting data on every card played in every encounter. That has created millions of records in our database in the last 2 months. Recently we finished building a tool that allows our designers to visualize this massive amount of data for heroes, sorting cards by frequency of being played, opened in card packs, crafted, disenchanted, "discrafted" (disenchanted and then later crafted), added and removed from decks--over disciplines and levels for all players. We plan to expand this tool to visualize boss deck cards too.
One major insight is: players should not ignore common cards, especially those that do not have numbers on them. There are many useful utility cards that do not appear great at first, but the best players are using them to defeat hard boss setups. There is a tendency among most players to select the biggest damage dealing cards and the highest rarity cards for their decks. With the current card set, this is not the optimum strategy in many cases.
The next update(s) will have extensive shuffling and recategorization of cards, as well as some rule changes.
Next Major Update
The next major update will be in a few weeks. Accounts will be reset then. All card packs purchased with gold will be returned as gold and those purchased with Tokens will be returned as Tokens. Any card packs purchased with real money will be returned as Tokens. Gold on balance will remain and earned Stardust will be returned as well. Stardust from disenchanting will not be returned. This is the method we used last time with the addition of Tokens and real money.
In a future progress report, we will address how the Hero Store will impact unlocking heroes and bosses going forward.
Discord
Join us on the official Labyrinth Discord server to chat about Labyrinth and get tips on how to play from other players: https://discord.gg/labyrinth