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New Challenge Island, UI Tweaks, and a Higher IceVale

New Challenge Island

There's a new Challenge Island for the week! There are new card restrictions and new quest lines to tackle. That also means there's another batch of Star Points to earn.

UI Tweaks

We're a really fast team which means things can DRASTICALLY change very suddenly, and there's been a lot of back and forth with UI this last month that's probably given some whiplash.

As much as I'm sorry we've upset so many people with the last UI pass, I'm glad that there were some people who gave us some good feedback on features we totally missed. We're trying to address some of those this week.

  • More UI during the Map! People were asking for access to the vault and being able to see their gold/gems too. So we added those to the map.
  • Gold and Gems on the bottom of the screen now (since most of the screens needed them on the bottom it turned out).
  • Shrunk the size of the gold/gems/xp bars.

  • Save button added to the side menu (yeah we totally missed the importance of that). The Save/Quit button is still in the Settings.
  • Shrunk the size of the side menu and its buttons.

    Level 500 Quests in IceVale
    I wanted to try a bit of an experiment and see if we could bump up the max quest caps on islands. I figured IceVale was a decent place to start. I can't let the early islands get too high since that'll throw a wrench into brand new players' progress but later islands might be able to all bump up somewhat.

  • If you already have the max achievement, you'll still have it. Nothing's being taken away.
  • I'm hoping higher level caps on islands will give some higher-end goals for later game players and give them higher payouts to boot.

    Thief and Explorer Cards in Store
    The Thief card is back in the gem store for individual purchases, and now the RAREST GUILDIAN OF ALL is finally available for purchase: The Explorer!

    What Are We Working On?
    Lots of things!

    New platforms!

  • We'll be (re)launching on web soon.
  • And there's mobile (starting with Android) coming after that.

    A new card and card upgrade system!

  • It's been an issue for a while but we didn't have an easy fix for it, and just adding more content to cards was only going to make the problem worse.
  • There are too many cards, and too many useless cards.
  • Our original intent was to make it more like a Diablo-ish loot system, but in Diablo you're not still holding onto the first club you found on your first enemy.
  • We want to streamline cards and allow you to upgrade the cards to get better stats.
  • More details about it next week.

    Another Challenge Island!

  • Coming next week.
  • The three of us are going to take a much-needed vacation in a couple weeks which means we'd miss getting a new island up. So instead I'm going to try and get it out next week!

    UPDATE
    An issue popped up starting last Thursday or so where some new players were failing a server check and thus losing their first Explorer. It ended up feeling like Prestiging was killing Explorer cards, but the reality is that players weren't getting that first Explorer successfully added to their inventories.

    A few other people were getting issues with the tutorial not moving forward from Bunny Island, and HOPEFULLY this will fix that issue for them. Let us know if that still doesn't work for you!

    A fix for that is out, and we're giving everyone some FREE EXPLORERS and basically the contents of a Store Chest to compensate.