We wanted to try something very...different.
Our regular islands are very normal for idle games. Making an idle game challenging usually just means making things cost more. But that also doesn't FEEL very interesting or fun to us at this point (and we've been hearing from others who feel the same). So we went in a different direction for this new island.
Challenge Island
First of all: It's a limited event island! It's only going to be available for this next week.
Second: You don't build any quests on this island. AND you don't upgrade any of the quests. AND you can't equip any quest cards. You only have guildhalls to maintain and pay for.
The goal of the island is to survive and defeat the boss.
It has prestige levels, so early-level players will be able to take part, and late-game players will cruise through the first few prestiges...but then will HOPEFULLY run into problems the deeper they go. You'll earn star points for each prestige difficulty too.
We really like this new island and are curious to see what people will think! It's been a lot of fun for us to play and build.
UI Tweaks!
The UI change last week for the quests seems to have angered some, and I'll fully admit I probably took things too far with it. So I've redone them to dial them back, only use certain parts to highlight (like they worked before), and to keep the Quest Number in the center, and the Quest Level on the right (like before). They're also smaller than they were last week.
It's a little more in line with how they were before (they've always been that kind of purple stone, and guildians could always walked on top of them, etc), but hopefully getting a bit more legibility out of it. We also wanted to avoid using full words for translation purposes.
We've ALSO updated a lot of the icons used around the game, so especially when you're collecting your daily rewards you're not assaulted with a bunch of jagged pixels anymore. I know how upsetting jaggies are.
New Chest in the Store
While playing this new island, we started wanting to be able to specifically just buy guildian boost cards to equip. So we made a special chest just for that.
You'll get 3 guildian boost cards in each chest (NO quest cards), and the rarities go from Uncommon to Epic. You can get cards for every single guildian type.
What's Coming?
We're really interested in hearing what people will think about this Challenge Island. Whether they like a style of play that's all about guildians and figuring out the best combinations to tackle challenges. Whether there are features you'd like to see that compliment that more, etc.
Keep an eye out in the community posts too, because soon we're going to put an ask out seeing who would like to help play an early build of Guild Quest on Android! We'll probably start asking this next week to start gathering up emails to send invites out to.