Hello fellow Agents, Hackers and Wish listers,
We apologize for not doing more frequent updates, but we are looking at changing that from now on. As we are moving forward with the development of MINDNIGHT we would like to go through some subjects that are very important for us regarding going free-to-play, launching a new website for the game, expanding the community in a number of ways and adding new features to the game.
Going Free-to-play
TL; DR - We will go Free-to-Play starting 30th of November
Being our first published game, we believe we have learned a lot from this experience and we will constantly improve our pipeline for our other more ambitious games.
The recent narrative about pay-to-win games have also let us realize that sometimes it is not important on how much a game is worth, but what is important is that we want to share our work with as many players as possible that want to play our game, and they cannot right now because various reasons.
Pay-to-win is a flawed concept, overused by game designers of free-to-play games. We believe that this kind of systems create bad habits and toxic behaviors. Spending to be good at a game should not be an option and we believe if someone will want to spend money on a game, they should not be forced in doing so.
Manipulating human behavior is not what games are about, it's about triggering emotions, having fun and getting people together.
Therefore, we decided to make MINDNIGHT, free-to-play with no microtransactions that will affect the gameplay in anyway. The only possible spending can be done only to customize your experience through unique additional visuals such as skins, emoji and gestures.
We are working to define compensation for the current players that have bought the games, and this will most probably translate into Coins in-game that can be used to buy skins, emoji and gestures to use in the game once the update is live
Update 2.0 - New Features
For the last 2 months we worked hard into creating a more interesting gameplay loop by adding improvements to the current gameplay, add new features and fix many bugs that we encountered since launch. With your help we have found a lot of bugs and we are proud to announce that we fixed most of them!
Firstly, we have added a number of Visual Customization options to the game that we believe it will make your experience more fun and interesting by choosing to use one of the 18 skins, type in chat with newly implemented emoji and spice up things in-game with new gesture animations that can be accessed by typing in chat /cry, /facepalm etc.
Skins, Emoji and Gestures can be unlocked through leveling up, or buying them from the Marketplace. These do not affect gameplay at all and we are not planning in doing something in this regard. Do not worry thought, there are some skins, emoji and gestures that are already unlocked from the start of the game.
We will also constantly update the game with new skins, emoji and gestures.
Secondly, we have added a Progression System , through which you can now level up your account from 1 to 30. You can level up by playing games and acquiring experience. From time to time you will unlock rewards such as emoji, gestures and skins from level to level.
Together with the progression system we now have a Leaderboard, where the best players are shown. You are also able to see your rank in this screen in comparison to other players.
There are a lot of new features that we added, but the ones explained above are the most important.
Other features that we implemented are:
- New Main Menu
- Profile and Stats
- Global Chat in Main Menu
- Friend List in Main Menu
- Player Database and Tracking System ....and more
We will release a full Patch Notes announcement, once we release the Update 2.0.
As we heard complaints and we have seen users abusing and taking advantage of their anonymity we decided to work on a Reporting System, that will come a bit later. This will make sure that abusive players will face consequences and even be banned from the game if they do not respect other players. We are also working on integrating Voice Chat for custom games. Both these two features will not be available in Update 2.0.
New Website and Expanding Community
We have worked on a new website for the game that turned out really beautiful. Here is a sneak peak:
Together with this we are also expanding the ways the community can interact with us and discuss strategies.
We have created a subreddit, where we will post announcements and discuss further updates.
We are also opening up a Patreon page to let some players that wish to support us, get involved in development and help us cover server and marketing costs.
We are also working on a Wiki Page where we will explain everything that is in game, from features, gameplay to skins and lore.
Last but not least, we have a How to Play video ready to be integrated in the game and published on our pages for players that are new, to get accustomed with the concept.
We also have a new trailer, that it's 10x better than the first one. We hope this will help the game have more hackers and agents!
That being said, I hope you can support us next week into transitioning to Free-to-play, sharing our new trailers and start having fun in some deceiving games of MINDNIGHT.
Thanks for being with us, this helps us a lot to move forward and try to do our best in development.
Cheers!
MINDNIGHT TEAM