UPDATEAugust 24th!
Still working on the update, I'm afraid. Apologies, y'all, but this is turning out to be a lot larger than we had originally anticipated! There's turning out to be a lot of knock-on effects that we need to fix before we can release.

Basically it started as a "Hey our data is showing that the majority of people are going to the wrong/hard islands first, getting stuck, and leaving the game forever" so we wanted to address the way the map works and your route through the world. And that's basically turned into a reballance of every area, and changing how prestige works. It's dug up a lot of our long-term deeper issues with the game, and we want to actually try and fix them instead of paving over them.

Here's a look at the new world map, though! (All the same areas, in a different order, and on different layouts, for the most part.)
The bonus islands are...probably not going to happen at launch of this update (since we're already so late), but we'll see!

Again, really sorry that we don't have anything to play yet, but it's a really big update!

UPDATE August 17th!
I was hoping to unveil the new game balance this week. It’s not ready yet, so we’re going TWO weeks without an update, which is a first for us on Steam. But less nodes meant more rebalance, and we discovered some serious issues that we should probably fix which has led to a new world map, new island flow, and new balance to every single island.

This won't solve end-game issues and people who are just out of content, but I'm hoping this will help make NEW content faster. But first I need to get through all the existing content. This also doesn't involve us using the new 3D-looking maps I showed last week.

ANYWAY, apologies for another boring week. The three of us are heads down, and hopeful we’re making good steps forward with taking this extra time. Fingers crossed we'll have something for next week!


ORIGINAL
The news up front is that we're not launching this week.

The short version is that we've been working on some fundamental changes that need more time to test and feel out before releasing to everyone, and want to take an extra week to round it all out.

The long version is basically I've gone and reballanced the entire game.

There's only the three of us actively working on the game, which means we can only focus on a couple things at a time. So when we finish a big feature like a card refactor, we can finally look up and reevaluate things. One of the things we wanted to question is how and why we've set up quests like we have.

The goal was always to give players a choice of different quests, but with only two quest types there weren't much meaningful choices. Instead we ended up with 3 (we were even at 4 at one point) different quest choices, but usually only two of those choices were actually different enough to warrant decisions.

So we wanted to see what it would feel like to reduce the number of decisions and instead focus on meaningful decisions.

I've got the game down to two quest choices per quest node. And it's almost always split between Adventure and Battle (with the occasional Battle/Battle selection since those can be spread out more). There are no more quests that feature two Adventure quests and a Battle, or three Adventure quests, etc. Anything that didn't feel like a meaningful decision has been axed.

We've also been working on helping to explain the differences between quest types better too, since we still have players asking what Adventure Quests are (which is a failure on our part).

The dev build of the game is at a point where everything has been paired down to two options, but it came in hot Wednesday afternoon and more time should be spent on it before just shipping it out to all of you.

The extra time will allow us to address one of the other issues with making meaningful choices--a new quest type!

When this ships next week you'll have access to some new quests to play with, which could end up being a healing quest type, and a rally point quest type. (Things might change, though.)

• The healing quest type will automatically heal every guildian who walks onto the node.
  
• The rally point quest type will be a place where you can set a threshold before guildians will move on. So if you set the rally point to require 20 guildians, your guildians will stay on the rally point until they reach 20 guildians. And then that group of 20 will leave the rally point and move on.

These won't be options on every single quest node, but they'll be peppered around the islands.

The OTHER thing we wanted to finally address was the look of our islands. We literally haven't taken the time to address the style of the game since the launch. We've actually been a 3D game this whole time, but we don't really show it properly, for example.

So we wanted to see what we could do. Now this is all very early and no final textures or anything, but here's a shot from some of our experiments this week:
The idea being: can we get more than two colours on a map at a time, and can we get more definition and variety in the terrain and heights. And it looks like we just might be able to after all.

Apologies for no update this week, but next week will hopefully have a whole lot more for you to play around with. It still won't fix any of the issues with late-game players but we're working towards fixing what we can to try and get more players to late game, and we've got ideas on how to add a new set of islands at some point, it just takes time.

See you in a week.

Not a huge update this week, but mostly because we've spent a lot of our time fixing issues from last week.

Card Fixes
(Some of these happened during the week)

• Fixes for various cards that wouldn't change stats after you ugpraded.
  
• Fix for quest 12/13 XP cards that would tell you you didn't own it (even if you did), or didn't even exist in the first place.
  
• When switching categories, a sub-category auto-selects so you're not left with the wrong card inventory. So when you click the "Quest Card" tab, you'll be actually in the Quest Card inventory instead of also needing to click an island first.
  
• Sort all cards ready for upgrading with a handy new toggle in the sorting menu!
  
• Added a delay when upgrading cards to avoid an exploit with swapping to new cards.
  
• Added common cards to Open x10 Uncommon chests.
  
• Tweaked Epic Chest drop tables to reduce guildian drops and nudge up epic drops (guildians were way too high previously).

Boost Theatre
Something we've had on the backburner for a while and finally finished off. It's essentially an adwatch theatre, but without the ads.

• Use gems to temporarily boost random stats for a limited time.
  
• The boosts and the gem costs reset every 6 hours.

Random Tweaks

• Added colour to some of the island trees.
  
• Changed the look of Epic cards to line them up with the rest of the cards better. (And to make it so we don't have to create a new mesh for higher tiered cards.)
  
• Added "prev" and "next" text to the arrow buttons on the quest detail screen.
  
• Added a brand new (and real purdy) banner for the initial loading screen.

Working On

• We're having some deep talks about how to handle future content in the game. Right now it takes about 2 weeks to create a brand new island, and a few days to finish it. Which...is a pretty bad return on investment. But we also recognize that getting more islands seems to be what most people want. And the Challenge Islands don't really scratch the itch of conquering NEW islands, based on feedback.
  
• Better onboarding! We do a pretty bad job at teaching players how the game works and want to address that.
  
• Better island art! We want to do some more experiments to figure out how to create better looking islands (with maybe quicker ways to create quests so we can make content faster).

Hoooo doggy. This is potentially the biggest update we've worked on since launching. And it turns out this is actually the first idea we had for how we wanted to handle cards, but decided that was going to take too long to build so we didn't do it. (But we sure ended up regretting that decision. Game development!)

We've found one of the big issues with our cards is that there's too many of them, and too many of them are useless, which leads to a lot of knock-on issues (a largely useless collection of cards and chests are boring to open since it's just more useless cards).

This wasn't an update to a major system so much as a complete rebuild of a major system.

First things first
Your cards have changed! We've limited the amount of cards there are to collect now. So, for example, instead of having 4 different Common Cleric DMG cards, there's now only 1. Any Common Cleric DMG cards you have will all be changed into the new Common Cleric DMG card.

This is going to mean you'll have less cards now than where you were last in the game.

But now you can use your duplicates to permanently upgrade your cards to values higher than before.

Every tier will upgrade by a specific amount, but will always remain in that tier. Theoretically you could upgrade to a Common DMG +1000 card but it'll still be Common.

This isn't creating NEW cards, this is upgrading existing cards. So when you change a +25 card into a +50, you now have a +50 card and no more +25 cards. Any dupes you still have will also be turned into +50.

Here's the breakdown:
Guildian DMG and ADV Cards
Common +25 --> x2 per upgrade.
Uncommon x1.5 --> +0.5 per upgrade.
Rare x2 --> +1 per upgrade.
Epic x10 --> +2 per upgrade.

Guildian HP Cards
Common NA
Uncommon +600 --> +300 per upgrade.
Rare +1200 --> +600 per upgrade.
Epic x10 --> +2 per upgrade.

Quest Gold and XP Cards
Common x3 --> +0.5 per upgrade.
Uncommon x5 --> +1 per upgrade.
Rare x20 --> +1.5 per upgrade.
Epic x30 --> +2 per upgrade.

Island Cards
Common NA
Uncommon x3 --> +0.5 per upgrade.
Rare x7 --> +1 per upgrade.
Epic x15 --> +1.5 per upgrade.

And there are no caps on upgrades. So you can keep upgrading a card as much as you want, it's just dependent on how many dupes you collect.

New Card Equip Screen
There's a new Equip icon! To call out cards a little better. And once you get in there, it's a brand new equip screen.

• Select your category/guildian/island on the left.
  
• Select the card inventory on the right.
  
• Just click to equip instead of dragging.
  
• See where a card is equipped from the inventory.
  
• See the card's current level and how many dupes are required to level it up.
  
• Clicking on the info button or the upgrade arrow will bring up that card's upgrade screen.
  
• Unlock 3 more equip slots (but that'll be happening later).

Store Stuff

• New store icon! (Since it was mostly cards, and I wanted to make the equip button cards.)
  
• Bard is back in the store, Explorer is out!
  
• Store Epic Chests now have a third, guaranteed Epic Card drop.

The Forge
Is still down. We haven't removed it from the game, but we wanted to see if people still wanted a Forge if duplicates are also used to upgrade their cards. Our fear is that if you use duplicates two different ways for two different benefits that it might be confusing/angering to players. We'll see though!

As for the Forge Achievements, if we do get rid of the Forge entirely we'll change those achievements into Upgrade achievements instead.

And so...

Enjoy the update! I hate taking things away (like some cards), but hoping the fact that you can upgrade well beyond where you could before will make up for it (also there will be a few chests waiting for you too).

Please be aware that there might be some server issues with all the upgrades and chest opening that might be happening. So there might be some delays when you upgrade a card.

HOTFIX UPDATE JULY 26th

• Fixed an issue where you wouldn't be able to upgrade a card when you got it for the first time from treasure chests unless you rebooted the game.
  
• Added a text field search bar to the card inventory.
  
• Fixed an issue where you wouldn't properly upgrade a card if it was equipped somewhere different than your current category.
  
• Faster scrolling in inventory list.
  
• Full menu shown in drop-down filter lists, no scrolling required.

Finally! A week without an event island.

We're still largely heads-down working on the big Card Upgrades system, so there's not much in this update, but we're setting up the roll-out for the Card Upgrades next week.

Some balance changes on early islands
The first four islands got some tweaks to hopefully smooth out the early game.

• More money generating in Bunny Island, Emerald Island, Westacre, and Ashfield.

Some minor UI art tweaks
Changing some of the art used in a few different screens like in the Skill Points screen and the store and a few other places.

Bards back in the store!
Bards and Thieves are in, Explorers are out.

The New Card Upgrade system is coming
There are some big changes coming! Here's what we know right now (BUT THIS CAN ALL CHANGE):
We're consolidating the amount of cards we have.

• Right now we give you a range of cards within the same tier. For example, a Cleric can collect 3 or 4 different common Damage cards. This leads to a lot of cards that are, frankly, useless, and you can never do anything with them.
  
• Just selling cards or changing them into other cards doesn't really solve the problem with having too many useless cards to collect, and it tends to lead to the treasure chests being dull to open (since you end up with cards you don't use anyway).
  
• We're going to standardize the way we handle cards, and just have ONE card per tier. So the Cleric will just have 1 common damage card to collect, instead of 4.
  
• What's going to happen to your collection is you'll get your cards changed into the new card. So for example, if you had 18 common Cleric DMG +5 cards and 15 common Cleric DMG +10 cards, those will ALL be turned into the new common Cleric DMG +25 card (giving you 33 duplicates).

You'll be able to upgrade your cards using duplicates.

• Now instead of being stuck with a card's base value forever, you'll be able to use your collection to power it up.
  
• Upgrading a card will cost money and duplicates of that card.
  
• The cost of money and duplicates will go up with each upgrade on a card.
  
• There is no ceiling on upgrades, so with enough time and dupes, you might be able to make your Common card extremely powerful.

What does this mean for you?

• Next week we'll have to take the game down for a few hours, in order to update the database on our end. This will upgrade everyone's collection to the new database.
  
• Late game players are probably going to end up feeling less powerful right away, BUT, thanks to all the duplicates, they'll be able to upgrade their cards beyond what they had before. (For example, your x5 card has turned into a x2 card, but now you have 20 duplicates of x2 and can upgrade yourself past x5.)

When is this happening?

• We're aiming for NEXT TUESDAY.
  
• But things might change!

UPDATE
We're still working on the update for today. The good news is we won't have to pull down the servers for hours to update the databases! We're not ready to go yet but we're working on it, so stay tuned.

Also, as a preview:

Back-to-back-to-back Challenge Islands aren't quite what we wanted, but the timing kind of worked out that way. But we would feel bad if we came back after a week off and didn't put up a new island.

New Challenge Island
Now featuring a boss with recharging health (if no guilidans are on the quest). The shared quests also feature recharging health. And there's a quest or two in there that will cancel out all guildian special effects.

And there's also another fancy chest to earn if you can complete the island on Supreme difficulty.

Check your guildians from the map!
Now you can browse where you have guildians equipped from the map! Just click on the new button at the top-right of the zone info panel from the map and it'll show you everyone you have equipped by order of cities.

Click on one of them to unequip them from that city and add them back to your inventory to use elsewhere.

Still working on...
The big card update! Fingers crossed that we'll have it out not next week but the week after that.

HOTFIXES

• Fixed an issue with the gold header art formatting weird in the City upgrade screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where one-time-only purchases could be bought multiple times in the store.

We're all taking next week off (it's been a while for us!). And that arrived at an awkward time with our one week up one week down for Challenge Islands, and we didn't want to have NOTHING happening in the game for two weeks.

So I know you just had an island, but here's another one, and this'll last 2 weeks just in case.

New Challenge

• It's the longest island ever at 34 quests!
  
• 2 cities with 4 guildhalls each.
  
• Finishing the island on Supreme difficulty your first time will earn you a fancy new Challenge Chest filled with goodies.

• Quest Abilities! Quests can now have special powers for different challenges.
  
• There are a few exploration quests that will damage with poison, as well as block clerics from healing.
  
• More abilities coming in the future.

New UI
With abilities we realized we need to list them in the quest info, which meant we had to re-arrange the layouts so there's some new art for that.

• Updated some old UI buttons in a few other spots too, like the map and the city screens.

Guildian Tweaks

• Cleric DMG gone down.
  
• Knight DMG gone up.
  
• Corgi ADV gone up.

Card Upgrade System Incoming
Don't call it a refactor, because that's a scary word. But we're redoing the way cards are going to work. It's something we've tried to patch quickly with systems like the Forge, but that hasn't really solved the problem: we have too many cards, too many duplicates, and not enough interesting things to do with them. It's a big problem!

Here's a look at what we're working on:

• A smoother equipment screen experience! Better organizing of cards (you'll choose a specific guildian and now you'll ONLY see their cards listed).
  
• More equipment slots per guildian (and island), though the last 3 will require gem purchasing to unlock.
  
• Less cards! We'll be reducing the amount of cards, since we don't need 4 common Cleric ADV cards, for example. (Your other cards will turn into the new card. We're going to make sure that the card we keep is the highest card in a rarity, except for the multipliers, which will start at x2 on rare and x10 on epic).
  
• Use duplicates to upgrade a card! Collecting enough duplicates of a card will allow you to permanently upgrade the stats on that card. (Hence why we've disabled the Forge.)

It's a big change, but one we believe will be better for everyone, and a proper use of duplicate cards and collections in a more meaningful way. (An issue that's coming up more and more as people have been playing for longer.) There's going to be some awkwardness with the transition, but we'll most likely be giving a few chests away to help compensate for anything and to get your duplicate collections growing.

We'll see you in a couple weeks!

HOTFIX
Last week we were hearing from people getting stuck in the first island, and we weren't able to find the reason for it...UNTIL NOW.

• If a player had a crash/disconnect/shut-down at a specific moment during the tutorial, the tutorial wouldn't know how to resume.
  
• Fixed now, so player stuck on Bunny Island SHOULD be able to move on finally! Sorry about that.

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.

First up: Challenge Island Down

I think this one turned out a little more successful than the last, and even sprung up a lot of discussion, which is awesome! I especially love that people were able to find a few different strategies to pull off the final difficulties.

We actually tried turning on Dark Knights to test last week and it turned out...they didn't work. So that's kind of funny.

New Challenge Island coming up next week!

First Impressions Update!
There's a lot of stuff that went into this update, and a lot of it you might never see again as an existing player.

Why are we working on first impressions? Well we're trying to gear up for other platforms. Games are a business and all that fun stuff no one wants to hear, and if we're going to keep working on the game we need to keep earning money. We've had recommendations to double prices and pinch harder on the existing audience, but none of us are comfortable with that, frankly. So instead we're working on spinning up some new platforms for the game (namely web and mobile). We hope spreading the game around to more people will solve that issue for the time being.

All of which means we wanted to start looking at our tutorial and HUD, which are very, very common complaints about the game for first-time players.

We also want to be able to keep platform parity with everything, so everyone always gets the same updates, which means one code base.

On top of which: we want to keep the updates rolling on Steam, so this isn't a 'goodbye' post or anything. I just wanted to lay out some explanation for why we're working on what we're working on right now.

There's new Doceo art for the tutorial!

• Higher res art!
  
• A smoother, more luxurious Doceo.

There's a new HUD

• I don't like taking features away, but we couldn't find space for the quick travel that made sense anymore. Fast travel was created in the hopes of fixing our tutorial drop we saw between islands 1 and 2, and it...didn't end up helping, it turns out.
  
• Instead we decided to bring the map functionality out much more.
  
• Greater emphasis on the Buy Multiple button.
  
• Toggle the Quest UI on/off with the Build button.
  
• Notifications for star points, chests, and when you unlock a new island!
  
• No Save button (it was a weird throwback from our first web days). Autosaves are happening every few minutes, or after defeating a boss, or after making a purchase, or after prestiging. There's also still the "Save and Quit" button in the settings just in case.

Tutorial Tweaks!

• Some slight adjustments to the existing tutorial to hopefully help players get through the early game better.

Social Link Buttons!

• Finally added them.

New "News" screen art!

• So many more pixels now.

Android Test?
It's close! Thank you to everyone who signed up and I'm hoping....next week? Ish? After playing the game more with the old HUD we found it was hard to click on buttons so we wanted to try and get that updated before finally getting more people to play the game.

Next Week
A new Challenge Island!

+ Level 600 cap
+ Some super-tiny guildian stat tweaks that probably no one will notice.

New Challenge Island
Taking into account that it's actually pretty tricky to make an idle game HARD, and without the scope to drastically change how combat and stats work, here's another Challenge Island for everyone.

The hope with these is that early-ish players can play the first prestige or two, middle players can play the middle four or five, and only the highest level players can actually finish the final prestige level. Not too sure how enforceable that is but that was the goal with the balance.

We were able to tweak the rules and start banning specific guildians from guildhalls. So that means there are no Dark Knights allowed on this new island. We'll see how that goes!

The island will last about 6-ish days from now. You'll be able to earn a new batch of Star Points, but gilding resets when the island is taken down (which is why it's so cheap compared to others).

Level 600
The level cap has been bumped up! And as we tend to do, there's a new achievement for hitting 600.

Small Guildian Tweaks!
It probably won't be noticed but I tried nudging around a few of the starting and upgrade values of Guildians in an attempt to make the early Guildians maybe a little more self-sustaining?

Fixes
There were some issues with some of the symbols we use in the UI that have been tweaked. So gems shouldn't be covering up the first digit when you're looking to gild, for example!