Universal Give Me Fuel - Async Card Battle w/ Friends (by Wonderspark)

Made some minor changes to Focus cards. Now if you use a Focus (-4 to +4) to adjust your aim to hit the Range exactly, you do bonus damage. We've been cranking away on a bunch of back-end bugfixes & optimizations - including some significant UI & animation performance increases, but next week's gonna see some visible new user improvements, and some fun stuff coming shortly after that.

Most likely we'll see XP (finally!), leveling up (which gives free Fuel), and then Daily & Weekly XP/Wins leaderboards w/ prizes, including (hopefully) our first cosmetic customization item.

 

awesome. If you think THAT stuff sounds exciting, you should see what we have in store for the long term.

We're also getting some more variations of animations in the game so things are less repetitive. Right now, there's still just this initial batch of really basic animations, but as a small team with a whopping one animator, stuff takes time!

 

Finally got some minor user-facing things out yesterday, including what should be a significant performance boost for older devices (and iPods), a new background to polish up that old, fairly abstract image, and some new buttons. Small things - still the main focus is on helping new users understand the game, and for that we've got some neat things coming that won't just be good for new users, they should make the game a lot more intuitive for everyone.

1.) The health meters will now decrement "in real time" or close to it, rather than all changes happening at once at the end of the turn. Seems like a small thing, but should make a big difference.
2.) "Tooltips" that pop up to show you exactly how Attack & Evade are calculated when you drag a card over the interaction area.

There are some really fundamental things about GMF that don't work the way people expect. Range is the big one, and it's been a beast to try to get across in tutorials. Our current tutorials give you way too much info "up front", before you have any chance to experiment. So part of what we've been trying to do is to give you more info "on demand" when you're actually in the process of taking the action. We tried to get this info into the "field" where the characters are shown, but it was just too unclear. So making it more "diagram"-like will hopefully help get the idea across.

On the plus side, the current version of the tutorial looks like it's helping people more than the last one, and the last one was helping people more than the one before it. So progress is being made, which is good.

 

Bars now are animated & move in the correct phase with the turn. We also finally finished our App Preview video, which you can check out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNmBMmevfMs

 

Some storyboard sketches that our artist is using to rough out the new sets of animations that are coming.

New attack animations


New move animations

 

One of the main things that's been tricky is really getting the basics clear & complete before going bananas with things. One of our inspirations for the combat in-game was The Bourne Ultimatum. If you saw that, there's a sequence when Matt Damon and another guy are chasing Julia Styles' character through a building, and then they end up fighting. It's not two characters standing on an invisible line throwing fireballs at each other - but a lot of the animations in our game look that way because it helped us get a better understanding of how the mechanics of the *game* worked, and how to communicate that to players. As the game & the UI have evolved a little, some of the things we used to show in the main "idle" screen are now moved into the UI, and it frees us up to do a little bit more with how we show the characters, and gives us the flexibility to get back to doing the animations in the way we'd originally hoped to be able to do them.

It's not a short process - getting these in will require a bit more logic behind it, and obviously... lots of animation. But I'm pretty psyched with how it's going, and excited for combat to look like *combat*.

 

When we first launched the game, the extent of how we told people how to play the game was a few screens at the start that were practically unintelligible, in hindsight. Once we started seeing how confused folks were (it's hard to understand when you've been working on the game for ages), we've been working to try to make the game more understandable to new players. We now have "tooltips" that appear when you hover over a given action - so it's a lot easier to understand that you play a number card close to the range to attack, and to evade, you want to play something further away. It also let us really trim down the initial tutorial. So hopefully it's easier for folks to understand!

 

Over the last few weeks, we've made some pretty massive changes to the in-game UI to make things (hopefully) a lot clearer. If you haven't given the game a shot, and are willing to take a few minutes to try it out (it is free), I'd really appreciate any feedback anyone's willing to provide about how understandable it is!

Thanks!

 

One of the things we're working on now are a set of permanent, upgradeable cards - essentially they start out as weak cards, comparable to the lowest-rarity cards. The catch is that they're not consumable - they recharge after a short delay & are reusable (the delay is so you can't spam the same card over and over again in a single game). You can use the consumable cards to upgrade these rechargeable cards, leveling them up until they're equivalent to the most powerful cards in the game (defeat cards).

Probably gonna be another week or so until they're in, but we've got some of the ground work in place! Also just added an IAP currency to the game. The reason was pretty straightforward - managing IAP through Apple is a huge pain, and since we're constantly iterating on the game, slows us down a lot. So now, there's "gold", which is *only* purchasable. You cannot earn it in-game. We didn't want to have to tune costs & rewards in-game based on potential purchases, and we didn't want to make things pay-to-win. So Gold is spent on stuff like removing ads and the upcoming (still a few weeks) cosmetic customizations. We're also removing all other real-money IAP and replacing them with gold. I know this might look kind of awkward, but hopefully over time it'll be really clear why we're approaching this the way we are, and that it'll (hopefully!) let us do some interesting things that we wouldn't have been able to otherwise.

 

Thanks, McGuffin! We recently had a UX expert take a look at the game, and she gave us some really stellar help - including at least one full-blown epiphany that should help things become more understandable over time. But I'm glad to hear that you've noticed the changes (and that you're still playing!)

 

MrTorche! Thanks for the kind words (I've been playing a couple rounds with you - "helava").

When you say the multiplayer is "running a bit slow" do you mean it's taking too long for people to take their turns, or something in the game is actually running slow on your phone? (If it's the latter, what phone do you have?)

re: trainer difficulty - yes, there's a plan to upgrade the AI - though right now it's not the focus of our efforts, because we really need to be able to help more people understand the game. The trainer making "not stupid" moves is part of that for sure, but the other part is revisions to the UI & providing a bit more feedback for what's going on. So there's a lot to do!

We've been working on something I hope folks will find really interesting - "Rechargeable" cards. While most of the cards in GMF are consumable, we're also creating non-consumable, reusable cards that can be upgraded by playing consumable cards (NOT "dusting" them - but actually using the cards in matches will work towards upgrading the Rechargeables). Upgrading Rechargeables will also be the only way to get "Legendary"-class cards.

It's all still a work-in-progress, but we'll be rolling out the 1st wave of Rechargeable cards pretty soon.

 

Awesome. Thanks so much for the feedback. re: Multiplayer - one thing we need to work on a bit is "smarter" matchmaking. Right now, you're simply put into any available game if there is one (and there's never more than one), and then if there's no waiting game, you're play your turn & then wait for an opponent. It theoretically shouldn't take long (more than a few minutes to an hour, worst case) for someone to get back to you with their turn, but that's still not *ideal*. It also doesn't take experience or skill into account *at all*, and once we start introducing the rechargeable cards, experience (and the "strength" of your deck) starts to matter more.

We've also been contemplating doing some matchmaking by pitting vets vs. noobs, because one of the problems is that if you match vs. a new player, and that new player never takes another turn, you're screwed, and have a bad experience with the game. So making sure someone's first few turns are against someone who's actually playing is a huge deal.

Anyway - we should be getting the first few Rechargeables out this week, along with a "News" feature that we can use to keep people updated on changes to the game. We make a good deal of tuning changes, but they're invisible to most players - one of the reasons there aren't that many crushingly over-powered cards is that we do make a lot of adjustments.

But we do keep some really strong cards in the game - after all, close games are fun, but a lot of times, it's the turnarounds - fighting back from what looks like a blowout - that are the most satisfying games.

Woo!

 

MrTorche - you're ALWAYS permitted to voice your opinion as a beginner player. This kind of feedback is SO VALUABLE to developers, and it's extremely difficult for devs to get honest feedback from new users. User tests & focus tests and friends & family betas never really get you fully "honest" feedback. So it's very, very much appreciated, and always welcome, ESPECIALLY when it's well-thought out and critical, because that's the kind of feedback that helps us improve the game the most. Thank you.

The thing you said about the Trainer is why we put it in early, even before it was necessarily "done" - the experience of playing as a n00b vs. real people is *awful*, and often really off-putting, so we wanted to have an AI character to play with (also so you wouldn't have to wait for a real person to take a turn) where you could practice strategies even if you had no idea what you were doing.

The funny thing was that the 1st version of the trainer was so "dumb" that it actually made some peoples' experience *worse* - not because it was beating them, but because if they tried to learn how to "play well" from the trainer (which sounds like an obvious thing to do) they'd get super confused, because the trainer's strategy was "the easiest thing for the engineers to implement". Which was "attack all the time with the card on the left, and play a random Power Card sometimes!" Hahhaha.

Fortunately, now it's a little bit smarter, and we've got plans to actually make it a legitimate competent opponent at varying skill levels. But when you've got a very small team, sometimes you just do what you've gotta do.

We're actually gonna start having the trainer provide feedback on the turns you're taking while playing vs. the trainer - so if you're making "mistakes" in your strategy (a common one is just playing your highest card all the time w/out taking range into account), it'll help you understand what you're doing "wrong". Hopefully that'll help clear up some common early-game miscommunication, and help people understand the mechanics better.

Thanks again for the feedback!

 

...and Rechargeable Cards are now live! We gave everyone a starter, 'cause they're fairly rare cards, and w/out one it might be a while before you find one in a pack. I just started an upgrade on mine, so we'll see how long it takes to get it to the next level.

One thing to make clear, if it's not clear already - you don't "burn" resources to upgrade cards. You just use the cards in-game like you would normally, and if you play a card that's part of an "active" upgrade process, it'll count toward that upgrade. We didn't want to have some conflict between whether you wanted to use a card to upgrade or play - we just wanted to encourage people to play & make that rewarding.

If you get a chance to check it out, let us know what you think!