Yeah, I think it'll likely take a little bit to get through even some of the earlier upgrades. They get even more intense as you get higher in rarity. Which is kind of the point - it's intended to be a long-term kind of thing, and for you to have multiple upgrades in process at any time. But we'll obviously be taking a look at the tuning and making sure that it's not super ridiculous.
Just wanted to give you all a heads-up on an impending revision to the UI. One of the weird things that we've realized over the last few weeks is that we made a bit of a weird error in the way the UI works, because when we first designed the game, it was a card game. You got "Range Cards", and then decided whether you wanted to use them to Attack, Evade, or Shield Up. But the thing is, in videogame form (rather than card game form), instead of deciding what Range you want to use then what action you want to take, you *should* be deciding what you want to do first, then which Range Card to use. So this revision does a bunch of stuff to put that in a more sensible order, make the colors more "communicative" - Attack = red, Evade = yellow, Shield = blue. That's how it currently works, but it's not as clear, because it's not as called out. This isn't final - we've got a handful of revisions to it, but in broad strokes, this is how the UI'll look in a few weeks.
Also just rolled out another thing people have asked for - tap the screen to skip animations! Now you can crank through turns even faster!
Also, we're running a usability test on an upcoming UI revision - if you can take a second to run through this, I'd really appreciate it! https://usabilityhub.com/do/d45d9e4f83d/54b1 Thanks!
Spent the better part of this week working on a new UI for GMF - and we're trying to really do it right this time. Usability tests, fully-functional UI prototypes (meaning that you can actually play through a turn with the UI on your phone in prototype form), and going through every detail with a fine-toothed comb. Why? Because we made a serious mistake with V1. In the first version of the UI, we based it off the card-based prototype we'd been playing with. In the card game, you had to really internalize the rules of the game, and then when you played, you picked a number card & a power card each turn, and then declared what you were doing with them (attack, evade, or shield up). When we translated the card prototype into digital form, we kept that same flow. Felt like it'd make sense, and for people who started playing this game via the card game (every early beta tester), it did. But when we launched the game, we found that new players were *extremely* confused. Even if we explained the rules. Why? Because we presented players with four arbitrary-seeming numbers, and gave virtually no context as to how to choose the best option. It sounds insane, but that's how the card game worked - you had to know the rules *before* you played. And we tried to do that with a tutorial, but the problem is that a tutorial is a really bad way to communicate the "mental model" of how a game works to a player. We spent weeks thinking about it, trying to improve the tutorial, trying to explain things more clearly, and then at some point, a friend of ours pointed something out - that the numbers weren't "cards" - and suddenly it clicked. I don't really know why it was that moment, but that was an epiphany. Later, I was writing a new version of a tutorial - and I wrote a sentence, "To attack, select a number..." and one of my teammates said, "That's weird. To attack, why don't you select "attack"?" and it all came together. We can't rely on a new player to understand how the rules of the game work *before* making a critical decision in a turn. We need to give them the context *first*. So where it used to be "pick a number, then pick an action," now it's going to be, "pick an action, then pick a number" - and once you pick the action, we can show you exactly what each different number will do, and help you make a good decision. The great thing is that we can tell you exactly which cards will produce the best result, and it doesn't lessen the strategy of the game at all, because making the "best" decision isn't where the strategy of the game is. The strategy is where everything interacts with each other, and picking the "biggest" attack isn't always the best strategic move. It's strange that it's taken us this long to realize we'd gotten something fundamentally backwards, and it seems obvious in hindsight, but it wasn't at all obvious to us, because of how the game had developed with us over time. The new UI revision's likely to take 2-3 weeks to complete, and will be our team's sole focus until it's done. So I'm unlikely to be posting much between then & now unless anyone has questions. I hope that this will help more players understand the game, and be able to get into it. We've found that folks who get over the initial confusion have stuck around for the long haul (we've got a bunch of people who've been playing daily since they started) - but getting that initial confusion out of the way will be the difference, for us, between life and death! So here we go. Working hard to get to V2.
http://imgur.com/a/lGXNs One of our engineers had some nagging doubts about the complexity of the new UI - that there was a simpler way to do it, and after a few days of sketching and discussions, we've completely revised things *again*. We ran a handful of usability tests, and this version beats the pants off the last one. It's not as pretty (yet), but in terms of understandability, this is leaps and bounds better than previous versions. Woo! Now on to V3.
Making a solid dent in this UI upgrade. We've got about another week until we're done with it - I'd guess that we're likely to take all next week & roll it out over the following week. It's looking a bit different than the other things I'd posted, because as we've been doing the revision, we had some good ideas on ways to communicate more information effectively, and wanted to get it all in there. Looks like with the UI revision, we're also gonna be getting a new wave of animations in, which look *amazing*. Between those two changes, it's going to feel like a totally different game - but it'll still have the depth of strategy that's kept folks playing for the last three months. Can't wait to get this in your hands, but there's still a bit more work to do.
Getting there. One of the fun things about a total UI revision after getting the whole game together (as opposed to building the UI as you go) is that everything's a lot more coherent, space-wise. Instead of having persistent powerups end up covering part of the "turn submit" button, they now live in a sensible place. Things are on track to release this as an update next week, and so far, playing with it as it comes together, it's *WAY* more understandable than the previous version.
We're starting to roll out the new UI for a small handful of users. If you're interested, DM me your serial number (on the "settings" page under your username), and we'll add you to the list. Got a handful more tweaks to go - end-of-turn UI & card reveals, and making the Power Cards more visible when they're sitting in the "dock" at the bottom of the screen - but we're getting there. It's been an interesting process, because when we launched the game, we knew that we'd likely have a lot of work to do before it was acceptable to a broad audience. We knew it was confusing, but it took us longer than I'd expected to genuinely understand *why* it was confusing. We've got our fingers crossed this'll do the trick. But it's an interesting process, essentially trying to "relaunch" a game after it's been out. Press is impossible to come by. It all ends up being in the hands of word of mouth. If we made the game better enough that people finally love it, we hope folks will tell their friends. If not, then we simply have more work to do. We're expecting to roll out the new UI to all users mid-next week, likely Wednesday.
...and it's Thursday. Ha. Everything always takes longer than I expect. But at the same time, it's also turning out quite a bit better than I'd expected. So much of this has come together in the last few days, and the feedback & flow of the game is *way* better than it used to be. We've gotten a bit of feedback from beta testers, and we've got a few post-release tweaks that we'll be getting into the game (mostly for experienced players, rather than people coming to the game fresh, around being able to see your Power Cards more clearly 100% of the time), but I'm super psyched with how this is turning out. It's gone from feeling like an Alpha to feeling like a real game with some actual polish! Difficult to say when we're going to release. The hope was to get it out today, but we've got some engineering work to do because the new animations in the game are quite a bit more complicated than before. Could be out as early as tomorrow am, but more likely than not it'll be Monday.
We've finally launched our massive UI update! More details can be found here. I hope you'll get a chance to check out the game. Before, we kinda had to explain to players that this is a super early release, and it's confusing & rough in places & hard to understand. With this release, I feel like finally I can say, "Just check it out," and hopefully it'll be clear enough that people can just understand what's supposed to happen & just "get it". I do want to thank people, though - a bunch of you have provided us TONS of feedback over the last few months, and it's shaped a lot of what we've done with this update. Please please please keep that feedback coming. I'm sure there'll be stuff in this that you like (please let us know) and stuff you don't (please let us know). But that feedback helps us make the game better, and we're hard at work on it, every day. Thank you! And please, if you like the game, please tell a friend. Every single player means the world to us.
So I know at least some of you reading this post must be thinking, "You're the only one who posts here! Why do you keep talking to yourself?" And yeah, it's definitely a little weird, but the reason is that we've actually talked, in-game, to a bunch of folks that have come from TA. So I know it might be weird, but it's nice to at least have a place to leave sort of long-form communication to the folks we play in-game. It's been an interesting week! We released the big UI update, and had our fingers crossed that it'd help "early user retention" - whether new players come back or not - because we hoped it'd address the biggest problem we had, which is that players were really confused about what to do. Well, as with most things, we didn't get the update exactly right, and kind of traded one problem for another. With the original UI, if you ended up getting to a point where you were making good moves, it was because you understood the underlying metaphor of the game - two players fighting at varying distances, and your cards represented the options you had in any moment. With the new UI, way more people were making good moves, but it was unclear to people *why* they should choose one card over another, or why they shouldn't simply always choose the card with the biggest number on it. So the quality of moves went up, which was GREAT, but the understanding of why either stayed the same or went down. We've spent the last few weeks revamping our tutorial. One of the strange things that happens, if you're a small developer, is that you can't do a bunch of things at once. Two months ago, we made the decision to revamp the UI, but the thing we put off to do that was a more polished tutorial. The hope was that more people would "get it" with the new UI, and we'd actually need less tutorial. That may or may not be true - but the thing that *is* clear is that a better tutorial will help a LOT. So we're in the midst of doing that, and hopefully it'll make new players' experience a lot better. We've also been considering a bit of a "puzzle mode", where you jump into a game at a preset moment, and you have to win with the cards you have. It'd be a way to show people that there is a ton of strategy, and you do need some foresight to set up big moves, but even with the element of randomness that's present in card games, there are definitely good moves, bad moves, and great player with bad cards can still outsmart a bad player with good cards. That's probably at least a little ways off - but the other thing we're going to be doing is bringing back the AI player to fight against in single-player mode. The reason is that one of the big parts of this game has always been a single player mode, but our goal with it is to actually do something that we've never seen done before. The whole card-combat mechanic is, in essence, like clicking on monsters in Diablo. You need that part to be fun in and of itself, before bothering to make the rest of Diablo. It's the foundation upon which you build. I think we've got a good foundation, finally. And we've got about two weeks of things to do to really solidify that. But after that, we're going to start getting into the weirder stuff. Should be fun!
We did some rejiggering of the graphics in the game. Cranked up the contrast, added some blend layers, and things look a lot more polished where they used to be a little on the flat side.
In a lot of games, the tutorial is one of the last things to get finished, because you really don't know how to teach someone how to play a game until the game exists, you can play it, and figure out what's confusing. For a new player, our game was *very* confusing. Why? 1.) It's not like other CCGs. 1a.) There's no collectability. 1b.) There's no deckbuilding. 1c.) There isn't a minion/face structure 1d.) It's not real-time synchronous multiplayer. 2.) It's not like many other card games. 2a.) Higher numbers aren't strictly better. 2b.) You play two cards at a time. 2c.) One of the cards' strengths is situationally-dependent. 3.) It's both synchronous and asynchronous. You play the trainer & single-player synchronously, and multiplayer is either async or sync, depending on whether the other player is online at the moment and taking turns. Trying to figure out not just how to convey all that, but that those were the critical things to convey has been a massive challenge, and for a ton of players who downloaded the game early, it was a confusing nightmarish mess. And weirdly, we knew that, and released it anyway. Why? Because by having real people play the game (and fail to understand it), we learned where people had problems and were able to fix it faster than if we'd just done internal focus testing & tried to develop the game in a vacuum. So finally, yesterday, we released what we'd consider the first "complete" tutorial/new user experience into the game. It's finally something we can just hand to someone and say, "Okay, give this a shot & let us know what you think," and stand a pretty solid chance of them understanding how to play, how to strategize, and what to expect. If you've got a chance to give it a shot, we'd really appreciate any feedback from new players. Thanks! https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/wonderspark-inc./id944089926?mt=8
Coming in the next few days: character progression! GMF was intended from the start to be a single-player game where you'd have leveling up and custom gear and all kinds of stuff. But in order to make sure it was worth building that, we had to make sure the core combat was fun. We've had people playing for months without any progression mechanics, so ... yeah, we'd consider that "confirmed". Now, we're building in progression, which will eventually lead to "new, custom gear w/ stats", but in between, we're also going to be doing something I don't think we've seen too much of in games, and is part of the "core idea" behind GMF, and its original title, Alter/Ego. So yeah - next up, character progression. After that, something rather strange.
Single player character progression is in. You earn an Upgrade Point for every level you go up, and you can assign it to one of your character's stats to make them stronger. Right now works with the single player vs. AI mode - and the AI's gotten a huge upgrade as well. Enemies now have "perks", where as you level up, they get stronger & their rewards increase. It's all a bit weird now, because it relies on something that's not quite done ,but should be in in the next few days, which is an activity log. If that sounds strange, it is!
Still hard at work. Coming soon: New Client Update - massive improvement in load times "Adventure Mode" - a Single Player campaign that (optionally) uses Motion Data (pedometers, activity trackers, etc.) to give you extra content & rewards. 1st step toward a grander idea, but you've gotta start somewhere. New enemies - "bite-sized" combat you can knock down in 1-2 turns. Recently: Character Progression - just the beginning, but vs. single-player opponents, you can now upgrade your attack, defense, etc. New graphics - new loading screen graphic, new loading screen flavor text. Big revision of art style coming in the next month or so. UI Audio - FINALLY, we've got button clicks & card SFX, and boy does it make a big difference.
Our 2.1.0 update has been submitted to Apple. This will enable "beta" access to the new Adventure Mode, which is still very much a work-in-progress. If you opt-in to playing it, you'll get a single-player campaign that unfolds over time and integrates with activity trackers & your phone's step tracker, if you enable Motion & Activity Data. It's a weird little mode - you'll have a persistent health bar that'll recover each night, but the goal is to survive the whole day to maximize potential rewards. We've got a way to go on it, but it's kind of a strange feature, so we wanted to get it out there early even though it's super rough, so that we can get a feel for how people are playing. We're still waiting on Apple to approve the update, but historically speaking, it'll probably be live before the end of the week.
We just released an update with a very early version of "Adventure Mode", which is a single-player campaign that uses activity tracking to create content from your real-world activity. It's very rough at the moment, but we wanted to get it out into the world. To access it, start the game, get to the main menu - click on the "news feed" icon at the top (it'll be badged), then read the update, and opt-in to the beta. Once you've done that, you'll have a little Adventure Mode button at the top of the main menu. If you get a chance to check it out, please let us know what you think! Thanks!
