First of all, apologies for the bug with Challenge Island going down this morning! When we tested the takedown a week ago we didn't run into this, but of course now that it's LIVE it turns out that people who had guildians still slotted into the island had them stuck in the island when it went down. Not an ideal scenario and not at all by design!
The push out today should be solving that.
We ALSO had an issue where the online services went down for 15-30 minutes or so yesterday. Sadly this is completely out of our control and affected all sorts of games other than ours. If you ran into some weirdness yesterday with trying to open chests etc that's most likely what was happening to you.
In more bad news, we were down a dev this week so it's just two of us, which means it's pretty slim pickings for an update. BUT, that doesn't mean we've been slacking off.
Challenge Island is down! Thanks to everyone who participated and gave us feedback. We're going to take that and see about giving you a new island next week that might have some tweaked rules even! Things like only being able to have one Dark Knight equipped on the island at a time? We'll see.
Android Closed Beta Sign-Up Sometime in the next few weeks we should be ready to start sharing a closed beta for android. If you're interested in helping out and getting your hands on an early build, please follow along to this link and leave us some info so we can send keys when it's ready.
New UI? As we're spreading out testing on Android, we've been getting...pretty consistent feedback about our UI. So I've started work on making our buttons easier to press and read on small screens.
Not saying this is the final layout or anything, but it's a first draft towards a hopefully better direction!
Welcome to... CHALLENGE ISLAND
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.
Quality of Your Lives And Other Fixes
Last week was a big update for us, so we're going a little quieter this week.
New Quest Map UI The original art was pretty old, but more importantly, it was actually causing a LOT of drawcalls (which can get expensive for some systems). We were able to crunch those all down which should help with performance across the board, even if it doesn't feel like it.
Smaller Curve of Purchasing Starpoints Once you reach 10aa price for Starpoints (in the Skills screen), instead of jumping up to 100aa it will instead go up by increments of 10aa each subsequent purchase. So 20aa, 30aa, etc.
Guildhall UI Tweaks We updated the card slot UI in the guildhall screen to help make buttons easier to read and click, and to have clearer slots for actual guildian cards (which are shaped differently from regular cards).
Also a new X button, which doesn't deserve it's own title!
Coming Soon... There are a lot of things being worked on right now, but next week SHOULD bring you a brand new temporary island we want to test out. Something that shows up for a limited time and is more about a challenge to overcome.
Update <*>Pushed a hotfix for rewarding players with a chest that has starpoints in it. We changed the costs of purchasing starpoints with gold and wanted to compensate for the changes.
<*>Pushed ANOTHER fix since we forgot an X button in the Forge, oops!
Here Come the Corgis
The winner of the Next Guildian vote is.....
The Corgi! The corgi got...a lot of the votes. (The Huntress did rather well though and we'll have to re-look at that design and give them a better/different ability and bring them back later maybe?) So we've been working hard on drawing corgis, animating corgis, researching corgis, creating a corgi island. It's been a lot of good Google searches this last week and a bit.
Corgis will help sniff out your goal in Adventure Quests to speed those along, and end up with a chance to 'critical' an Adventure Quest when they've reached their final form. They also up your adorable stat significantly.
Corgis have their full star point states to unlock, they have cards to find and equip, and they're available in Guildian Chests and very rarely in Epic Chests. You'll also earn 1 Corgi each for unlocking the 2 paths to the new island. AND there's a Star Point bundle for the Corgi that can be bought one time (and has replaced the Bard/Thief bundles).
Crgydogery You'll find this Isle of Corgis on the far right of the map, and can reach it through either Hollowkeep or Icevale.
Quality of Life <*>Swapped out the Quest Icons when you select a quest for icons based on the quest type instead.
<*>New level cap of 550!
<*>Boss timers reset when new Island keys are available, which SHOULD mean even if you just defeated the boss in IceVale, it should reset once the update goes live and you'll be able to join your Corgis soon.
Good luck out there! Enjoy your corgis, and thanks for voting!
UPDATE <*>Just pushing a minor update because I said the new island was on the far LEFT instead of the far RIGHT in the news screen. Whoops.
D-D-D-DAILIIIIIES
First up, thanks for the people who've voted on our next guildian! I'll save the reveal for when the guildian launches (hopefully within the next couple weeks). It was a fun vote! We'll have to do that again more often.
Dailies Dailies are finally implemented! Now you'll get rewards for each day you log into the game.
<*>Dailies are integrated into the Offline Progress screen.
<*>Earn things like gold, xp, cards, starpoints, and gems.
<*>28 days of rewards.
<*>Gold and XP rewards multiply based on your level (so that value can change every time you look at the screen).
<*>Missing a day won't reset the calendar.
<*>Also accessible from the HUD.
New HUD Buttons While I was making a new Daily button for the HUD I figured it was time to update all the buttons, since they're so, so old.
Coming Soon The new guildian!
A new island!
UPDATE We maaaay have used the wrong word in our javascript code which maaaaay have made it hard to collect your dailies after a certain point. A server fix was pushed over the weekend so you should be okay now! Sorry about that.
Gild Your Guildhalls
Get ready to gild your guildhalls for more guildians!
This is a lean update this week. We were also hoping to get Dailies released as well but had to pull it at the last minute so we can make sure it works properly. Apologies! Next week you should start getting daily rewards when you log in, which is something people have been asking for.
How does gilding work?
Every guildhall slot is going to have the option to gild it from the upgrade screen. The cost varies from island to island, city to city. Starts low and gets higher as you go, generally.
Once paid, this guildhall slot is PERMANENTLY upgraded, even when you prestige, and even if you swap a different guildian into the slot. You also are given the power to toggle on/off the gild abilities.
Double Spawn means that you'll spawn twice as many guildians at a time. So 2 will come out instead of 1, but you can't go beyond your map cap. So if it's 25, then you'll only get 25 guildians out maximum.
BUT the other boost is you'll get 50% more guilians to your max, so if you were at 25 max, now you'll get another 13 guildians for a new max of 38.
Enjoy your fancy shiny guildhall that's also larger than before!
Bug Fixes!
We messed up the way the timer works on the Starter Bundle so it wouldn't disappear unless you actually were there when the timer went to 00:00:00. Oops! That's been fixed so it'll be gone now once the timer expires instead of going into negatives.
VOTING TIME Want to help us decide on the next guildian? Then please go HERE to vote for what you want to see next! We've got three options for a new type we're thinking about and could use some opinions.
It's going to be a guildian that boosts the adventure stat for everyone sharing a quest with them, but we can't decide what it should look like!
It's the Final Ascension
(Sorry about the downtime before the launch. We found a last-minute bug that was breaking the game when we made a live build so it took a little longer to roll out than our usual.)
Final Ascension Levels Available!
Now you can upgrade your guildians to their max state! We've been calling them ascension states but I have no idea if that's what we SHOULD be calling them in-game.
Every guildian has 4 states to unlock, and on the final state you'll earn that guildian a new ability ON TOP of the ability they already have! DOUBLE THE ABILITIES! You'll also earn a fancy new look to the guildian, and a new state to their cards.
You can still readjust all the points you've given to guildians at any point, but when you take points away, you'll lose their states.
Buy More Star Points With Coins
At the top left of your Skills page you can spend coins to buy more star points. But the cost will rise with each purchase!
Buy More Star Points in the Store
We've also put in two new bundles into the store, that are only available to purchase once! Each give you 100 gems, 30 star points, and then either a Thief or a Bard to add to your collection.
There will be more chances of getting more star points in the future as we add more islands, too. So while you can't max level everyone yet, it'll be coming as we get more content out there!
Star Point Fix
We had an issue where people could earn more points than they were supposed to thanks to re-grinding the final prestige level. We've fixed that, but won't be taking any star points away that were earned that way. Our bad, but enjoy the extra points!
Coming Soon
I don't want to give specific days of WHEN something is happening, but here's what we're working on for the next month or so:
<*>A new island (or two).
<*>A new guildian (which means new cards, ascension states, etc).
<*>Offline chests (but we'll probably slow down the recharge rates a bit).
<*>Daily rewards!
<*>Permanently upgrade a guildhall's output with gems.
UPDATE
There seem to be some issues with displaying the star point currency from a bundle. On the backend you should be getting the real amount, and if you restart the game everything should sync up. We're looking into how to get that displaying properly though. Sorry about that!
Also totally forgot to mention! Because of how we had to re-adjust the server for adding new temporary bundles, we had to reset everyone. So essentially EVERYONE is going to be offered the Starter Bundle again for the next 48 hours.
Top Requests Update!
This week was all about trying to accomplish some of the biggest requested features from the community!
Opening multiple chests, and seeing your XP values.
Open x10 Chests Yes, we know people want an open all for all their chests! But sadly, we can't accomodate that because of the way the servers we use work. We've been working the last few weeks on trying to figure out how to accomodate SOMEthing, however.
What we could pull off after a lot of rework was an Open x10 button. We'll keep looking into how much we can push that in the future but for now you'll be able to open 10 at a time. Hope this helps!
See your XP Now you can see just how much XP you need! This is probably the second-most-requested-feature. And is a pretty straight forward update.
A pretty straight-forward quality of life update that we hope qualities up your lives. We're also working on other systems at the same time that all take longer than a week so we're trying to pace ourselves out a little better. Next week should give you the last 2 transformations for every guildian for your Star Points! That'll be an exciting one.
Starpoints Shopping Spree!
First off, apologies for the missed update last week! I was sadly the one with family and health emergencies and it just meant we were underpowered to actually deliver anything. So instead, please enjoy the very BIG update this week.
Upgrade Skills!
As you've been finishing islands and difficulties, you've been collecting Star Points. Now you can SPEND those Star Points in the Skills screen. Head on over through this button in your HUD:
From there, you'll see your inventory of guildians, and you can choose to upgrade the stats of that guildian. Give a guildian more Hit Points, or Attack, or Defense, or Adventure (whoops we keep calling it "Explore").
And when you upgrade five times, you'll unlock a new look for that guildian.
We currently only have 2 visual upgrades for each guildian, with 2 more on the way. PLEASE BE AWARE that you can't earn enough points in game to unlock everything yet. We're setting up a runway for more content to start earning more points in the future.
You can add and remove points as you see fit.
New XP Curves
Our XP flow wasn't the best. It started too low, and then SUDDENLY spiked at 401. It wasn't ideal, but it was reactive to how fast people were leveling up. Now it's a much more gradual growth so there's no sudden jolt.
New XP Cap
Level 500! And a new achievement.
New Cards! <*>We added Battle and Adventure multiplier XP cards (didn't have those before).
<*>New Quest cards for quests 22-25 (didn't have those either!).
<*>We've also bumped up the values on Uncommon and up HP cards for your guidlians.
So yes, big week, brand new gigantic system (that was inspired by comments and screenshots posted in the community), and we're off to start on next week's update.
Thanks for playing!
UPDATE <*>Changed the wording from Explore to Adventure in the guildian stats screen.
<*>Star Points weren't saving when you spent them on guildians. That's been fixed!
<*>We had an issue with people who had old HP cards that had been updated to new values conflicting with their databases and not allowing them to log in anymore. New forced update should fix that.
Update Pushed to Next Week
We planned a smaller update this week while we keep working on some of the bigger additions we want to make to the new prestige system. Instead, our little team got hit pretty hard for sick days this week, and we’re still missing the final checks and polish for this week’s update. So we’re delaying and wrapping it all up into next week’s update instead.
Apologies to all of you waiting to see “what’s next” after the big prestige changes last week. Each week’s update comes down to the wire, and doesn’t leave much room for error or absence. Hippogriff’s been hit the hardest on the team, and we need him for finishing all of the XP and gold balance changes we’ve made.
*Pushed to next week:*
• XP balance for up to level 500
• Adventure and Battle Node XP cards
• Fixes to gold balance
• Backend updates to help recover save data if lost
