You may have noticed a few updates over the last few days. We did a few more today and decided to bundle them together into a proper news announcement! Here's what's been added to the game
(Totally forgot to mention in this update, but while I dropped the price of Guildians spawn TIMES, I upped the price of spawning multiples! They're not at all a 1:1 switch, you're still saving way, way more money with this switch, but I wanted to balance it so buying 5 will cost a lot more than getting the speed down to 10 seconds, for example. Since buying multiple spawns causes a lot more growth and waiting for spawns is much more boring.)
(UPDATE: Whoops, the values got a little too overzealous for the costs of guildian spawn multiples. An update will be coming later this morning that will drop those to more reasonable costs. Sorry about that!)
(UPDATE 2: We think we found an edge case that was causing some people to not get the 'complete' achievements. When you download the update and start the game back up you should get those achievements you were missing!)
State of the Guild Jan 30th
Wow. It's been a big week for Guild Quest! Super exciting times. We were hoping to keep up with forum comments but y'all are already overwhelming us. That's a GOOD problem to have, though.
Thanks to everyone who's given our weird game a shot!
Here's what we're planning to do next:
Quality of Life There have been a number of great suggestions that have come up that we want to start getting into the game. On the top of that list
<*>Right-click to go back a screen in the UI.
<*>Numbered timer for Boss battles.
"Dead Zones" These are the empty areas of the game right now where you have nothing to do but wait to earn enough money. We knew about these going in, but what I didn't expect was that these would be interpreted as pushing you to the store. That wasn't the intention! The idea instead is that you check back in later when you have enough money.
This is a known issue that we're going to be working on addressing.
<*>Tweak payouts so you don't hit the dead zones too fast (which is a common complaint right now).
<*>Add in a new activity to do that will give you the chance to play the game to earn more gold and XP during these dead zones.
More Islands More islands and zones will just kind of keep happening. What's there right now is NOT the end of the content by any means!
New Level Cap Right now the cap is 100. That'll go up as we add more content to help you grind and survive.
Game Start Bugs We still have some people who are unable to get the game started and we're still hoping to get that solved. The error logs we've been getting have been a help and will get us there quicker! So thanks to those that are helping out.
Again, thanks for playing and reviewing and talking about Guild Quest! We're blown away by the reaction.
UPDATE Just pushed some tweaks to quest payouts. In general Battle quests will start earning more money the more you upgrade them.
Post-Launch Update!
First of all: Thanks for everyone who's been playing! And thanks for everyone leaving messages and reviews! AND thanks for everyone who's reading this!
We pushed out an update with a few fixes:
- VSYNC: You can now toggle vsync from settings. Previously, you could only select whether vsync was on or off through the Unity graphics quality settings (and Unity doesn't tell you where vsync is enabled and for what). Also, vsync is now on by default in the "Fast" and "Fastest" settings in Unity.
- CARD EQUIPPING ISSUES: It looks like the issue some people were having with equipping cards locking and scrolling around weirdly was a conflict with touch screens. We ended up removing touch screen functionality and things should work properly now.
- WHITE SCREEN: Thanks to the people who helped with error logs, it looks like there are issues with connecting to Steam at the very beginning. You need to be online, AND playing the game in Steam, which should hopefully help most of you with this issue.
The anti-virus software Avast has been known to conflict with Unity on occasion. If you're using that you might want to temporarily disable it and THEN see if the game will run. If that does work please let us know!
We've also heard that resetting computers has helped others. If there's any other info with people still having this issue despite the steps listed here, let us know! If it's something we can fix we'd like to fix it.
- NEW DRAG IMAGE: There were enough people having issues with figuring out how the Equip screen works that we added in a graphic when you first enter the Equip screen that will hopefully help show players how to drag a card out onto the board and into a slot!
WE'RE ONLINE!
Feel free to ask questions!
UPDATE - Mac users: we forgot a single toggle for you! You might need to restart Steam to trigger the new build, but then you should download an actual game when you come back. (If you weren't a dev you couldn't access our Mac build.)
UPDATE 2 - WHITE SCREEN ISSUES: If you're getting this mysterious white screen problem, it would be a huge help if you could tell us some of your system specs (like OS, DirectX, ram, etc). We're not able to repro it and are trying to narrow down the causes.
We've Got a Green Button, People!
Looks like we'll be launching...tomorrow? Hooray!
Not to Troll But...
Boy we suuuuure are getting close to a launch. We're actually playing the game on Steam (in the office anyway), Achievements are in, all sorts of stuff. We're going to spend some time triple-and-quadruple-checking as much as we can and find the things that bug us and fix them.
Barring a disaster (fingers crossed) we'll be launching in January. It's just a matter of if it's next week, and what day, or will it be the 31st?
We'll have Achievements and what's looking like a Windows and Mac build for launch. But no Steam Cards (hopefully that can come soon-ish after though)!
So soon!
State of the Guild Jan 10th
There might have been some holidays in the middle there but we've made some good strides since the last post!
Including a new trailer up on our coming soon page! So make sure to check that out and "oooh" and "aaaah" and all that good stuff. http://store.steampowered.com/app/547680
All sorts of things are being built at the same time as we get ready for a Steam release: re-balancing, more quests, more islands, getting a store set up, and now there are enemies! It took some heavy lifting but we now have enemies appearing on quests and animating and everything, which makes a big difference.
Here's a peak at some of what my days tend to be filled with: graphs and numbers! We've got some pretty great in-house tools made for this game that make editing a breeze, especially when compared to the fact that the very first build of the game used hand-made spreadsheets for every value. But it's still a whole lot of quests and variables to wrap your head around.
Still trucking along for a launch date in hopefully January, so there'll be more soon!
State of the Guild Dec 21st
The one before the Holidays!
We're still working hard, crushing giant ToDo lists on a daily basis at this point. Who knew games need so many little things fixed??
Our goal has been to hit a decent feature-complete milestone before Christmas so that in January we're all about polish and setting up the store (then launching!) and we're lining up well for that.
We just did an internal playtest last week that resulted in us gutting and remaking our tutorial so it'll be less wordy and more conveyance-y. It's a fine line, but there are a lot of systems we need to introduce you to but need to do it in a way that's quick and to the point.
Right now I'm going a little cross-eyed from balancing numbers, but it's been a whole lot of progress! It's feeling good to visit the different islands that all run at the same time, collect my loot drops from bosses every few hours, and expand! Only 4 islands for now but it's a HUGE difference from the single island from before.
Just posting about how we're building a game doesn't seem like the most exciting post, but just in case you didn't think we were building...we are! And hopefully you'll be playing it in January.
Enjoy the Holidays!
State of the Guild Dec 7th
Another week of development! We're starting to be able to get more art and content into the game at this point, which is always a good thing for me. My anxiety levels when we're just coding and can't actually SEE anything are always higher than they should be.
All the systems aren't yet in place, but a bunch of them are stitching together right now. We've been playing around with the first tutorial island and it's feeling pretty good again, which is always a good sign.
Here's a shot of where the World Map is at right now (names, stats, some HUD elements are up for changes).
You'll be expanding zone-to-zone as you play the game. Originally we had it set up that you were on one island and you would keep resetting the island, but we found that wasn't actually what people wanted from the game--everyone wanted to expand, not redo! So now you'll be able to do just that and start building guilds on other islands.
The cool part is that all your islands will be running at the same time, so you'll be collecting benefits from previous islands, so long as you still have guildhalls running on them.
This week we should have loot drops happening properly, which is very exciting! Seeing a treasure chest pop out of a quest is pretty great, even if they don't actually DO anything quite yet.
The question last week was whether we would have Steam Achievements and I'd like to try and launch with that for sure, but I've got a question! If MORE achievements are added later, is that fine? So long as we don't move the goal posts and change existing achievements, that is.
State of the Guild - Nov 29th
First off, apologies for not even checking the community page before! I kept thinking no one would check this out until the game releases. I was wrong, it turns out!
I'll start posting weekly updates of what's going on with development starting now.
Guild Quest is a game about managing quests. You build a quest line, decide which quest to build from an available list, and watch your Guildians work through them. All while you collect the rewards.
The prototype/Alpha build is currently live on web, and we've learned a lot from it and the thousands of players there. But as we move towards Steam and a Beta release, we're making sure to learn from our mistakes.
We're deep into rebuilding the game right now as a result. Getting more stable save systems, performance, and up-ending some of the systems that didn't work as well as we wanted. For example, we tied too much to the 'prestige' system and that left the game very unbalanced, but people really love collecting treasure chests (don't we all?). So we're decoupling treasure chests from prestiging so now you'll get loot drops from specific quests and bosses.
We were also limited to a single island that was hand-drawn and a bit of a beast in texture size. Instead, we've created a system where we can have multiple islands that don't require massive hand-drawn textures and can be tweaked very fast.
As the person who drew that map and knows the pains it would cause to tweak/update it, this is a huge boon. It means I can get more islands and zones for players to explore and build on for very little extra work.
And it's also meant we can now have animating water! That's a good thing.
Feel free to ask any questions and bring up any topics you'd want to see covered! I'll make sure ot answer what I can. Thanks for being here!
