Celebrating the first Pill Bug Interactive Golden Ticket Winner!
You may not be aware but for the last 5 months, 14 days and 6 hours players of our second game Cycle 28 have been working hard to solve a mystery in the game.
The ARG-esque community puzzle involved hunting through ship logs, hidden stories, local libraries, and artisanal coffee videos.
We are extremely excited to announce that a member the Cycle 28 community, Sam from Australia, has claimed the first ever Pill Bug Golden Ticket by solving the mystery!
Having solved the mystery of Cycle 28, Sam explained step-by-step how they broke Flight Lieutenant Olivia Bergen - the game’s protagonist - out of the time loop, becoming the first person to see the end credits. Sam was very grateful to many members of the Cycle 28 community in helping them reach the solution. As well as a bunch of Pill Bug goodies and prizes, Sam will get every Pill Bug game we ever make!
We’re not going to tell you exactly how the mystery was solved, that’s up to Sam, but we will say all the community’s hard work in finding the codes, cracking the cipher, and keeping each other going made a huge difference. If you aren't part of the discussion already, check out our Discord channel:
https://discord.me/pillbugint
To celebrate Sam’s achievement, we are putting Cycle 28 and Intelligent Design on sale on Steam from August 27th to September 3rd!
UI Update Preview
Hot off the tails of our recent launch of Cycle 28 on Nintendo Switch, we turn our eyes to the next update for Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox.
We have been working on some UI updates which we wanted to share, you can watch Dave and I chat about them below. Let us know your thoughts.
EDIT: You can now try this out yourself... To download it go to Intelligent Design in your Steam library, right click it and select properties. Then click on the Betas tab of the window which appears and select the Experimental Branch from the drop down list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cXhnqeXKYI
Pill Bug Talk Intelligent Design (and much more) with Tanked Up Cast!
This week Sean and I were lucky enough to be invited onto the Tanked Up Cast. We talked craft beer, game development, and future plans for ID. We also went pretty deep into the development process for Cycle 28 too.
It was great to sit down with Ben and Aadil and talk about life as game devs, including what we've learned over our two releases.
What will quickly become clear is we can never call ourselves beer connoisseurs! Perhaps the biggest takeaway was that we need to listen to Tanked Up more - as do the rest of you!
Check out Tanked Up episode 115, available wherever you get your podcasts!
Update Plans
The dust has started to settle following the launch of our second game Cycle 28 and Dave and I have started to draw up plans for the next Intelligent Design update.
We sat down today and read though every review for the game to find common themes we can address based on your feedback.
Based on that we've decided to work on the following things in the next big update:
1) UI and controls
When I first designed Intelligent Design I wanted it to be a relaxing couch experience, which to me meant controller support. The constraint I put on the design by wanting to retain controller support was a bad decision. We are going to rethink the control scheme by removing that constraint. Our plan is to have the game control like most other management style games, a simple menu where you click to select what you want to build then click in the world where you want it to appear.
2) New player experience
There is a lot to take in for a new player in Intelligent Design. Sometimes it is unclear what impact your choices have on the game world. To help this we are going to scrap the current tutorial and start again. The improvements to UI and controls will help us with this, making it easier to include context aware tooltips.
3) A new map
More maps can only be a good thing right? :D
We can't give a timescale on these updates, but we will continue to let you know how it goes. To get the news before anyone else be sure to sign up to our mailing list (which also comes with a free copy of the Cycle 28 soundtrack!)
We will be showing Cycle 28 in Cardiff this weekend!
Dave and I will be at the Arcade Vault's Player Nation event this Saturday in Cardiff. If you are local it would be great to say hi. We will be giving away some Pill Bug Interactive goodies, some for free and others which you'll have to work for by getting high scores on Cycle 28.
Pill Bug releases 2nd game!
Hi everyone,
We just wanted to let you know that our 2nd game, Cycle 28, has released on Steam! It's pretty different from ID, but still has some of features you'd expect from Pill Bug - like a really juicy, community-drive puzzle to solve. We know how much you love those! Check it out
here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCkjgSqn23c
We also have some exciting plans brewing for ID updates, so keep an eye on the Hub!
Free copy of the soundtrack for our next game, Cycle 28
We are currently giving away free copies of the soundtrack for our next game, Cycle 28, when you sign up to our mailing list here.
I'm really proud of what we have created with Cycle 28, the soundtrack in particular is pretty special. It was composed by Jordan Rees who has worked on trailers for movies and games, including Call of Duty and Blade Runner 2049. Check it out.
Genetics and New Player Guides
We have just published a full guide to all the genes in Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox. This contains all we know about the genetics, so don't read it if you want to figure that stuff out yourself.
We have also posted a video guide for new players which is a little less spoilery. Also don't forget to join our [URL="https://discord.gg/TEagzYy"]discord[/URL] to discuss all things genetic.
This is to get people thinking about the guide competition we announced last week to win a copy of Cycle 28 . If you want a chance to be one of the first to play our next game, follow the instructions in the post linked above.
Since I started designing Intelligent Design my aim was to make people feel like a scientist. To achieve that I wanted to hold back some information and let players work together to investigate the world. Some people really enjoyed that, whereas other people did not. For a while I've been resisting making a guide like this, but more recently I wondered "who am I to tell you how to enjoy the game". In light of that change of heart we've posted this guide. Hope you enjoy it and really hope it ignites some creativity with genetic engineering!
Community guide competition to win copies of our next game Cycle 28
Today we are excited to announce Pill Bug Interactive's next game: Cycle 28.
To celebrate we are going to run an Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox (ID) community guide competition. The winners of which will get free copies of Cycle 28 with full closed beta access.
Over the last month we have gained a large number of new players to ID. These players missed out on the game’s amazing launch, during which everyone was working together to figure out what all the genes did to their flora and fauna. To try and help these new players out Pill Bug will be writing our own official guides, but we would love to see what the community can do, hence this competition.
On the first of February we will rank all the community guides by their rating and give the top 3 guides a Cycle 28 beta key (which is also a retail key).
To learn more about Cycle 28 and add it to your wish list check out the store page here.
Patch Notes 15/07/2017
Updated to Unity 2017.1
Added per object culling of objects at distance, should improve performance on low end machines
Optimised building rendering
Edit: Valve are currently having server issues which are causing problems with pushing updates to clients so this build won't turn up until they fix it
