Hey there,
it’s us again. As promised in the last update, we’ve added and enhanced quite a few things to make the game even better. So let’s have a look.
Cards
As teased in the last update, we’ve added cards into the mix. The game awards you with cards at the end of each turn based on a secret formula. When you get these cards, they show up in your hand, which you can access at the start of the next round.
With cards we wanted to add a way to influence the others players during the round, since we felt that this would make the game more interactive and fun.
So here are the cards we implemented:
All of these have a negative effect on at least one player when they are played. From our testing we’ve found that these six cards feel like a good mix of effects: some more detrimental, some less. So we’ll await your feedback before adding any more.
Narration
An important part that was missing from the game was a proper narration, which is something we added now.
Every screen of the game is fully narrated with about 150 voice lines. In accordance with our goal to make this game as international as possible, the narration has full subtitles in English and German.
We’re really satisfied with how it turned out, but feel free to let us know whether you like it.
Graphics
The graphics of the game have always been something we had to make sacrifices for and we want to explain why.
Our goal was always to support as many devices as possible and with that goal in mind, the whole game is made in web technologies. This is why you can always go to (http://supersketchy.party) and play the whole game without any limitations.
While this is great, it’s also something we had to account for in the graphics department. As you probably know the web is very capable today and offers some really great ways to visualise your content. The flipside are the old browsers that are still around that we also want to support, which often don’t offer the same kind of capabilities as your desktop browser. Why do we want to support these old browser? Well, mainly because these are the kind of browsers which are on your Smart TV and we wanted our game to run on there as well.
Long story short, that’s why we were struggling to deliver a more compelling visualisation for some elements of the game. But since the last update we’ve invested more time in enhancing the elements we didn’t like with the tools that even the old browsers have and we think we have something good to show for now.
Our new Endresult with a better visualisation who made how many points in which round.
Our new Turn Result with fully animated picks and confetti 🎉
Game Client
We’ve changed the underlying technical base of our game client, which should give you a smaller installation and better game support on linux. This was quite the effort to pull off, but we think it should pay out in the long run.
What’s next
To be honest, we don’t know. The game is in a pretty good state right now and really fun to play. We’ve achieved most of our Early Access goals and are overall very confident that you’ll have fun playing the game. We are planning on adding the rest this year and release version 1.0. What comes after depends fully on the player feedback we receive. Before adding any additional features beyond the scope for 1.0, we want to assess the feedback first to see what would bring the most value to you. So, as always, leave us your feedback here or in the Steam Reviews, so we can see what you think we should improve.