Hello everyone,
As you know, there were no posts about the development progress during the last few weeks. And if you’re observant enough, you noticed there was actually a new update of the beta version available on Steam. Yes, we are still working on the new update, but we changed our plan a little bit. The update is much bigger than we originally planned it to be. This is happening for one simple reason, the domino effect. When we finished the first iteration of madness mode, we found out that we need to rework the whole mission system from the scratch. We needed to keep the replayability in the game. On top of that, we had to rework the EXP system and the algorithm of how slow/fast will the players gain the experience points. This system is not fully debugged yet, but we think it is ready to be released in the update.
So the game has underwent major changes in the last few weeks. The madness mode was added, the missions and exp systems were reworked. There is now 22 missions totally and a lot of them are scalable, so you can gain some more rewards from higher levels of certain missions. As regards the leveling, the player should gain experience faster in the initial phase and then the progress will be slowing down. However, unlike the normal progress, the “rising differences” will decrease at the end. This means that the progress will be slower and slower but the process of slowing will not decrease. Apart from this, we added more stable rewards for reaching new levels, so the player has enough madness points to try out new events in Madness Mode.
The next big change is the fourth one, the Tutorial (we haven't been mentioning it until now). When you start the game for the first time, the tutorial will be automatically launched. This lets player come through the basic mechanics of the game and limits the confusion after connecting to a server for the first time. The tutorial will show you most of the mechanics, that are needed for understanding the basics of the whole game. We hope this will not disturb the players that already had done this. (Shall we add the Skip tutorial button?). The tutorial is in some sort of raw form for now but for total newbies it’s enough for understanding the game. We are now thinking of creating a “Madnesspedia" but we will not give you any date since we are still focused on the development itself.
The last thing is the change regarding to Achievements. Those changes apply together with the missions so you will see this in Steam already.
Okay, there are lot of new things but let’s get back to work :) You can try the latest version in the beta version, but the build can be unstable and most probably it will freeze sometimes. Better said, we put the dev version into the beta. If you would like to help us to debug the glitches, let us know on the game forums.