v0.44: Revamped New Player Experience, Starter Relics, and more!

Hi everyone!

Some of you have already tried v0.44 because it has been out for 3 weeks now. But I haven't published an article for it till now because I was on a holiday and wanted to add some additional features and polishes. But now, say hello to v0.44.1! ^^

This patch was focusing on making the new player experience much better, improving the tutorial system, and adding some new tutorial bubbles. Besides this huge change, I also implemented various smaller UI, QoL and world map changes, and of course balancing and fixes!

As always: join my Discord server to share your thoughts and receive instant access to the playtest! ;)

Tutorial Improvements!

• Tutorial now starts without a user interface, teaching the player the basic controls.

• Interface elements appear gradually, as the "tutorial monk" introduces their corresponding feature. For example initially only your cards are visible, then as the monk introduces the player to the resources, the resource panel appears, and then while explaining the game's goal, the population circle appears, and so on.

• Interface elements are highlighted when the tutorial talks about them.

• Images appear besides some of the the tutorial texts, e.g. when the tile claiming effect of the House card is explained, when the town rank system is introduced, etc.

• New tutorials have been added! For example about the resource panel, about stone, gold and barbarian camps, also about sacred islands, treasure chests, coins, relics, and finally regarding the unlock system.

World Map Changes

• At the start of each run, you can choose from 3 random relics. The relics provided by the starter decks are now called ancestral relics, to avoid confusing them with these "starter relics".

• First utility layer moved further ahead, so now there are two regular islands before the first utility island.

• Resting camps are less random: now besides the always appearing camps before the boss island (which are temporarily replaced, see next bullet point), there is now always one camp in each half of the map.

• Temporarily replaced the resting camps before the boss node with sacred islands, thus letting you try your brand new stuff after the second/final shop. When boss levels are implemented, this will be reverted.

• Fixed a big issue: when a game was continued in the world map, island modifiers were always regenerated.

User Interface Improvements

• Reputation now pulsates if you have only one left.

• Tooltip visuals improved

• Smaller coin and reputation panels

• Moved the draw and discard pile buttons to the bottom left part of the screen, besides the population panel.

• Moved the decree panel to the bottom right corner where the pile buttons were.

Smaller Changes

• When using the Territorial Deed or Expansion cards, and the selected tile can be claimed by multiple towns, the player has to select which town they want to claim it for. But for a lot of players it was unclear what the game was waiting for. Now there is a text describing the situation.

• Islands visited added to the post game screen.

• Unlocks on the post game screen are separated into a second "page" for a cleaner look, also fixing widescreen issues.

• Intro video volume is affected by master volume setting.

• Quests having undiscovered card rewards was a bug, but it turned out to be a nice, intriguing "feature". So made it into a proper a feature and fixed it so it's discovered when acquired.

• Relic balancing, either via value tuning or mechanic changing. Also polished some descriptions.

• Lots of fixes including card merging, tile related quests, card "reroller" card, quests wanting you to use already exhausted cards, unlocking starter deck relic by mistake at the end of a run, flying resource icon issues, and many many more, most likely only discovered by me and I was silly enough to spend days on fixing them. ^^

As always, a huge thanks for your continued support and feedback!

Now I just have to decide whether to work on overhauling the existing content which could introduce some "urgency" to the player (possible removing demands, who knows), or to work on the wonder/boss islands feature,

If you'd like to share your thoughts on these changes or report any issues, join my Discord server! (and of course I'll grant you instant access to the playtest! ;) )

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the update! :) Tibor a.k.a. Tudvari a.k.a. Portgate Studios