Version 156 & Playtest Update

The last two weeks, we've been juggling the development of this project as well as the update to the original Gremlins, Inc., and thus a few builds went unannounced. Here's where we are, and what we're up to:

VERSION 156

We are now at version 156, and made progress in several areas:

• we have redone the main menu, which lost all of the non-functioning options; it still looks not too beautiful (so I'm not showing it to you, for now), but it's the baseline from which we'll finish it within this week.
• we have the first version of a public multiplayer lobby working; so that the connection is no longer peer to peer, but through a shared space; we'll need more tests to understand if we need 1 or 2 servers to support the playtest;
• we've solved a few more issues with complicated actions in user interface, such as stealing resources or drawing cards and turning them into resources to be assigned;
• we've caught up on Simplified Chinese in the majority of the game, which now supports all the 4 languages (Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Russian and English)

A few small improvements that we've shipped:

The nicknames of players now have their "player color" (you are green, the opponent is red).

The currently active player (on the screenshot above, me) has an "active player" frame around the avatar, in its color. So if you look at any screenshot at all, you are able to immediately say, whose turn it is now.

Whenever a player plays a card, it has an outline in that player's color in the middle of the table (here you can see me playing "Easy gamble", and you can identify from the green outline that it was me who played it, and not my opponent).

When you need to assign resources (whether to your projects, or away), the neon hand symbol is of the color that matches the initiator of this action. So, here, you can see that I (green nickname) played the card (green outline), which requires me to assign resources, by my own will (green hand).

The hand in the middle reflects the progress of the assignment – here's how it looks once I selected all that I needed to select:

Notice also the project IDs, which are red when they reflect the numbers of projects on the opponent's side and green when these are my own.

Besides this, we harmonized the way we display the unavailability in the game:

In this screenshot you can see:

• the 4 cards on the right side of my hand cannot be played for action right now, with their gears ("rules") crossed out, since I don't have any projects at the moment, and thus cannot satisfy their required condition ("assign 1 resource to your project", says the first card – but I have no projects!).
• the last 3 cards on the right cost resources to play, and since I don't have any projects, I don't have any resources to spend either – hence their cost is crossed out (similarly to what you may recall from Gremlins, Inc.).
• finally, the action slot in the middle of the table has a plus sign crossed out, confirming that I have no action cards that I can play at the moment.

In this way, everywhere in the game where there's a current impossibility to do an action because you lack something (a condition, a price to pay, a specific type of card, etc.), you will see a red line that crosses out the required element.

PLAYTEST

We started accepting sign-ups for Steam Playtest, which at this point is a few weeks away still. As of now, there's 1.500 requests, which we hope to satisfy, with the majority of players from Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, USA and Japan (we're not certain, but Kazakhstan could be a proxy for both Russia and Ukraine; we're happy to see players from any region, speaking any language).

The good news is that with this number of people who want to join the playtest, you guys should have no problems finding someone to play with, in the lobby.

One thing that we started from this week, is the separation of the Playtest Steam branch from the Developer Steam branch. So that once we start the test, we will be able to update the developer version daily, while the public playtest version will be updated once every few days, and will remain more stable. And the news here that you will see, will now deal with the Playtest versions rather than with our internal builds which we keep to ourselves – beginning with the very next update.

What stops us from opening the Playtest right now?

• proper lobby for matchmaking, and server that shows low ping for most of regions
• settings and main menu options (for now it's here and there, not yet finished)
• stats for your sessions, so that we can find a specific sessions when a bug report comes in

It's hard to say when we'll be done, but we now work day after day to make it sooner.

Thanks to everyone who sent their warm wishes, and we can't wait to let you try this thing!