Good morning, peoples –
Thanks for joining the Playtest, and for giving this game a try. We now have close to 4.000 players in the system – with China, Russian Federation and Japan in the lead.
VERSION 215
We just updated the version of Cards & Projects to 215. Here's what this brings, in no particular order:
FIXED: DISCONNECT BUG
There were cases when you would join the multiplayer queue, an opponent would be matched, and the first thing you see when the session loads is "Opponent disconnected". Then you join the queue again, and you see the same opponent – this time, properly connected.
We located the source of this bug, and fixed it in 215.
TEXT EDITS IN MANDARIN AND IN RUSSIAN
Several players sent very helpful feedback about the spelling mistakes and/or mixed up rules on a few cards in Mandarin and in Russian, we fixed everything that got reported and verified. Thanks for taking the time to send those reports!
FIXED: SOFT LOCK THROUGH REVEAL OF COUNTERFEITS
There was a bug where revealing counterfeits could lead to a soft lock. This is now fixed.
MULTIPLAYER LEADERBOARD LIMITED TO 20 LINES
At the moment, we find that Steam could take a really long time to load the leaderboard data. We now have close to 400 players in the multiplayer leaderboard, and it could be a few minutes before the list is loaded. We thus decided to limit the list to just top 20 entries.
How do you find your own position in this case? Click on the "Steam friends" button shown above.
And you will see a list of players limited to your friends, including yourself. This is not an idea situation, but it's a workaround that works. We will return to the full leaderboard either when we deploy our own server, or when we find out why Steam may take such a long time to return the data.
FONT SIZE NOW ADJUSTABLE FROM MAIN MENU
A few players requested the ability to fine-tune card's font size in the main menu, before going into the actual sessions, and we've added a new section to main menu's Settings.
ZOOM CARD ON HOVER
We forgot to mention this before, but the "Hover on zoom" option for making cards larger when you look at them is now fully functional. You can turn it on/off in the Settings menu, in-session and in the main menu.
RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON CLICK FOR GREMLINOPEDIA
Only after the Playtest started, we realized that we did not communicate anywhere except for one tooltip, that you can right-mouse button click on any card (in hand or in slots) to open its Gremlinopedia page. To make it more obvious, we now explain this in the rules of the game.
GREMLINOPEDIA GOT UPDATED ILLUSTRATIONS
A few illustrations in the Rules were mockups, these are now replaced with better options.
ALL SOUND EFFECTS NOW SHOULD RESPOND TO VOLUME SETTINGS
A few sound effects were not affected by the change in the volume slider. This is now fixed.
APP ICON UPDATED
On Windows clients, the app icon now shows The Governor character from the Japanese character set. On Mac, it's still the weird folder icon, we'll fix this at a later point.
COLORS FOR PROMPTS
Your own prompt texts are now shown in green, and opponent's – in red. Both prompt areas lost their brown background, and now use black – for higher contrast.
COLORS FOR PROJECT CAPSULES
As a small step to having more than 2 players in the session, we decided to experiment with the color of project capsules: these now reflect the color of the players, red and green (in the bright future, after Early Access, players 3 and 4 will be blue and yellow; hence the use of color throughout the game to mean a specific player, we believe it will be very useful).
WHAT'S NEXT?
There's a long list of issues we plan to complete, and among them, we wanted to update you on a few:
PRIVATE SESSIONS
We are aware that a large number of people prefer to play with friends, and thus would join the queue, then disconnect, then not matched with their friend. There's over 1.000 friend invites issued as of now, and more are being issued every day.
We will address this by allowing private multiplayer sessions, which won't affect the rating – but would allow to play with the specific person you're after. This should help the general queue to be more predictable. Private sessions are thus in our focus now.
COOLDOWN SYSTEM
Following this, we'll work on a cooldown system that prevents players who leave the session mid-flight from re-joining the queue before some time has expired. We are aware of situations where a player may leave halfway through the session if they feel like they're losing anyways. We'll try to discourage this behavior. Cooldown period after leaving a multiplayer session is on our map after private sessions.
SERVER-BASED SESSIONS
A dedicated server is a much larger issue that we will deal with next. As it will take significant time, we're going to work on it only after we stabilize the current multiplayer experience with cooldowns and private sessions. Having our own server will allow us to support spectators, protected ranking ladder, and the possibility to re-join a session if you lost connection for any reason. This is coming later.
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Thanks for playing, sharing feedback and reporting the bugs – we are lucky to have such a community!
– S