Dear Players,
Welcome to our developer diary. It will be a bit of a long read, but it’s worth it for those of you who want to know a bit more about what is on the horizon, what has happened, and what Blue Byte is currently working on.
Let’s start out by giving an overview of what has been happening within our developer team over the last month. Besides releasing the Adventure System, we have been restructuring and changing our priorities. As always, developing a game that is already running means changing your priorities and plans when the situations demand it.
We have listened to your feedback on the forums and have seen the annoyance that the Adventure bugs have been causing. Due to this feedback, we have made fixing these bugs our number one priority. This doesn’t mean that all the Adventure bugs will be fixed in the next version, but it does mean that we are focusing our attention particularly to this matter.
Of course, we are developing new content next to fixing these bugs. Please note that the order in which the features are mentioned does not portray the order in which we will release them! As always, it might take some time before these features are realized, but our goal is for them to be released before the first quarter of 2012.
I will be posting these updates over the next few days so keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Twitter as well as this forum post.
Currently Developed Features being tested (will be in build in near future):
Update 1)
Hotkeys:
As requested by the community, we implemented hotkeys for the buildings that are used most often, as well as some tweaks to improve the game experience:
- you can scroll with W, A, S, and D
- with numpad (1-9) you can jump to the different sectors
- with H you can jump to your city hall
- with P you can jump to your Provision House
- with B you can jump to your Barracks
Update 2)
Daily Log In Bonus:
The Daily Log in Bonus seems pretty simple, but there is, technically speaking, a lot more going on in the background. Firstly, it is our guinea pig to implement the technical backend for the quest system that we will do in the future. Secondly, it’s another addition to the game that will give players the option to gather gems for free!
For each day that you log in, you will get a little bonus. Yes, you get this bonus for just simply logging into the game. Each consecutive day that you log in means a nicer reward, with a reward of 45 Gems on the 7th Day! After the 7th day, or after you missed a day, it starts all over again The rewards are fitted to your level.
So what about that quest system? As said, the Daily Log In Bonus is our technical guinea pig to see how it works having triggers and sequenced events. By doing so, we can spot the problems beforehand on a relatively ‘simple’ system so we can start building our more complicated quest system
More Adventures (Updated 9/5)
More adventures? I thought you were fixing the bugs with the Adventures!
Yes, we are, but we took the feedback into consideration, and we are constantly balancing and fixing the existing ones and want to add more to make the game more balanced.
For players ranging from level 36 to level 46, there will be five more Adventures in total.
These five new Adventures will be ‘middle’ to ‘hard’ and will have a difficulty rating of 5 and higher.
Halloween Event
Even the Castle Empire citizens get spooked sometimes! We are planning a Halloween event with some nice new buildings and, of course, specialists. Just a little sneak peak:
- new resource: Pumpkins
- new building: Pumpkin field, Seeder building
- new buffs: Horror, Ghostbuster, Zombie, Frank and Stein
- new specialists: The Grim Reaper General
.. and much more. Please note that the names can still change during the development process, but doesn’t it make you curious about the outcome?
Last thoughts
We know that there are some features that are not listed here the community would really like to see implemented. For example PvP, economic overview screen, and much more. We have gathered all these wishes and we are actively working on them, but as they are still in the concept stage, there is not much we can say about how they will function, what they will look like, or when our estimated release time is. There will be more information on that next year. In the meantime, enjoy the new features for this year!