Atomic Blog

semi-coherent ramblings from the developers of Atomic Brawl

State of the Game: October 23rd

Remember last week when we said week when we said we were going to make our State of the Game a weekly feature? We’re happy to report that we’re not dirty liars!

This week we’ll talk about what’s next in our work queue, highlight some interesting community goings-on, and introduce a Random Thing of the Week.

Coming Up Next

This week we have a few things we’re working on in parallel. As always, bugs are top of the list, and anything that comes in will be addressed immediately.

This week, the amazing folks at Power Up Audio (@PowerUpAudio) will begin helping us with the development of some sound effects for the game. One of the biggest critiques we get when people first check out the game is:

What!? No sound… Why is there no sound? Are my speakers broken? This is a game right!?

Sounds can be turned off if it’s not your thing, however we really think this will add a ton of depth and polish to the game. This polish should help us convert more potential players into Atomic Brawl addicts.

On the topic of sound, we’ve been working on cleaning up the tutorial in preparation for some voice-over work. We’ve teamed up with the illustrious Jacob Burgess (@CapnXez) to come up with some rocking narration for the tutorial. We did a trial run of this and the result was amazing. This is another thing that will really help us get some more meat players for everyone to consume play with.

Finally, on the feature front. This week we’re going to try to get an implementation of our Friends feature complete. What is friends, you ask? Great question! Here is what this feature will look like:

  • Create a list of players you most commonly play with.
  • Track your win/loss record against specific players.
  • Check out the profile of your friends, their league, records, etc.
  • Quickly invite your friends to games.
  • View the profiles of your opponents in-game.
  • Opt-out of having a publicly viewable profile if you’re the shy type.

The friends feature addresses some super common feedback we get, so let us know if you have any other ideas in this regard.

Community Shout-Outs

I thought this week I would bring attention to some cool community stuff. Let us know throughout the week if there’s anything you think should be mentioned in this section.

Firstly from @JustinMolinari we have:

We love hearing this sort of stuff. We hope we can generate more buzz soon. Internetting is hard. Next up we have @AlexCatamo who wrote:

Which made both Ken and I laugh pretty good. Over on reddit there’s a few really interesting discussions going on:

  • Puppet Problems: We know that these control cards can be frustrating, and would love to get feedback from the community as to what everyone else thinks.
  • Low Cost Card Spam: Here’s another one we’re following closely as it relates to card balance. Low cost cards, and Aggronium are on our radar, but we haven’t yet settled on how we want to address this.
  • More Challenges: We get a lot of requests for more challenges. Here we mention that if anyone has a good concept for a challenge, send it our way, and it may end up in game.

Random Thing of the Week

Ok – so what is this feature? Basically, just a place for Ken and I to write a little something about anything on our mind. This week – our Random Thing of the Week will be a link.

Before we start, Ken and I both love all things Day[9]. Ken has, on many occasions, said:

If Day[9] plays our game, that’s success. That’s all I want.

So it comes as no surprise that when I run across something Day[9] related, Ken gets sent that thing pretty quickly. This week, I found Day[9]’s new web series on the Geek and Sundry channel where he plays MTG with his friends. Since our community has a lot of Magic players, we figured some of you may get a kick out of these, if this is you be sure to check out Spellslingers. It’s super well done, and a great way to showcase Magic.

That’s all for now. See you next week.

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