We had a great showing at Insomnia 56 in Birmingham from December 11-14. I had the pleasure of attending the show with the ever-wonderful Matt Gambell, developer of RPG Tycoon. Matt is not only a skilled developer and wonderful human being - he is also talented with a camera (both still and moving!). He has some great shots up on his blog, which you can check out here. Thank you to everyone who came by and played the game!

The feedback from players was tremendously positive. We got fan mail and people are also really enthusiastic about our community-driven story, which is super encouraging. Being a bit of a niche product, it is always rewarding to see the game ‘click’ with users.

We did learn a lot about how players are viewing and interacting with the combo wheel UI system. Contrast, movement, subtle directions - all of these things are playing a role in how people are using the wheel, and being able to see this up-close was extremely valuable. Our latest updated includes the UI changes we developed in response to what we saw!

Here’s one of my favorite shots from the show (RPG corner!!):

Following Insomnia (we’re getting enough sleep, don’t worry, Mom), we set about updating the game with some things we’ve had in the works for a while, namely our real set of Mage animations and an updated game camera. We’ve also added several new features, listed below:

0.0.5 Patch Notes:

• As mentioned, new Mage animations!

• Special attack gems now use moving arrows to show you where to move the mouse next (thanks, Matt!)

• Draw order for gems now keeps the first activated gem on top

• Camera now rotates to a higher angle when characters are bunched together

• We now have persistent player inventory, and items can be awarded from quests

• Equip items to change your character stats!

• Performance enhancements!

• Saved games are now stored in our cloud backend, so they will be portable across platforms

• Tiles that grant bonuses are now green so it’s clear that it’s good to stand on them

• Corrupted tiles now have solid visual effects on them to be more obvious that you should not stand there

Did you notice the bit about player inventories? Just to geek out for a moment here, that means we have the fundamentals of our equipment system in and working! As the game gets built, more gems that have more dramatic stat effects will be introduced, so you can enhance and alter your characters to behave the way you want.

With that, we wish all of you a very happy holiday season! And we will be opening the new year with a very big announcement, so stay tuned!