Getting Back to Business

I'd like to apologize for my absence on the blog and the game over the past month and a half. A few personal and professional factors came together and took me offline for a bit, but I should have at least made a post letting you guys know.

So, where do things stand now?

In late March and early April I promoted Catastrophe X pretty heavily and we received a substantial inflow of new players. It was a crazy time for me, and I was pulling 15 hour days trying to engage new players, keep return players busy with new maps and crafts, release new features, and fix issues with existing features.

Although the game accumulated a great group of core players, it didn't gain enough traction to start growing by word of mouth. Rather than go broke, I decided to pull the plug on most of the promotion. Fortunately, I feel like have a good sense of what needs to be improved in order to make Catastrophe X appeal to a wider audience. Much has been learned.

1. It takes far too much effort for new visitors to create an account, find an opponent, and figure out how to play by watching or reading the tutorials. I need to make the game much more approachable -- new players should be eased into things in an enjoyable, engaging manner, with as few hurdles as possible.

2. I need to work on making gameplay more engaging and strategic. The root of the problem right now is that I am fairly limited in the functionality that I can assign to crafts, but I have plans to improve this considerably. Moreover, basic actions like moving and attacking feel tedious because you need to command them each tick. Players should be able to, for example, instruct a craft to move across the map in one click, even if it takes multiple ticks to get there.

3. The game needs a broader goal so that battles have a real sense of importance. Player ratings were intended to fill this need, but they are somewhat lacking -- new players don't come back just to improve a rating. If winning a battle yielded territory or resources of some sort then there would be a real reason to fight. Giving each player a personal army of crafts to develop through battle will be a major step in the right direction.

I will be spending the coming weeks and months trying to improve the game on these three broad fronts. In the mean time, I will not be promoting Catastrophe X heavily. It does not make sense to pour resources into publicity when the conversion rate of visitors into repeat players is low.

My first priority is to finish implementing the new framework throughout the rest of the game. I have spent the last couple of weeks working at this, and I plan on completing and releasing these changes within the next couple of days. The game will look and feel mostly the same, but the new setup will be faster and far easier to extend and improve. This will lay the groundwork for significant improvements moving forward.

Now that I am back online, don't hesitate to drop me a line on the forums or private message me with any comments and suggestions for the game. I will regularly make myself available for online chat and battles as well.

More soon!

New Map, Battle User List, and More

Today's new roll out of Catastrophe X includes the following additions and improvements.

Improved Battle User List

The battle interface has always had a user list, but it was hidden in a tab. Such important information ought to be available at a moment's notice, which is why you will now find a small user list at the bottom-right of your map display, right above the chat console.

New Map: Rotary

This new three-player map has a central battle area, plus energy-rich side routes to each opponent.

Other Improvements

Your login information should now be saved even when I deploy a new version of the game.

There will now be fewer blog timeouts at the Capital. Moreover, new blog posts now show up in real time in the Capital, and highlight the tab to get your attention.

I have reduced the size of the chat console in battles. In my opinion, it was occupying too much playing area.

I have fixed a problem that prevented consoles from staying scrolled down to the newest entry.

New Craft, New Map, and Much More

Today's Catastrophe X release includes the following additions and improvements.

New Craft: Particle Cannon

The particle cannon costs 15 blue to deploy and is stationary. When straddling a blue tile, the cannon's attack inflicts 7 damage on a single tile in its large range. When not straddling a blue tile, damage is reduced to 1. The attack costs 10 blue to command.

New Map: Subversion

This new two-player map features an energy-rich island that can only be incorporated into your deployment zone if you have made special preparations in your detachment. Green and blue energy tiles are noticeably absent.

Craft Changes

Medicraft: Repair action now does +8 health per tile instead of +2 health per tile, and costs 5 green instead of 2 green, 2 blue, 2 white. The craft now costs 5 green to deploy instead of 5 green and 5 blue. Moving is now free instead of 1 green and 1 blue.

Regenerator: Regenerate action now does +5 health per tile instead of +3 health per tile, and costs 15 green instead of 15 green, 10 white. The craft now costs 10 green to deploy instead of 4 green, 4 blue, 3 white.

Map Changes

Command uplinks in Tetrad have been pushed away from the center to make defense easier.

I also fixed an alignment problem with the top-left command uplink on the Flake map.

Bug Fixes and Minor Changes

Fixed the bug that would execute the deployments by defeated players on 3+ player maps.

Fixed the bug that would freeze portions of the UI when a player was defeated in 3+ player maps.

Players can now view five profiles at once, instead of three.

When an event occurs on a hidden tab, it is now highlighted bright yellow to get your attention.

Looking Forward

There are still some nasty bugs in the game that bring down the server and halt user input. I am doing my best to track these down and eliminate them. Unfortunately, they are difficult to reproduce, and therefore difficult to debug. I'm on it.

I have also started moving the battle functionality to the new framework. I will do this gradually and behind the scenes over the next week or so. Once transitioned, I will be able to add new features to the battles at a much faster pace.

A Plea for Help

I am very happy to see that Catastrophe X has developed a solid core player base over the past week. There is now a growing group of regulars, and I am impressed by the skill that I see in both battle and detachment design.

I am having a problem though. There is often a lack of upcoming battles, and many new players simply leave as a result. To try and grow the community, I am currently spending the majority of my day engaging newcomers in battle. I do enjoy helping new players, but it prevents me from improving the game as quickly as everyone would like.

I would like to ask for help in the following way:

1. Please host battles. Preferably just leave an upcoming battle hosted all the time and keep an eye on it for activity (ideally unrated with the default settings). New players are usually looking to dive right in to a battle, and when there are none hosted they often leave.

2. Please help newcomers learn the game. Don't just destroy them. I would like Catastrophe X to be a friendly and open community, so let's all put our egos aside and teach people the game.

If we work together, within a week or two we can have significantly more skilled opponents to battle against, and the game will be more fun for everybody. Moreover, I will be freed up to spend more time on development, so we will have more cool new features, crafts, and maps.

For what it is worth, I will need game moderators relatively soon, and I will be looking for players who have contributed positively to the community. I know that's a bit of a a vague, hand-wavy promise for the future, but it's a sincere one.

Thank you, and more soon!

Craft Changes, Tab Highlighting, and More

I have just released a new version of Catastrophe X with a variety of improvements and fixes.

First off, I have made a number of changes to existing crafts in an attempt to improve balance and make some of the previously useless crafts more viable. Looking forward, I will be focusing more on creating new crafts.

- Arrow damage has been increased from 1 to 3 and deployment cost has been reduced from 5 to 4 red.

- Spitfire deployment cost has been increased from 3 grey to 6 grey.

- Falconcrafts have been reduced from 3 damage to 2, but now hit 3 tiles instead of 1 (see image below).

With today's release, you will also find that the navigation tabs at the top of the game highlight when there is activity on a hidden screen. This will help you monitor a number of screens without constantly switching back and forth.

I have also made a number of other fixes and improvements:

- I believe that I have fixed the "selection bug" (where nothing pops up when clicking on the battle map). If you still experience this problem please PM me.

- I can now deploy a new version of the game without disconnecting players on the old server (which would, for example, discard changes to any detachments being edited).

- There is no more error message when you press Done twice in battle.

- Private messages are now sent when you press the enter key.

- Fixed the host recognition bug in battles so that hosts can now silence players and observers.

More soon!

New Maps, Craft Updates, Password Management

With today's new version of Catastrophe X I have added two new Maps: Flake (6 players) and Frozen Worlds (2 players). I may revise these maps slightly in the coming days based on player feedback.

I have also made the following craft adjustments in an attempt to make some of the less viable crafts a more important part of game play:

- Regenerators have a much larger healing zone
- Satellites have a much larger moving range
- Drones cost less and have a larger damage area
- Spitfires are less expensive
- Corvettes have a slightly larger attack range

I have also added some password management features, specifically password reset and password change features.

More tomorrow!

Craft Balancing, Luna Overhaul, Bug Fixes

Today's new deployment comes with a number of changes to help balance battles:

- Command Uplink health increased from 10 to 30 to help against rushing.
- Trident health reduced from 100 to 60, since they were nearly impossible to destroy.
- Wasps have been downgraded, health from 10 to 4, and attack priority from 1 to 4. They were far too powerful.

It was also brought to my attention that the Luna map was not fully symmetric, giving an advantage to one participant. I started working on the map, and ended up pretty much overhauling it since it is tricky  to make rectangular maps symmetric. It now has a very different shape and is fully symmetric.

In addition I made some miscellaneous bug fixes and usability improvements:

- Consoles now scroll to the bottom properly when there is a new event.
- Your own chat messages appear in a distinct color to separate them from others'.
- Completed battles are now destroyed after 30 minutes instead of 10, since this was cutting many post-battle chats short. Down the road I may keep battles open until all users leave.
- Fixed a problem with the user list sorting in upcoming battles.

More soon!