Quadropus Rampage v2.0 Early Access

Ulnarevern

Another little something:
When I have special enemies on a new depth they appear normal for an instant before they get their special colour (probability due to my slow phone).
It has always been the case but since we're on some details here I think it's worth reporting it
By the way does that mean that your pseudo-randomness generate selects the species of ennemies and then determines the special or not genre?

Also can't you add an arbitrary normal run ending? Once the breaking point is reached, the game has no real interest and then it's just way too easy.
I stopped at 6000 meters but I could've continued for hundreds of depths.
Basically, if we buy many artifacts, we end up almost invincible at around 3000 meters (or even before that) and after 4-5km it's just the same thing over and over again and we kill every ennemie with 1 to 4 attacks.
Couldn't you put a 5km ending with a secret perk? Or pass your variables on 64bits but I don't think it easy to do.
Arbitrary stopping the normal run could also be a way to make the players play the other game modes and prevent them from getting bored. Or something like that.

bscotchAdam

@Ulnarevern‌ All valid points! As I understand, before the original launch of QR Seth and Sam were good at the game but not yet good enough to get to the point at which it became broken. Most players still never get there, so I think they just decided not to worry about it.

Some sort of ending would indeed help with that. Sadly, we can't go past 32bit values without faking it in the background (which is possible, but would require that we recode a lot of stuff). 

Ulnarevern

@BscotchAdam‌Yeah that's what I supposed (more or less).

HopeofGlory

Ulnarevern said:

I noticed a little something: the protection icon (blue shield artifact) does not show above the Tack's head when falling to a new depth while you also have the cinderblock artifact, but it is operative. There are also some "0" damage (received) text that pops up from time to time

I realized the 0 damage might come from the mastery where you become invincible for 3 seconds when falling to a new depth. Unbalanced adrenaline. At least that's when it showed up for me. 

bsb333

For some reason my orbs dropped to zero without me spending them...

bscotchAdam

@bsb333 I've had a report of that in Flop Rocket as well, but I haven't been able to track down a source for the problem. It must have something to do with syncing. Do you have any info on what was happening in-game right beforehand? For example, were they already at zero when you rebooted the game, had you just spent orbs on something, or was it at the end of level? And do you have rough guess about how many orbs you had at the time?

bsb333

I first noticed it after i rebooted the game and looked at the shops page and i think i had between 30 - 40 thousand orbs 

bscotchAdam

Still can't find an explanation, but I gave you the coins back.

bsb333

Thanks. Hope you'll find the problem

Ulnarevern

@sam Maybe but I didn't choose this mastery. I'm not sure but I believe it may be involved with bubble (no shit), shield artifact (the one that protects you at the begining of a new depth) but also due to killed monsters. Like, if you kill a monster, it's projectile doesn't deal the damages. Really unsure about that.

@BscotchAdam I had the same problem as bsb333 for Quadropus. It was more likely to be linked to the update for me (and I got 200 bonus doubloons). But I think I worte that somewhere above.

Also, if you add the arbitrary end, you'll need to modify the best run stats/variables (just in case you forgot about that)
And it seems I have definitely a problem with the orbs counter and depth stats. BUT this time I come with an analysis: I wonder if it's not because I already had began my normal run in 2.03 (or 2.02 I guess) and that it didn't take the first ~100 depths I did. Basically it isn't a problem (it's just weird).
For the orb counter, I don't know. But I'm almost certain I did 100-150k orbs during the 6km run and my best is at 62k or something. Am I the only one with the problem?

bscotchAdam

@Ulnarevern‌ The 60k best orbs is because it's stored as a 2-byte integer on the server, so it can't go higher!

Ulnarevern

Aaah ok. Fun.  

bsb333

Kinda off topic and maybe too early to ask without the big titels really being out there yet but how has the bs id system been working out for you buisness wise so far?

bscotchAdam

@bsb333 So far we have 1100 registered BscotchIDs, which is about what we were hoping for before the launch of Quadropus. Of those, 600 have logged into Roid Rage and 300 have logged into Flop Rocket. The fraction of those players who Butter Up is about 45% in Flop Rocket and 25% in Roid Rage. So all in all, it's performing pretty well!

We intentionally started with these games, and without any fanfare, to keep the numbers low so that we could work out all the kinks (thanks to you all!) before we try to go big.

I'll put together a big post-mortem a month or so after we go live with Quadropus and Towelfight.

Duh83

Good job! Those numbers are impressive 

Ulnarevern

Yay nice! I finally bought some credits, ready for after! By the way do you know how much you get (percentage or else) on your sales?

bscotchAdam

@Ulnarevern‌ We get ~70% from Google and Apple. Which is pretty painful. We have no idea what the Steam rate is, since they hold things close to the vest. In any event, we're looking forward to the day when we can get independence from the distribution platforms!

Ulnarevern

70% sounds great but when you consider that it's 70% on 2$ it sounds way worse... I hope you'll be able to become independent as soon as possible

I have another question (about Quadropus this time): wouldn't it be possible (and easy to do) to let the player choose the skins of the weapons he find? Or do the weapon type also determine the characteristics?
By the way, now that I wrote it, it sounds way less interesting.

bscotchAdam

It sounds even worse when you think about it in the other direction. On the one hand, we lose 30% of our sales. On the other hand, if we got to keep that money we would add 42% (30/70) to what we currently make.

Devs definitely get the raw end of the deal.

bsb333

That's terrible
I really hope quadropus will do very well and even more so I hope you'll have your big breakthrough with Crashlands. I mean I haven't played it yet but for what I have seen it seems to be shaping up to become the best game there is on phones... I hope that many other people will think the same way as I do

bscotchAdam

Thanks! We're pretty confident that things will work out. It takes time (and a hell of a lot of work) to build an empire, after all

Duh83

I say we skip towel fight and narwhal and go right to crashlands.  I miss playing the alpha. I'm so excited for that game

bscotchAdam

Well, we're just a few days from being done with Towelfight, so I think we'll just go ahead and finish it

We have changed the timeline for everything else, though, which I'm sure we'll have a post on before too long.

Duh83

Cool. On my old phone I had towel fight completely beaten. I'm glad you guys are making cloud saves.  I look forward to seeing your hard work

CyberKlown28

Can Tack get a Christmas hat from the update through the rest of the year? xD

bscotchAdam

@CyberKlown28‌ We actually wanted to put a bunch of seasonal stuff in there, but we got so bogged down from all the updating that we JUST WANT IT TO BE OVER.

Which means no, probably not  

Duh83

So I opened quadropus rampage and went to the bscotch ID system to look at my perks.  First off I noticed that even though I beat petemare the achievement is not registered.  Second,  when I attempt to back out of the bscotch system using the red back arrow in the upper left corner I get this error message and the game shuts down.  I was able to go back in and use it again normally the next time though. 

bscotchAdam

@duh8383‌ NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

OH MAN we have gotten down to so few of these damn crashes. Hopefully this is the last one. A few questions. Can you reproduce this, or does it seem to be a total fluke? What happened right before you hit the back arrow (e.g. had you just switched tabs, or opened up the avatar window, or sent a message, or looked at stats, etc) .How much time was there between tapping the exit button and whatever you did right before that?

Duh83

I have not been able to reproduce this after trying 3 or 4 times,  it does seem like a fluke.   So I went to the bscotch ID page,  clicked on the perks list. I'm pretty sure that I looked at what you got from the perks(like gaining a Pete avatar from beating Petes reckoning,  the details pop up window). I hit my phones back button soft key to back out of the perk details.  Then I hit the back arrow maybe one second right after that and got the error message. I am noticing that the levels are still different across the 3 games. 

bscotchseth

@Ulnarevern‌
I HAVE SOME BAD NEWS! We've fixed the balance issues that happen at incredible depths. The game's difficulty will now begin ramping up after 1,000 meters and will plateau at 3,000 meters, and your numbers (and the enemy numbers) will stop getting any bigger at that point. So now it'll be an actual challenge to keep pushing further and further, instead of you becoming an unstoppable killing machine!