Quadropus Rampage: Petemare

bscotchAdam

Update: We are no longer requiring registration or limiting participation. Anyone in the Google Group will be able to download and play the pre-release on Google Play.

The iOS8 update broke all of our games. No biggie, not many people play our games on iOS. But we can't leave our fans hanging even when they are few and so we fixed the problem. While we were at it, we went ahead and added some new content, because WHY NOT!?

We want to test the new stuff before going live, so we're opening up a public test run on Android. It isn't live YET (probably Friday evening). To get the game (when it is ready), join our Google+ Community for public testing. This will grant you access to the test version through Google Play.


Patch 1.3.0 "PETEMARE"

• Currency Updates
• Grubby now accepts doubloons for artifacts & weapons, instead of orbs.
• You can now convert your orbs directly into Doubloons at the in-game shop.
• New Game Modes
  • By request, you can now kill pete TWO MORE TIMES! "Petemare" and "Pete's Reckoning" game modes have been added to the game.
• New Masteries
  • I AM THE NIGHT: Defeat Pete in Petemare mode. Choose between:
    • Shadow: +10% Run Speed, +25% dodge speed
    • Moonfall: +30% smash damage, +20% crit damage
  • HELLACIOUS: Defeat Pete in Pete's Reckoning.
    • No Rest: -10% Smash Cooldown, -1 Sec Bubble Recharge, -20% Spin Attack Charge Time
    • Hot blooded: Increases your Rampage duration by 30%
• New Upgrade Tiers
  • All upgrades can now be leveled up to Tier 9 (up from 6) to better equip players to handle Pete's return. The upgrade orb cost algorithm will remain the same (cost doubles every tier), and all upgrades up to tier 6 have been left as they were. This means the orb prices for each upgrade tier are (1) 300... (2) 600... (3) 1200... (4) 2,400... (5) 4,800... (6) 9,600... (7) 19,200... (8) 38,400... (9) 76,800
• Bug Fixes
  • Going to the main menu and coming back no longer heals you to full health.
  • Artifacts no longer drop XP and orbs when you buy them from Grubby, because... that totally wasn't supposed to happen.
• General
  • The "warp hole" as explained by Grubby has now become the "Warp sphincter." Enjoy.
• Effect Updates
  • Tightened up the attack animation to make it feel more punchy.
  • Enemies now flash in a cool way when you hit them, rather than turning dark red.
  • Lasers have been updated to be more awesome and lasery.
  • All explosive particle effects have been replaced with hand-drawn explosions.
  • Damage text that pops off enemies has been made more... DRAMATIC.
• UI Updates
  • Removed the daily slap. No more bribing people to come back!
  • The top mastery of the Masteries page is now expanded by default, to make the whole system more intuitive.
  • The option to jump ahead to 500 meters for 50 doubloons has been removed from the game mode selection screen.

Ulnarevern

WOOOHOOOO!

bscotchseth

The combat feels so much more punchy now. You're going to love it.

bscotchAdam

HELL YES IT DOES. Just played the crap out of it this morning.

bscotchseth

Added more stuff to patch notes (new upgrades and masteries)

CyberKlown28

Woahhhhhh. This came out of left field.

B3A5T

INCREDIBLE!! Now Pete comes back to taste more of my bloody tennis racket! 

bscotchseth

CyberKlown28 said:

Woahhhhhh. This came out of left field.

We want to refine and work on the BscotchID system to get all of our players under one roof before we launch Crashlands, so to speak. So that entails hooking it into all our old games, but we figured HEY, why not add some other cool stuff to those games while we're in the neighborhood? BOOM!

bscotchseth

v1.3 has been uploaded to Google Play as a beta. If you want in on the beta for the weekend, hope into the Bscotch Early Access G+ community!

https://plus.google.com/communities/100242302839310322509

Ulnarevern

Here are some first impressions (as supposed by "first impressions" it is not definitive):

- Why not buying stuff in doubloons or orbs (why not leaving people the choice)?
- The new character upgrades are probably way too costy (in my opinion. 300k orbs weren't enough and it's not given to everyone)
- The new game modes seem way too really difficult. I mean, I had everything of the previous version, I upgraded at least one level for each characteristic and the game is already way harder than manic mode at 300 hundred meters. It seems pretty hard to beat Pete in those conditions, let appart Pete's Reckoning mode.
- In fact, either the game modes are too difficult or the stuff to buy is too costy (2 doubloons per artifact. It's not given to everyone either)

Other stuff I may have seen:
- Did you remove the daily reward? (not certain about this one)
- Masteries seem to need to be re-selected (not certain either)
- Did you lower the orb loot?
- For the two points above, it may be caused by the update, that may not be taking the previous versions in account.

EDIT (You may read that directly)

I corrected the presentation of my post (my phone doesn't feel like getting on the line under when I told him to, sorry...)
And I'm going to correct my first impressions:

- The new difficulty modes are insanely difficult, but after meditating it, it's really awesome.

- The character upgrades are too costy in the end and may be dissuasive for the players.

- Paying all artifacts in doubloons makes me feel like you are somewhat incitating people to buy doubloons packs. I'm certain that it's not the goal but it seriously reduces the "play everything for free" feeling (even if I have more doubloons than needed so i don't imagine how new players would react). I'm convinced you have a good reason behind it but I'm skeptical. Why not putting both ways of payment, even if orb paying costs more comparatively?

The big thing is that paying like 20 doubloons, or even 5 per run on artifacts (plus resurection sometimes, that you reduced to 5 doubloons) is not possible (even less on the long run), and it seems hard to me to continue without some of them. So it's something like "I need that so much that I'm going to spend my hardly acquired doubloons. It is too usefull for me to continue without buying it"

I hope you understand my point, and I would like to discuss it, to know the reasons behind your choices. That would probably change my point of view

P.S. I just love the "Kill me once, shame on you. Kill me twice, also shame on you." line!
(why not more awesome lines for Grubby?)

bscotchseth

ULNAREVERN! Here are answers to your questions.

Why not buying stuff in doubloons or orbs (why not leaving people the choice)?
We're working on putting together an orb-to-doubloon conversion system, so the choice will be there. Not to worry!

The new character upgrades are probably way too costy (in my opinion. 300k orbs weren't enough and it's not given to everyone)
Previously, you could upgrade everything to max for only 132,000 orbs. Now, you can still get everything to 6/9 upgrade levels for 132,000 (same as before). But 132,000 orbs is just not that tough to get. Think about the fact that you had 300,000 orbs just lying around. Now, the last tier of each track will actually take a fair bit of effort to unlock, and we wanted to make you feel like you really earned something big with those.

The new game modes seem way too difficult.
"Too difficult" is always a relative thing. Someone beat Petemare mode within a couple hours of us putting up the Alpha, so it's definitlely not too difficult... at least for that guy. We felt that once you were maxed out on masteries and had 6 tiers of each upgrade track, the normal story mode was just trivially easy. You could one-shot most enemies all the way up to 1000 meters, so we wanted to bring back some challenge.

Also, we wanted it to be the case that beating Pete's Reckoning is one of the most badass things you can do in a game. It should be like the Mount Everest of gaming. So "too difficult" sounds just right!

Either the game modes are too difficult or the stuff to buy is too costy (2 doubloons per artifact. It's not given to everyone either)
We decided to take a second look at Doubloons and make them actually have a purpose. Originally, they were intended to feel like a very valuable, important thing that you could use to really amplify your badassery. What we found though was that only about 1% of players were using doubloons to unlock masteries, and only about 4% of deaths led to a resurrection (using doubloons). In other words, almost nobody used doubloons for anything... ever. They just didn't matter.

So we're re-tooling the Doubloons to be used for everything within a run -- Grubby will only accept Doubloons for his wares, and you use doubloons to resurrect. But you can convert your orbs into doubloons, so you'll have a more predictable, controllable stream of Doubloons this time around, and you'll have something valuable to spend your orbs on once you've maxed out all your upgrades.

Did you remove the daily reward?
Yep! With the orb-to-doubloon conversion, you can now get your doubloons that way. The daily reward felt weird and shoe-horned, and it didn't really fit with what we wanted the game to be. We want people to come back because they want to play and kick ass, not because we're handing them a daily reward! We may bring it back if it seems detrimental to the game overall, but we'd like to try pulling it out for now.

Masteries seem to need to be re-selected
That's not SUPPOSED to be the case! Unless you started a new game and had purchased the Mastery pack or somesuch?

Did you lower the orb loot?
Nope! We actually may raise it a tad on the new game modes (to balance out the risk/reward from the higher difficulty).

It doesn't take the previous upgrades in account.
What do you mean by this? Did you lose all your upgrades? Had you purchased the Upgrade pack or the Mega pack?

Ulnarevern

Okay it's awesome!

- The conversion orb-to-doubloons sounds fun. And it reassures me about game balance (between paying-non paying)

- For the 300k orbs, you've got a huge point!

- You're right about the difficulty (I did realize it, that's why I edited my previous post)
- Daily reward won't be regretted

- About masteries, I'm really not sure, but during a dive, the smash refill mastery (upon the beginning of a new depth) didn't work. It happened only once so it was probably a weird bug.

- A rise in orb loot would be nice (we need to pay our expenses)

- The upgrade thing was more of a feeling, don't worry. It is just that Tack felt really weak in front of ennemies, but I'm probably underestimating the 2.5 strength factor.

Thanks for the answers!

bscotchseth

Yeah, 2.5 strength means they hit you 2.5x harder and have 2.5x more hp!

Those additional upgrade tiers really come into play at that point, because they are a bit more effective than the previous tiers. For example, the first 6 tiers of the Vitality track add 8% HP per tier, while the last 3 tiers add 10% per tier.

And your Rampage damage goes up crazily during the last 3 upgrade tiers (from 20% to 50% boost) of the Rampage track, which really helps in the new modes.

Ulnarevern

It will indeed!

Duh83

Downloaded and played for 10 minutes.  New animations look sweet! So far everything seems good.  I almost miss the daily spin but now I have to play rather than getting free stuff for 2 seconds of work.  I just hope I can find enough dblooms to keep up on purchases,  and I know you are working on a conversion for orbs and dblooms. Hopefully it won't take forever to collect enough for conversion and upgrading. Have you thought of new artifacts? Even if it's like 5 or 10 new ones.  Maybe a new pet too? Just thoughts,  I look forward to all the other games getting touched up too

Ulnarevern

I guess it'll come with the bscotch ID and the cross game stuff (why not pets from Crashlands as pets in Quadropus and vice-versa? I guess you already thought of that)

bscotchseth

Yep, we'll have tons of crossover stuff! Unfortunately we have to wrap up Quadropus for now and move on to the other games, so we won't be getting new pets or artfiacts in this time around. But we always come back to it in time!

Ulnarevern

Why not a "do it yourself" mode? With customisable options (and orb loot depending on it), like choosing if there's Pete or not, if he gains his life back when you die, the strength of the ennemies, heartfish or not... That could be fun (once you've done everything you want to).

B3A5T

Um... guys, iv found a slightly irritating bug within normal mode. After I started playing the game with the new modes installed, I found that, for some reason, I had to defeat Pete again and had initially just assumed that you guys had reset some stuff and maybe he would last until a depth further than 1000 metres. However, I soon found that he would appear at 1000 metres but didn't really mind since wooping his ass was so much fun! When I did eventually get to him again- after several days of game play- he just exploded as soon as I had encountered him. The orbs started drifting towards me as usual but then suddenly, the game just froze and the following appeared on my screen:

#########################################
#######################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object story_pete_fight:

Push :: Execution Error - Variable Get 19.phase(100871,
-2147483648)
at gml_Object_story_pete_fight_Step_0
####################################### 
#########################################

I can't do anything about the problem. I've tried almost everything I could apart from deleting all of my game data. Also, I've just read one of Ulnarevern's last posts regarding first impressions and there was something about being given 300k orbs and this further leads me to believe that I was supposed to renew the game data as it would allow for one to actually use the apparently given orbs. Nevertheless, I also believe that I'm not supposed to delete the game data as it would make it quite difficult and time-consuming for a tester to actually have access to the new game modes as it can take long to defeat Pete. Is this the problem? Will I have to erase all of the hard earned data on my file? Here is a screenshot of the error:

   

My device: Samsung Galaxy Tab 2, Android 4.1.1- Jellybean.
(Just in case it had something to do with the device.)

bscotchAdam

That definitely is not supposed to happen, and the goal is to be compatible with legacy save files. Normal Pete should still be defeated if you've already beat him in the prior version, so that's also an error. We're on it, and I don't think you'll have to wipe your save file. Do you see this every time you boot it up?

Not sure what the deal is with that 300k orbs thing, since I'm pretty sure we didn't do that intentionally!

Ulnarevern

Nope that's just that I had like 300k orbs lying around after hours of game, before the new version
And I didn't have the problem on my device.

bscotchseth

I'll get that fixed! You shouldn't have to delete anything.

bscotchseth

@B3A5T Uploading a new build to Google Play Beta now!

B3A5T

@BscotchAdam‌, yup that comes up every time I boot it up.

@Ulnarevern, thnx for clearing that up! I found it slightly unclear in the post tho.

bscotchAdam

@B3A5T‌ Have you managed to update it since @BscotchSeth‌ uploaded the new build? That should clear up the problem.

Ulnarevern

@B3A5T‌ My bad.

B3A5T

@Ulnarevern‌, no worries bro, but anyway, yh, I had automatic updates on and so when I started playing again, Pete just exploded and gave me a whole bunch of free doubloons!! Im at 1400 metres right now and im doing good. I noticed, something else tho- the new build also got rid of a lot of unusual lag I was experiencing on my device so thnx a lot guys!!

bscotchAdam

Yep, Seth made things more efficient and smoothed out some of the animation, so the game is now just overall better.

scotchste

Loving the update, just a couple of minor things. I'm getting occasional ads when moving to a new level. I have made a purchase and never saw any ads before the latest update. Also I was unable to report a bug in the app, the link took me to an unknown page.

bscotchseth

We'll get those both fixed! We had to force the ads to show during testing so we could make sure they worked; must have missed that "off" switch upon pushing out the update. The bug report link will also be fixed!

bscotchAdam

@scotchste‌ Thanks for letting us know!

We moved the entire bscotch ID system to a new domain (id.bscotch.net) and so all of the links were broken (including the bug report).

As for ads, we had them turned on regardless of purchases while we were debugging, and it looks like we forgot to turn them back off!

We're preparing the final build RIGHT NOW, intending to get it out on Android tonight, and it should fix both of these problems.