Final Development update before SA Soft Launch, and an overview of our Comic Con Africa plans — Community update, September 7th 2018 Kyle Haffenden Follow Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read

Hey Guys!

This week, we give you a final development update before the soft launch in South Africa next week. We also provide an overview of what will happen at Comic Con Africa, and what the goals are for soft launching there. We also give you a sneak peek of the new UI! Enjoy.

UI Update

As we mentioned in the Post-Alpha update, we’ve revised the UI of the game, this was for two main reasons 1) some of the elements didn’t provide the best user experience, such as the size of the buttons, or the positioning of certain screens. 2) By updating the UI, we’ve been able to optimize the graphics, which also addresses some of the performance concerns raised in the Alpha Feedback.

We’ve also updated the Non-AR background to reflect the Datasphere. Check out some sneak peeks of the new kick-ass UI below:

New home screen UI

Creature selection and collection

We’ve created a new separate creature selection and collection screen! This will make scrolling through your impressive collection easier, and it will also clearly display all the statistics for each creature. This includes the starting health, mana, defense and attack points as well as the Relics equipped to each creature. You’ll also be able to scroll through your collection of Relics on this screen and equip them to your creatures from here.

New Creature Screen

Onboarding

We’ve implemented a full practical tutorial to make the onboarding process as seamless as possible. The mystifying Soyak will take players through all the important aspects of the game. He will give players the wise Ki as a training companion, who will take you through all the battle basics to make sure you’re fighting fit for your first real battle!

Your sage training Master, Soyak

Soyak will make sure players understand the battle screen, and what all the icons mean, as well as show them how to cast abilities and find out more information about each spell before you cast it. We’ve made sure that the tutorial is as practical as possible, Soyak will take players through casting their first attack spell as well as casting a shield — these will all be done in the training screen which has a training dummy and all!

Battle Screen

Once players are comfortable with the basics of battle, Soyak will explain the rewards portal that players recieve after every win and then will take you to the battle deck and explain all you need to know about upgrading and selecting spell cards. We’ve also ensured that he explains the skill points that you can assign to creatures, as well as how to equip the ever-important Relics and how to use them. Your training Master will make sure you’re ready to battle for dominance!

Choose your allegiance

Battle Matchmaking, gameplay and performance

We know you’re all going to be happy about this one! We’ve improved the performance when matching players — meaning you’ll be matched with battle partners much quicker. This was one of the most commonly mentioned areas that Alpha players wanted to see improved, and we’re happy that it will be in place for Soft Launch at Comic Con Africa next week.

We’ve changed up how the Relics can be used; in Alpha they could be used as many times as you could during battle. Now, players can only use Relics once during a battle, so you have to be strategic about when you use them. We’ve also increased the number of Combos. This means that if players are really strategic about what spell cards they use and when, they could achieve an awesome Combo play which is extremely powerful!

We’ve optimized all spells, creatures and backgrounds to boost overall performance of the game. However, please take note that the game is built for high-performance devices. For a refresher of all compatible devices, please see:

Android Compatible Devices

Apple Compatible Devices

Comic Con Africa

In just SEVEN days we’ll be at Comic Con Africa, getting Augmentors into the hands of the general public for the very first time! We hope you’re as excited as we are — it’s been a journey to get here and we’re thrilled that you have all walked this road with us. Here’s a quick reminder about our goals for soft launching and a few details about our time at Comic Con Africa.

Firstly, we’re going to have an amazing stand! Michael & his team have really outdone themselves this time, it’s truly epic and we can’t wait to reveal it next week! We’ll have a ‘battle station’ in our stand, which will have four tablets and a surface for players to spawn their AR creatures for battle. Here we’ll be able to see players’ reactions to the game firsthand, note feedback and encourage them to download the game.

Augmentors at Comic Con Africa

We’ll have a number of team members in the stand at any given time, all prepped to answer questions and grow our amazing Augmentors community. We’ll also have a couple of competitions happening over the three days, to increase engagement and excitement. South African gaming influencers, reviewers and media will be visiting the stand, playing the game, and where relevant, interviewing some team members.

Kicking off our soft launch at Comic Con Africa allows us to gain feedback and reactions from a large captive audience, which means that we’ll have a solid player base to work off of when we start analyzing important data, such as player retention, player behavior and monetization. These initial findings will help us optimize the game further for the next stage of the soft launch, where we’ll release to a further two countries. As a reminder, we’re purposefully not pushing the soft launch messaging globally, because we need to test our assumptions, optimize, test, optimize again until we’re satisfied before the game will be released globally. And of course, when we get to this stage, we’ll be expanding our promotion and marketing scope and go all out!

For a full refresher of what a soft launch is and why we’re doing what we’re doing, read this community update.

And a last reminder to our community: We’re ensuring that you’ll be able to play wherever you are in the world from next week! We’ll send out an email detailing exactly when it will be available to you on the app stores.

We can’t wait to start battling you again!