Your Feature Presentation

Scheduled for September 30th, Patch “King Gabriel” is the biggest release since the introduction of the Auction House. It improves HEX Shards of Fate from top to bottom. The major changes have improved the game now and, more importantly, set us up for even more improvements in the future. You’ll be able to see all the changes and upgrades in the patch notes next week. Today, we’ll outline the new features that are coming to the game.

New Patcher

For the last two weeks, we’ve been alerting players to the new patcher download that everyone will need to complete once server maintenance is complete on Tuesday. The old patcher will not work and will tell you to download the new one. Watch for our Twitter or Facebook announcements on when that’s available. You will need to make a fresh install after downloading the new patcher.

Wax on, Wax Off

If you’ve been here from the beginning of the Kickstarter, you’ve probably heard a lot of talk about ‘polish.’ Well, here’s a big coat of that. We have some things we still need to adjust, but we’ve taken a big step forward to deliver you a fresh, modern looking video game.

We replaced the background on the home page. The navigation bar splits Play Now and Tournaments while also better organizing all the elements on the page.

The auction house is cleaned up with individual sections visually distinct and all items that can be interacted with are easily identifiable.

Everything on this page gets the visual polish as well. Tabs, buttons are all improved throughout the game and help you organize your collection.

New player nameplates, phase wheel, and buttons—to be covered later—make important information like active player and who has priority far more accessible to the player. Charge count and Charge Power are now next to each other. Cards in-hand are larger, and the pass priority button is now highlighted. You can now see your opponent’s sleeves and they can see yours, letting you make a statement.

The right bar is now better organized and you can use filters on it. The ground texture has been completely redone to pop on the screen.

It’s now far easier to control the scroll bar when cards are in this window, and we’ve added text to the cards when they are positioned at an angle.

You’ve Got Mail

In HEX, we want you to be able to share your cards with your friends and your collection to have real value, just like in a physical TCG. That’s why we have an open economy where you can buy and sell cards on the Auction House. Of course, the T in TCG stands for “trading.” In this update, you’ll be able to mail cards to other players.

You can attach up to 20 items in a single piece of mail and send it along. That includes cards, booster packs, mercenaries, platinum, and gold. When you receive mail, you’ll open the message and click “Claim Attachments” to send the items into your stash.

After you’ve claimed the cards, the mail remains as a record of everything that you’ve received until you delete it.

In the Flow

Gen Con is great in that we get to meet our HEX fans in meatspace and show the game to future HEX players. We also get to watch new players interact with the game and see where we need to smooth out the user experience. That’s especially important for a beta product.

We noticed that, in the previous physical TCGs we’ve worked on, the game flows well because a player can say “I’m done.” If both players agree, they go to the next turn. There’s a social contract in place that with communication, the turns can flow quickly. The same goes for “attack.” If your opponent nods, you declare your attacker. If your opponent has a response, you can both start adding cards to the chain.

To try and mimic that behavior in an online environment, we added two buttons to the phase wheel in order to help players get to the action faster: Attack Phase and End Phase. Now, players can choose to click Attack Phase and move to declaring their attackers (assuming the opponent passes priority). The same goes for End Phase button. If you click either button and the opponent plays a card before you get to the phase you selected, you can choose to: react and put an effect on the chain, pass priority and move through the turn as usual, or once again click that phase button. If you both click the same button, the game instantly moves through the turn to that phase.

You’ll find these immensely useful on your opponent’s turn, choosing to pass priority until you get to combat or you get to your opponent’s end phase. Again, if your opponent plays a card, the game stops auto-passing and gives you the opportunity to react.

With these two buttons, we’ve improved the flow of the game and removed unnecessary clicks through turns. We’ve essentially given you the opportunity to essentially say “I’m done.” Plus, you can set these to hotkeys in the menu by clicking on the gears in the wheel! Double good!

AI

Smarter. Faster. Better.

The old AI wasn’t the savviest opponent, so we’ve replaced it with a new AI that brings a much better game experience to the table. We’ve set the foundation for computer opponents to have varied personalities and strategies, though players won’t notice it this time around since there’s currently only one personality. What players will notice is much improved combat. The AI will now bluff, as well as attempt to outplay you with combat tricks. Watch out for Wild Growths! The computer now blocks incoming attacks for much better value. The computer opponent will also play with card counts in mind, like managing its chump blockers because it’s trying to draw to the one Murder left in the deck. Finally, our engineering team also cleaned up the AI’s processes so the “hanging AI” bug should now be fixed.

This AI just the first version, and we’ll be working with the AI in future builds to improve its strategies and add in personalities.

Those are the major new features for Patch King Gabriel. On Tuesday, you’ll see even more bug fixes and quality of life improvements as well. Everything will be outlined in the patch notes, so be on the lookout for that next week. Thanks and let us know what you think in the forums!

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