Who’s this shady “Ken” character, you ask? Why, it’s me! Chris came down with the flu this week, so I’ll be bringing you the State of the Game in his stead.

This week we cover the deck size changes, and some plans for getting more people into the land of Atomic Brawl.

Deck Size Changes

As you probably noticed, we rolled out the changes to deck sizes that we mentioned last time. Decks changed from a 40-card minimum to 50, with a max of 3 of any card instead of 4. Feedback has been mixed on this one. We’re convinced it will be good for the game long-term, as it’ll help encourage variety, and mitigate totally broken combinations of cards (especially once we start rolling out expansion sets). Unfortunately, one big casualty was that combos balanced for the old deck sizes got much worse, due to decreased odds of having all the cards you need to get the combo working all at the same time. We’ll be tweaking combo cards over the next while to make them fun to play and build decks around, but not totally broken.

In that vein, one feature we’re considering adding is a “search” card, which would let you look at the top cards of your deck and choose some to keep. That would allow combo decks to go “hunting” for that last card they need. If this turns out to be easy to create, we might do it sooner than later (modifying Light Bulb or Stroke of Genius), but otherwise it’ll be a high priority for the first expansion.

Trailer

We’re still hard at work on a trailer, and that has taken up quite a bit of our time lately. The first draft is done, and we’re working on sound for it and the final draft now. It should be ready sometime soon, hopefully in the next week or two.

More Players!

Now that we’re done that big tuning pass and the deck size changes, we’re shifting focus to getting more players into Atomic Brawl! Our #1 complaint has been that it’s hard to find games when you want them, and/or hard to find a good variety of evenly matched opponents to play against. We hear you loud and clear, and want more players in Brawl just as bad as you do. Once the trailer is ready, and the holiday season and best of 2013 lists are done, we’re going to be slamming on marketing, trying to get reviews, Let’s Play coverage, and so on. This is our first time marketing an indie game, so if you have any bright ideas or good connections, we’re all ears!

iPad Version

We’ve been ensuring all along that the game works well on iPads, and is semi-reasonable on iPhones. Over the holidays we’ll be playing around with a more official iPad version of the game, to see if we can get it solid enough to submit to the App Store. We’re thinking that this could help open up Atomic Brawl to many people who use iPads as their primary gaming device. It’ll be a bit of work, though, so no guaruntees, but we’ll of course keep up our iPad support for web-based ‘Brawl either way, and eventually shore up iPhone and Android support as well.

So that’s it for this week. Happy holidays, and thanks a million for all your support of Atomic Brawl. We couldn’t ask for a better Christmas present than people enjoying this game we made.