Many of you have already enjoyed the new user interface, backgrounds and tribe-specific buildings in the Codex Victoria game worlds. In the last couple of months, we gathered a lot of feedback and we are now close to the release phase.
But before we consider the details of the changes, we need to go back a little more than a year to August 2018, when the Closed Beta for Path to Pandora started.
That moment represented a turning point in the game development. As of then, we started developing two different game versions (branches) at the same time, which also needed to be maintained. And well, it’s not like we doubled our team size.
From this moment on, every bug fix and every new feature had to be included in both game versions, raising the effort of maintaining the two different game versions and increasing the risk. This also heightened the possibility of bugs appearing and passing through our QA controls undetected.
So, how could we make things better?
We decided to proceed slowly and start by finding out what is the perception of the tribe-specific buildings, new user interface, and new backgrounds. We did that using surveys. In the last 12 months, we sent several of them and we also applied some improvements to the new UI and buildings according to community feedback. For example:
- We added a notification that shows when a daily quest is ready to be collected
- We added colors to make it easier to recognize where the hero is
In the last survey carried out this October on the Codex Victoria game worlds, the level of satisfaction regarding the new buildings, user interface and background images was so good that we took it as a sign the time has come.
For what? You may ask.
To release it worldwide.
Don’t panic! We know some of you have some conflicting feelings about the toggling navigation bar. From our survey, we were not able to clearly detemine whether it’s liked or disliked. (Data)
But we’ve decided to take the safe route: By early 2020 at the latest, the toggle will be changed to something more like what we have in the current UI.
What will the implementation of the new user interface bring to the game?
By implementing this, we’ll go back to having one branch. This results in less complexity for developers and more time for XAP to test the release more thoroughly. What’s more, since July 2019 we already started developing a decent number of new features for the new game version only. These especially include popular requests during the LOT2019 event, like the improved farm list and the wave builder, to name just some of the more expected ones.
When will it happen?
All game worlds starting from December 1, 2019 will launch with version 4.5 of the game.
What does version 4.5 include?
- The new user interface
- The new tribe-specific buildings
- The new backgrounds
- The new contextual help
By introducing the new contextual help, the old tutorial will be removed and all tutorial benefits will be applied directly as soon as you enter the game.
Right now, we’re also evaluating some technical solutions that will allow us to update the currently running game worlds to this version. We see the toughest challenge as well as the biggest impact for gameplay being the position of the main building. Moving to the new user interface will force us to move all the main buildings of all the villages to a new spot. On the other hand, updating the running game worlds to this version will allow us to implement the upcoming features mentioned above here as well. Our aim is to find a solution and roll out this new version on the running game worlds by the end of January at the latest.
