Codemon 3.1: Dark Codeboxes and more

It has been a while since the Arcanes were released. Today we have an update that includes a brand new item: The Dark Codeboxes.

Dark Codeboxes

Many players were not motivated to open battles. You open them not knowing your opponent and once an player knows the strengths and weaknesses, they can always accept it with a Codemon that has a high chance of winning. And losing most of the battles is demotivating.

But opening battles is key to the game, se we wanted to motivate this players again. The Dark Codeboxes are the first step towards that.

A Dark Codebox hides the Codemon, that simple. This levels the field since you open it blindly, but they are also accepting it blindly. Dark Codeboxes can only be used with Codemons of level 6 or more, which is where efficiency starts to be very relevant.

A Dark Codebox is obtained by applying Dark tinture to a Codebox. You do not get an extra Codebox, but you “Darken” one.

darken_codebox_complete_framed

Darken the first Dark Codebox is free for all the players once they raise a Codemon to level 6.

We will continue to encourage players to open battles in other ways in the future.

Second currency: Codebucks

Dark Codebokes are a premium item, and for that we included a second currency: Codebucks.

You can get Codebucks by linking Codemon on Facebook, as a daily reward and completing free offers. Achievements and (some) Quests will -in the future- give Codebucks.

Of course you can get them as an In-App purchase.

The slots on the market and the extra Codeboxes have changed the price and now cost Codebucks instead of Credits.

When summoning an Arcane you just spend Codebucks or Credits to get an A-Summon or a B-Summon performed on the spot. Prices are the same, just made it simpler.

Event ticker

We do run events every now and then, and when we do so, we send an in-game message to all the players that have been active, and we also publish it on Facebook.

Still, I know that many players miss them. So, from this version on, whenever an Event is running you’ll see a ticker under Quests, where you can see the details of the Event.

event_tick_framed

Improved Codemon filtering for battles

Until now, every time you went to open a battle, the search terms were cleared and all your Codemons were shown. That was a bit unconvenient when you were trying to open a few battles with the same type of Codemon, for example, Epics.

From now on, Codemon will remember your last search for as long as you are opening battles.

Transfer account

Because Codemon associates the account to the phone, we have many requests of people that want to migrate their account to their new phone.

We have added the option under settings, so you can transfer everything to another account.

Final words

This update has taken a lot longer than I expected to be ready, but I hope all of you enjoy it. There are still many ideas on how to extend Codemon, and I hope I’ll have the time to implement them.

Until then, happy scanning and battling!

Get Codemon on Google Play

Speaking at GDC China

The talk “The Indie Game Developer Survival Guide” is part of the Mobile and Smartphone Games Summit of GDC China.

The talk is inspired by other guides like “The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy” and “Zombie Survival Guide” and it is a compendium of the post-mortem of the games of The Pill Tree and a post-mortem of The Pill Tree as well.

The talk goes over the current mobile gaming landscape, the different business models, how they worked for us, lessons learned and tips so you can increase your chances of survival as an Indie Game Developer.

GDC is a great conference for game developers, be it USA, Europe or China, and I am really humbled that they invited me to speak there.

However, China is very far away, but for the ones in the Netherlands, I will be presenting a slightly different talk at DroidConNL this year: “The Mobile Indie Developer Survival Guide” which includes some more details about how apps do.

The slides will be available on Slideshare soon after the conference.

Codemon 3.0 – The Arcanes

It’s been a long time without updates on Codemon, finally, the wait is over.

Players asked for more Codemons and evolutions… well, players always ask for more creatures and evolutions in games like this.

There were a few limitations to give them what they were asking for.

In first place, the barcodes always generate the same result, by design. That makes impossible to make more creatures from scans.

Secondly, Codemons were already able to reach level 100 without any evolution, so that discards the easy way. In fact making the Codemons evolve will make it look more like a copy of Pokemon, and the idea is not to copy, but to just be inspired.

framed_new_home_screen_with_summon

We found a quire interesting solution: The Arcane Codemons.

Those were the original Codemons and they are extinct. That is why they can’t be scanned. Arcane Codemons need to be summoned.

To perform a summon, you need to use 2 Pure (a.k.a. having only one element) Codemons, they will be sacrificed and the Arcane will be summoned. Well, it is not that simple, there are several types of summoning and it depends on the Codemons involved.

framed_arcane_summon

This is a great mechanic, it puts more Codemons into the game, and it does it in something that “resembles” an evolution and at the same time does not break the existing game mechanics and is also different from other games.

The other big improvement of this version is cloud sync of accounts. That sounds easy, but it has been quite a nightmare. I needed to rewrite all the communication layer, the server side and the client cache… pretty much half of the game has been rewritten to make it work.

But all the coding and testing is done and it is available on Google Play, so grab it and play!