This is the end...

With a pain in my heart, I need to announce that the Next Fest extended demo has ended. It was fun sharing it with you. It turned out to be a good playtest and a nice way to gather some more feedback before the full release. Thank you so much for every feedback piece, report, comment, and review! :)

Since the beginning of the Next Fest (Feb 23rd) up until now, the extended demo has been played by over 4000 players, including many of you who returned to the game to check out the changes. In total, since the original demo was published, there were over 10000 players!! WOW! My little game also gathered almost 4000 new wishlists. It all happened during the Next Fest and TurnBasedThursdayFest. I love these festivals :D

What is removed from the demo?

I saw that you loved some of the new additions, like the rice card (the fact that you can finally utilize water tiles is significant!), and I decided to keep some of the new stuff. Just a little reminder: everything that was available in the Next Fest demo will also be available in the full version of the game! And that's coming in late April (hopefully!).

So, what's removed?

• Gorilla Garambe - it turned out to be quite a challenge to win with it, but I received very positive feedback about its core mechanic - very high scarecrow limit. This will be even more meaningful in the full version of the game, where runs will be longer.

• Grains card class, along with the Corn and Sunflower plants. However, the Rice and Wheat cards stay! They will have only one class, though.

• Self-Sower, Waitress, The Sprinkler - the new scarecrows introduced with the extended demo.

• Stonks, Doctor, Scarecrowstain - they also go on the bench. They will be more meaningful with more in-game content, especially Doctor, as there are only 2 plague cards in the game now (reminder: Doctor gives extra coins for each plague card in hand).

• Exhausts card pack - there is very few exhaust cards in the demo, so the options you get from this pack were often the same. With the full version of the game, there will be more cards that can be a part of this pack.

Rice, Eggplant, Garlic, Scythes, Perfectionist and Sprinter scarecrows, but also encounters stay in the demo :)

I believe the current content will still give you the essence of what Cropdeck is, without burning it out and spoiling too much of what is coming in the full game. I know some of you were having so much fun with the demo, and the reduced content is a bummer to you, but please stay tuned - release is just around the corner!

There are some more changes in the v0.5.0

This new update introduces a few bug fixes, but also a few balance changes, based on the feedback and data I gathered during the last few weeks (thanks to everyone who allowed me to collect the anonymized game data! 🙏).

Balance

• Rice plant range has been reduced (most importantly, the rare version is now 2 tiles, not 3).

• Garlic base value is reduced from 10 to 8 (7 to 6 for golden).

• All scythes have been buffed. This includes:

  • Lower energy cost for common, rare, and epic variants (with 0 cost for first variants).

  • More coins on harvest.

• Cabbage extra layer value has been reduced from 4 to 3 (5 to 4 for golden).

• Onion extra layer value has been reduced from 5 to 4 (8 to 6 for golden).

  • Also, rare and epic versions have 1 less tile range.

• Red pepper can be harvested 2 times instead of 3, but the yield value is increased from 10 to 12.

• Yellow pepper can be harvested 2 times instead of 3, too.

• Wheat base value is reduced from 10 to 8 (12 to 10 for golden).

• Rare Beetroot card energy cost is reduced from 2 to 1.

• Taxes have been adjusted.

  • Mid-game should be a little easier, but later levels should give you a bit more challenge.

  • These changes are quite small, but I will look at how they impact the stats. I guess I will need to raise the tax, but the difficulty curve is different now.

Other changes

• Fixed a bug that allowed you to infinitely harvest dead crops.

• Fixed a card class details pop-up to display the current cards correctly.

• Fixed a few tooltips that displayed "Gold" instead of the coins icon.

• Fixed a bug that prevented changing the display monitor in some rare cases.

• Fixed encounter option buttons not displaying.

  • Funny enough, if you encountered this issue, it means you were clicking the buttons too fast before they appeared fully on the screen. Their animation was not resetting properly, resulting in faded or even invisible buttons.

• Next Fest Harvest banner was replaced with the event summary banner. Thanks for participating!

Best,

– Piotrek