Version 222: Timers, Leave Penalty, Last Round, New Languages

First of all, congratulations to the whole community on reaching 5.000+ players with access and 3.000+ players who have already played the game at least once.

The top regions remain the same: Russia, China, Japan, USA, Ukraine, Germany, Belarus, Poland, France, Canada. Observing how you play the game allow us to spot the areas where new features and UI changes will cause a positive impact on player experience.

Thanks for giving this game a try – and welcome to version 222, which brings a number of improvements:

TWO NEW LANGUAGES

The game now has 2 new language buttons, which turn on Spanish (the European version) and German languages (bonus points if you understand the references we used to create these buttons). These translations are still work in progress, at the moment about 50% of content is translated and the rest will display in English.

If you speak one of these languages – we'd love to hear your feedback on how easy to understand these translations are.

SPANISH

Our old friend and writer Josué Monchan is back in the saddle. He translated all of Gremlins, Inc., and we're thrilled to have him working with us on Cards & Projects. Fun fact: among the games that Josué has translated into Spanish, is the famous Papers, Please from Lucas Pope.

GERMAN

Another veteran of Gremlins, Inc. is back: Rolf Klischewski is now working on the German version of Cards & Projects. Fun fact: not only does Rolf translate video games, but he also teaches a course on game localization at a university.

USER INTERFACE

We continue to work on the UI of the game, there's a few bigger changes in the pipeline as well as a batch of improvements in today's update.

[V] BECOMES [OK]

We aim to create the UI that works for players from different countries, speaking different languages. In earlier versions of the game, the confirmation button was the checkbox ([V]), and whenever there was a choice, it was between [V] and [X] ("Yes" and "No").

But this was not so obvious to players from some of the regions, and thus we now transition to a pairing more common on the consoles: [OK] for confirmation/meaning "Yes" and [X] for cancellation/meaning "No". While it probably won't affect the majority of the players, we hope that the UI is a bit more comfortable for the players who raised the issue.

BUG REPORTING NOW AVAILABLE IN MAIN MENU

The button for reporting bugs/sending us feedback was previously available in the Settings menu, which made it difficult to report an issue in, say, multiplayer queue. The button now is on the side of the main menu's frame, and is accessible from any place in the main menu.

We also changed the design of this button in the in-session Settings menu, to match the main menu's design.

ACCESS TO STEAM PROFILES VIA LEADERBOARDS

If you wonder who are the top players in the leaderboards, you can now check their Steam profiles by clicking on their names right in the leaderboard (proper in-game profiles are coming later in the development cycle; please also note that with the next update, we will change the single-player section, and wipe all the leaderboards clean).

LEADERBOARDS NOW LOAD PROPERLY

Speaking of leaderboards, they now load properly. Before, we had a patchy solution where we showed just the first 20 lines, as we struggled to get the data from Steam on time. But now we have seen the light, and have found the way to display it all.

BALANCING

We made small balancing changes here and there, in the number of the cards in the deck as well in some of the effects. Nothing big. And generally, work on new cards (of which we have a plenty in the pipeline) is scheduled for after we're done with bigger features like the server, or the updated single-player section.

FEATURES

PENALTY FOR LEAVING RANKED SESSIONS

We saw a number of reports from sessions where a player who was losing, would just leave the session before it's over. It's not a nice experience. With today's update, we introduce a confirmation window for when you want to leave a ranked session in progress...

...and a penalty of 100 rating points for this action, if you leave once the mulligan stage has been completed.

When the opponent leaves after round 10 of the 20 round session, the other player also gets +200 – so that leaving a session without finishing it is treated as a resignation. We hope this discourages some of the people from aborting their ranked sessions.

NB: in one of the future updates, we also plan introduce a cooldown of 10 minutes after such action.

LAST ROUND ANNOUNCEMENT

If you're hanging out in our Discord, or on the Steam forums, you may have seen the discussion of how we can crank up the drama by specifically announcing the last round in the round-based session. Well, we have implemented it – with a custom visual, and a super-duper sound effect.

NEW MEDAL ANNOUNCEMENT

If you score 1 of the 6 medals as a result of your session, we now display a cool announcement, complete with the special sound effect. if you see this – well done, you're one of the best players then!

MUTE EMOTICONS OPTION

Some players have requested an option to mute emoticons from the opponent, and we just added it (in Gremlins, Inc. it also exists, just there you need to first hover over the avatar to have it slide in; in Cards & Projects, for the moment, it's always visible). The visual of the button reflects its state: red cross – muted; green checkbox – emoticons are displayed.

TIME LIMIT FOR ACTIONS: COUNTDOWN

In addition to the progress bar, we now also display the actual countdown for time limit for actions (active in ranked sessions).

TIME LIMIT: RESERVE

This is a feature that we debated first with the Gremlins, Inc. community: a reserve timer, mahjong-style, one per player for the whole session. When your action timer runs out, the countdown of the reserve timer begins. And only when it's down to zero, the time-out occurs.

We clarified this rule in the Gremlinopedia, too.

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WHAT'S NEXT?

Among the issues currently in work and/or in plans, we have:

• "REPLAY" option for all the leaderboard results (so you can verify the validity of each record)

• leaderboard wipe-out (as we see some suspicious results, and want to start with a clean plate)

• overhaul of single-player section (with weekly challenges introduced)

• more progress with Spanish and German translations

• a cooldown of 10 minutes after leaving ranked session

• proper rule for who wins if there's a draw by score (doesn't work properly for now)

We also, believe it or not, discuss a possible Kickstarter campaign where we offer players the option to pre-purchase Cards & Projects and a set of enamel pins (ːmaliceːːscoreːːvotesːːbh2coinː) and/or the actual deck of cards for Cards & Projects game and/or t-shirts. If we do it, it won't be to raise money (we don't need funding to ship Cards & Projects), but as a way to collect orders for the pins/cards/t-shirts.

On the one hand, this would satisfy all the requests to ship the pins which we have received in the last year. On the other, the shipping won't be available for Russia, Ukraine or China, so half of our audience won't be able to use the campaign. We don't know if we will do it, we'll keep thinking about it.

Anyways, we're back to development work – and we hope you enjoy version 222 in the meantime!

[CO dev team]