Finding equilibrium. It's a TagTime

Lets not talk too much about the weather and jump straight into the fray!

We’ve been working thoroughly on a few things. First off the game has recently been extremely unbalanced in favor of the monsters.

Balance is not something we have been focused on so far. Reason being, the constant introduction of new features continuously changes the balance of the game. And so it seemed like a Sisyphian task to try and balance it.

But we have done a minor gameplay feature freeze and been hard at work making the game balanced. The equilibrium has been reached! This means the game is in a prime state and fun as f*ck! Or to be honest, more likely still unbalanced. So we would love for you to smack our equilibrium. We will be opening up TagTime on Thursday and it can be played till the end of Sunday!

Please do leave feedback on our Discord telling us how we could miss such an f***ing completely unbalanced OP feature. Do tell us what features you’d like to see, or maybe just tell us in a very polite manner how garbage TagTime is.

If you want to make sure to match against other players, bring you friends or join us Thursday 10pm Central European Time for a casual and chill session.

If you are a loner or don’t like to play with other people, fear not! We’ve optimized the bots quite a bit, so they should be way better to play with now. We would love feedback on those as well, so for any loner who wants give feedback, but fears the discord, do write an anonymous mail to contact@niila.io.

On another note, if you want to know how we fucked up our attendance at the latest Steam Scream Fest, check out this Reddit post.

And on a third note, here’s an overview of the changes we’ve done to TagTime recently:

Balancing A while back we changed the movement speed and attack power of the monsters, because they felt bad and frustrating to play. This completely changed the dynamics of the game, making it:

• Way faster overall.

• Monsters felt more powerful.

• As a Runt you felt super scared when chased by a monster.

• Barricades became more fragile and less important.

• Runts became less inclined to hatch eggs because they needed resources and power-ups to get away.

Our belief is that the experience improved because of increase in monster power. But we now need put more weight again on the runt end of the scale (or less on the monster end). Concrete balance changes:

• Increased base harvest speed for Runts. Better for new players who base harvest more. Easier to get resources.

• Decrease the time on Monster Grow power-up. Way too powerful for too long being a big monster.

• Enable golden axe on cauldron and eggs. We saw that player tried this. Makes golden axe a viable power-up for trying to free other runts from cauldron (instead of only speed boost being viable).

• Decrease the golden axe timer so the duration is a bit shorter.

Other stuff

• New Witch Ability pose and animation.

• Tons of new icons (can you find them all?).

• Moved mushroom near cauldron next to the blue egg instead.

• Moved spawn point for both Monsters and Runts for improved game start movement.

• Increased bot functionality. Made Runt bots actually try to free captured teammates from cauldron.

• Ghosts now becomes stunned for a short duration when hit by a monster.

• New lobby loop, 30 sec cooldown instead of 60. Can join any continent server with lobby code.

Sorry for the wall of text. Hope you will try out the new build from Thursday. Yours truly, -Natve