GCL release date postponed
Let’s start with the bad news: GemCraft Labyrinth will not be ready any time soon, it’s still far from being completed. I don’t know when can we release it, but not before the end of September. Our calendar is full with other things for the next few weeks, so we couldn’t rush anyway. We can say Q4 2010 or say nothing at all, it won’t make things faster. We want this game to be out just as you do, but won’t make if a pile of trash just to be over it. We’ll try to make this game worth the wait.

GemCraft for iPhone
For a long time, I kept saying that it’s unlikely we’ll ever have GC running on iPhone. From time to time I got emails from iPhone devs, but we either didn’t have the trust to hand over the game’s source code, or would have to take all the financial risk. But now, we got the opportunity to work with a skillful developer with released games behind his back, and a publisher who can fuel the project financially and able to promote and distribute the game. For now I can’t tell anything more, but this is serious now, and we’ll only have to support the project with the source materials and design suggestions to tailor the game to the small touch screen, so it won’t take much time away from GCL.

GemCraft Labyrinth graphics not new enough/too pale/too dark
It’s meant to be pale and darkish to add to the athmosphere of the game. The ground doesn’t look new enough, but it’s brand new. The plants are reused. But I don’t think this is what GCl being a good or bad game will depend on.
There will be many new and some reused graphics (old skills will have their old icons, new skills will of course get new ones). There will be new buildings, and hopefully new monsters as well.

GCL battle mode settings
In GC0, there were battle modes like Endurance or Sudden Death. In GCL, you can mix various settings, including number of monsters, number of waves (including endurance), giant monsters only or every sencond wave, or more monster armor.
Each setting gives a multiplier to the final XP you get at the end of the stage (just like the battle amulets you earn). For each stage, the game will store your one highest XP. How you achieve it, is up to you. You can mix an easy mode and earn lots of battle amulets, play it hard and earn a few, or level up and boost your skills, then play a hard mode and still achieve tons of amulets.

Amplifiers
This building type, as everything in GC, will work with gems. Place a gem in it, it woN’t be able to fire, but each surrounding (thus, maximum 8 ) tower and trap will get a percentage of the inserted gem’s attributes. Make bastillons or trapfields, or even a super tower surrounded by 8 amplifiers!

That’s all for now, I hope I’ll have some progress to write about soon!

A little something you can have fun with while you wait for the next GemCraft, here is the game, called Reeelz, we have been working on in the last two weeks (about 40 total net working hours).

It all started after I played Achievement Unlocked 2, and especially the slot machine on floor 3. A year ago I saw the card game Fluxx on the net and liked it so much I bought it over Amazon, and I wanted to make a game some day which contains figures (Fluxx calls them keepers) you can collect and combinations (or goals) you can achieve. And the slot machine scene gave me the starter push. That’s about all our game has in common with the two titles above, the final game we came up with, Reeelz, is a slot machine with 7 reeelz, and 150 combo cards you can achieve.

Sounds simple to make, right? Well, it seemed to me so at least, no more than a weekend and it would be done I thought. This small project showed how greatly I can underestimate the development time. Sure, it was not a two weeks’ intensive workshop, but the calendar doesn’t see the everyday time demanding activities, nor did I.

Being apathetic from the endlessly extending GCL project, I couldn’t resist the temptation to take a weekend (and then the rest of days needed) off and make this game. Temptation is a major element of the game too, you are presented with many options (the final deck has 150 instantly pursuable combos), many of them easy to take down, but clicking all the easy combos will lead you nowhere. Check out the game, and maybe the Strategy Guide for more tips.

There are news and things to talk about with GemCraft as well, I will give it a new blogpost tomorrow.

So, just in time, here are the screenshots I mentioned in the first post. Many things can and will change before release, so what you see there can look and work different in the final game.

Running through the comments, I decided to answer some of the more common questions here.

What happened to the Arcade Lounge?
The Arcade Lounge was a section in our old site where other developers’ games were hosted. It took too much time to manage so it was laying there with no updates for more than a year. We decided to close it and concentrate on developing more games of our own, so we put a one month notice (at the end of May) on the opening page of the site.
You can find all the games that were there, on newgrounds.com.

GCL release date:
I’m sorry to say, but no need to check the site many times a day, the game will not be released for quite a while, there are tons of things to do before that.
I also can’t tell any exact release dates. We want it to be out in Q3 2010 (e.g. before September 30, 2010), but we can’t promise anything, so if you don’t see the game up and running on the 1st of October, please wait just a bit more, we’ll keep you updated here on the blog.

GCL difficulty:
Some players would like to see a harder game, others an easier one.
Good news for those who got stuck in GC0: GCL will leave the strict player progress mechanism where you had to beat your own highest scores to get any more XP. Now, if you run a stage again and again, you’ll get the XP you earn each time. Of course it won’t be worth beating the first stage on the easiest mode/settings repeatedly because you could get much more XP trying on those stages and difficulty settings that fit your skills.
Hardcore players can test their skills on the more difficult stages and modes, and a new class of amulets (the “challenge amulets”) will be there to be earned – when you get a challenge amulet by meeting the task/condition (like causing 1M HP damage on a given stage in a given mode), you can go on and push your limits, the amulet will remember your best score, so you can show off on Youtube or try to beat your top score.

And last but not least, about the business model we plan to use in GCL:
1, all stages and most skills will be available for free.
2, a one time fee of a few USD (about $5) will unlock all game modes/settings and all skills.
3, extra skill points can be bought if you want a temporary (one stage) boost for your skills (something like 1000 extra skill points for $1). You’ll be awarded with extra skill points when leveling up or gaining a new amulet, so you can try it without paying a cent. With these extra skill points, you can level your skills up further, but each time you play a stage, the extra skill point amount you used is subtracted from your total amount until you run out.
4, No more victory panel ads – if there will be any ad, it will appear when the game starts up.
If you are unfamiliar with payments in online games, check out Bloons TD 4 and other games on NinjaKiwi, or Robokill and Robokill 2 from Rocksolid Arcade.
If you want to know more about how and why flash game developers earn money or go out of business, and why placing ads in games and not asking for payments is a dead end, read the article Flash love letter (a must-read eye opener for every practicing or wannabe developer!) on Lost Garden.

:: Update July 11, 2010 ::

Yesterday I forgot to write about these:

Beta test:
For now we don’t know if a sponsorship/”primary license” agreement will be made for this game, like it was the case with GC1/GC0 and Armor Games. If the game leaks before release, it can ruin our contract. (for example see the StarCraft 2 invitational beta, which was originally tied to Battle.net, is now available on torrent sites, and comes with a login bypass for offline playing. Of course StarCraft 2 and GemCraft are not in the same class, so I don’t think top tier cracker teams would spend their time on making GCL available, but a flash game (a mere .swf file) is a piece of cake even for a novice cracker. So, instead of a pre-release beta, in the first weeks after the official release, many fixes and improvements will be released for the game.

Donations:
Thank you for showing us your support, but we can’t receive donations that easily. Maybe I haven’t dug deep enough in the maze of tax laws, but as far as I know, here in Hungary we can’t just put out a Donation button and receive the payments on Paypal, we should send an invoice to anyone who sends us money. We would have to ask your name and address, and the processing fee of an invoice, and the amount Paypal and our bank subtracts, be more than the money you originally sent.
If you’d like to support us, you can do this by purchasing our future games, so you will get something in return. Handling the payments will be done by third parties, so we won’t have to issue a ton of invoices and ask for your personal data.

Payments (continued):
I understand your point when you say you wouldn’t pay for a simple online game. On a game that is so simplistic and short that I can play it to the end in an hour, and purchasing an “ultimate laser cannon” would just make it even shorter, I wouldn’t spend aynthing either. If you enjoyed our past games, give our next one a try, and if you think it’s reasonable to buy all the features, go on and enjoy the full experience, otherwise have fun with the basic (but still huge) version.

Hey Everyone,

First, a few things about ourselves. We are a small company (a crew of 2, my wife and me), working at home in our office-livingroom hybrid, located in Budapest, Hungary. My name is Peter Hargitai, I’m the developer behind our games, and I will write most of the blog posts here.

It was more than a year ago when we released our last game, GemCraft chapter zero, and since then, we haven’t given any lifesign, except a few comments here and there, and replying to e-mails asking whether we’re still alive. Now it’s over, from now on, you can follow us here (put our RSS feed in your feed reader, like Thunderbird) or on Twitter, and you will get first hand info about the things going on here.

And so, what happened since last May? Why does making a new game take so long?
Our plans changed constantly, we spent months on planning a multiplayer game, then an other one, in the end abandoning those projects because they would have taken too much time to complete. In about November, we started working on a sci-fi themed base builder/shooter game, which is now on hold, but will be continued once we release our current project.

This March, frustrated for not being able to at last release a game, we switched to making a new chapter for the GemCraft series. I thought it would be done quickly, after all we have a working GC0 base, we don’t have to write all the game mechanics from scratch. But as the project progressed, it became more filled with new features, and now we can say it will be a full chapter (and major part of the storyline), not just a cheap repacking of GC0.

So now we have a project on hold, named “Terran Twilight episode I: New contact”, and an ongoing project, “GemCraft Lost chapter: Labyrinth”. (GemCraft chapter two: Chasing Shadows is still in our plans, we didn’t forget about it)
The events of GemCraft Labyrinth will happen after chapter 1 and at roughly the same time with chapter 2.

We’ll get back to telling you more about the delayed sci-fi game when it’s time, but for now let’s see some of the changes in GC Labyrinth:

• The game’s area will grow to 800×600 pixels (GC1 was 640×480, GC0 was 690×540), which means bigger stages.
• The game will take place in a labyrinth having 13×13 stages (1..13, A..M grid).
• Monsters can now roam freely in wide open areas (depends on stage layout), you can build towers and walls on the path tiles.
• You can pick what type of gem you want (each stage has its available gem types just as before, but now your success won’t depend on what random gems you get).
• You can create gems up to grade 12 without mass combining, gems from grade 1 to 12 have distinct looks.
• New summonable structures: walls (build a labyrinth cheap and fast) and amplifiers (use them to boost your other structures) – walls can be further upgraded to either tower or amplifier.
• Towers can attack enemy buildings now when no monster is around.
• Drop gem bombs on your structures to destroy them (it takes time until a structure disappears completely).
• Shrines can be built now; simplified shrine system (2 types left: charged bolts and beams); Shrine projectiles depend more on the gem inserted; Charged bolt shrines have a limited range; shrines, instead of having a use limit, recharge slowly after each use.

Coming next week with screenshots!