After a lot of hard work, we’re proud to release the tutorial update for Hex Gambit! Now you can learn the basics without reading walls of text in PDFs. This latest update puts us in the home stretch of development. We’ll be looking at the game from every angle in the coming weeks, polishing up the experience, implementing missing visual FX, and getting everything ready for launch on Steam. We’re almost there!

New:

• Interactive Tutorial Mode! No more dinky PDF links
• AP tokens pop out of characters as you spend them

Improvements:

• Lots of new audio for UI and minions
• Turn banner now auto-dismisses
• Improvements to AI behavior when they have 0 AP but still have actions left.
• Salvador’s AI now protects units properly
• Many minor bug fixes

Known issue: Adam is revamping the stadium for online play, so some of the arena visuals are weird-looking this update due to the transition.

For those of you who’ve wished for a way to play Hex Gambit while waiting for your turns to come back, the Blitz Royale has arrived! This single player survival challenge was devised by Abbacus himself, and consists of 6 battles using one, persistent army.

You’ll choose a loadout like usual and receive a certain number of reinforcements per unit, doled out to you randomly before each battle in the blitz. Every minion you lose is gone for good, so tread carefully! In all, you’ll get a little more than 2 standard matches’ worth of minions to survive. Here’s a rundown of our three difficulties:

Easy: You’ll get an extra AP every turn, and start each match with a full Captain charge. You’ll benefit from a bonus that helps you recharge your Captain’s Ult faster, and your opponents won’t trigger their Ults as often.

Normal: You’ll get the same AP as your opponents, and start each match with an empty Captain’s charge. You’ll also receive a bonus charge to help you fill your Captain’s Ult faster.

Hard: Your enemy gets an extra AP each turn, and will trigger their Captain’s Ult more frequently. You gain no special charge bonuses for your Captain.

Please send your bug reports and feedback for the new mode to contact@onemanleft.com.

I’ve updated our Early Access Manual with all the current minion stats and this Blitz Royale info. Our next feature will be an interactive tutorial, so you won’t have to dig through that pdf much longer!

New This Update:

• The Blitz Royale single player challenge is now available!
• Improved audio for minions, added vocals
• Improved audio for UI
• Improved character select artwork for minions

Stat Changes:

• Pacifist now moves 2 spaces (up from 1)
• Thresholds for captain ultimates have changed:

  Salvador: 6
  Lolli: 5
  Molera: 5
  Abbacus: 5
  Penny: 4 (2 triggers are now possible)
  Bjorgolf: 4

Fixes:

• A bug with the crowdsurfing animation was fixed
• Fixed FX for Salvador’s Protect

Known Issue:

• The totals in the Blitz Royale’s reinforcement screen are off vs. the actual spawn menu.

Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. Buy a copy today to save 10% on our $14.99 launch price, then give us some feedback to help shape the final product! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get an email reminder for the official release on PC later this year.

Some fixes for Hex Gambit‘s multiplayer are coming online today before we dive full time into single player. It’ll be a few weeks before our attention returns to the multiplayer side of things, but we’ll have some neat bots to fight when we reach the other side!

The biggest change launching today: our cheaper Captain Ultimates will now recharge for a second use! We’ve also tweaked some costs to balance for this change. As far as the current Captain roster is concerned, this is good news for Bjorgolf and Penny Miser but bad news for Lolli, whose bonus cost went up.

So ults that cost 4VP or less can now be triggered multiple times if your opponent lands on certain scores. But savvy opponents can block those extra uses if they avoid ending their turns with certain VP amounts. It won’t turn the metagame on its head, but it provides some flexibility for future Captain additions and gives us a neat tool for the single player mode.

Here’s a full rundown of what’s new today:

• Captain Ultimates are now rechargeable, and we’ve taken a pass on some of their VP costs. More on that above.
• Added some audio for the Pacifist
• Tweaked some audio for the Sniper
• Captain voice-overs have been adjusted to be less chatty when a lot of VP is earned.
• Fixed replay functionality for the Pacify special
• The Pacifist’s Donate move had an issue on the server side, but now works as expected.
• Fixed a bug with Pillars having shields

Big day for Hex Gambit Early Access: all seven launch minions are live! With the addition of the Pacifist today, you now have 21 different combinations of minions to use on your team, times six unlockable Captain’s Ultimates to choose from. You can carefully customize your tactics to taste, or go nuts and randomize your loadout every match.

Like the Sniper before her, our Pacifist is launching sans sound effects but fully functional. Infectious love and generosity are her specialties! Use her to nullify your threats and to block late game pillar taps.

1. Pacify: Don’t like what’s headed your way? Pacify it to disable tapping and specials for 1 turn. But be warned: this move’s cooldown is a window for revenge.
2. Donate: At 8HP, the Pacifist is Hex Gambit’s most durable unit. Lucky for her teammates, she’s also our most generous! She can give up to 3HP per turn to injured comrades.
3. Pillar Guard (Need 7 VP): Stand next to either friendly pillar to make it untappable.

Another big change this update: a better Motivator! Shout is now free with a 1 turn cooldown, and Intimidate now strips buffs from its targets. That means it removes shields and overwrites Inspire. Inspiration will resume once the Intimidate clears, but those shields are gone for good. Enjoy!

Gameplay

• New Unit: The Pacifist! A master of not fighting.
• Sniper’s audio has been added
• Sniper HP reduced to 3 (from 4)
• The Sniper’s Tapping Round no longer counts as his pillar tap for the turn. You can do both.
• Motivator Intimidate buffed: same as before, but now also strips any buffs on the target.
• Motivator’s Shout now costs 0 AP, with a 1 turn cooldown

Fixes

• Sniper’s longshot is now blocked by blockades as intended
• Sniper’s longshot now works properly when hypnotized by Lolli

Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. Buy a copy today to save 10% on our $14.99 launch price, and give us some feedback to help shape the final product! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get an email reminder for the official release on PC later this year.

Today we can happily announce that Hex Gambit‘s Apex Cup now uses the robust style of skill-based matchmaking you all enjoyed in our previous TBS game, Outwitters! That means we’ve added an under-the-hood skill rating that watches how well you fare against other players. As everyone starts to spread out across the skill range, your matches will become more and more even.

The Apex Cup is all about battling other factions for territory, so affiliation is a factor now, too. Here’s how it works:

1. The new matchmaker favors skill-based matching above all else.
2. Once it’s found a set of suitable candidates, it’ll match as many players as possible with an opposing faction.
3. Being that picky can really bog down matching for 2v2, so your faction is only considered for 1v1 Apex Cup matches.

To clarify: if two players in a similar skill bracket are queued for 1v1 and are on opposing factions, they will match against each other. But in scenarios where the matchmaker has candidates in your skill range and none are from an opposing faction, it will match with one of them rather than waiting for perfection. We’re striking this balance to give you a fair match as quickly as possible.

The first question that’s bound to be on every Outwitters fans’ mind is, of course, what about my skill tier? This update is strictly a server-side, invisible kind of thing. But we are looking into visible ways to showcase your skill rating to the world, and we’ll have a solution for that in a future update. Stay tuned!

Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. Buy a copy today to save 10% on our $14.99 launch price, then give us some feedback to help shape the final product! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get an email reminder for the official release on PC later this year.

Our always amazing OML fans have created a Discord server for Hex Gambit players and fans. Whether you want to find a 2v2 partner, talk strats, or connect with live opponents for a pickup match; this is the place to be!

Attention Kickstarter PC backers: Looking for people to play the Hex Gambit alpha with? Drop into the community Discord server via the widget on the right and say hi!

For the rest of you waiting patiently, here’s a fresh peek at the upcoming Apex Cup we’re adding for next year’s beta. This is the”Torga Wins” map state, one possible outcome at the end of a season. I only wish a screenshot could do the fireworks justice.

Click to enlarge.

Phew! Took quite a bit of effort to get Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous up to snuff, but it’s done! It’s an oldie but a goodie. A nice side effect of having to update the underlying Unity engine was some decent performance gains during gameplay.

We’ve just submitted an update for Tilt to Live HD adding 64-bit compatibility for the upcoming iOS 11 release. This should keep the game working a few more years, until iOS inevitably decides to support quantum-bits. Next up for the 64-bit treatment: Tilt to Live 2!

I’m in ‘networking land’ for the next several weeks/months for Hex Gambit as we try to start getting this game up and running for online multiplayer. While a lot of the ‘big features’ are now largely known, I wanted to share over the next few weeks a few of the tiny features  we’re implementing into Hex Gambit that I think some of our more dedicated fans might appreciate. But first, a quick history lesson:

Outwitters was our first major online game. Since then we’ve heavily updated it, launched Space Food Truck, and then over-hauled the online system for SFT as well.

Not every update networking-wise has been ideal, but with each subsequent release we’ve learned a ton and have been able to improve the fundamentals. Outwitters never really had truly ‘live play’ (or what some of our forum regulars call blitz play). We were able to update the notification system for faster response times, but limitations of the system kept it from really achieving that goal.

Space Food Truck finally was able to achieve seamless real-time play with asynchronous fall-back. A huge upgrade to how things use to work. But we weren’t satisfied 100% with the user-experience due to more technical limitations on getting the asynchronous play to ‘play nicely’ with real-time servers. Not to mention, stability was harder to achieve in this system than in Outwitters.

Now with that bit of background out of the way, what does that mean for Hex Gambit? With this being our 4th-ish iteration of online turn-based play we’re confident we can finally meld the two modes together in a way that feels good and looks good and is responsive.

So one of the tiny things Outwitters/SFT fans may pick up on when playing Hex Gambit for the first time is if you leave your game mid-turn, you won’t have to redo your turn from the beginning. Why? In Outwitters and Space Food Truck, entire turns were sent to the server. In Hex Gambit, each action a player takes will be sent instead. This does complicate a few implementation details, but this approach leads into another minor detail that Outwitters fans will appreciate that I’ll go into next time.