All of my early Outwitters UI designs allowed room for player avatars, but ultimately they never made it into the game. Not so for Hex Gambit! Your collection of avatar options will grow as you level up your player profile. Here’s our first batch of designs for Early Access (including some icons and characters you might recognize). If you have any requests, leave them in the comments. Maybe you’ll see them in the game some day!
Click to enlarge.
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Yesterday was our first online playtesting session using real world copies of Hex Gambit! Adam versus Alex, and it’s not important who won every game (Adam). There’s still a lot to polish up, but the core game is working wonderfully. We could watch all of each other’s turns in progress, just like a local match.
Once we get the game into presentable shape (around the end of this month), we’ll be giving our PC Kickstarter backers pre-Early Access to the alpha build. It’s rough around the edges, but we’ll be squashing bugs and adding features all the way up to our Early Access launch (pushed back to November). Here’s our current plan:
Pre-Early Access Features:
- 5 standard minions
- 1v1 Exhibition mode: play online with skill-based matchmaking
- One random captain is unlocked for your player profile. Level up to unlock the rest!
- Get a head start earning EXP for your profile. Earnable items will be retroactively unlocked for you as they’re added.
- Metal Minions and Legendary Pillar skins will be immediately accessible for our top tier backers.
Added before Nov. Early Access:
- 2v2 Exhibition matches
- Interactive tutorial
- 1v1 and 2v2 League Play in the Apex Cup: choose a faction and battle for territory in monthly seasons!
- Unlockable captains and avatars
Added during Early Access:
- Pacifist and Sniper minions: customize your loadout!
- Local 1v1 and 2v2 support
- Single player vs. the AI
- General tweaks to the rules, moves, and metagame based on your feedback.
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Among the last particle effects I needed to complete for Hex Gambit‘s Early Access release, Abbacus‘s captain’s power lets you return any enemy unit you don’t like back to their spawn pool. It’ll cost a few precious turns to respawn and reposition them, and they’ll return to the board in the same condition as they left.
Yesterday was day one of our captains’ voiceover sessions! We’re recording the six Early Access captains we showed off during Kickstarter, plus some extra voices for future captains we may add after launch next year. We had a lot of great auditions and too many talented people to choose from. We can’t wait to show off the results!
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Things are getting prettier as we approach Hex Gambit‘s Early Access release. Here’s a mockup of our new captain tile in action, plus a little ice icon for Bjorgolf’s Cold Feet ability. The turn after it’s triggered, a blizzard reduces your opponent’s mobility and removes their ability to crowdsurf.
Alex is getting all the shiny new UI in place, and our sound guy Mike is casting for our captain’s voices. We’re all working our butts off right up to the deadline!
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
In addition to completely overhauling the UI for Hex Gambit, we’re also finishing up all of our character and special move FX so our sound guy can tackle all that in time for Early Access next month. I have been a very bad blogsman in the midst of all of this, and I beg your forgiveness.
So here’s some quick screenshots of what we’re working on!
This new “captain’s hamburger” sits on your side of the map. When your bonus power is ready, it transforms into a flashier state to let you know the time has come to rain sweet vengeance on your enemy. This one has pixelated placeholder art and is half-finished; the final product will look even cooler!
Here’s the new matchmaking screen, just before you jump into the arena. A cool feature we’re hoping to get implemented is the “Random” minion slot. Any slots you don’t fill with a specific minion class could be set to randomize every match, so you can have a few wildcards on your team. We’re also wanting a convenient “Randomize All” button, so you can easily mix things up and challenge yourself. These features won’t be that interesting until more of our minions are in (Early Access only has 5 minions on release), but they’d work for captains too.
The in-game UI has also been rearranged to help you find important information easier. Most of this stuff won’t be on the screen all at once like this, and the console version won’t have chat at all. Maybe we’ll work in some kind of emote system to get basic information across in 2v2? We’ll see what we can do.
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Sort of left you hanging on Hex Gambit details this week, but for good reason! We’ve decided to totally overhaul the UI I spent months designing to better accommodate our console version. That means we’ll have big, beautiful, readable text with less screen clutter, but it also means I’m reeling to get these improvements done fast in time for Early Access next month. Didn’t have a chance to capture new video this week, sorry guys!
All of our character animation and move effects are finally ready for Alex to hook up. All I had for the Brute and Motivator in time for Kickstarter was that epic shout and some heavy breathing. I can’t wait to finally see everybody bouncing around the map and blowing each other up!
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Slowly getting back into the groove of content production and blog updates after our Kickstarter, I’m extremely close to finishing all of our Early Access character animations for Alex to implement. Here’s a peek at another nifty, non-offensive ability.
The brute doesn’t just pack a powerful melee, he also has a move called Toss that lets him rearrange the board a bit. His target can be flung over barriers, or even crowdsurf a line of other minions if you get a good angle. Use him as a blunt instrument on the front line, or as a springboard to feed reinforcements up the field! It’s also great for physically removing enemies that are standing right where you don’t want them.
Check back weekly for more progress on our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
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.
Thanks to everyone who showed up to pledge, and a huge shout out to our Outwitters OGs, our art print enthusiasts, and to all our god-like metal minions. We did it! Our first fully funded Kickstarter campaign feels pretty good, and this boost to our coffers (and self esteem) buys Alex and I some much needed breathing room to do our thing. $14.7k means more time to polish Hex Gambit’s look, feature set, and controls; plus a bit more budget for quality sound design. We really can’t thank you guys enough, and we’ll be working extra hard to make you proud!
Kickstarter surveys are coming soon to confirm everyone’s platform choices and reward preferences. Art prints will be signed and shipped out sporadically between now and November, and Early Access for our PC players is being assembled and tested as we speak!
If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our beta this year and the official release in 2018.
Time is running out for the Hex Gambit Kickstarter! Huge thank you again to everyone that backed this project in any capacity, we’re extremely excited to have garnered so much support for our return to turn-based strategy. We’re SO close to unlocking that House Rules stretch goal; if you know of any holdouts or feel comfortable adding a few dollars to your pledge, every little bit can help push us over the top!
Spread the word in person, on social media, or on reddit: let everyone know that this is their ONLY chance to lock down free DLC for life, grab that cool legendary crystal pillar skin, and even become one of the few and proud chrome minion players on planet earth.
