Around the start of 2017, Alex and I set out to make Hex Gambit, the culmination of all of our post-Outwitters turn-based strategy experiments. Almost 2 years and a Kickstarter campaign later, what a beast this thing has become!

It’s got 2v2, 21 team combinations, a huge territory control game for the league, a single player mode with AI, trophies and ranks to earn for your profile, and it’s playable in four languages. And when the dust settles on today’s launch, we’ll be optimizing it for our first console release on the Nintendo Switch™! If you want a reminder email when the Switch version is ready, sign up right here.

Whether you’ve been an owner since Early Access or you’re just picking up your copy today, the inaugural season of the Apex Cup has begun! Come join a faction, meet some other players on discord, and leave your mark on the Summit in our most ambitious project yet.

Here’s a list of fixes in today’s Launch Update:

• Fixed bug with Flametraps causing selection of units to stop working after triggering it.
• Flametraps no longer trigger if a friendly unit is on top of their own flametrap.
• Flametraps no longer cause a crash when trying to surf through a flametrap.
• Fixed some localization errors.
• Fixed a few animation bugs with minion deaths on lower end hardware.
• Fixed several bugs in tutorials where players could get stuck.
• Replays and in-game UI handle crowd surfing animations better.
• Fixed UI and AI bug showing incorrect ability status.
• Fixed a few visual bugs involving AI doing a sequence of moves.
• Fixed bug with looping spawn audio.
• Fixed bug with looping blizzard audio.
• Added more SFX.
• All Captains now available in Blitz Royale only.
• Updated visual FX for Flamespaces and shout.
• Fixed tutorial animations stopping mid-dialogue.
• Update minion and captain ability in-game text to reflect latest balance changes.

We’ve got plenty of stuff we wish to add in the coming weeks, and as players pile into the Apex Cup we’ll be monitoring any issues on the hub or our discord.

We’re just 2 days away from PC launch of Hex Gambit, and we’re still working hard to squeeze in as many finishing touches and bug fixes as possible! Here’s a fresh batch of polish for you.

New

• New Apex Summit scenery and faction victory cinematics!
• New Blitz Royale Completion screen
• Updated Captain selection screen

Improved/Changed

• Added better support for offline mode
• There is now a soft cap of 30 games per account simultaneously
• Brutes can no longer toss characters into a crowdsurf.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where hypnotizing a runner would damage them upon movement.
• Fixed a crashing bug with Motivator AI in Blitz Royale
• Fixed a bug with Runner’s Hard Surf not unlocking at correct VP on servers.
• Fixed ranking bug where the profile screen always showed ‘contender’
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to delay game timeouts indefinitely.
• Fixed an occasional crashing bug in the placement phase
• Fixed an AI bug where some Captains would attempt to target recently spawned units

We’re closing in on launch day, but we’re still not done improving the game! We’re trying to squeeze in as much polish as we can in the coming days, as well as get to the bugs and usability requests that have been lingering on our to-dos for far too long. Hex Gambit launches on Steam October 15th, so tell your friends and get ready for the first real season of Apex Cup! Be sure to drop by our Discord servers and network with other players.

New:

• Integrated the pillar tapping UI into your action bar. The in-game iconography is now a 3D icon that doesn’t obstruct your other action buttons.
• Pathfinding has been re-worked from the ground up. Resolves a lot of edge cases where runners and other units would take longer routes rather than favoring crowdsurfing.
• As a result of new pathfinding, movement highlights now show every space you can move to rather than just your range +1 crowd surf.

Improved:

• You can now deselect units by clicking anywhere (!)
• Updated Stadium Visuals

Fixed:

• Inspire Visualizations now correctly remove themselves in replays
• Fixed Match History not remembering dismissed games.
• Intimidate Visuals now disappear correctly if you’ve targeted multiple enemies.
• Doubletime passive ability now becomes active mid-turn for Brutes if you cross the required VP threshold

Alex and I emerge from our dev bunkers to stream a match in the latest build of Hex Gambit for PC, launching October 15th! Can Alex turn his losing streak around after months of intense coding?

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in August of 2017 and half a year of hard work in Early Access, our competitive turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit, is finally ready for its official Steam launch! Early Access saw the addition of two minion classes, league play with a community-wide turf war, and the Blitz Royale, our single player challenge mode.

We hope you’re as pumped as we are for this massive milestone! Mark your calendars for October 15th and come be a part of the new Hex Gambit community. You could even grab your copy while we’re still in Early Access and start practicing today.

We know that many of you are waiting for the Nintendo Switch™ version of Hex Gambit, which is currently in development and estimated for a Q1 2019 release. More updates will be coming on that once we have our PC release squared away. Thank you for your patience!

I’ll probably make some minor tweaks before launch, but I deem this Hex Gambit stadium trailer-ready. Time to capture some footage!

Not finished yet, but it requires a lot less imagination to see where the new Hex Gambit stadium is headed! The big screen and the pillars on the game board have some odd-looking states when the game isn’t running, but you get the idea. I’m feverishly polishing things up all over the game while I work on a launch trailer for the next few weeks.

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.

Here’s another peek at my progress on the new, more impressive Hex Gambit stadium. This isn’t even its final form!

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.

I need to get back in the groove of updating this feed. It’s so tempting to just lock ourselves in a bunker and work! We’ve been busy assembling an interactive tutorial for Hex Gambit and prepping for the next big thing we’ve never done before: localization! We plan to have the game translated into Spanish, French, Russian, and German to help grow our footprint on launch day. The target keeps moving around for when that might be, but the Steam release will come first, and we’re aiming to be on the Nintendo Switch™ in Q1 2019.

We should have a firm date for the Steam launch in the next month or so, but you can always join Early Access if you want to save 10% on our launch price and take a peek at what we’ve got so far.

You’ll never guess what I’m working on today… but if you guessed I’m taking another pass on the stadium artwork, +1 cookie for you. I think this is like my fourth iteration. My goal is to liven things up, make it feel a little sportier, and make the “jumbotron” area a bit more impressive. Here’s the progress so far (the pillars and the big screen look pretty wonky when you don’t feed them a state to be in). Bigger differences are coming next.