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.

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.

Yikes! Almost a month with no blog post. Time definitely flies when you’re focused!

On my side of things, not much has been going on visually, hence the lack of posts. I’ve been helping Alex refine the AI logic and plotting out a first balance pass for our single player mode, the Blitz Royale. I’ve also been polishing up some sound effects, which I can’t wait for you guys to hear. Soon the minions will all be yelping and grunting!

Alex has a first pass on the AI and cinematic flow done, and he’s working on splitting the mode into Easy, Medium, and Hard now. When we have a good playable pass ready, we’ll be streaming to tell you all about it!

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

Almost done tinkering with this arena background! I’m told Alex has AI working on a basic level today, and my first pass on the single player dialogue is ready to go. Can’t wait to get all this framework in place so we can start battling some bots!

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.