Captain’s Profile: Abbacus

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Abbacus will probably be the first captain you meet in Hex Gambit; he’s planned to be your guide in the game’s tutorial. Being the man responsible for all of the tech that powers the gambit, he’s uniquely over-qualified to be showing you the ropes.

Captains each have their own unique set of bonuses you can cast, and Abbacus’s are themed around his being the “father” of the minions. He can call in reinforcements in ways that bend our normal spawning rules, and he can mess with your opponent’s spawns as well.

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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Showing Off

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We plan on having 5 skill tiers in Hex Gambit, much like we had in Outwitters. Here are the titles and profile badges you’ll be competing for.

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

Categories: Hex Gambit
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Outwitters 2.0.13 Update

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We recently launched an update to fix push notifications as well as various other bug fixes/improvements that comes with updating to the latest engine. Unfortunately, there have been some newer bugs introduced involving ‘signing in’. Currently a work around is to kill Outwitters and restart it (not to re-install). There are some people experiencing restoring purchases issues that we are looking into. We’ll be rolling out a fix as soon as we can.

Several users have expressed concerns with missing their turns due to a bug preventing them from loading their turn lists. For the time being we’ve disabled turn time outs until we’ve resolved this issue so players will not be forced to lose league points.

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Oh Captain, My Captain

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One feature of the old Skirmish and Skirmish 2 prototypes that is still included in Hex Gambit (in its own way) is the hero concept, which now takes the form of your team’s Captain. You and your opponents each select one to accompany you into battle. But unlike Skirmish, your captain is no longer a character on the board that can be defeated. Their job is to provide bonus powers from afar.

The idea came when one day, Alex got stomped hard in the Hex Gambit prototype (I had lot more experience playing than him). There’s a point in any competitive game when the losing player is done for, they know it, and they no longer have any fun taking their doomed turns in the slow downward spiral to defeat.

What if we gave that losing player some kind of bonus to keep things interesting? Not a “blue shell” solution; nothing that automatically turns the tables in their favor. But some smaller powers that, if used wisely, could help you change your fortunes. And the worse you’re getting stomped, the more you’d get to use them.

The captain system in Hex Gambit is based on that idea, and it really works beautifully. In a neck-and-neck game, both players have equal access to their captain’s bonus powers, which can be used 1-3 times in a match depending on their strength. But if one player pulls WAY ahead, their access to bonuses dwindles while the losing player’s access grows. The result: players losing badly still have a few tricks up their sleeve, and players that pull ahead can’t get too cocky.

There’s a lot of interesting strategy in timing your bonuses, and it’s a ton of fun to watch these matches unfold. It reduces the “hurry up so I can win already” moments, replacing them with an extra layer of excitement. When you get your hand on the beta, we think you’ll agree!

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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The Three Factions

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Hex Gambit Factions

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When you first boot up the league in Hex Gambit you’ll have a choice to make: Neptis, Torga, or Volcan? These three factions compete in a larger territory control metagame every season, which we think will last a month each. There are leaderboards within each faction as well, so you can fight for your own glory at the same time you’re fighting for your team.

Profile trophies are awarded to the winning faction at the end of each season, and to the top players for each team. You can switch factions at the start of every season, and we’re also planning some population-based bonuses and lockouts to keep everyone on even footing. We’ll tell you more about the rules of the metagame later in development. It’s designed to provide some dramatic icing on top of our usual leaderboards and skill tiers.

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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Space Food Truck: Leftovers

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sft-leftovers

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We’ve decided it’s time to move on from Space Food Truck content production, but I did have a solid head start on the artwork for what would have been our first expansion: the Resupply Remix. Basically all of the items would be removed from the game and replaced by totally new ones with different abilities. Sadly, these guys never made it to the beta testing phase.

We also had some neat ideas for new character skins. that would not only change the way your Captain looks, they’d also change all of her class cards in the lab to new ones. So between that and the resupply remix, you could play SFT all sorts of different ways.

But alas, in the way that most of our games go, we never have time to add everything we want. We’re already off on our next adventure, Hex Gambit!

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UI: Slow and Steady

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This week I’m working on UI, which is going a bit slower than I’d like. Still hoping to have it all knocked out this month, but I’m putting a little more TLC into things than usual.

This is about what your games list will look like should you join the red Volcan faction in our league metagame. Will probably be updating that “player” icon to something original, seems a little odd to be nodding that heavily at Outwitters. Back to work!

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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The Arena: Early Construction

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So we’ve got our plan laid out for the year, and the pace is going to be pretty grueling considering how new we are to Unreal and 3d games in general. January is my month for blocking in most of the game’s arena environment, finishing up our first character’s animations, and working out all of the UI. Thankfully, I had a head start on a lot of this artwork at the end of last year. Hopefully by February I’ll be free to focus on the meat of the project: character art!

The shot above is a peek at the current state of our untextured arena. It’s going to look miles better once the details and lighting get finalized!

I should probably take a second to explain what a Hex Gambit is. In a world called Agon, the Hex Gambit is a wildly popular arena sport where contenders engage in live “battle chess”. Each player assumes command of a squad of expendable tin soldiers. Whether you win or lose, your performance will influence a larger metagame, which we’ll show off later in development.

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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Humble Winter Sale

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Happy Humble Winter Sale everybody! Our co-op card adventure Space Food Truck is half off until January 26th, EXCLUSIVELY on the Humble Store. And so are a ton of other great games!

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Outwitters Race Refresh

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While we thought about how our followup to Outwitters would play, I also took some time to work on how it might look. Very early on when a straight-up sequel was being considered, I explored some fresh looks for the old races.

The Dystopian Adorables: If we decided to bring the Adorables back for another round, I thought it might be fun to “Mad Max” them up a little.

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I also experimented a little with new takes on some old Feedback and Veggienaut designs:

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Since Hex Gambit isn’t a true Outwitters sequel, these characters are staying in my sketchbook for now. When we decided to explore themes outside of Outwitters, that opened up all kinds of possibilities for what characters could look like. I’ll have some real designs from HG to post very soon.

Want to know more about our upcoming turn-based strategy game, Hex Gambit? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. 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 Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.

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