Hey Breakers! Thanks for sticking with us. The new build has been a massive undertaking, and we’re now getting the last few structural pieces in place. If you’ve been following along, that means the new live PVP engine and the effect resolvers, and as of today the biggest pieces are actually in. What’s left is a change to how we present card effects visually, some testing, and the war system.
If you’re playing the public release today, every match is async. You’re up against a snapshot of another player’s deck, so the person on the other side isn’t really there. The new build changes that. Two players can sit down at the same time and play each other live, with real decisions on both sides, and that’s what the new PVP engine is for. It’s the biggest change since the game went out, and most of the hard part is already done.
Async isn’t going away. It’s still in the new build, but now it’s something you can opt in or out of in most cases. Alongside it we built direct challenges. From most pages that show a list of players, you can challenge someone straight from there. Each challenge has a timed response, so the other player has a window to accept. If they have async turned on and don’t get to it in time, the challenge rolls into the async system and the match still gets played.
There’s one more piece I’m excited about. When a season ends, the top players get their last winning deck preserved. After that, anyone can challenge the deck itself, not the player behind it, and beat it for a shot at that season’s finale card. It gives the end of a season something to chase, and it means a great deck doesn’t disappear when the season does.
I want to be straight with you about something. Things slowed down after mid-August. Stuff in my personal life hit harder than I expected, and it cost me real time and energy. It reached past Rankbreaker too, and I pulled back on a lot of what I’m involved in for a while. Development never stopped, but some of the new build pieces got pushed out further than we hoped.
So what’s left? A full round of verification on the new play mechanics, a change to how effects look, and the war system. We can do a lot of the testing ourselves, but we also want to get Steam keys out for the updated build as soon as we can. I can’t give you a date yet. The holdup is mostly cost. We’re moving to Amazon’s managed GameLift fleets, and we can work out what that costs for the player count we have now. What we can’t do is absorb a sudden flood of new players, and that unknown is what has made us stop and think before opening the doors.
The visual change is how card and location effects look. We’re moving away from PNG sequences and toward particle systems. The learning curve is steeper for us, but they’re easier to work with once you’re past it. The real win is for effects that travel from one card to another. Right now a player has to work out the line from the reveal to the thing that got hit. With a particle path, the effect just shows you. We’re starting with pre-made effect packs from the asset store, so I’ll say it straight: some of it will look more generic than what you’ve seen. We lose a bit of the hand-made feel up front. As we tune colors and timing and build our own style on top, the effects will start to look like Rankbreaker and not like a pack.
Then there’s the war system. Two factions can fight over a territory that one of them holds. Factions are now called Legions, and there’s no cap on how many can exist, but the number of territories is fixed. That means there’s always something worth fighting over. The early release build had Legions at up to 25 members. In the new build we cut that to 10, which keeps the economics of a Legion in check and makes a war a lot easier to run. The system itself works, and I like it. The honest problem is that our player base isn’t big enough yet to justify it. A war needs enough Legions competing for a small set of territories, and we’re not there. I know the appetite to fight over resources is real anyway, so that’s why we haven’t shelved it. We’re weighing whether to finish it now or get the new build to you first and bring wars in after.
My gut says the right call is to get the new build into your hands before wars are finished. I also know that would feel unfinished, and I don’t love that. So I’d rather not decide this alone. If you have an opinion, come find us in the Discord and tell us. Would you wait for wars, or would you rather have the new game sooner and get wars after? Either answer helps, and we’ll read all of it.
Until next time, Breakers. The current build is still up on Steam if you want to get some matches in while we finish this one.
