Hey gang, Star Realms graphic guy / community manager Vito Gesualdi here. For those of you anxiously awaiting the digital release of Star Realms, let me and the rest of the team stress that we hear you! We’ve all been toiling away to make sure the final app is as polished as can be, and we hope to submit our build within the next week.
Did we mention the campaign mode?
Of course, you may actually want to rethink your enthusiasm for our upcoming release. I’ve personally found myself playing 10-12 concurrent games over the course of each day, severely limiting my productivity. I have a feeling that app might’ve been finished a bit faster if all of the team wasn’t so addicted to the beta!
Anyhow, Pocket Tactics has an excellent review of our near-final build, saying it out-plays one of the best deckbuilders around. Check it out!
rob kardashian weight lossPlay the Game in Style
Vito,
Since there is an Android build, will you be releasing the app simultaneously on the Amazon Kindle Fire?
Thanks,
Chad
I’ll check in with our digital mastermind Tan Thor Jen to find out.
Is there any way to sign up for an alert when this goes on sale. This is pretty much an instant buy in my book. Now I just have to go pick up the pieces of my brain, thanks for blowing my mind.
I see the digital game is up on Google Play. How long until it is available on Kindle Fire HDX?
It is? What’s it listed as?
I just emailed this humble list of a handful of suggestions to Wise Wizard. Figured I’d repost it here for reference and convenience, and for the baleful gaze of the public eye 🙂
Greetings, Wise Wizard Games!
With the PC beta release, I’ve finally had the chance to obtain a comprehensive overview of the digital iteration of Star Realms.
The original product and mechanics are, of course, very nearly flawless, and this heritage is enough to make this one of the premium deckbuilder for any digital platform. And graphically, the client is smooth as a card protector’s surface.
But the digital iteration still needs quite a few improvements (some of the most basic kind) to reach the state of perfection that Owen of Pocket Tactics already seems to believe it has. Hopefully this list can help speed development along that way.
(If it seems that this list works from the assumption that Ascension is the ultimate iOS product and the pinnacle of contemporary culture and cutting edge research, bear with me and stay your conclusions. I actually find Playdek’s engine woefully underdeveloped in many ways, and consider Carcassonne the grandest example of of a digital board game port. But with Star Realms heritage and heredity, comparisons to Ascension are more relevant, especially when it comes to card handling.
In terms of mechanics and the original product, however, Star Realms is already AUs ahead of its older sibling.)
The UI:
* Settings to control animation speed, in particular to speed up. Watching the computer slowly perform its turns gets old already during the tutorial, and quickly becomes a major detractor from the game. And when animation speeds prevent us from interacting with cards (we have to wait for each animation, no queueing), frustration quickly sets in.
* Inconsistencies in the interface. When scrapping from discard pile or discarding from hand, cards cannot be dragged to a discard or scrap pile, and neither can special abilities be activated by dragging the card to the target, or by activating the ability and then dragging the target card to a discard pile (in the case of abilities that destroy bases, or allow us to remove cards from the trade row).
This might be particularly relevant for touch interfaces (where the dragging motion feels particularly natural), but in general, making all card interactions draggable in digital translations of card games helps replicate the board game experience as closely as possible, and adds a lot to both atmosphere and usability.
* Scrapping, discarding and viewing the discard pile in general is less convenient than it could be. The big scrap button gets in the way, and seems out of place in the UI experience, and there is no reason the discard pile should fill and dim the screen. Ascension for iOS’s solution is more elegant: slide out a tray whenever the discard pile is tapped/clicked, and allow us to scrap and discard by dragging to a scrap pile. In addition to being a more practical solution for both touch screens and desktop, this also better emulates the physical experience.
* Better sorting of the card gallery. Allow us to sort by type, faction, cost and (in the future) expansions.
The log and statistics:
* The log only shows the last turns. Include a full log. Also, allow this log to be exported/saved (in lieu of a full replay feature).
* And speaking of the log, it could really take cues from Ascension for iOS, with visual representations of cards bought, and colored borders to indicate what actions were performed.
* Accessing the log (and, really, all other user functions. In mobile clients, even essential elements such as discard piles and decks can be hidden nicely this way, a la Ascension) is probably best done by tapping the enemy user.
* A better results screen would be nice, especially if it includes a scrollable list of our decks (very valuable for analysis, for learning and competitive purposes). Again, look at how Playdek’s Ascension go about this.
Multiplayer:
* We need friends list for online multiplayer. I have never before seen a multiplayer title where the player has to manually type in usernames for EVERY challenge, and I would guess there is a reason for this 🙂
* The next game button is a blessing, but it would be so much more useful if it included the number of turns in other games in brackets ( “NEXT GAME (2)” ). Missing the new turn notification is easy enough, especially when we keep the desktop client open in the background while awaiting turns, and I often find myself clicking back and forth just to check. Letting the button itself alert us to available turns (in addition to the pop-up) is much more elegant and convenient.
* Show the inactive player completed opponent actions as they are committed, instead of waiting for the active player to submit his turn. Cards purchased, attacks, etc, anything that cannot be undone. This makes waiting for the next turn much more interesting, and adds perceived interactivity to the experience. Especially pleasant for those of us who like to play quick realtime matches as well as async, since this adds to the realtime sensation. Go to Ascension for an example of how this is done.
* Manual deletion of finished games.
* User-configurable turn and game timers.
* Let us replay the last opponent turn, either through a button in the menu, or by exiting and renetering the match. In a game where the client is often kept open in the background while the player waits for turns and occupies himself elsewhere, forcing us to watch the match just to see opponent moves is a very clumsy system. Having the desktop client recognize when the player multitasks back into the match and replay the last turn would be really nice.
For the Android/iOS clients:
* Push notifications that bring the player directly into the match. This is the big one. An an industry standard (and present in just about every single async title, from Playdek’s offerings to Carcassonne, with the peculiar exception of Starbase Orion) that EXCEPTIONALLY few async titles leave out. This might be why:
When we are active in several or many async matches at the same time, going through a lobby every single turn starts to cost us not only seconds, but minutes every day, and takes away from the extreme convenience and accessibility of async (and of this particularly polished app itself). And those minutes makes quite a big difference for those of us who can barely squeeze even async multiplayer into our daily schedules (since we often take those turns in between appointments and scheduled tasks, and sometimes heartbeats 😉 ).
After the possibility to play multiplayer even for those of us who have no time to schedule contiguous sessions, the luxury of taking one or a few turns while we are out and about, wait for machines or people, etc, is probably the greatest appeal of the async format, and possibly why this multiplayer form constitutes a (very small) revolution in mobile gaming. Notifications that opens up matches directly is one of the vital mechanics of this convenience, and the current opposite is surprisingly limiting to this sense of accessibility.
For that rainy day when there is nothing else left to code:
* User-configurable Authority totals, for varied length games. (Of much lesser priority than anything else on this list. For that rainy day when there is nothing else left to code.)
(In general, anything that lets us break the rules helps to more closely replicate the physical experience, and improves fun factor by allowing the players more control over their games. User-configurable variables could easily be expanded to include banning of cards, hand size, etc. That is, all the stuff we can do in the physical version. For the Star Realms client to truly offer the same flexibility as the physical version, plus all the advantages of digital play, anything that can be altered and messed with is a good thing. However, this is stuff I think we could benefit from, definitively not something we *need*.)
Feedback on the physical game, for future expansions:
* While I assume that the generic nature of most cards (a recurring ability plus trade and combat boosts, possibly another recurring ability upon scrap, and most abilities either scrap from hand/discard/trade, discard, draw cards, put acquisitions on top of deck or boost trade or combat further) is a conscious decision for purposes of balance, I still would like to see a few more cards with unique, more cplicated and very particular effects (along the lines of the Stealth Needle and Mech World) in future expansions. While Ascensions might feature too many of these, and balance can swing wildly as a result, it also adds flavour and a less predictable sense of tactics to the game. A compromise between the first edition of Star Realms’ and Ascension’s ability principles would probably strike the perfect balance.
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In closing (an appeal that might be the last thing a former Ascension designer, and the makers of the primary deckbuilding rival for mobile platforms, might want to hear 🙂 ), I return to the same general advice, a point that has already been reiterated several times above:
Look to Ascension for most design principles that revolve around the card and deck handling aspects of Star Realms (card interaction and dragging, displaying the discard pile for scrapping, etc). I’m afraid this advice might continually be thrown your way as long as the digital client remains in its current, clumsy state.
(For the iOS and Android clients, Carcassonne is probably the smoothest, slickest, most feature-complete example of async mechanics and mobile board game clients available, and should probably be used as a reference points for almost all digital board game makers.)
Also, anything that puts the client closer to the physical experience in atmosphere and gameplay procedure is probably a good thing.
Now, I return to Star Realms. Considering the size of above list, and the urgency of many of the features, the fact that this game will occupy the majority of my limited gaming time screams loudly for the quality of the mechanics and the potential of Star Realms to set a unrivaled standard for deck builders and board game ports!
Best regards,
// Jonas Hedenquist