I do agree that it'd be nice to have a bookends-like module which is like the tutorial but harder. The Yellow Dragon is sort of like that, but it's not the expected rematch with Greenfang and chance to finally actually get that Golden Blade item. Currently the only way to fight it is in custom modules or the top of the Cavern of Chaos. Speaking of, does TKoU intend to also keep developing the CoC as the game gets new adjustments? New Quick Draw content? There's so many different routes to develop CH in, I'm really curious to hear what they think the best part of CH is. Personally I find myself agreeing a lot with Vacuity's post, I liked the low-level AotA and the whole of EttSC modules more than the high-level AotA, CM and AI modules in terms of single-player PvE content.
I highly recommend implementing a battle replay system. Currently, it's only possible to save battle logs via the F1 clip method, and being able to save battle replay files to your hard drive to watch later would be excellent.
Yes if there is potential to do Save Battle Replay menu, it will be nice. its part of advertising also if people share it in public for a nice fight etc. Nice we have good News for Card Hunter, long Live Card Hunter. it's a nice game and balanced, but as I see, it's lack for money flow for the developer, maybe you can make some commercial approach without broken the game. Cheers for Blue Manchu and KnightUnity.
I just visited this forum on a whim, and was very surprised to see this (recent) news. I haven't played for quite a while, but I'm curious about what changes will be made. The death of flash has put this game on unstable ground, so I'm assuming that the Knights will start by trying to free Card Hunter from the shackles of flash. That will be a large amount of work on its own... so having invested all that work, I then suppose there will be a fair bit of new content added to make it all worth while. It should be pretty interesting.
Yeah, they are most certainly remaking it in Unity. Possibly with a WebGL build to continue browser support / Kongregate and will have a build for Steam too. It looks like the Steam version of Card Hunter is made in Adobe AIR so I assume when they remake it in Unity they will update that too.
That's some great news. Cardhunter is a great game and I think it really has potential to expand. I'm looking forward to see what happens next
On this topic, when the new devs eventually answer the stated questions about the game's future, I'd suggest to then also change the game's greeting text (the one that currently reminds the logged in player that flash is about to die and that the web players can't buy stuff anymore) with something new. While the current greeting might technically not be wrong, this is perhaps the ideal platform for non-forum users to also get this great news and - in case this game will see a non-Steam future - to be directed to somewhere (the forum?) in order to get to know, when they will again be able to play their favorite game.
Dear Jon and(/or) the new Devs: I've spent years thinking about the most serious aspect of the game, and hope that "panicking" and wrtiting some advice quickly here won't affect anyone's ability to take me more seriously if/when I have more time to write a better-written appeal. (Unfortinately, I'm so concerned and fond of the game, that my busy schedule and the implied quick new developement cycle is encouring me to quickly put years of thought so quickly into words that I can't organize and.or proofread them even vaguely as well as they are thought out.) I think it would be great if the new Devs were to work on things like pretty promotion for game, new maps for PvE, new maps for League, but NOT powerful new items or other big changes to PvP Ranked. (Even "overpowered" new items or new "unbalenced" classes could theoretically be added to PvE (rather than PvP) without risk of harming something very very spectial, as PvE is, by comparison to PvP, very-easy and/or "possible" to balence by changing how your AI "opponents" utilize those items.) I want to urge and caution against "jumping into" anything that might seriously alter the PvP Ranked enviroment! Especially rules, class system, and, mostly likely, powerful new items. This need not affect PvE in any way, so there's so many other things that can change before figuratively "dangeriously playing with fire!" (Of course, in the non-figurative sense, we burn stuff with firestorm all the time.) I
[More parts due to the 15000-character limit of this website] I say the above as someone who not only really cares about the game, but also thinks it has huge potential that's both largely unrealized and very much at risk of possible irreparable damage if not treated with great care! BTW... I do not care about "Ranked" rating, so please don't confuse me for someone who cares about that, or even anything that's more "specific to myself" than what I wrote in the previous sentence! (Obviously I'm using the term "irreparable" semi-figuratively, anything bad could be reverted, whether or not the game could be re-promoted if it lost it's current base is a different story.) If one takes the time to look that statistics of who plays in PvP ranked, I believe you'll find that Cardhunter, compared to other games, has a very very ussually dedicate based of LONG-TERM players, abiet, not a huge number of them. When maintaining games as a profession, I think it's important to try to pay attention to such statistics.... in this case I believe it is indicative of a very good, and extremely difficult to replicate or improve PvP enviroment, which may have failed to see very very high revues only because of lack of sufficient attention! Hopefully some of the logic here isn't too hard to follow.... if people who appreciate the PvP enviroment, as a seemingly very large portion of the players you'll find on the Multiplayer screen do, like the game enough to stay and play for many years, then it should at least raise the "need" to consider how well the game is at RETAINING such players, and the POSSIBILITY that the primary issue to be addressed in PvP is simply better recruiting/exposure to that enviroment! Seriously I think Cardhunter PvP has sometime so special that even Blue Manchu itself, and probably nearly all of the players may not fully appreciate. (I spend a lot of time thinking about the game, and suspect that Blue Manchu's "specialty" lies more in PvE, and they've done that very well! [No insult intended here, it's a possibly invalid assumption based, in part, on how I feel Richard Garfield, who reportedly help develop Cardhunter seems to understand PvP games better than anyone else I can think of! In all honesty, if someone where to compare Albert Einstien and/or Steve Hawkings to Richard Garfield, I would be concerned about the potential insult of comparing "left gifted individuals" to Richard Garfield!)
[Part 3 of whatever-it-takes] With Magic the Gathering, it's my (I suspect correct) understanding hat Richard created (primarily(?)) just the first set! But the second attempted stand-alone set, (the orignal attempt at "Legends," was reportedly such as disaster in-house, that it was (thankfully) reduced to be released as just an add-on expansion.) One of things I'm trying to imply here, is that you, Blue Manchu and anyone you've deligated authority to, maybe be SITTING ON A GOLD MINE, a PvP game with, IMO, a huge, and possibly EFFECTIVELY UNREPLICATABLE potentional for RETAINING PvP players! So, if it were to someone get a lot better a RECRUITING PvP players, it might have more potential to geometrically grow that player base! (Another quick thing for consideration.... MtG "Arena" seemed to be an attempted by Wizards of the Coast to combine a CCG with a 2-board game... it was failure and despite Wizard's noteriety and fame, it failed and was shutdown with a much shorter lifespan than Cardhunter's.) So, after taking the time to figure out how to word this plea, during the short time I'm taking to write it now, I guess I'd like to urge CAUTION with changing the PvP balance, (at least for now(!)) and start with all the other things that be improved without much risk to hurting that-which-already-exists. But, again, I think it would be great if the new Devs were to concentrate on figuratively any/all other areas (at least now now!) That includes new maps for PvE, new maps for League, but not powerful new items for PvP Ranked. (Even "overpowered" new items or "unbalence classes" could be added to PvE only without affecting this, as PvE is, by comparison, very easy to balence by changing how your AI "opponents" utilize those items.) If they want to alter the PvP enviroment, then I simple plead for trying to keep the PvP Ranked as it is (except perhaps for continuing to add items in the same, carefully paced, carefully-to-not-be-overpowered way that Alonzo's Arsenal has.) Maybe call it "Ranked Classic" and add a new version as a "Live Test" the new Devs want to go that way! After years of thinking about how to improve this game, and now find myself quickly "banging out" some advice without taking the time to write or proofread as carefully as I could if I had more time to devote to this. (My "good hours" are limited and have bad availability right now.) so as well as I've considered going over those past few years because I suddenly feel it is urgent that I do. (New, undisclosed changes by a new team coming soon.) So I'd also like to strong urgent Jon, the new Devs, and anyone else who is seriously concerned about the game (or who should be) to try to carefully consider what I'm trying to say here, and not just likely typographic and "political" "errors" in the way that I'm trying to convey those many years of thoughts now!
[Part 4] I am honesty, I'm worried that very few, in any, game developers can create and maintain a PvP game as well as Cardhunter has done. Richard Garfield, pretty much the creator the Magic of Gathering, and, by proxy, pretty much very CCG was on the orginal design team, and I think it shows. (Honestly, I even think that even the Werewolf cardforms, were an unfortinate deviation from the really-well thought out design, largely because they caused you draw from a pre-made deck (while the form was in place) rather than your own - pretty much the opposite of a "constructed deck" game. Of course, this wasn't much of a problem for the other card forms, simply because they weren't powerful enough to become arguably "definitive" strategies.) [Note to self: I wonder if Zombies have "fun/abusive more potential" than I previously realized, because drawing Zombie cards prevents them from drawing the "purge" cards that could cure themselves.] There is much much more than I have to say, and, at somepoint, I'll have the chance to write it in a much better way. But for now, PLEASE, consider the possibility that MAYBE the way PvP plays right now is kind of like the way CHESS plays it's not just something that someone could recreate anytime soon regardless of how much they might want to.) I know one could argue that Cardhunter PvP hasn't "proven" itself successful the way Chess has, but again, I urge anyone with access to try to carefully LOOK AT THE STATISTICS and consider that it might be unreplicable, or at least not EASILY modified, while maintaining it's ability to MAINTAIN players. And if you can manage to GET MORE PLAYERS TO TRY IT OUT, it might just be a very very profitable endevior!) No matter how smart and how-well-meaning the new team is, it's not easy to quickly come out with new items or rules that aren't likely to be too premature to be introduced into a game that has so much time and care built, into it, (or for arguements sake, hypothetically "but there by accident" because, for the purpose of this arguement, it doesn't really matter how the PvP enviroment got so good, as long as on can appreciate that it did and that it might no be something that can easily improved on.) Again... this is regard to mostly the PvP enviroment. People, and how they think, is sometime mankind itself has yet to figure out, so that's one of the reasons that making (or in this rehers keeping it.) an extremely good PvP enviroment is so hard to do, and even harder to understand what really is good and specical about it! In an attempt to qualify my "worth/ability" via anecdotes, like me give you three short true stories about myself: 1) A friend of mine, working mostly by himself, and then later his wife, made a gaming website early on; it managed to catch the eye of investors. They offered him around $250,000 which I pretty much implied was "completely off the mark" so he turned it down. The investor later offered him $1,000,000 for the website and it's content, and EVERYONE HE KNEW, except myself, suggested and/or urged him to take it! But, as someone who can "guesstimate" numbers and spot potential more easily than most people can, I can only guess that they did so because "ONE MILLION DOLLARS" (US dollars, circa roughly 2000) had such a nice ring to it, and certainly wasn't based on any form of critical analysis. So, rather than do that, I actually tried to do a "rough statistical estimate" of what I thought he could get for the website, (and because he didn't have much money and getting nothing would be really bad) I basicly went for the "lowest number they would very likely be willing to pay.) That number was $5,000,000, and even though nobody else suggested any number above $1,000,000, he held out for that and got it! (I could also point out that it was roughly 1 in 7 website that sold for, I forget, roughly $37,000,000 via the combined IPO, again suggesting that validity of that number.) 2) There was a game that I liked where I really really like the "look and feel" on the physical game, but felt that the basic design on play "needed" improvement. That was back in the usenet days, so I used it to try to solicit help from other people in trying to come out with various suggestions for new rules and/or modes of play. In that group, I was basically flooded with only critism and disagreement, as people kept telling me that there was nothing wrong with the game and that I should stop complaining about it. I tried to explain that I was trying to help the game, not complain, but still nobody would say anything to validate my point, or agree that the game needed improvement until the very first point to do so.... That post was from the game's creator and publisher who said: "Yes, I know the game is broken! Please stop [harping(?)] on it!" That took me and everyone else by surprise. But for what it's worth, the designer did later come out with many other varients of the game! 3) Because I'm very dyslexic, it's hard to do math without several dyslexic errors. But when I took that Math SAT's I scored 760 (which was then well into the 99.999th percentile) because I decided to ESTIMATE the answers rather than just use pen-and-paper and actually "artithmatic" to figure them out. Nobody had suggested I try doing that, it's simply something I figured out for myself. (The same way that I "figured out"/strong-hypothesized that Cardhunter PvP is really really special and should treated with great care and/or, better promotion! (I was also one of only about 7 people working for IDT, a small company in it's infancy; the companies owner, Howard Jonas, later recieved a check for LITTERALLY over a BILLION DOLLARS, but the only reason I'm mentioned this, is to point out that I beleive my contribution to the $5mil above was based on my personal and unussual abilities, while, by comparision, I admit that although I could list true facts implying that I was somehow responsible for that $1-billion, but I'm also honest to admit that role was extremely trivial, possibly inconquential, by comparison. In other words, I wouldn't try to convince you that I probably know my own ability to gauge things like Cardhunters worth if I didn't have a good reason to really beleive it.) My point of the anecdotes above is that there is strong possibility that I "really do" know what I'm talking about, regardless of whether or not I'm making a convincing arguement to that effect, and despite the fact that even if I did spend a huge amount of time carefully writing about what is so good about the way Cardhunter PvP plays, I probably couldn't even figure much of it out, despite being very certain that it's there. Unfortinately, it's going to be a bare minimum of two weeks before I can write anything like this out with great care, so, before a "disclaimer", I'll just give the simplest suggestion that I've been wanting to give Jon but haven't found the time to word it as well as I would like to: I really think the PvP portion of Cardhunter is underappreciated and under-advertised! Please consider better ways to promoting it more prominently, perhaps ways as simply as giving it more attention in the Steam Store page, and more importantly, perhaps just a textual arguement in it's favor early in the PvE campaign. In RL, I have a friend who is sinking in many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars in the Hearthstone CCG, but won't even try Cardhunter PvP because he lost interest in the campaign. I don't think he's unique in that I think he's someone who might have really gotten into Cardhunter PvP and also spent a lot of money there, if only it had been promoted better! Of course, that's contingent on not "breaking" the PvP. If it's altered significantly, then it's likely to "break", not retain players longterm as it has, and promoting PvE in preference to it might not be a bad thing IF (and only IF) the fundamental (and very hard to describe) quality and uniqueness the of PvP game is reduced. Disclaimer: Although I'm very serious about the idea above, I'm obviously not too found of how it's written. Please don't quote the ENTIRETY of the above in any follow-up posts, although extracted quotes could likely be very good things to include!
Oh... a short piece of advice I've been wanting to give Jon due to how simple (and hopefully benifitial, abiet blunt it is): I'm hoping and suggesting that you MOVE or ALTER THE "Aquitions Incorporated" Video on Steam! It's effectively an ad for the expansion, not the base game itself, but it is being viewed by people who are trying to decide whether or not to first install the Cardhunter Game! It's filled with so much tongue-in-cheek/"camp" humor, that I had to buy and play that expansion before even understanding that video myself! It's being shown to potential new Cardhunters with little if any explaination of what's going on, and, as such, I strongly suspect it might tend to confuse people and probably do more harm than good! Simply adding something like: "The Following Video is a promotion is for the Cardhunter expansion Aquitions Incorporated. (In practice, the Developers of this game do not actually care too much about whether or not you actually if you own your own real-life Sword.) ought to help better hint at both the context and humor and sufficiently mitigate the danger of potentially lost sales related to it. (The Video, https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steam/apps/256663065/movie480.webm?t=1461121433 is the second most promintantly posted video at the Steam Store, https://store.steampowered.com/app/293260/Card_Hunter/ )
I think I have done the long story short thing by page 1. But to add something anyway, both portions of Card Hunter is underappreciated. Forms are fine, including werewolves. They are pretty much an average warrior anyway, and when people complain about them the actual aggressor tends to be Bless. Walpurgis is the only form of Forms I see problem in, and that doesn't have place in the metagame. It is true that, if devs want to keep the game moving, they must think harder than to just let power creep take over. Being balanced isn't good enough; It has to be balanced where it's fun. For example, things like Parry must stay good, even after numerous updates. I have no problem with long rants, but just don't italicize or in any way emphasize entire paragraphs, please? It's the literary equivalent of going to eleven, and along the "disclaimer" make it look like some legal texts.
The Walpurgis map is too unpredictable, it removes the meaning of assemblies. This is interesting and especially useful for players with weak builds, but brings too much randomness to the game. 1. I believe for using this card there should be a penalty to the sorcerer, for example: he becomes a zombie 100 percent. That would be fair. 2. I believe that there should be a card in the zombie deck that removes the zombie curse. 3. That the need to do with the wolf howl? every second assembly of warriors howls. It's annoying and it's everywhere. 4. Vampires and werewolves should receive additional silver damage.
I'm gonna make a suggestion to @Sir Civil that I wouldn't dare attempt to make to @Jon, simply because Jon just isn't as interested in CH as he obviously is in Void Bastards. Make a CH Discord. Please. We need it. Badly.
Howdy new devs, do you guys have any plans to innovate on the marketing? There are some games like slay the spire and the darkest dungeon that sum hundreds of thousands of views on youtube and twitch, and I think CH would appeal to similar audiences. They look pretty indie, so I don't know if those games did something right marketing-wise to become popular or just rolled a nat 20, because I think CH is at least on par with their quality but have much less views. Maybe you guys could form some kind of partnership with popular content creators that play those games like northern lion (and jorbs, dogdog and many others) to reach their audiences, and regarding the content, implement some custom campaign rules and challenges (maybe daily/weekly/seasonal special challenges?) because honestly the encounters can be very trivial sometimes, especially when you're a veteran with a big item collection, so it would be cool to have an "official" nudie run-like mode; and support roguelike modes to increase single player replayability and make the game more streamable. I also think, on the same vein, it would be nice to fiddle with the multiplayer "draft mode" quick draw: most card games let you have a run and change your deck along it - like the sideboard in MTG, adding cards in hearthstone duels, redrafting some cards after set number of losses like mythgard. I don't know which gimmick is best, but I think would be cool to add a new layer to the mode. I don't know how much this particular game benefited from this move, but monster train (a roguelike deckbuilder) sponsored some streamers at launch this year, and some even streamed spontaneously after that because they liked the game. There's a +200k views video from northernlion playing it on youtube, and i don't even think this particular video was sponsored because there are no disclaimers on the video. There are audiences very open to sponsored quality game streams, jorbs and filthyrobot are aways picking up new strategy games.
