I have a question for you all.
What do you think we should do to make Blight more appealing to the average gamer?
I would definitely encourage the aspect of playing with friends and hosting games for friends. The idea of tournaments is a great step in the right direction, and nightmare difficulty helps for those darkest dungeon/ dark souls types who want a challenge.
But all this either already exist or is just more of a “Hey look! Play the game like this”
I think giving users the ability to fast forward games in longer and shorter increments in multiplayer would be good. It would open up the game to players who might want to optimize more/ have different or constrained schedules.
Also, giving a custom map editor to be used without hero coins WOULD BE AWESOME. Imagine building a map and testing out with friends. Just get rid of the currency part, so its pure sandbox, and maybe throw out an award for map of the week or something, and I bet there would be some really creative things done. It would also appeal to the sandbox players of the world.
Not necessarily a feature of the game but more about fleshing out the world of the game. Funding out some light graphic comics/ “story” for the game. That little excerpt about “The First Necromancer” was pretty cool. Imagine a couple of cool short strips showing orcs being orcs, goblins being goblins, etc. Maybe even some merch with images and the like. Who wouldn’t want a T-shirt with The Crone’s image on it that says “World’s best Grandma”. Maybe not… but you get the idea. Hats/shirts with the various racial symbols. More ideas to come.
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I think a lot of gamers would find Blight way too slow, maybe making it clear that by hosting a local game players could sit down and actually play a game in an hour or so?
Maybe a “blitz” mode where each hour = 1 minute?
people love customization and unlockables as well. custom game avatars, “foil” cards to collect… also playing up the ccg aspect would help, they’re soooo popular right now 
I personally don’t need that stuff, but it tends to have mass appeal.
there’s probably other stuff that would give the game more mass appeal, but let me be totally honest: those games are garbage pay to win affairs that require little skill and are mostly your typical “push a button and watch a number go up”
You’ve really got something way more unique and interesting here… I should just finish that damn video to give you something flashier Yo show around 
I’ll do that soon I promise!
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One thing that might help with mainstream appeal would be to alleviate the need for frequent logins to play. Some rough ideas how to achieve this could be:
- A queueing system for orders so that the player can plan further in advance and is more flexible when to interact with the game
- If a full queueing system adds too much complexity, some limited automation could already help. For instance, an auto-activation check box for certain abilities that the user generally wants to activate whenever they become available (e.g. Crystal Miners)
- Some limited form of selectable unit AI (let’s call it stances). As an example, a Dryad in the Guard stance would auto-activate Forest Light if it is available and an Immortal stack enters range.
Any such additions would need to be balanced against UI complexity, which is of course an important consideration when talking about mainstream appeal.
As an additional point, I was wondering why Nightmare level games are offered to beginning (free) users. I imagine most new players will choose Normal for their first games but those who don’t will almost inevitably be overrun in short order. Many of those won’t sign up for another game. From that perspective offering Normal and Hard games to free users seems to make more sense.
Another thought: a dedicated app for mobile with a slightly tweaked UI
currently it works fine in may phone browser, but there’s a few things that could be improved.
This game is begging for (optional) notifications and whatnot.
A dedicated mobile app (actually two, assuming support for both major OS) seems like overkill to me. Maybe further down the road, but at the moment that would be a monumental undertaking for the devs.
That said, the game is clearly well-suited to mobile gameplay. I’d say that keeping it in the web browser, but resolving the biggest current pain points on mobile, could have a huge impact on the game’s popularity. I’ve got a few specific ideas, some more fleshed-out than others.
- Reduce processor/network demand. Every mobile device I’ve used has struggled to provide a halfway decent experience on any but the smallest maps, even on the “Low” map graphics setting. The two main culprits appear to be waiting while map tiles load (displaying the blank green base texture, but not interrupting user interaction) and waiting for various assets to render (causing “laggy” interactions while panning around the map, etc.).
- Reduce the size of various UI components on smaller devices. I check in on my phone fairly often, and I expect this could be the primary form of interaction for a large number of people. Even on a large, current-generation device, many of the UI elements cover the entire map, making them cumbersome to use at best. Reducing the visual size of the commonly-used components could vastly improve the mobile experience.
- Change some UI behavior to be mobile-friendly. This would be things like maintaining the selection/detail UI after panning the map. Anyone who’s played on mobile has encountered this: you click a unit that you want to move/use, and then unthinkingly you drag the map so you can see what you’re doing a little better. Now your selection is gone, so you have to pan back, click the Move or Use Ability button, then pan over to your target… Technically this is an undesirable behavior on desktop as well, but with so much more screen real estate and faster controls it barely ever comes up. But on mobile, where every action is slow and may need to be repeated (such as if you’re trying to move a unit 2+ screens away), this is a serious setback in the ease-of-use department.
- Fix mobile-only bugs. This is a no-brainer, but there are definitely some bugs that I’ve seen on mobile but never on a desktop client. I’ve never bothered reporting them in the bug thread because I have no idea if they are specific to my device or if they’re real bugs, but to go after the mobile market seriously, they’d obviously have to be investigated.
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I’d be keen to hear about them if you are in Chrome on Android or Safari on iOS. (I’m not going to try and support the default Android browser or Firefox for Android because both are really buggy.)
Penny has started reading about cordova and we plan to have a iOS build coming out soon.
I’d like to package a maps textures in the release and have some kind of look up system to see if a maps textures are available in your current build, or if it should download them from the internet.
Yeah I guess in theory, this is more what I was thinking… as the game is essentially a responsive Web page anyway, if some more tweaking went into making the game mobile friendly, all you would really need for an “app” would be a pretty icon that linked directly to the website.
Definitely don’t recode the whole game… yikes