Boxy Kingdom’s first week has been fantastic! So many players on Facebook, the Touch Arcade forums and more have contributed the most valuable feedback. We’re humbled by the 4.7/5 rating on the App Store, but are committed to making Boxy Kingdom even better.
This past week we’ve been hard at work on getting some of the lowest of the low-hanging fruit taken care of in a quick 1.1 update. The changes mostly focus on new player experience, ensuring the game was accessible to newcomers. It’s clear as AAA game devs, what felt “easy” to us might not have been all that easy for a lot of you – so here’s what’s changed.
•We pushed poison mushrooms out a bit, so you don’t have to learn how to deal with them while you’re still learning how to deal with basic enemies.
•We pushed the spawning of Fire and Poison Drakes out a little bit as well, to give new players more time with Orcs and Goblins.
•We lowered the initial Spike trap density.
•We stopped spawning random Coin and Heart drops on top of spike traps. While we thought it was a fun risk/reward gamble to present to players, it ended up just being more annoying than anything.
•We’ve made warning signs more prominent when you’re lit on fire or poisoned, to better instruct players of their impending doom should they not seek a remedy. Remember, when you’re on fire, look for water barrels – and when you’re poisoned, find a green antidote vile!
•We delayed the appearance of the Guardian Dragon a bit to give new players more time to line-up their backstabs.
•And we snuck some performance improvements and minor bug fixes in, of course!
Most of these settings scale up organically over time. So after a handful of games, you’ll always see the normal volume of spike traps and variety in enemies from the very beginning of a round. And if you’ve already played a whole bunch already, you might not see much change to difficulty at all. Lastly, if you’re on a particularly promising run (indicating you’ve mastered the basics), we return the difficulty to where it’s always been, this way there’s no worry about people cheating the leaderboards by gaming the systems designed to make new-player experiences better.
And yes, Android version is coming soon. We’re just wrapping up optimizations and testing on all the various smartphones and tablets. There are many more combinations to get right with Android, and we want to make sure the launch goes just as smoothly as it has on iOS.