Talking with the testers today in my forums, I decided to change the way the experience level of avatars works. Instead of having a “multiplier effect”, which was causing avatars too powerful, I opted for a simple “addition”.
Each level will add +1 on attack and defence, and +5 on hitpoints.
As you can see in this screenshot, even the most basic and “harmless” avatar can turn into a deadly opponent once it reaches higher levels. Sure reaching level 5 means collecting 50 stones and that should take a while!

Yes finally after quite some time I am very close to its release, or at least a beta by next week.
The fact is that I got distracted by a nice game made by some friends at Sakura Games, called Mythic Adventure.
Nothing complex, just a simple plain inlay with some nice effect and a word game every 5-6 levels or so, but quite addictive. I wish them good luck!

Back on topic, I have made a major change in the Magic Stones battle system: I have “mitigated damage”. What it means? it means that now avatar will hit more often, but their overall damage will be lower.
Yes, if an avatar has attack 10 and the target defence 1, you’ll still see 30 damage or so, but if the gap between attack and defence is lower, there will be less chances that this will happen.
This way I think the game changes radically, together with the new limitation to Mannaz spell, that will replenish UP to 25% of total druid mana (not cumulative). I think the game is much more strategic now!

Yes, the USM 2 editor is almost finished. I’m quite proud of it, it is fast and can export .csv files, just in case someone prefer to use external tools like Microsoft Excel or any program capable of reading .csv files.
That was the biggest step in USM2 development. Once you have a working editor (and so a working DB engine too), you “only” have to call its functions to display a list of players, teams, statistics and so on.

That doesn’t mean that the game will be done in 1 month of course! but I can say that 30% of the work is done for sure.

Once again a user feedback turned into a cool new feature for one of my games, Magic Stones. He simply asked “what’s the point in collecting 3-4 times the same avatar stone if you already have it? does it increase the avatar’s power?”
Before this last update no, but now I added it 🙂 the update isn’t released yet, but I am already testing it and works great. This solves also the problem that got correctly reported in some review and users comment: once you got more powerful stones, you stopped using the low level ones.
Now what will change? every 10 stones of same avatar collected, the avatar will get one level of experience. Each level multiplies the avatar power by his value: so a level 3 avatar will have his attack, defence and hitpoints multiplied by 3!
A humble Stinging Swarm that had defence 3, at level 3 will get defence value of 9, making it very hard to kill.
Now I have to see if this new rule has too much impact on the gameplay… more info soon!