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!

I’m very busy doing the first Magic Stones expansion. I have people who want more challenge with my last game, so I’m going to give them some 🙂 the new quest mode will be very limited in terms of mana and creatures allowed, this way I can test the difficulty myself, shrinking the range of possibilities, and having more control on the real challenge of the game.

Talking about a very different thing, was fun seeing the post of Popcap creative director, complaining about the Clones invasion (basically he is calling those devlopers parasite, who cannibalize sales over other people ideas).
Fun how the idea of every other developer seems to be “you want money? me too!” 😀
Me? I don’t think I’m going to make a casual game soon, I’ve too many ideas going on at the moment (USM2 for example) …

I’m very happy to announce that finally I finished the beta of Magic Stones. I’m letting testers test it a while then hopefully I’ll be able to release it by next week or sooner!
The testers reactions so far were very good, I’m glad of it 🙂
If you’re curious, look at the game page (still hidden from my main site):
http://www.winterwolves.com/magicstones.htm