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Welcome to your weekly update in cool little gaming campaigns being hosted on Kickstarter right now.
Starting as always with the updates to those previously covered, both Goodwill and A Little Less Desperation have reached their goals with time to spare – meaning these two projects are go once their campaigns close. The Station has also made up a sizeable amount of its target since last week and still have just over two weeks to go, making it perfectly reasonable to assume it will finish completing its goal.
However, there are some campaigns with little time left and too much of that target to make up. All of Drawing Dead, Death Witch: Bloodline, Cloud Runner and Alone in the Woods have less than 2 days left, and the closest to target is Drawing Dead which has made nearly three-quarters of its goal. Unfortunately with Kickstarter’s rule of backers not having to pay if a target is not reached, three-quarters isn’t enough.
First up we have a ‘tycoon’ management game – one of my favourite game genres. Only this one is a board game!
Arcade Tycoon sets you against your fellow players as you all attempt to build up the biggest and best video game arcade to win the game. You can sabotage your opponent’s machines and swap around machines to get your pieces into the best traffic-filled areas to become a Tycoon! You earn money by having your rivals land on squares with your machines – first to $40 wins! Think Monopoly with video arcade machines.
Arcade Tycoon has a £1,800 target, with 29 days still to go. It has made £235 so far.
Next up we have a game that brings back memories of the platformers I loved to play as a child in the 90s.
Nin is about a keyring ninja who has been left and forgotten about since he was new in the 90s. Now he sets off out of the dark shoebox he has been kept in to see the outside world. As a miniature plush keyring, Nin’s world is full of giant things from real-life that you must find a way through. There is also a damage counter that lets you keep track of your ‘health’ by how much wear and tear Nin is showing on his body. Being plush means you can take hits, but you’re not invincible by any means.
Nin has a $75,000 goal of which it has made $780 so far, with 31 days to go.
Next up we have a turn-based tactical games that incorporates chess and fantasy gaming into one.
The campaign’s page says that Chessaria is “The turned-based tactical that brings fantasy to strategy board games” and the developers have taken cues from games like the Zelda series for this game, developing a world and a story for their game. There are two main races in the story, white elves and orcs – with the white elf characters listed on the page representing a chess piece each. It can be assumed that the orcs also on the campaign page who have details yet to be revealed will also be representations of the same pieces for the ‘black’ side of the table.
Chessaria: The Tactical Adventure has a €20,000 goal and has 28 days to go; it has made €1,499 so far.
Lastly we have a sci-fi roguelike game with RPG elements.
Jupiter Hell is another 90s inspired game, taking cues from Doom and other games of that era. The movement and actions are turn-based and set you in as a lone space marine taking on waves of demonic monsters. To aid you with this, you can pick up and use any weapon you find to make a mess of your enemies before they do of you.
Jupiter Hell has 22 days to go. It has made £27,770 of its £60,000 goal.
Arcade modes have recently been introduced into the game of Overwatch, along with the new character of Sombra who after the long hunt and trail many players were finally glad to actually see arrive. One of the new Arcade modes is the Duel Arcade mode where players go 1v1 against each other in match-ups. For reasons of interesting play, Mercy and Lucio are excluded from this mode… but it seems so was another character much to Blizzard’s dismay.
Game director Jeff Kaplan was explaining why Mercy and Lucio weren’t in the Duel Arcade mode when he let slip that Ana was also not in the rotation, due to a bug.
“Also, we just discovered a bug that causes Ana to almost never show up in a 1v1 match (well, she has shown up twice since we patched). That bug will be fixed soon so you’ll be seeing more of Ana.”
Lucio and Mercy are currently out because of their healing skills, with Kaplan noting: “We removed Lucio because the battles (if played a certain way) would always end in a draw. Also, when we buffed Mercy, she ran into a similar situation.”
The good news is that Kaplan said that they “have some other ideas” to solve these problems, so hopefully in future we can see all the characters in Duel Arcade. At least for now all the invitations that were sent for the party have been received properly.
Last week in my Gadgetzan new card article I theorised that Blizzard was revealing the cards one crime family at a time, and that after so much attention spent on the Grimy Goons we could soon expect to see focus shift to another of the families.
Well, I was right. An awful lot of the cards revealed this week have been focused on the Kabal classes – Mage, Warlock and Priest – which means finally Warlock has some new cards! Now the only class without any revealed is Shaman and as they are Jade Lotus we can probably expect to see a few coming in a few weeks time if not next week.
Anyway, here are the new cards revealed to us this week:
Druid
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Mage
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Priest
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Warlock
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Tri-Class
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Neutral
As you can see, both Mage and Warlock got a lot of new cards this week. Priest not so much, but they’ve had cards come in the last few weeks and it could be that next week if still Kabal focused might be more Priest-heavy. It seems that the Mage cards are focused more on bringing mana costs down, while Warlock makes use of previous mechanics the class is known for – spells that buff Demon Minions and damaging your own Hero to gain advantage. On the non-Kabal class cards revealed, I’m interested to see just what a Jade Golem looks like.
Interestingly enough, we have two ‘alternate’ versions of two other Minions that have been around since Hearthstone’s start. The Backstreet Leper is a slightly more costly and powerful Leper Gnome, while the Poisonous Swamp Ooze is a much tougher but more costly Acidic Swamp Ooze with a slightly less impressive ability. I can’t see the Backstreet Leper being too popular as more attack doesn’t really make up for the 2+ mana cost, but the Poisonous Swamp Ooze may find a place in some decks. If the downgraded Battlecry doesn’t put people off. Acidic Swamp Ooze‘s popularity was always in it being one of the few commonly available cards that could outright destroy a weapon and just taking one Durability could be a dealbreaker for some.
At the moment eSports are becoming a very big industry, with a lot of money being exchanged and made through tournaments watched by eyes from all around the world. That being said, in some ways major eSports is still a fairly young industry and now a story has emerged from a South Korean team, alleging that the coaching staff of the team badly mistreated the actual pro players.
Mighty Storm is one of the top Overwatch Korean teams has provided a statement to an eSports site in the country describing the conditions they say they were forced to endure. They’ve said that among other things that practice times extended from noon to 4-5am, with only one or two meals a day of ‘2-3 quail eggs and pre-made kimchi and kongjaban’ (a sweet and salty bean paste) and while they could get more meals it was at the player’s expense to do so. What’s more, they claim to have been made to sleep in a single bedroom with 10 people in the room or a living room with 4 people to the room.
There are also claims of not having been paid for events they’ve already competed in, and detailed incidents that occurred during some of those events. Before the final match the team played against Lunactic-Hai, a very strong Overwatch team who took them out of that tournament on November 16th, they claim to have been told by coaches that ‘you guys will probably lose 3-0 today’ and weren’t provided any strategic advice. Upon being knocked out, they were told that they ‘did not deserve to eat’ and the players were given no more meals for the day. A prior loss on October 19th saw the players being screamed at to leave the vehicle home and forced them to walk 40 minutes back to the team house, only to be greeted with a statement that ‘you aren’t even worth the effort to teach’.
One player, Gang ‘SIP’ Jun Hyeong, expressed a desire to leave the team but was told by management that if he did he’d be in breach of contract. He was then told that if the management reported him to KeSPA (Korean eSports Association) for this breach, he would never be able to play Overwatch professionally again.
On the other side, the management and coaching staff dispute all this. They claim that the captain of the team, Jun Hyeong, has not fulfilled obligations in his one-year contract and so therefore they had not released the funds to him until these things were done. They also say that no underfeeding of players ever happened and that the coaches told the players that “if you continue to practice this way, you will lose 3-0” rather than outright calling them useless.
KeSPA has stepped in to mediate the dispute, with the Mighty Storm players being given legal support according to the chairman Byung-Hun Jun.
“We have received extensive reports of this unfortunate happening over the last month,” Jun said. “eSports has multiple teams across numerous games, but we are aware that not all players are guaranteed the proper rights that a professional gamer deserves. The fact that pro gamers are often young further exacerbates problems when it comes to gaining the required resources and support of a properly constructed contract.”
Minecraft has had its next big patch update with Vanilla 1.11 coming in, dubbed the Exploration Update. It introduces a small number of new things to the world, as well as a good deal of bug fixes.
The big thing that many have been talking about is the addition of one of the new mobs, llamas – a new passive mob with some of the same mechanics as horses. Llamas will be found in Extreme Hill biomes and can be tamed by climbing on their backs and being kicked off a number of times until it is ‘tamed’. Unlike horses though, llamas will attack back with a spit that takes off 1 hitpoint or half a heart of health. Once tamed you can place carpet and chests onto your tamed llama, and each colour of carpet will have a different design – for example the purple one has an Enderman motif and the white one comes with a nice little neckachief. Although you can climb on the back of a llama the best way to direct them is via a lead, which will then cause all the other nearby llamas to follow on behind in a train, even the wild ones and babies! They drop leather upon death.
Other mobs introduced in this patch take the form of two forms of ‘anti-Testificate’ also known as “Illagers” as well as a small mob that one of them can summon. Both form of Illager are hostile to both the player and Villagers/Testificates, but their methods of attack are pretty different. The one with a physical assault form of attack is known as a Vindicator (with blue pants), and upon seeing an opponent will pull out an Axe and charge forward to attack. The other Illager is called an Evoker (with the gold trimmed robes) and upon seeing an opponent will pull their arms apart to summon small ghost-like mobs with Iron Swords known as Vexes. Vexes can go through blocks and will attack nearby targets but expire on their own after a certain amount of time. Evokers can also spawn ‘Fangs’ which aren’t mobs themselves but more a method of attacking hostiles or enemies. Both spawn inside of a new type of structure called Woodland Mansions, which are buildings of wood and cobblestone you can find dotted around the map rarely. Evokers drop a new drop called the Totem of Undying or sometimes an Emerald upon death; while Vindicators drop Emeralds and an Iron Axe.
Villagers themselves have something new as well, with a new ‘type’ of Villager added to the professions they can have. A Cartographer is a type of Librarian Villager and trading enough with them will give you access to special Exploration Maps – Ocean help you locate Ocean Monuments and the Woodland ones help you to locate Woodland Mansions. There’s also been a type of ‘untradeable’ Villager called a Nitwit added; Farmer Villagers can now give different amounts of apples or cookies on trade and all Villagers can now be named via Nametags.
Other things added to the game include a drop from the Shulker mobs introduced in a previous patch, they now have a 50% chance to drop a Shulker Shell upon death. Two Shulker Shells put on top of and below a Chest in a Crafting Table will make a Shulker Box, which is another way to store items but keeps what you put into it if you destroy and pick up the Shulker Box. It can also be dyed different colours, but unlike chests will not connect to become doubles. They open with an animation similar to how a shulker opens its shell just with a bit more spinning.
There has also been a block called an Observer added, ported over from other versions of Minecraft. An Observer will watch the block in front of it and when it detects a ‘block update’ it sends a redstone signal out of its back port. This block will probably be useful for map makers to get circuits across gaps without having to build a bridge for a line of redstone or similar.
This is just a taste of what 1.11 is bringing into the game. If you want to reach all the patch notes, you can see them here.
And stop by our own Sanitarium.FM server at www.sanitarium.fm. We’ve already set up a llama pen!
