Greetings Handelabranauts, we have some awesome news for you today. If you are reading this, the first major update (v1.1) to the game is available worldwide across all current platforms and app stores! Read on to see what this update has in store...
Promotional Variants
By far the most anticipated feature now available is Variants. On the physical plane, you may know these as “Promo Cards” and they are alternate versions of heroes and villains. You can easily see which characters have available variants by the banner adorning them. There are 4 hero and 2 villain variants included so far, but as fans of the game know, there are lots more out there. Some will become available in future updates, and some might require expansion packs (you can’t have a variant Expatriette without Expatriette herself).
So what makes a variant so exciting? In the case of villain variants, it means essentially a whole new challenge to defeat as each villain variant has new gameplay included on both sides of the villain card. Double the challenge when you count advanced rules. And for heroes, imagine Legacy as a mixed support/damage dealer vs a pure team support character. Or The Wraith with some “The Visionary”-style powers over the enviroment deck. Variant heroes give you even more ways to compose your team for the ultimate match up!
Variants are included for free in this update, but you’ll have to work out how to unlock them on your own. If you manage to work out how unlock a variant card, make sure to take a screenshot. Then share us that screenshot via Twitter @handelabra, on our Facebook page, or our Google+ page and let us know! If you’re the first person to do so, you’ll be entered into the Sentinels Hall of Fame! Furthermore, we’ve set up a forum thread here where you can discuss your progress (and ideas about how to unlock the variants) with others.
In addition to new content, we’ve also cleaned up and reorganized the game in a couple important ways.
Playing the Comic Book
As many of you know, one of our biggest goals with the digital version of Sentinels was to really support the idea that you are playing a comic book. We’ve kept pushing towards this, which you’ll see in the new game start screen. This will really set the stage for the battle about to take place.
Turn Order
One thing that we received a lot of feedback about for the first release of the game was that it was easy to forget which heroes had already played their turn. To make this work a little more smoothly, we’ve reorganized the hero turn layout. Instead of a round robin, each hero now has a fixed slot on the top left of the screen that they return to when they’ve finished their turn. The bonus here is that we can now call out explicitly on screen who is currently up using the individual hero logos. Check it out:
Artwork
You may also notice in the above screenshot that the heroes and villains look a little better. We’ve cleaned up (and zoomed up) the characters almost anywhere in the app you might see them. We think this makes them really pop off the screen, and we think you’ll agree.
Flipping Out
We call this “The feature heard round the world” because it’s very much one of those things that you don’t realize you need, until you need it. Then you REALLY need it. We’ve heard you all and yes, this should have been there from the start, but it’s there now so start flipping cards to your hearts content!
Size Matters
Moving out of pretty features, and into bug fixes, there’s a couple important updates along those lines as well.
First off, thank you everyone who reported that the app on iOS would download 240 megs, but then install to 1.6 gigs. This was only an issue on iOS due to differences in how iOS handles compressed graphics. For this update, we’ve completely replaced just about every graphic in the app (hey, we were doing it already to update the character artwork). This means the game now uses space far more efficiently and the installed size on iOS is now less than half of what it was on launch day, even though the game has more content now.
As part of these optimizations, we’ve also cleaned up the memory usage of the app so those of you playing on iPad 2 or the original iPad Mini should stop having quite so many out-of-memory crashes.
Finally, thanks to our eagle-eyed players for helping us nail down a couple persistent card bugs that made it into the official release. If you were having troubles with “Atlantean Font of Power” covering things up, or having other cards get stuck on the screen when they should have gone away, all those problems should be cleared up.
As we mentioned, this update is no longer "coming soon" - it’s available right now! If your device is set to auto-update, you might already have it but if not, just visit SentinelsDigital.com to download it, or check the app store on your device.
Red light - Greenlight!
As many of you know, tablets aren’t the final stop for Sentinels of the Multiverse. We’re currently on Steam Greenlight, trying to gather enough votes to earn our way onto the largest digital distribution platform dedicated to gaming. If you are a Steam member, please head over to the campaign and give us an upvote. If we get blessed by the greenlight gnomes, we could have a PC/Mac version of Sentinels ready to play in time for Christmas!
We hope you enjoy the update, so get out there and keep saving the Multiverse fellow Sentinels!