Founder Jenna Hoffstein featured speaker at Casual Connect

Founder Jenna Hoffstein is speaking this week at two sessions during Casual Connect, the premiere event for the casual games industry:

Indie Entrepreneurship: Lessons from the Trenches

Wednesday 2:00 - 2:50, Imperial Ballroom

Indie is not just about a certain visual aesthetic or gameplay experimentation.  Indie is also about being economically sustainable and having the means to keep creating independently.  Thriving, let alone surviving, as an indie requires an entrepreneurial skill set (and tenacity) not often discussed.  This panel will explore the entrepreneurial side of "indieness" as we hear from four different indie studio co-founders and leaders.

Designing Educational Games for Fun: Throwing Out the Chocolate-Covered Broccoli

Thursday, 2:00 - 2:20, Imperial Ballroom

Educational games struggle, and often fail, to provide entertaining experiences while delivering high-quality educational content.  Instead of rewarding players with fun for getting an answer right, this talk will explore how to make the learning itself fun.

New Monsters Approach: 0.9.0 Update

This is our biggest update yet!  We have two new types of monsters that you'll be squaring off against in the later levels:

Armored Monster Counting Kingdom

The Armored Monster is protected by it's mighty cardboard box. The first spell you cast on it will tear the box to pieces revealing the monster underneath.  That means you'll need to cast a spell on this monster twice to completely clear it from the playing field!  You'll first encounter the Armored Monster in the Polar Plains.

The Magic Monster wields its own magical powers, but can only affect the monsters around it.  Every turn this monster will cast a spell on the monsters up, down, left and right of it, increasing their number by one.  The Magic Monster makes its appearance at the Polygon Peak, so you'll have plenty of spell-casting practice before you need to defend against it!

Other Updates:

  • Catapults are now battering rams.  This seemed to make more sense.
  • Flags on the world map now waft gently in the breeze.
  • Bug fix: When monsters were placed onto a Doubling Tile with the Move potion, their number wasn't doubled.

 

Let us know what you think of the new update in the Steam forums!

Thanks as always,

Jenna and the Little Worlds team

Trading cards are live!

The monsters have jumped out of the game and into your Steam account - trading cards are now live! With monster and magic-filled trading cards, badges, profile background and emoticons, you'll be able to share your love for The Counting Kingdom in a whole new way.

Share your badge progress with us on the forums!

Thanks as always,
Jenna and the Little Worlds Team

PS - Big update to the game coming soon!

Optimization and Balancing: 0.8.3 Update

We have a brand new build to celebrate America's birthday today! It may not have eagles or fireworks or flags, but we think you'll enjoy it all the same. Here's what's new: 
 

Optimization

This new build is smaller and faster. We pulled out unused scripts and images, reorganized our atlases, and reduced file sizes. The most noticeable part of this will be that the build size is now half what it used to be! 
 

Balancing

In playtesting we were finding that the last regions in the game (the Polar Plains and Polygon Peak) were frying people's brains. We've reigned in the difficulty a bit there so that the game is more enjoyably challenging instead of brain-melting. The largest monster you'll come across is now 15 instead of 20. 
 

Monster Reordering

The monsters were put into the game before we even had a world map, so there was no real connection between what the monsters looked like and where they'd show up in the game. The monster order has been reshuffled a bit so that the region where you'll first encounter a monster makes more sense. 


We hope you enjoy the new updates! As always, please let us know if you have any thoughts or problems in the Steam forums. 

Thanks, 
The Little Worlds Interactive team