Uplift of Enlightenment

Gone but not forgotten: When I finished playing Dreamfall I was stunned by the epic open ending that left me hanging with millions of questions and I was really looking forward to the sequel of this very fine adventure game. But it never came. So over the years (it must have been 6 by now) I forgot the game even existed. Until I came across the Kickstarter: The core team of The Longest Journey is back together and planning to pick up the story where they left of. And swoosh: my anxiety is back as well.

During the first games, the dialogues are a bit exhausting at times, but it’s very much worth to chill out and play the first two episodes (or at least the second one, as the technology of the first one got quite ancient by now). Not a big fan of spoilers so I’ll just give you this: The technology driven world as we see it is just one half of what is out there. There is a parallel world of magic and both have been kept in balance for centuries. In the first part the balance starts to crumble and you play a girl who might be important to prevent that from happening. I won’t spoil anything from the second episode, except that you play yet another even sweeter girl.

You move through an epic and very atmospheric adventure with breathtaking scenery and a fantastic conspiracy story holding all of that together. At the end of part two you just want to know how it all plays together. So hurry up to finish the first parts if you haven’t done so already and get onto the kickstarter…

Watch the clip in which director Ragnar Tørnquist and his crew explain what the sequel will be about:

P.S.: They are building it in Unity3D – which by coincidence I just started to look into myself (more on that in one of my later posts maybe). Would love to pledge and in return have a look at their source!

Edit: I just pledged $50.

Its a matter of minutes now. I will put up the new release today and boy, have I been working or what? The game mechanics have changed… almost entirely! Especially the buy and sell price calculation and also that the price changes depending on the volume that has been traded. I think I won’t go into too much detail here, because I would prefer you to try out the mechanics and see if they work for you and let me know about it (also interesting for me: if you understand them).

For questions or curiosity about their details you can reach me as well by posting a comment here or on twitter @kicktradegame.

And you will have to update your client this time or you will not reach the server.

More changes besides the entire buy/sell mechanics included in this update are:

• The history graph is now zoomable and scrollable
• You can share your rank and networth (for example on twitter) via a button from the ranking
• Button and list item clicks have visual feedback
• Fast scrolling on the history now shows the correct format of sections
• Going back to the market from a trade reloads the list
• Users see how many shares all investors have of one stock
• The API does not publish unused values anymore (sorry, tbx!)

Follow the kicktrade news on twitter. All news including server maintenance times and game changes will be announced only there from now on and will be linked via the app soon:

@kicktradegame

or

https://twitter.com/#!/kicktradegame

P.S.: Major release changes and other topics that can not be expressed in a few words will still be published here of course!

The first two days of beta testing have revealed a bunch of minor changes to the game. With the new client v0.13a you will see the following:

• All prices have been made x10 so a single trade which increased or decreased a stock price by 1 will not have such an impact on the price shift. Accordingly the end conditions have been adjusted so that stocks will be bought back by the bank with a price x10 as well (8000 for the 1st, 4000 for the 2nd and so forth).
• Trading lock time has been increased to 2 hours. After you made a purchase, you can’t buy or sell the same stock for 2 hours. If someone else trades that stock however the time is reduced by half.  Also: The time currently remaining is displayed in the market list as well as on the stock trade page. This time might be increased further if the amount of players increases. Be aware that what is displayed is not the final lock time, it can change depending on the trade of others!

• Example: You buy and would have to wait 2 hours. After 45 minutes someone else buys the same stock. So the total waiting time has been reduced to 60mins, giving you another 15mins to wait. A third person trading the stock will give you 120mins divided by 3 = 40 minutes of waiting time. Since you waited already 45mins the stock is unlocked for trade again immediately (and so forth). So even if you see a 2 hour waiting time it is worth to check back before the time ends in case someone else made a trade and thereby unlocked the stock.
• A Price History Graph has been implemented. However, this is still a very early stage and besides displaying a curve there is not much working yet. I just thought it might be helpful enough to be in there already.
• Minor Bugfixes: Depots that are empty are correctly removed from the list now.