Previously, when you booted up the game, you'd be greeted with a black screen for a few seconds as the game calculated your offline rewards.

Now, the game will show a % indicating how far along the processing is.

This should hopefully improve stability as well, as the game application itself is no longer unresponsive (from the operating system's perspective) during that calculation time. I suspect that this is what was causing many of the crashes that some players were experiencing when the game was starting up.

The change also affects the importer, so your game shouldn't soft-freeze while importing save exports anymore, either.

- Added some optimizations to the game.

- The card-buying animation should be instant now.

- Realms in general should run a little faster, especially the ones that were getting laggy (Plains of War).

- Removed the estimated launch date of the Cityscape expansion due to delays. Still on the way eventually. Mod support is in an early state of development as well, but it's too early to announce anything yet.

I built this feature last weekend, but held off on releasing it due to the visual glitch when dragging and dropping.

But enough people have requested (or outright demanded :P) it that I figured it's better to release it with the minor glitch in place than to not release it at all.

The glitch is that, if the window has been resized, the card you're dragging will appear a little off-position. This doesn't affect anything except that it looks a little weird.

After the next expansion is out, I'll be spending some more time looking for ways to improve it and get rid of that tiny glitch.

You may have noticed that the game switched over from free-to-play to a regular game while still in its prerelease state. The price is set to $1.19 for the first week after launch, and $1.99 after that.

My plan originally was to release the game free-to-play with microtransactions.

But making the microtransactions appealing would have required slowing the game's progression down, making it less fun for anyone not willing to shell out a few bucks. If you've played the Kongregate version, you know that while Creature Card Idle has some idling involved (it's right there in the name!), it tends to progress at a much faster rate than most idler games. You could unlock three expansions in a week if you strategized well. But the flipside of that is that there's no reason to pay for the microtransactions that are so commonly used in these types of games to speed up progress. The "speed boost" is already built into the design for free.

So adding microtransactions would have made the game much less fun to play, except for those who were willing to shell out $10+ worth of cash to bring the game back up to its normal progression rate.

There were also a number of technical issues to sort through if I wanted to get microtransactions to work in the first place. That would have taken away another week of development that could have been used for other improvements and new content.

Ads were another option, but they're annoying. Nobody wants a 30 second ad every time they start up the game.

Adding paid DLC expansions-- along with keeping the existing expansions for free-- was another idea that was floated, but wasn't a popular one in the Discord when I asked.

All in all, I honestly think I'll make a tiny fraction of the money this way compared to if I'd released it free-to-play with microtransactions. But hopefully the quality and originality of the game, coupled with the low price, generates enough word-of-mouth sales to make up some of the difference.


You might ask "why wouldn't I just play on Kongregate?"

For the dollar-or-two the game costs, you're essentially getting the permanent removal of all ads, the addition of cloud saves so you can play on multiple computers more easily, and Steam achievements. All of the achievements match the ones in-game. You can import your Kongregate save if you'd rather play here; this will also instantly unlock all of the achievements you've already earned in-game on Kongregate for Steam.

Additionally, you're more directly supporting the game, because Kongregate ad revenue doesn't add up to anywhere near as much as paying two bucks here does. I'd like to keep adding new expansions to the game for months to come, and I have plans for a big CCI spinoff game I'd like to do at some point in the near future. Your support helps make all of that happen.

Lastly: I was able to add native Linux support over the weekend, so that's confirmed to be in the game. The Mac version didn't pan out, because getting that to work is much more complicated than it should be. If a lot of people want a Mac version, I'll take another look at it in the future, but for now Windows & Linux are the two platforms the game will release with.