This page contains all the blog posts from february 2016. To read the most recent blog posts, click here.

Exploration is made up out of two parts. The first is available right away and scales with player level. The second part becomes available once the first part is completed, and it's difficulty scaling is very different.

I'm currently implementing the mechanics related to the first part of exploration. Since this is available right away, and scales with player level, it's aimed at newer players, but this doesn't mean it'll be easy (more difficult than regular duels). Exploration duels are spread over areas, 3 per race, and each area contains 4 opponents and one boss. The 4 opponents need to be defeated before the boss is unlocked, which in turn needs to be defeated to unlock the remaining areas of that race. In the first area, each opponent, upon defeat, will provide a boost to all remaining opponents (including the boss). Since all 4 opponents are available, players have control over which boosts become active right away, and which boosts will be delay. Next to providing rewards similar to a regular duel, the first time players defeat any opponent, there will be a guaranteed reward. Spread over the 15 opponents (5 for each of 3 areas) per race, there currently are 4 uncommon and 11 elite rewards. Players can choose any uncommon or elite of that race.

The first part of exploration is getting close to being completed, but it still needs to be put through testing after that. I haven't decided yet if part 1 will be released without part 2. Doing so will complicate matters regarding savegames. An option is to disable the savegame portion related to exploration until part 2 is complete. In any case, there's a good chance i'll release another update before exploration is complete, containing smaller improvements and bug fixes.

No blogpost next week as i'll be posting once every two weeks from now on.

Hidden Dimensions 3 is now on Steam Greenlight. Check out the game page here : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=620037416 If you have a Steam account, i'd appreciate your vote.

HD3 being on Greenlight won't affect the version of the game that's currently available. Even if HD3 ever makes it onto Steam, the free version will remain accessible, and will be updated alongside whatever version that ends up on Steam.

Meanwhile, work has begun on the Exploration mode.

For me, the beta is not too different from an actual release. The only main difference is that two large features are still missing (exploration and drafting). Release or beta doesn't mean that the game is finished, but it's evolved far enough for it to be treated as a complete game. With that idea in mind, it's time to look into a few ways of promoting HD3. I will avoid all forms of advertising that involve randomly placing ads on sites, as it's generally expensive and only pays off when you can really pump lots of money into this system. In the past, i advertised larger games by releasing one or two small games on various flash game portals. I considered this with the 'Xyth Mercenaries' game, but that game is most likely not going to get released at all. On top of that, since HD3 itself is not going to get a flash version anytime soon, primarily targeting flash portals doesn't seem the best course.

I'll be trying a few things over the coming week(s).

Last week's HD3 update put the game into (open) beta. Technically however, this only truly applies to the windows version of the game.

For mac and linux i don't expect any problems, it's just that i don't have access to a mac, and the last time the game was tested on linux was almost a year ago. While i expect the game to work on these platforms, there could always be platform-specific problems.
As for android, while the game has been tested alongside the windows version, there's a serious problem with recovery that happens every so often. Basically, the game's stability can no longer be guaranteed after a recovery. I have some ideas to make this issue less of a problem, but i don't expect that it can be resolved fully.

I'll keep providing the game for the non-windows platforms, and these versions will be updated alongside the windows client (since it's 99% the same code for all platforms).