Sep 19, 2012 - Patch Woes

[Lord_Venan]

Hey All,

I wanted to share a note with everyone about what's been happening at Venan and where we are with things. First off, we are completely committed to BoH and making it better. So even though things are quiet recently, don't mistake that for complacence. We are working, HARD, on getting stuff out to you.

What really sucks though is how long it takes to get things done.

Our goal for 1.4.2 was to get out a smaller, quicker update with some usability enhancements, lay some groundwork for 1.5, and get something new into your hands PRONTO. However it was supposed to be done by now. Actually we were hoping for a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately (like always it seems) we hit some snags.

Getting Retina/universal support in the game was a bigger nut than we expected. Most of the artwork had already been done, so we didn't think it would take that long. But once we started implementing it, memory started to bite us (bigger graphics = more memory = game crashes), and we had to do a bunch of re-factoring to reduce our memory consumption (that's programmer-ese for basically rewriting what was already written so it sucks less). Then we lost some original art assets that had to be redone. Then there were a slew of just time-intensive tweaks to get everything working properly and drawing in the right spot.

And then - the game got over the OTA limit. So we had to break out the assets into a separate downloadable pack. But this caused another problem of getting the game to properly detect and load the assets. Sigh. More refactoring. Add to this all the confusion with the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 coming out. Anyhow, today was supposed to be the submission and we discovered another fringe bug that caused the game to crash on iOS 6. We think that's fixed now though so it looks like tomorrow we'll be getting things into Apple. Yay!

It's frustrating because we really want to start tackling the "big things". What is big? Well lots of things really. The stuff everyone talks about on here (and some perhaps just we talk about). More content. Raising (or removing) the level cap. Adding PvP. Some kind of GvG. Creating world events. Dramatically expanding the equipment system. Re-balancing classes. New classes. Crafting. Fixing the stats so they make sense again. Giving monsters more bite. Hardcore content.

Will all this be coming in the next patch - no, that would take us another 6 months. But you'll start to see it in 1.5.

You will be getting a lot of nice enhancements in 1.4.2. Native iPad and Retina support (not retina iPad - that's just crazy), numerous UI enhancements, universal leaderboards, and a bunch of other new features. We'll be posting a preliminary list once it goes out to Apple.

We suck at blogging, but I hope that sheds some light on what we've been up to. Hopefully next time it won't take three months to post something new

[Pur3Aw3zom3n3zz]

Quick thought, I think that when 1.5 comes out the most important thing for it to have, (in my opinion), would be harder difficulty. Why I think this, is, because eventually the game gets really easy. Which makes it repetitive, and also makes might be the only important thing that you need.

[Bbbb]

As a person who primarily plays on the iPad, I wish you all hadn't spent a moment of time on a native iPad version. The iPhone version works great on the iPad. I doubt you will gain any customers in the process and probably have lost quite a few by the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

New levels, content, and such are what almost everybody is wanting the most. Since labor day, I've seen (and discussed with many others) that most of the guilds in the top 30 range or so are having raid completion issues - whether it be schedule (school), burnout (from lack of content and what is there is repetitive), or too many guilds at the high end chasing too few players. That's a whole separate discussion.

[Arthoris]

As long as there is some sort of advancement that takes time to complete im good with that cause level 4 gem farming gets boring really fast and after awhile seems pointless

[LordNathor]

As a person who primarily plays on the iPad, I wish you all hadn't spent a moment of time on a native iPad version. The iPhone version works great on the iPad. I doubt you will gain any customers in the process and probably have lost quite a few by the opportunity cost of not doing something else.

New levels, content, and such are what almost everybody is wanting the most. Since labor day, I've seen (and discussed with many others) that most of the guilds in the top 30 range or so are having raid completion issues - whether it be schedule (school), burnout (from lack of content and what is there is repetitive), or too many guilds at the high end chasing too few players. That's a whole separate discussion.

Hi, Bbbb. I totally understand your sentiment but I think I can shed a little light on why we opted to increase the graphics quality at this time. I think that we at Venan agree that content and features are more important to the user base (and to the long-term health of the game) but there are issues of staff availability that came into play.

Improving the graphics on iOS was largely an engineering task for us. Most of the art had already been authored and processed accordingly at an earlier time. As such, the art requirements were lower and more important than anything, the task required no input from the design department. Really, the goal was to make sure we used all of our engineering resources effectively while preliminary design was being done on some of the features that were being targeted for 1.5. A lot of product planning and systems design was able to occur while other engineering tasks were being performed. Hopefully this will allow the engineering team to hit the ground running for the next phase of development.

[Hachiman_Defender_of_Oda]

You guys and gals at Venan are doing a great job! BoH is the only game that I play right now, and that is a huge accomplishment! Most games I'm bored with after a month, yet I was playing BoH back when it was a single player game, and I'm, still here. I'm also a cheap son-of-a and you have gotten me to buy gold shields numerous times, with no regrets!

Keep up the good work!

[MaryEllen]

Can PvP be optional? Please oh please?

[Little_Mike]

PVP will be an optional way for character progression. You won't be ganked or anything unexpectedly.

[Møürñíñg]

Im glade that the devs listen to the ppl who play most other games dont.
On a side note have u considered have paypal as another way to pay for shields just a thought.(some banks dont like google pay dont know why)

[Little_Mike]

Im glade that the devs listen to the ppl who play most other games dont.
On a side note have u considered have paypal as another way to pay for shields just a thought.(some banks dont like google pay dont know why)

It has been discussed, but we do not have a timetable for implementing this at this time.