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
