Firstly, the biggest thanks to all of you: building this game is a herculean endeavor for three college students, and we would not have gotten this far without such an amazing and active community. In just Quickplay alone, 50,000 matches are being played weekly, and so much damage was dealt that our stat trackers overflowed (805,706,054,350 to be exact). Here’s everything we’ve learned in the last few weeks, and what we want to do in the next few months to really bring Tiny Titans to its full potential.
TLDR:[]
We’ve built a lot of things, and want to build even more things:
- New Characters: Release many more new characters by launch, and beyond.
- New Modes:
- Rotational modes: Moevasion received a lot of positive feedback, and we want to keep adding new modes like it to spice things up.
- AFK Rewards: We want to rework this to a more interactive format.
- Character Campaigns: Campaigns for specific characters, so we can share a story, and so players can try out all the characters.
- Clan Raids, Clan Battles: Clans will finally be epic. And useful.
- Tournaments Mode: A competitive, strategic series of battles.
- Item Rework: Items work, but could work even better.
- Ranked Ladder: What’s more fun than some friendly competition?
- Character Model Improvements: We sunk a lot of effort into the splash art, now it’s time for the models to match.
- UI Improvements: This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to what the code-monkeys are doing.
- Sound: The sound of greatness, that is.
- Performance: No more space heater, only ice-cold wins.
Variety is the spice of life[]
Nothing saps away the excitement of downloading a game that promises “100s of unique characters to play!” faster than when you find out that 70 are unplayable, 20 are p2w, and the last 10 look super cool, but are also completely and utterly unplayable. When we design characters, we design it with the goal that every single one of them is playable, and fulfils a niche. Pako is a massive meat shield in dungeons, Sha’kiva decimates teams with a weak backline, Demetra is a great overall sustainer, and so on. Every character should have some situation(s) that they’ll excel in.
In the next few months, we plan on releasing at least 20 more characters to fill in some of the gaps. Unlike other games, the goal of our new characters is not to invalidate old characters, but instead, to create more characters that cover the many niche use cases. By doing so, playing teams is not just about picking the characters with the highest stats, but instead, picking characters that exploit the opponent’s weaknesses.
Beyond just new characters, we also want to keep adding more modes that add variety to the gameplay. In no particular order, here’s a bunch of modes we want to add:
- Rotational Modes: Given the positive feedback we received from Moevasion, we want to double down on creating more for-fun modes, and create a whole roster of these modes going forward. One downside of these modes is that replayability is always going to be the limiting factor. By introducing a rotating schedule of these modes, we can keep things fresh by keeping the new content coming, as well as bringing back old fan favorites, with enough of a twist each time to be worth checking out again.
- AFK Rewards: Right now, AFK rewards is a pretty plain feature: climb in other modes to make the gold/minute a little higher, and collect rewards before the 12-hour cap. What if instead, AFK rewards is a full-on Civ6 game where you can buy castles if you need to generate more gold, or a library if you’re running short on dust? You’ll have to defend your resources from barbarians, but by strategically retaking your land, you can greatly accelerate your income flow. One way or the other (maybe not Civ6), we want to add more interaction to income generation.
- Character Campaigns: When we design our characters, we design them with a story that we want to tell. Given the inherent nature of the game, telling a cohesive story when new characters are being released all the time is always a difficult challenge. We’re working on a new mode where each character will go on its own campaign. A lot of work goes into each of our heroes, and we want you to experience each hero’s own story. The secondary benefit of this is that it helps with our goal of promoting and incentivizing full character diversity: players have a chance to try out all the characters without risk of making a poor levelling decision (players are rewarded accordingly for playing the campaigns, of course).
- Clan Modes: Clans are 90% of the reason why some people play games; being able to play modes with friends is always a great time. In this area, Tiny Titans is admittedly lacking. We plan on releasing 2 modes in the near future that addresses this: Clan Raids and Clan Battles. Clan Raids so players can work together to earn resources, while clans can compete to be the best in the realm in Clan Battles.
Finally, items are something that we want to take a deeper look at. Items are currently not as interactive as we would have liked: the decision is essentially limited to picking the highest stat item that your heroes are able to equip. We plan on redesigning this system ground up, and want to redesign more items that have a dynamic impact on the state of the game beyond just raw stats. We’ll release more details on this later down the road.
Some friendly competition[]
Ahh, three cheers to the joys of life: beautiful weather, no work in sight, and absolutely curb-stomping your best friend in the Tiny Titans leaderboards. Friendly competition is always an exciting part of every game, and that’s something we want to expand on.
Part 1 of this is upgrading our current ladder to a season-based PvP ranked ladder. This means that instead of being at 800 elo, you’ll instead be in “Silver IV, 50 points”. By switching to this format, we can add a lot more incremental rewards for playing PvP, and it also means that we can give out plenty of end-of-season rewards to players who worked hard climbing the ranks during the season.
Part 2 of this is adding more competitive modes. As mentioned previously, Clan Battles are one of the next targets in our sights. We want players to compete as a team, and be able to earn a name for themselves as a team. Another one is a Solo Tournament mode for the lone wolves out there, that follows tournament-standard levels so everyone is on the same playing field.
Life is good...but it could be better[]
Let’s talk about the big elephant in the room: why is the elephant so quiet?
Daniel, Yan and I are code monkeys, through and through. We’re big sticklers for clean code, scalable designs, and server stability. However, in the time that we’ve spent writing that code, there are several artistic features that ended up a bit neglected. This is further emphasized by the baseline of standard that our artist team set when they created the splash arts, and the ingame animations (thank you, RT and Chris!).
We’ve laid some gameplay groundwork, but now it’s time to clean up all the areas that surround that. That includes doing things like implementing sound effects, redesigning unintuitive parts of the UI, upgrading our ingame models, plus adding general quality of life things like replays, a forfeit button, and that 10x level up button that has been quite highly requested.
Roundabout way of saying that we know some areas aren’t perfect, but you can bet your butts that we’ll fix it.
Cold and calculated[]
To our fellow Northern Hemisphere players, winter is rough. Out of the kindness of our hearts, we designed the game to keep you guys nice and cozy during those frigid winter nights. Now that spring is upon us, however, it’s time for change.
Early Access means that we’re releasing several new features every week that are being field-tested for the first time. In every design discussion, we make a decision together on how much time we want to spend on each feature. Though being a small team means that we can build fast without managerial overhead, it’s a double-edged sword. It’s a common saying that premature optimization is the root of all evil, due to lost time perfecting a feature that ends up getting scrapped anyways.
Partly due to the fact that we’re a 3D-based game, the design challenges for high performance are much tougher than your regular game. Now that we’re looking at getting the game ready for an official launch, performance improvements are something that we’re planning on sinking much more time into. For those that have been around long enough, you’ve probably already noticed that the game runs a lot cooler, and older phones experience much less lag. Performance improvements are already underfoot, and we have plenty more coming.
What’s next?[]
No jokes in this one. In all seriousness, working on Tiny Titans is a labor of love for all of us on the team, and this is just the beginning. Thank you again for supporting us, and we will continue to work hard to keep creating more Tiny Titans content in the years to come.
Wilson