January 19, 2024

🎆 Athena Crisis January Updates

Hello there!

The past month has been incredibly busy with tons of major improvements! Here are the highlights:

• Android Support: Athena Crisis now works great on Android. You can open app.athenacrisis.com and directly install the game as an app on your phone. Try it today!
• Community Maps: Check out maps made by other players! There are already more than 30 fun maps created by the community and you can search, filter and rate maps.

• Discord Integration: When a user creates a public game or publishes a new map, our Discord bot will share the links in the ⁠👯-pvp or 🗺-editor channels. Soon you'll also be able to spectate other people's game – including their campaigns – and maybe even help out via coop features 🎉

• Skill System: You can now select a skill when creating a new game! While this system is still heavily in development, we decided to roll it out as we go. For now there are only three starter skills available with attack or defense buffs, but we'll be expanding this feature a ton in the coming months and add more interesting skills. Please share any ideas for skills or powers you might have!

• Map Evaluations: It's hard to know if a map is balanced or not. The Map Editor has a new Evaluation feature where AI players play 10 games against each other to give you a rough idea how well-balanced a map is. We also sped up the AI performance by 4x and made it a lot smarter.

• Unit Shadows: Unit shadows are now transparent and we are nearing the game's final look. Check out the subtle difference between pink and orange units:

• Backend Migration: We successfully migrated our backend to our hosting partner hetzner.de. I have been a Hetzner customer for almost 17 years and I'm excited to partner with them to make Athena Crisis fast and reliable. Given the experience from the Early Access phase so far, we have set up enough capacity for the game's future growth.

• Polishing & Balancing: A big focus of the private Early Access phase is polishing the game. We fixed over 100 bugs and made 30 targeted balancing changes. We improved the Windows app, iPhone and iPad support, added a lot more game info in various places and improved dark mode. We are happy with the overall quality of the game, but there are still ways to go on balancing. Thanks to everyone for providing tons of feedback!

• Accessibility: We want to provide accessibility options to make Athena Crisis a great experience to everyone. We added an option to confirm moves, which is enabled by default on touch devices, and we also added options to disable map tilting or the soft edges for fog.

• Streams: There were lots of awesome streams of Athena Crisis by community members. LunarChris showed off the Map Editor and the custom campaign he is building, and Yoyoyoshi1, Barrett, sean_the_ocktopus and PurpleSea (French) all did comprehensive deep dives into the prequel campaign. Check them out!

• Maneki-Neko: Athena Crisis has tons of cute pixel art. Community member @casdis drew a Maneki-Neko which we integrated as a decoration in the game. Thanks for the awesome art! If you'd like to contribute art, please join the Discord and share your ideas in the Early Access channels.

For the full changelog, check out the #📰-updates channel on Discord.

Thank you for subscribing, and have a great day!