Following up on the follow up on the Automon Arena announcement, I'm here again to convince you to get excited or at least mildly less indifferent
First I'll remind you that the game is already publicly playable at the Itch page. In fact, I released a new version few days ago, so you can experience all the new bugs I added!
You can also join the Discord to visit it once per quarter to see how the game is going and get disappointed that I didn't add lootboxes yet. Or follow me on Twitter or BlueSky to see some low-res gifs regularly.
So what's new this time? Many things! At least 2!
Most graphics are now different ("better" is too strong of a word here)!
There are now bots you can play against! If you play solo, the timer is disabled so it's like the original Automon, but with less features!
The bots aren't smarter than players, but they know to use Automons with matching types to get bonuses, and to send out ones that are strong against the enemy. They will also collect duplicates for upgrades AND when facing players, they will try to guess what the opponent will send out and make decisions based on that!
On a second thought, that does sound smarter than players
There is now a proper tutorial when playing against bots, featuring your favourite Professor Jitters!
(Oh yeah and the gyms now give out badges like they did in original Automon, I'm too lazy to record a gif of this (NOT because I tried to but lost before reaching a gym!) so you'll have to trust me on this one)
Yeah but when game?
Next steps are:
- Keep working on how the game looks and use a tazer on myself whenever I want to add gameplay features
- Get splash art and set up a Steam page
- Install spyware on game publishers' computers then blackmail them into giving me money
- Release the game either for very cheap or completely free with microtransactions added later, probably in Early Access but that's still up in the air
- Keep working on it until either I die or the game dies
I would estimate maybe August for the release if finding a publisher doesn't take forever, otherwise probably later but still this year
