Hey guys, it's been about 10 days into release, though it felt like 10 months to me.
Thanks for the attention, support, and sharing your thoughts on the game.
While there has been many suggestions and feedback on the game's state in the official discord as well as Steam, I felt the biggest issue at the moment was onboarding, and difficulty.
Thus, I mainly focused finding ways to tackle these issues for the first patch.
Patch 1.1 includes; new default difficulty, balance changes for certain cards, minor reworks of certain systems, a few bug fixes, a few qol improvements, and finally, a Russian translation.
New Difficulty
Insider Trading has several twists compared to other games in the genre, both thematically and mechanically.
This creates interest and a unique experience, but comes at an exchange of a steep learning curve.
Considering this, the current default difficulty, 'intern', felt a little inappropriate as the first difficulty. Its fast scaling of targets pressured users too much for optimization of their plays, even before most users had a chance to properly understand how the game is played.
Therefore a new default difficulty, 'TRAINEE', has been added.
Trainee's target amount will scale at a rate somewhere between the game's initial demo version, and the current intern difficulty.
New players will automatically start the game with both 'TRAINEE' and 'INTERN' unlocked.
If you are a type of a player that's looking for a challenge, you could go straight into INTERN. If not, the TRAINEE difficulty will give you a bit more room for mistakes in proceeding the game, while beating it, would still require one to have a good understanding of base mechanics.
There's no new achievement that can be unlocked only by beating the Trainee difficulty, so if you are already comfortable with the game, you could ignore it. The other difficulties are more or less the same, though they have been indirectly affected by other changes below.
Balance Changes - Cards
There were a few types and cards that were clearly underperforming, compared to the rest.
While there hasn't been a massive rework of things, a few selection of cards have been adjusted in their strength.
Most of the changes are focused on early game common cards, as to indirectly lower the early game difficulty for certain types as well.
New Media: Now modifies price by +8% instead of +7%
Old Media: Now modifies price by -8% instead of -7%
Clinical Success: Now modifies price by +10% when condition is met, instead of +7%
Clinical Failure: Now modifies price by -10% when condition is met, instead of -7%
Lottery Ticket: Now has a 1 in 5 chance to give +12 tokens on delete, instead of doing nothing.
Utilitarianism: Now gives +0.03x buff, instead of +0.01x buff.
Corporatism: Now gives +5 tokens when discarded, instead of +1 when drawn.
Controller: Now modifies price by -$2, maximum til $5, instead of -$1 with a threshold of $10.
Brainwash: Now gains +3% when locked, instead of +2%
Plastic Bottle: Now gains +3% each time it's deleted and starts with +0%, instead of gaining +2% and starting at -4%. Is now a green card.
Fuel: Is now a red card, as Plastic Bottle became green.
Black Swan: Now takes away 4 tokens and gives +0.04x buff, instead of -3 tokens and +0.03x buff.
White Swan: Now gives +4 tokens and -0.04x debuff, instead of +4 tokens and -0.04x debuff.
Balance Changes - Others
One other issue that was constantly brought up, was the lack of means to thin the deck, compared to the amount of cards that gets fed.
Therefore, I applied a few early changes to give some extra room in curating the deck, as well as rework the event that stopped you from doing so.
Game will still require heavy amount of optimization to get through 6 (or more) weeks with a thin deck, but will be a lot easier than before.
Choices Matter: This event will allow you to choose any number of cards in selection, between 0~6, instead of forcing you to select 4 cards every select. At the same time, this event will increase the reroll cost of cards by +2 tokens.
Connection's Pill Gift: You will only be gifted a white powder when forming connections, instead of being randomly offered out of 4 pills.
Rare Pills: The other pills that used to be obtainable through connections (ice, poison pill), will now randomly spawn in shop with a very low chance.
Panacea Removed: It's concept was too close with Anti-Depressant.
Other Features (QoL, Tutorial)
Tutorial Rework: Part's of tutorial has been reworked, to help a softer onboarding.
Warning Tooltip for Suboptimal Actions: When trying to perform an 'sub-optimal' action, a tooltip will popup, requiring you to select the action again. This can be toggled in settings.
Examples of such actions are; trying to trade when balance is over target, trying to buy items when you'll have no tokens left afterwards, trying to skip when the queue is mostly green, etc.
Auto-set to last played Character: The start menu will automatically grab the last played character and difficulty when booting the game.
Bug Fixes
Removed Bull/Bear card that wasn't getting unlocked in the collections tab. It was a removed card from the previous version.
Added 'Stitch' in the collections tab, as that was missing.
Changed Ape's banner in its card image, to match its rarity.
Fixed 'Reset' failing to precisely set the price to $100 when price was extremely high.
Fixed 'bear' being displayed red when its not a word on its own in French translation.
Fixed 'Bear Statue' not resetting the stacks of cards it transformed.
Fixed 'Hot Tempered' sometimes deleting cards it's not supposed to.
Fixed wrong difficulty being displayed in game.
Fixed FOMO causing screen to flash even when the screen flash option is off.
For a full list of bug fixes that happened over the past week, look at the last announcement down below.
[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3166810/view/490465653219656388?l=english"]
New Language
One of the users, Munzy, has kindly offered their translation of the game, with minor AI usage.
Their translation has been applied to the game, though I've market it as 'beta', since there may be some issues I've overlooked on, with me being unable to check the Russian translation myself.
Again, thank you Munzy, for offering the Russian translation for the game files.
And that's it for 1.1.
Let's see where the game will jump to next, and where the game needs attention in.
Thank you for playing!
