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Hi all, Matt here again. I run the store and work on some of our out of match features, and I’d like to talk to you today about level up celebrations in the next release. In Chapter 2, some players will see bigger level up celebrations when you unlock a new item. However, some of you won’t see these celebrations just yet.
More specifically, some of you will see new celebrations when you complete a quest, or level up in a chapter, class or mage rank.
However, the rest of you will continue to see the existing flow when you complete a quest or level up.
This experience is intentional as we look to make Spellbreak better in the long run.
Our #1 goal is to make Spellbreak the most fun possible in the long run. But sometimes it’s unclear which changes add the most fun and are worth iterating on.
One way to understand the fun of individual features is through a concept called a/b testing, where some players get one experience and some get a different experience. In this case, by isolating level up celebrations we can understand their impact without that impact getting drowned in the broader 3.0 update.
There are a couple of reasons we might test a change like this. The most common is when a developer isn’t sure if a change is an improvement. However, that’s not the case here—we’re pretty confident these level up celebrations strictly make Spellbreak more fun (or at least no worse for those of you who want to mash that skip all button).
Other times, we might test a particular change to better understand precisely how much of an improvement it is, because we’re considering further similar changes. In this case, if we find level up celebrations make the game much more fun, we’ll likely make similar additional changes in future updates. We’d love to make winning a match feel more celebratory, for instance. Development resources are always finite. More clearly understanding the impact of our updates helps us more compare things like additional fun weighty celebrations to other changes we’re considering.
We’ll need some time to understand the impact of this change, and we’ll likely leave this split experience in place for a month or two before all players see the new bigger celebrations.
We know disjointed experiences can be confusing. Sometimes you feel like you’ve got a different experience than the player next to you, or your friends are talking about something you don’t see. We feel this pain, so we’ve made sure to keep testing like this out of the core fundamentals of the game like the in-match experience. Moreover, our aim is for all of you to experience the new level up celebrations as soon as possible. Finally, we want to reiterate that this is the only test like this live as of Chapter 2.
In the end, building Spellbreak for the long term seems worth the work of some changes like this, and we appreciate your patience as we build for the long term.
Happy hunting,
Matt
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