Bringing it all together

Let’s break it down:

Kaiju Defense Club

We shipped Kaiju Defense Club at the beginning of the week! Thanks for playing and giving feedback!

We’ve been collecting feedback and pushing small fixes. Patch notes:

• There's a big giant laser beam now! Look for the (placeholder) powerup!
• Tuning update!
  • Increased base rate of fire.
  • Decreased range of 'crit' damage.
  • Rate of fire and shot speed increases become damage increases if the turrent is maxed out on those stats.
  • Reduced size of powerup/treasure/super weapon cores to increase likelihood of staying in hook.
  • Adjusted powerup/treasure/drone health to align w/new fire rate and damage values.
• Targeting cursors are now color coded per player so they’re easier to tell apart!
• You can now control the volume for the game as well as muting/unmuting, and your preferences get saved.
• Load times should be substantially better, especially on an empty cache. We have a fancy new packaging system that bundles all of the initial files you need in a single download.
• We fixed a variety of multiplayer connection issues.
• The game now stays in sync if the browser tab gets hidden.
• Some assorted other performance optimization! The game should run a little better!

Vapor Solitaire

People have been giving us great feedback and bug reports! Our favorites have been the ways people have found to cleverly stack cards in ways that technically aren’t allowed in Klondike Solitaire to make really huge piles! I almost feel bad about fixing them.

• Vapor Solitaire also got the updated audio controls! You can now change the volume and your preferences will be saved.
• Vapor Solitaire also has faster load times thanks to the fancy package manager!
• Stacks should now scrunch and un-scrunch correctly when you move cards on and off of large piles in the tableau.
• Now you can stack opposite-colored aces on twos in the tableau.
• Now you can't stack opposite-colored kings on aces.
• Buttons are a little smaller in narrow aspect ratios (which helps on mobile).
• Input no longer gets stuck if you drag a card stack out of the browser window.

Homestretch Bet

A lot of the improvements to Kaiju Defense Club and Vapor Solitaire were improvements to the core engine, and can come to Homestretch Bet too!

Homestretch Bet was built a bit before we could easily share modules between games, though, so it’s going to take a bit of refactoring before it can take advantage of all the improvements. Homestretch Bet means a lot to us, so we will circle back to it eventually!

(We’ve also got some great improved UI designs from Adeline that’ll help with the playability, especially on mobile, so we’re looking forward to getting those implemented too!)

Team

Big news for the 2weeks team this week: we’ve staffed up our team!

We’re excited to welcome two new people to the team:

• Leanne Bradbury is joining as Community Developer! Leanne is a super experienced community manager and has worked on some amazing games at great studios. Because of our open development approach, keeping our community involved in our development process is critical to our success. Leanne’s going to help us make that relationship great!
• Sean Nakamura is joining as Principal Artist! Sean is an extremely versatile artist who’s done pretty much everything when it comes to game art production, which makes him a great fit for our experimental development style!

With Jordan Massey joining us as Principal Engineer just a few weeks ago (Jordan is a stellar engineer and prototyper who Foge and I are lucky to have worked with across multiple studios), we’ve filled all of our open positions. Our small and mighty team is a little less small and a little more mighty!

We had nearly one thousand applications for our open positions. We were overwhelmed with the number of applications - if you applied, thank you for your patience with us as we worked through the queue - but we were also overwhelmed with the quality of the applicants.

We met some amazing folks in the process, and are working hard to get 2weeks to a place where we can grow so we can have the opportunity to work with more of you!