The main point is that opening chests should be fun. You finally played the time required to gain this experience and level up. You should have more fun doing it. Yet somehow I missed it, and a friend pointed it out.
December. End of 2025. What a year. Many great indie games were released, among them Silksong and Megabonk. Tons of small studios made amazing projects. I'm so happy about the current state of indie gaming.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah back to the devlog. So what did we do this month?
Whether chests are the correct choice for a relatively casual game like FTB is debatable, but since I already created them they will stay.
Anyway, we added cool particles that fly during the chest opening animation, and particles that fly around the chest in general. The one's fly around in general can be in blue, green, purple, or yellow colors matching the item's rarity. The more items of a specific category you get from a chest, the more orbs with the matching color will fly around.
All of the above made the chest opening more fun.
It may be a bit of a sensitive topic, but I still want to cover the ideas behind the choices and the reasoning.
I want you to have a nice experience in FTB without too many irritating ads. But with all due respect to you, dear players, the servers and game development cost something, so I at least want to try to break even (my bad for making my first serious game both for mobile, online and free). Since we want to avoid ruining the experience with ads, we need an alternative - and currently it's these chests. Gambling I guess.
Let's break down how we plan to at least cover server costs and the monetization plans.
We have a version called FTB Standard that you will usually get by default. Regarding ads in this version: you get interstitial ads only when you create new rooms. We do this to try to encourage people to join existing rooms. Certain actions also need ads, but they are optional: refreshing the store, refreshing missions, changing your name, etc. The most irritating ones are to gain more XP after a game and to open chests (sorry).
If you really enjoy the game and want normal progression plus customization, you can get the FTB Premium version. We made it a one time purchase. You will gain the experience we planned initially: no ads, all features available, a permanent XP boost, two immediate additional abilities, and the Titanic game mode (meaning you can create rooms and other free users can join you). Also, if you play for some minutes every day you can collect a free daily chest with Premium. Consider the purchase as a donation, I guess to help me not go broke, while gaining the experience we initially planned for the game without the, beeeh, ads and limits.
How do you gain coins to buy the "GG" emote in the store? In FTB Standard, you can watch an ad every few hours to claim 5 coins. In FTB Premium, you just claim it. But we want free people who don't want to watch ads to still be able to open chests or gain coins over time. So, we added the Coins Generator.
The idea is that it generates coins over time and you can just click the collect button from the menu, simple as that, and it holds max capacity. Basically like other games like Clash of Clans type where you need to enter every some time the game to get money - same concept.
I'm not an investment advisor, but I thought it would be a cool concept to do something like this: There are, certain people, who want, you know, to have fun opening some chests and ready to spend some $$$ on it. Or just donate and support FTB bless your soul. What if we make it easier? like create ready bundles of chests - one with only common chests for abilities, one for legendary items and so on. And give discount of course cause why not. This can be fun - I mean it's fun sometimes for me to open chest in CS, League of Legends or whatever.
The chest bundles can be bought with FTBs. It means that free, FTB Standard players, can collect coins and chests bit by bit without watching ads at all, and once have enough FTBs to buy a bundle they can get it and open all the chests at once because they have the no ads timeout. So the standard players can watch an ad to open the chests now, but if they decide not to they can wait to buy the bundle and open all chests they collected during the period without watching a single ad.
(((1))) Some ads from FTB Standard users. Very low income to try to not harm experience.
(((2))) Coins (FTBs) to get immediate items in the store or chest.
(((3))) FTB Premium to play the game as we planned it initially with all features unlocked.
(((4))) Chest bundles at low cost that also upgrade the coins generator.
Yeah, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Do I have moral issues since it's a bit like gambling? A bit. But I think these features make the main menu more interactive and offer a nice experience to any type of player. And hey, many other games already do it and on a lot more gacha level. We are always open to feedback if you hate these features. Hopefully, your support will help with the bills.
What does it mean? It means we have keys for the rebooted FTB and we can share them with certain people for testing purposes. We're at this phase. If you are interested to be among those drop me a message. We want to test everything well so you get a ready product(unlike the first FTB release where I literally developed the game while an unready product was public on the play store)
In one word: pain. I was able to make a TestFlight version with many errors using remote Mac build services. Many libraries can be compiled only with a Mac, which I don't have... god. It may take a bit of time. It's an interesting challenge, but I can't promise deadlines for the iOS version yet.
We created many social accounts. The ones you should follow are mostly YouTube and X. Literally built a marketing plan. Anyway, let's see if I can bring sticks to FTB. Also need to learn to create videos, high quality content (holy Davinci amazing software), and I guess socialize. I consider myself the gamer type not social media guy.
Fixing bugs, optimizing textures, making the game more balanced by buffing and nerfing stuff. Not that significant changes more preparation for a more stable release with leftover things.
Yeah so as you see the features are not relevant to the core gameplay as we shared in the previous devlogs but about literally anything around it.
That's for December. (Soon) happy new year I guess, may you achieve your goals people whatever they are. See you next year and thanks for being part of the journey :)