How we survived through the wild spring of 2018

Published in

Luden.io

7 min readMay 28, 2018

Hi everyone. Have you already checked the new kitties in the game? Alright-alright, let’s talk about the kitties later.

We decided to tell you about how the hot spring of 2018 went by for us. You remember the beginning of the story, don’t you? In the end of March we wanted our game to calmly enter Early Access in Steam and not tell a word to anyone about it, develop it until summer, and only after that, we planned to share some details about the game, prepare new localisations and etc. Only the first part of the plan worked out for us — we did release the game in the end of March, but one night after the release we understood that everything went totally different than expected. In one single night the game was purchased by more people than we’ve expected to purchase it for the whole spring.

We received lots of positive comments and suggestions on what to add into the game, what to change and which languages to add. What is more, there were many absolutely amazing guys waiting for us in Discord, who help us a lot every day. Please don’t get angry about this, but we do not remember what happened during the spring in details — all we can think of now is that we somehow managed to sleep at least a few hours per day lately.
But, well, here is how it all went by!

At least 3 schools and 2 universities are using our game right now in educational process. It’s so inspiring, please join us because all our games are free for educational organizations, just let Oleg know oleg.chumakov@luden.io

Interview with a brillian teach from this school (Russian language) http://www.edutainme.ru/post/while-true-learn/

26 updates

It feels like it was only yesterday when we began to think about making a game. And there are already 26 updates released out there. That’s almost unbelievable :)

We need more machine learning in the game

We’ve got into an interesting situation during development. We released the game without a progress screen, where you could see which task you are completing from the main branch of development or are you completing a side-quest at the moment.

Also, we have a lot of tasks in the game which will help people who do not know anything about programming gradually learn the context. This is why people, who were already familiar with the terms of programming, thought that the whole game was made about simple if/else nodes, and the game also did not tell how everything works in real life. We are going to fix the matter with the help of 2 huge updates.

The first one of them is already released — we’ve added some links to great YouTube videos and to articles which explain how everything works in real life to each node’s description. It was not an easy task to watch all the videos we found interesting in the internet and pick out the best ones to share with you, but I think we managed to successfully complete the task.

The second update is coming up soon. It will include a progress screen to the game. It will help you understand which tasks will show you the new educational nodes dedicated to machine learning and which are out there to simply help you make money. This way, every player will be able to select a starting point he/she likes the most. You will be able to follow the path of a scientist and learn a lot about machine learning by selecting new type of tasks every time or you can choose the path of a businessman and spend your time earning money in already opened nodes.

Oh, and please do not forget about the convolutional neural networks, evolution algorithms and reinforcement learning tasks which we are going to add to the game a bit later.

It’s hard to start without any tutorial

We’ve added a lot of tutorials. A hell lot of them. And we will add even more, since we do not like how everything works now: there are still some players left who do not understand how the nodes “learn” and etc. We keep this in mind and are doing our best to make the game interesting to absolutely everyone.

There is no localisation to my native language

This is a dream come true story for us. We have honestly told our players that we won’t have any resources to make new localisations on our own in the nearest future, so, if they want to, they can help us with that. In the end, we have 2 types of localisations in the game. First one is made by our community and the second one is made by professional translators. We haven’t put a lot of faith in this idea, but we already have 5 languages support in the game (English, Russian, German, Hungarian, Korean) and there are 2 (Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese) more incoming soon! Thank you so much, our awesome community! We feel like that there are 100 people making the game, yet in reality, there are less than 10 people in our studio :)

I wish to have an ability to create any type of nodes myself

Aye-aye, sandbox mode is already in development, we wish to see it in the game, too. We’ve finished up working on the CatHub recently — it is a special system which will allow you to keep 4 versions of the same scheme in stock at a moment. This will help you survive through the tough times while the sandbox mode is still in development.

There are too many kitties in your game

And this is only the beginning, lad. There will be more. A lot more.
There are many exclusive kitties you are able to receive only through being active on certain streams or asking for them from the journalists. There are some kitties made especially for those of you, who help us translate and test the game. Anyway, write to us in Discord or in any other social media and receive a kitty no one else has :)

DevGAMM Moscow 2018

For a whole day long we were showing our game to everyone who wanted to see it, spoke to our players and gave them cute stickers with kitties. That felt so amazing!

Our players asked us some deep questions and made us very impressed by their interest in our game and its topic. One guy took a look at the game, went for a walk and returned back with his colleague, who turned out to be an IT boss in some kind of company. They stood there and played the game for a while, and we saw that these lads know a lot about purchasing servers :) We don’t want to reveal the secret before the right time has come. But, we were very happy to chat with fellows from http://mmos.ch/. And it feels like that we will finally do something we dreamt of for many years! :)

What is going to happen next?

We recommend you to take a look at this post, where we told you about where are we sharing our plans with our players and simply speak to them. We are also dreaming of a future where our players will be able to produce new types of medicine or any other useful stuff by simply playing games. Games must bring benefit to the lives of their players and we believe that there is a lot of games can do in the field of learning. There is still a plenty of work to do to reach this goal. We are happy that there are people who are interested in this and share our point of view. We will do our best to not make them disappointed in us. Stay tuned and write us at least a few words back, we will be happy to read them :)