Dear Friends,
As many of you are aware, OEtG has resumed active development.
With the looming death of Flash, Original EtG's days are numbered. We want there to be a place where Elements can continue to expand and grow. Based on this, there have been a number of changes to the project staff and the project itself.
openEtG is no longer being considered an experiment and a side project. It is now our intention to build a game that welcomes its players with open arms, and that will grow into a thriving, active community that will one day, we hope, be able to be compared to the great community that surrounded and still surrounds Original EtG.
This means, going forward, there will be a greater focus on making the game accessible, usable, and beautiful. We recognize that OEtG's current form is "rough around the edges", and the user interface and experience need a lot of work. In the coming months, we hope to change that for the better.
Spex, who many of you will know as Antiaverage, has joined the dev team. In addition to the invaluable experience from many years of amazing service as elementscommunity's admin, Spex will be leading the UI/UX redesign. We are all looking forward to seeing what fabulous improvements he can make to the game to make it look and feel smoother. Spex will also be working with
Sovereign. Sovereign is our recently-arrived sound designer, who plans to add music and sound effects throughout the game.
Serprex resumed actively working on the project quite some time ago, and has already made a large number of backend changes in support of this next phase of OEtG's life, as well as quite a few in-game changes. For example, take a look at the "decks" button in the deck editor for in-game support of infinite deck storage.
I am resuming my role as forum admin for the time being, and have also joined the team to focus on card balance and in-game improvements. Due to this, going forward, balance changes and other in-game changes will be decided jointly between Serprex and myself. We hope this will bring a sense of stability to the in-game meta.
Lastly,
Fippe94 has left the team to focus on his own project,
Fragments. We hope he will continue to visit us while he works on his game, and we hope you will take a look at Fragments in addition to OEtG.
Due to these substantial changes, we are considering OEtG to be back to an "alpha" stage of development. Changes will happen frequently, instead of monthly releases, while we are figuring things out. We will attempt to keep in-game changes from occurring too frequently and from interfering with ongoing pvp events, but expect a lot of things to change frequently and without warning. Once the new UI is fully in place, we will consider the game to have gotten back to a "beta" stage and we will resume scheduled patches.
Even though we're in alpha, though, there's no need to wait. The game itself is amazing, and we're here to help you past the rough patches while we work on smoothing them out. If there's anything you're having trouble with, just find us in
Discord or post on
the forum.
If you can help, we would love your help. Let us know what you can do. If you aren't sure how to help, the biggest thing you can do is be a part of the community. Test the game, let us know what needs looked at. Help us grow the community. We need more eyes on the project to find all the issues. We need to get the PvP scene active again so we can fine-tune the balance. We need people designing new cards and testing old ones. We need you and we need your friends. Please help us.
We are all very happy to see this project moving forward, and we hope you are too. If the game is too rough for you right now, we understand and we hope you'll come check it out once we've been able to smooth things out a bit more. But we hope you'll give us a chance. We have something wonderful here.
Have fun!
cg, Serprex, and Spex