Community Content Unlocks

[Mooncalf]

You might have noticed today that a new countdown has been added to the main grid page which counts down karma remaining until a new relic is added to the game. I'm here to explain what this is, how it works, and why we've chosen to add this feature.

The shortest possible answer to all of this: this feature allows the community to pool their karma together to prompt us into action to add new content that's eagerly awaited by the players. So far this content only includes relics, but more options will be added. Simply go to the karma shop page, contribute 1 or 5 karma (or more), and when the total game wide pooled karma reaches the goal amount, the content is unlocked and will be developed by myself and Josh within a couple of weeks.

The reason we've decided to add this feature is that right now, as Path stands, we are unable to contribute much time to development. Much of the time we do put in is taken up with bugs and PMed issues and similar, but beyond that on an average week we can't usually take time away from our other workloads to put into this game. Our hope is that this update will change that, and allow an up-front way of saying 'hey this is what we'll add to the game for X karma', and then people can pick and choose what content they prefer.

As for the karma cost, new relics take around 5-8 hours to add to the game, depending on the complexity of the item's function. This is due to the custom coding required to add these items. This, coupled with the fact that many people have currently amassed a great deal of karma they don't know what to do with, equals a reasonable karma cost to development time ratio, in our opinion. Other content may well take much less time, and in which case these will have a much smaller karma goal amount.

Our hope moving forward is that new content will equal happier players, will equal more people sticking around, will equal more people returning, will equal more support for Path, will equal more time we can devote to adding more content for free.