With this producer’s note we would like to provide some insights about the strategy for Shakes & Fidget.

Our goal for the years to come is to modernize Shakes & Fidget. We would like to create a better first time experience to increase accessibility for new players by providing a better guidance and feature explanation, incl. more transparency regarding the balancing. In addition, old features will be reworked to make them more fun and less repetitive for both, veterans and newbies.

As we see more and more players joining our game on mobile apps, we strive to optimize the gameplay experience for those. But this does not mean that we will not pay attention to the classic browser version or the Steam client anymore.

Dungeon Rework

A good example to demonstrate our approach to modernize Shakes & Fidget would be the dungeons rework. The goal was make the feature to look more appealing, to be more transparent, to provide a better guidance, and to provide new content.

To achieve a more welcoming appearance we reworked the dungeon overview as well as the dungeon maps which have now themed buildings matching the dungeon’s monsters. All dungeons which are on the same map do now work the same way, containing ten floors each and do not have any special functionality. Special dungeons got their own space in the dungeon overview.

More transparency and better guidance was achieved by providing information about the dungeon unlock conditions directly on the map, displaying the opponent’s class and elemental damage as well as the last and the next opponent. Furthermore, when entering a dungeon map, the dungeon with the monster having the lowest level of all open dungeons will be preselected.

New content was implemented with the launch of 10 new dungeons (5 each for the light and shadow world).

Detaching the Continuous Loop of Idols for example provides us the possibility to extend this feature in the future. The same intention has the redesign of the dungeon maps. Separating the special dungeons also allowed us to display all needed information about their functionality on the first sight.

The navigation was changed to be more mobile friendly while still being comfortable to be used on PC, following common pattern for the latter while still improving the game’s handling on mobile apps.

Open Beta Tests

You may have noticed that we did not run any open beta tests lately while still launching new or reworked features.

The new dungeons were not open beta tests as we did not see the necessity for a public beta test and we did not want to ruin the surprise of the dungeon’s release and their content.

Anyhow, we have learned our lesson from releasing the rebalanced druid without a previous open beta test. Not running a beta test was a mistake and, thus, we are working on a new and better system to run beta tests for future releases.

We have learned that the community’s feedback is important and very valuable when it comes to reworks and rebalancing. Keep your eyes open for the next open beta test and help us to make Shakes & Fidget becoming even more fun in the upcoming year(s).

International Servers

The news of discontinuing the launch of international servers hit some of you unexpectedly and we would like to shed some light on that decision.

First of all, we will still launch new servers in the future but the naming will be different.

Currently, 95% of our players are from Central Europe but we would like to expand to other continents as well. To ensure that players on other continents will be able to play with a good performance, we will set up servers located on the respective continent and the naming will adapt to that location. Taking this into consideration, the naming of international servers would be misleading.