Across the Obelisk News

We are thrilled to announce an exciting contest for you!

Here’s your chance to leave a lasting mark on Across The Obelisk by designing a unique cardback. The winning design will be implemented in the game, giving you a permanent place in our game's history.

[h3]Contest Details:[/h3]

Objective: Design a unique, original and captivating cardback that will be implemented and featured in-game in Across the Obelisk.
Disclaimer: While your card design and concept will be used as the basis for the final card, the artwork will be redrawn to match the art style of our game and you will be credited as the original designer of the card concept in the game.

By submitting your design, you grant Paradox Interactive AB the right to use your submission for marketing, promotional, and in-game purposes.

Rules & Guidelines:

• Each participant can submit only 1 design.
  
• Create an original design that’s bursting with creativity and doesn’t infringe on any existing copyrights.

Eligibility:

• Open to all fans and players of the game.
  
• No professional design experience required – creativity is key!

Theme: Should be an ATO aligned theme.

[h3]Design Specifications:[/h3]

Dimensions: 400 x 640

File Format: JPG or PNG

[h3]Submissions:[/h3]
Once you have your design ready, head over to our Discord channel and send us your card back design along with a brief description of your design idea and inspiration.

[h3]Timeline:[/h3]

• Submission Period: July 25th, 2024 – August 15th, 2024
  
• Judging Period: August 16th, 2024 – August 23rd, 2024
  
• Winner Announcement: August 26th, 2024

[h3]Judging Criteria:[/h3]

• Creativity and Originality: How unique your design is.
  
• Artistic Appeal: How visually attractive your design is.
  
• Theme Alignment: How well your design fits with the game's fantasy.
  
• Team Picks the Top 10: Our team will review all submissions and select the 10 best designs based on the criteria above.
  
• Community Vote: The top 10 designs will be showcased, and the community will vote for the ultimate winner.

We can’t wait to see your amazing designs and are excited to bring one of your creations into our game world!

Greetings everyone!

Welcome to another Dev Diary. Today, we’re talking numbers. As you can see from the infographic below, we have loads of cool stats from the game.

These figures are super interesting to us—over 1 million runs this year already!—but they also help us make important decisions about the future.

We want to make sure that AtO is a game you keep coming back to, and that’s only possible with regular updates and DLC. To create this content, we need to learn about you, our players. That means understanding how, when, and why you play the game. And the key to that is data.

So, let’s spend a little time chatting about the stories behind these numbers, what they mean, and how we use them to continue making improvements.

[h3]Data power[/h3]

Data is a really important tool for us. Together with your feedback, it allows us to look at how you play and make informed decisions about areas of the game that might need to be updated.

For example, our stats show us the death rates for each zone in the game. This information is helpful because it allows us to understand which zones might be too hard or unbalanced.

Some zones, generally the later ones, are intentionally more difficult to create more of a challenge as you progress. But while we want you to feel challenged, we don’t want you to feel frustrated or like the game is unfair. We need to keep that balance and data helps us to do that.

We can also see how often you select each character. If a character is hardly ever picked, that might tell us they are too underpowered compared to the rest. In this case, we might decide to buff their stats or change their mechanics to boost their power and make them more interesting for you to play.



On the other hand, if one character dominates and is picked a lot more than the others, it could show us that they are too OP or that another issue needs our attention. Here, we come back to the question of balance. If a character is too powerful, it makes the game easier than intended, and you might get bored quickly. Nobody wants that.

Corruptors are another good example. These difficulty modifiers give those of you playing Madness an extra challenge. If you take a look at our infographic, you’ll see which Corruptors are picked most often and which are chosen less frequently.

A Corruptor that isn’t picked very often could indicate that it’s too tricky or not fun. On the flip side, frequently chosen Corruptors are likely to offer the right level of challenge.

In future, we may add more Corruptors or change and improve the existing ones. When we do, we will use this data to make better design decisions about how they should work.



[h3]Your feedback[/h3]

A crucial figure we want to discuss is MAU or Monthly Active Users. Simply put, this number tells us how many of you are playing each month.

MAU is vital for us because it tells us about the game's health. If this number falls over time, we need to investigate and find out why. If it's growing, we know we’re moving in the right direction.

This ties in neatly with the topic of player satisfaction and your feedback. We monitor many channels to understand how you feel about the game: our Discord, comments on YouTube, Steam discussion and reviews, social media, and more.

We collect your feedback and measure your sentiment everywhere you talk about the game. By fusing this feedback with stats like MAU, we build a complete picture of the game's state, what is working or not working, and the steps we need to take to ensure that we’re continuing to make the best game for you.

[h3]Surveys[/h3]

Our data insights aren’t limited to what you see in the infographic. We can crunch numbers in all sorts of different ways to find answers to any kind of question about the game you can think of.

But data will often only tell you half the story. Numbers without context can be misleading, which is why we also gather your (invaluable!) feedback through player surveys.

Our surveys ask for your thoughts on all aspects of the game: what you like and dislike, whether you mainly play single-player or multiplayer, the content you’d like to see in the future, and lots more.

If you look at the infographic below, you’ll see that new heroes and pets are the most requested content. With limited options, the healer class has been crying out for a new hero, and our most recent survey's results back that up. So, guess what? ;)



Through surveys, you’ve also told us how you’d like future content to be packaged. Many of you would like mixed packs combining new heroes and stories. But there are also those of you who want content split by type.

We’ve heard you, and we think we have a solution that will please both sides. Our aim is for future DLC to be built in a way that gives you the power to decide what you want to add to your game.

Your opinions about DLC and how it should be packaged demonstrate that data is an overview. What we learn may not apply to all players, and we understand that.

When we combine the numbers with your thoughts from the surveys, we get the complete picture on content, packaging, game modes, things that work and don’t work—everything. Having the whole story allows us to make educated design decisions and keep improving.

[h3]Summing-up[/h3]

Hopefully, we’ve given you a better understanding of how and why we use data. We want you to be happy with the game and as enthusiastic about its future as we are.

Finally, please continue to fill out our surveys, talk to us on Discord, discuss on Steam, and generally give your thoughts on the game anywhere you hang out online.

Your voice is important, and as we’ve shown, it directly influences the future of the game and its content.

Until next time!

- The Ato Team

Hey guys! This is not a drill! It's definitely a Rise of the Machines Weekly Challenge is going live now. Don't forget that you can compete against other players and reach the third floor of the challenge to unlock a card back!

Challenge ends on July 25th!

Hi everyone,

Here’s the latest hotfix for Across the Obelisk! With these changes we hope to slightly improve Nenukil's damage scalability in the early game when he uses a build focused on Fast charges, in addition to giving him several new options with Wrench or Feint.

[h3]Card balance:[/h3]

Charge: Yellow version increased damage with speed scaling to 1.2 (from 1)

HitandRun: Blue version increased damage with speed scaling to 0.6 (from 0.5) and 1.2 (from 1) in the yellow version.

Gunshot: Upgrades are now uncommon (from common). Blue version now deals damage based on enemy speed and yellow version has increased damage and burn charges.

Burning Shot: Added apply X burn charges in the base version, increased fast scaling to 2.5 (from 2) in the blue version and yellow version increased damage a bit.

Feint: Changed to Discard as many cards as you want to get block and shield. Yellow reworked to give block and shield based on your fast charges and puging them (With this version, we give the option to those scouts who at some point do not want to be the first to act or who want a way to spend their fast charges).

Wrench: Added dispel shackle.

Fixed, Double barrel talent to gain the bonus of + charges for fury and fast.

Hey guys!

We’re aware of the issues with the weekly challenges and we apologize for the lack of communication around the situation.

We have now been able to identify the issue preventing the weekly challenges from working as it should. We have been able to implement a fix for the bug, but a patch can only be expected after it has passed some mandatory steps on all platforms before it can go live.

While that may take up to a few weeks, we’ve made the decision to use the waiting time to simultaneously implement some pending fixes the community has been asking for recently. These fixes will be aimed at improving Nenukil’s damage scalability in the early game when using a build focused on fast charges and several new options with Wrench or Feint.

While we are unable to confirm a date for the patch at the moment, it can be expected within the upcoming weeks and we will be sure to keep you posted.

We appreciate your patience and hope that you will enjoy the additional improvements to Nenukil and the new weekly challenge when the patch goes live.