Welcome to the third installment of the Battle Dex Developer Diary, where we provide you with an insider's perspective of the game's development, and a glimpse of what's coming next.

BETA PROGRESS

It's been a crazy ride since our beta launch on April 12.

The number of new accounts has exploded over the past 3 weeks. We've squashed a ton of bugs, added new maps and game modes, held some great contests and promotions, given out $1,500 in cash for FREE, and witnessed a lot of great tournaments. It's really cool to meet so many new guys (and gals) on the battlefield... even though I usually lose.

So, the beta has gotten off to a great start in a short amount of time. What's next?

Here's just a sample of what's on our to-do list during beta:

• Public map editor
• Save, view, and share replays
• More single-player missions
• Revamped chat system
• New client user interface
• Card trading/auction systems
• Online player dashboard with deck editor built into the web site
• Tons of new achievements
• Team tournaments (2v2, 3v3)

Our players have been great about suggesting new additions and reporting what needs fixing. With your support, Battle Dex will continue to improve!

COMMUNITY SERVICE

For me, the most validating part of working on Battle Dex has been watching our community grow. It was astounding to see 175 card ideas submitted during our "Create a Card" contest in such a short amount of time (especially considering that there are 168 cards currently in the game)!

While we're always reaching out to the gaming press and recruiting new players everywhere we can, we also know how important it is to keep our current players informed and happy.

We want the Battle Dex community to be a place where players can talk directly to the developers and get a real response. Too many games out there don't offer that connection, and we want to go the extra mile.

BATTLE DEX GOES GLOBAL

Before our beta launch, our players were primarily based in the U.S. After the launch and some very nice words from places like MTV, Rock Paper Shotgun, Blue's News, Baixaki, Controller Throw, and Excessif, we now have thousands of players from all over the globe: Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, Greece, Slovakia, Peru, England, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, Australia... even the Philippines!

Next stop: Mars.

COMING SOON

Stay tuned for the next installment, where I'll talk about the results of our Create a Card contest and the process of deciding the winners, choosing which cards might end up in the game, and how we'll implement them.

Now let's hear from you, the players. How are we doin'?

-Cooldown

Y'all are doing great!

1 thing, card trading/ auction could lead to lots of crap that would cause imbalance to the game, just something to think about

one way to fix that is to give actual % chance of getting certain ultra rares and rares, so you have common ultra rares and ultra rare ultra rares XD

Just realized, ive yet to meet any that play! First time noticing this lol. Don't forget the maps to make more 1v1 decks :( that's a must

um... can't edit my post.. only quote. wtf?

**raises two thumbs**

Game´s looking hot, patches come at a steady rate, community is increasing and activity is picking up... you guys gotta be doing something right.

Development is going well and we have a LOT of new features that will be coming out before release (look for a patch today). Today's patch will feature, among other things, the 60 second countdown before the next round starts instead of after it starts for tournaments. This will give people an opportunity to drop between rounds. There will be no break before the first round.

I am personally looking forward to some of the new features that will be coming soon. The four features I really want to see are: tournaments where you can pick you teammate, cooperative campaings, single player campaigns, and a redone User Interface with workable chat.

There are so many decisions to make when building a game. The game building itself requires choices about balancing, which features we should make first, how the user interface should look, how in game chat should work, etc. We would love your thoughts on how you think in client chat should look so people can use it easily. What do you want the user interface to look like? What features do you want it to have?

We are also dealing with publishers and investors. We currently have interest from an Asian distributer that thinks our game would do extremely well in the Asian market, a German publisher, and a large US public company.

Finally, we have not done any marketing since the Game One spot because we have enough testers for Beta. We have been gearing up for a big marketing push when we are about to release. We hope this will dramatically increase our players.

Thanks for everyone's input. Please give us your comments on what you want to see.

The singleplayer stuff is in my opinion a complete waste of time and money. Singleplayer games today need to be VERY intense and tho battledex is an awesome and thrilling multiplayer game, you won't be able to tell a story as well as e.g. Assassins Creed 2 did, and if you put yourself onto that market, you will have to worry about a community with 2 completly different ideas of how the game has to be,
the multiplayer community on one side, constantly begging for new maps and tournaments and the singleplayer community asking for new content which takes lots of time, and the game is mostly for free, you remember? ;)
If you want the singleplayer stuff to be a gimmick, go ahead but I'd bet that if you go for it as a singplayer game, you'll have your money going down the sink.
I'm glad that you found investors and look forward for marketing and new players, beta doesn't take that much longer.

Singleplayer can be good for practice, for new players mainly. And with map editor, players can make their own singleplayers maps. With big enough community, there will be also maps.

i completely agree with Schlumpfi....when you want to make singleplayer just for practice, than its completely enough what we have right now, because you can't practice very well in singleplayer, you just have to make some multiplayer matches. Otherwise it would be great to have a extraordinary singleplayer modus, but it will take to much time and money.