1.8 "Bao's Counter" is in review: four horizons of quests, outfits that cannot be bought, and a difficulty curve that was backwards
Well... Week is not over :D
Two things shipped in this build. One is a tab I rebuilt from scratch because nobody was touching it. The other is a number I had wrong since launch.
The quest tab asked nothing of anyone
The old Quests tab held three fixed objectives that never changed. Two of them completed themselves after about three boards. The third just repeated the daily challenge card already sitting on the home screen. Stars landed automatically on the win screen, so the red badge on the tab led to a page where there was nothing left to do.
And eighteen days a month, outside the festival window, the whole thing was three lines and a link. That is twenty percent of the navigation bar spent on a dead end.
Four horizons instead of a list
The day. Three orders drawn from a pool of seventeen by the day's key, one per tier, identical for every player at the same stage. You collect them by hand. The badge now means something is waiting.
The week. A menu of five steps fed by the orders you collected. The fourth step stays reachable after two missed evenings, which is the entire point of having this horizon at all. A streak that punishes one bad Tuesday is a streak people quit.
The month. The festival, unchanged, but with a countdown where the emptiness used to be.
The whole life. Three outfits earned by delivering 75, 250 and 500 orders.
The outfits are the load-bearing idea. The skin catalogue is priced against a finite wallet, so paying a brand new horizon in stars would quietly shorten every price in the shop. These cost no stars at all. They are not for sale at any price, they are delivered, order after order. A reward with zero inflation.
The difficulty curve was backwards
This one is less fun to write. The board grows as you climb, from 4x4 up to 12x12. I checked how long each size actually lasted:
| before | after | |
|---|---|---|
| levels per size | 2, 4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 20, 20 | 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 17, 19, 21 |
| 12x12 reached at level | 70 | 103 |
Two levels on 4x4. An 8x8 board by level 15. Five difficulty cliffs inside the first fifteen boards, and then fourteen to twenty levels parked on a single size once the player was already an expert. Tight exactly where a beginner needs room, generous where nobody was asking.
A size step is a real cliff, not a nudge. An 8x8 star-battle is a different puzzle from a 6x6, not a bigger one. So every size now gets a longer run than the one before it, and the last one lands at level 103.
That also makes the store listings honest. All four of them have promised boards "past level 100" since version 1.2, while the code was handing over the 12x12 at level 70.
The part I could have hidden
Players past level 82 will see their board drop a size on their next game. That is a design fault being corrected, not a preference, so it goes in the changelog in both languages rather than being sprung on anyone. Six lines instead of five.
Where it stands
Android is approved. I am holding the rollout manually until Apple clears the iOS build, because the two have to light up together: the in-app update banner is driven by a single build number for both platforms, and shipping one first would send half the fleet toward a version that does not exist yet.
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