Over the past few weeks many folks playing on Steam have been affected by glitches affecting their progress. We are deeply sorry for any inconvenience this has caused and would like to take some time to explain what happened and what it means for the future of Idle Champions.

Why did everything break?

There was a perfect storm of things that caused the issues over the past couple of weeks.

The first issues were caused by a major overhaul of the game systems to support multiple adventures running at once, as described in our dev blog from the end of 2019. Changes were made to both the server and client code, and while they were tested internally quite a bit before being pushed, a number of non-trivial issues slipped through the cracks.

Additional issues cropped up later that week due to both our rush to fix the initial issues (for example a late-night 11pm update had issues that were missed in testing and persisted until morning), and other tech that was being worked on in parallel (for example Modron Automation, which will function hand in hand with multiple adventure mode). It's a small spoiler, but Modron Automation will be able to reset your adventure multiple times if you're offline for a while, so the reset code was being touched and that caused some of the issues around resetting.

Finally, with our launch on the Nintendo Switch we were attempting to do a fair number of optimizations to both the client and our server infrastructure. Some of those optimizations caused some unintended side-effects that affected saving, but on the flip side in the longer term they will end up resulting in much smoother gameplay and less issues with memory growth.

At this point, we are confident that we have addressed almost all of the major issues resulting from the initial push and we're preparing to move on to the next phase of testing of these upcoming features.

Why only on Steam?

Steam is often the first place we push new builds and content live, especially high risk ones like the system revamps for multiple adventure mode and modron automation. The reason for this is that we, as the developers, can control the client releases without having to go through an arduous or time consuming approval process (which are not designed to catch the types of issues that occurred anyway).

Other platforms, such as phones and consoles, have complicated release cycles that can range from 24 hours to several weeks before a submitted build is available to players. By releasing first on Steam and then observing the build for a few days we ensure that players on these harder-to-reach platforms will receive a generally well tested build without any major issues.

Why not test more before releasing on Steam?

While we make every effort to not release buggy clients by testing them internally, at the end of the day we are a small studio with a very ambitious release cadence. The occasional bug may slip through, and we always prioritize things that are affecting a large number of players for immediate fixes.

The magnitude of the issues these past couple of weeks on Steam was outside of what we find to be acceptable, and we have provided compensation to affected users as an apology of sorts. We will always endeavor to do better in the future.

What is coming?

One benefit of these growing pains is that we are now one major step closer to completing all of the new features outlined in our 2019 end of year dev blog. Multiple adventure mode and Modron Automation are closer than ever, and you will start seeing more information about them in the coming weeks. We are very excited about what the future holds for Idle Champions, and we hope that you are too.