Great to be on the Hunt! Gameblyr loves bringing high quality indie games to market! We hope everyone gets a chance to check out the game and compete in the weekly tournaments!
@trevorstricker Explaining mobile gameplay concepts can be tough at times as these things don't ship with a manual and it's harder to engage player concerns than if you are publishing a game to something like Steam. I'll try to do my best here for the sake of discussion.
I did want to first point out that you don't ever need to buy stars if you don't want to. Just by logging in and playing a single daily will get you free stars for use and quite a few if you play on consecutive days. Since the game is so new its not a concept alot of early players have seen yet but you will see the daily rewards are pretty decent - you can of course also win stars with precision gameplay as well and of course it's entirely possible to post high scores without ever continuing. This is because high scores are generally a result of multiple perfects and not necessarily the highest zone.
When we sat down to talk about how we wanted players to play Into the Circle we really looked at two different gameplay cycles. One is the simple fun from playing the game, trying to get your own personal high score, executing skilled shots, earning achievements, etc. The best thing about Into the Circle is the gameplay is really fun (or so we hope).
That being said we wanted to add an additional layer of meta gameplay over the top and that was to introduce a fun and competitive nature to a skill based game where you could compete weekly for a top score and to win something of value. Here is our approach - we expect players to use stars to continue and post really high scores when they are trying to win their weekly challenge. The top of the leaderboard should be hard to reach.
The meta game is when you choose to use all of the stars you earn. Do you use them casually or do you save them up for a big run at the top of the leaderboard. I would kind of compare this in a weird way to - ahem - Bloodborne. When you are taking on a boss for the first time do you blow all your blood vials or do you practice a couple runs knowing you are not going to down them on the first try.
If you are having a good round and think its worth to continue maybe you pop one or two to see if *this* is the time you take them down.
It's kind of the same in Into the Circle - if you really want to make a run at the top of the leaderboard (which is a random weekly cohort of 500 players) and take the competitive side that seriously then save them and go for a big run. Also keep in mind as with any free game the vast majority of people are not spending any money. In a cohort of 500 maybe only a few tops are buying anything and you can't buy precision shots no matter how many stars you have.
What I suggest is play the game for a week, log in for your free stars and see how much you get for just playing and then go for a big run to top the leaderboard. Always welcome feedback from players and we will continue to work on the game to improve it. Thanks again for playing.
Into The Circle
Jungle Rumble
Into The Circle