It started out as a hex grid based project in the summer of 2023 with the theme of the Silk Road. After swapping the roads to rivers and the carts to ships, keeping the trading aspect to the core of the game, Bounties of Babylon evolved to have quests and combat and release with more features than originally planned for.

It may be micro, but with its replayability, it can certainly take a few hours to complete.

• 84 levels with 20 pre-placed tile layouts
  
• 3 run difficulty modes, each with leaderboards
  
• Procedural bounty placement and tile stack generation. Along with random round stitching, each run will be a new overall experience
  
• 12 Artifacts to collect, trade and unlock
  
• 11 Quests with varying values. Each level has unique pairings
  
• 50 Steam achievements

Quests have been a huge addition to keep each level varied. Some examples of what you do are:

• Trade with a particular merchant
  
• Place a tile in a specific way
  
• Build a yield of a specific bounty type
  
• Collect so many of a particular pickup type

Depending on how the level is generated, it may or may not be viable to attempt a certain quest. Play each turn as it comes and see if the quest is worth your trouble, otherwise look at other ways to make victory points.

The game is more rewarding, especially to those who consider bounty yield building and not just simply river connecting. Secret tip, if you land on a replenished bounty, you gain one additional bounty harvest from that tile.

Being able to discard a tile is a huge tool to prevent the CPU from coming near you, or necessary if you have no more moves. In such a scenario, the UI will alert you to discard it. This is by design as I want the player to be in control of what happens rather than wonder "where did my other tile go?". Additionally, if you swap tiles and place that first, it may create a legal placement for your original tile.

If you roll a settlement (6) whilst on a settlement, you can choose to stay where you are.

If you couldn't move your first ship, an auto switch is applied where you move your second ship first (if able), and then that may create an opportunity for your first ship to move, rather than completely skipping it like before.

You can now pause your run in between rounds and save progress to Steam's cloud. You'll lose your current round's progress if you're mid-round, but seeing as each round may take 5–10 minutes, you'll have the ability to break your run into break sized durations of time. Particularly useful if you're short on time.

It's technically the pause screen, but now you see your quest progress and whether you've completed them or not. Additionally, basic round and run data can now be found here too.

Bounties now have their own models, blank tiles have more art variants (pyramids and small towns), and there is seabed dressing to improve the 3D parallax effect.

Bounties respawn during the upkeep turn phase with a holy "ahhhhhhh" and god rays, rather than viewing them all respawn individually.

There's also a little firework display on the end game screen if you complete a run.

When the map gets busy, it can be tricky to count the replenished bounties that can be harvested. Introducing, tactical mode, zooming out the camera brings up the bird's eye view of the map. Now all the tiles swap to a simplistic colour of their bounty type, and those that flash are harvestable!

When you trade an artifact, you get the achievement for it, plus it's added to your collection where you can read a brief synopsis about your naval treasures.

Some mildly interesting stats are also available for the achievement hunters out there who want to track how they're doing at a glance.

The game has been actively QA'd on Steam Deck, meaning from my perspective it's Steam Deck verified. Hopefully it won't be too long until it gets the official green mark from Valve.

1. Input - All input works on Deck (and any controller for that matter) to play the game. The glyphs are generic directional circles to represent all controller types used. No keyboard input is used in the game.
   
2. Seamlessness - No launchers for this game, the .exe boots right on up.
   
3. Display - It supports a myriad of resolutions and windowed mode, including the Deck's 1200x800. All text is large enough to read.
   
4. System Support - No additional middleware is included in the game, the game runs at ~60fps on Deck.

Kicking off the launch with an introductory offer of -20% off. This includes regional pricing following Valve's recommendations too. Any reviews to help boost the game's discoverability would be greatly appreciated.

The game supports 12 languages, but as of writing only English and German have been verified. You may notice issues in other languages. Ironically I'm writing this in English, but if you are bilingual and want to contribute to the localization spreadsheet to improve game, please do get in touch on the discussions board.

Feel free to reach out to me on the discussion boards if you find any issues, and thank your interest in my little fruit and nutty game design tangled with thousands of lines of code.

Enjoy sailing on the rivers of Babylon,

- Ant

As of today, leaderboards are now in the demo build. Using Steam's API, your high score from a run (regardless of whether you finish it or not - calculated at the end of a round), now persists for the world to see. There are filters for top, global around user, and friends too.

In the final game, there will be 3 run variants, each with their respective leaderboards. The key defining difference is the duration of completing the run (and therein difficulty).

1. Short: 3 Rounds
2. Regular: 5 Rounds
3. Long: 7 Rounds

A long-desired feature of swapping which ship you want to move first is now in the build. If you want to move your first ship onto your second ship's tile (particularly if it's a Settlement), this is very much actionable now.

Previously, in the game, there were only controller glyphs for the controls. So you have had to memorise the keybindings, but recently I've implemented glyph hot swapping so whichever input you're using, the on-screen glyphs will reflect your input.

You'll also notice a new trash can icon. It was highly unlikely, but if you had no legal moves, you were soft-locked and couldn't advance in the game. You can now hold down interact which has a pressing circle timer to discard your currently selected tile to prevent the situation from ever occurring. You can burn your tiles for a tactical advantage too.

If you downloaded the build during Next Fest, thank you for playing, it seemed to have generated a bit of hype from looking at the data. I'll be keeping the demo up for a while longer as we get closer to launch. Announced in the livestream was the launch window (March as reflected on the store page), so get your pre-launch high scores in now!

Naturally, there is the discussion board, a big thank you to those who have contributed there. Additionally, there is a feedback form live in the demo at the moment. It would help me out if you shared your thoughts with the anonymous survey. Thanks!