Did something change with coins or the death penalty in a prior patch?

[Dare Wreck]

The reason I ask is because there's at least one review here on Steam that indicates that you'll be overflowing with money after awhile, and I also came across this YouTube review where the person has a TON of money towards the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOp2Ji4Z_SM

I'm currently on level 24, playing with my kid, and we've lost a handful of fossil pieces in the bit pits there and need to pay the fisherman guy to get them back. However, for the life of us, we can't get any money to allow us to progress. We'll go up to a previous level to try to put together some custom fossils, but we end up getting super frustrated, because either our fossils get destroyed by cave-ins, or we accidentally slip off an edge and lose our hard-earned money. We can try to build more bridges in level 24 to help keep our footing there, but it's the same problem: we need money to get more bridges.

This game seems really punishing when it comes to coins, so I'm curious if something changed between the initial release, when the above people had more money than they knew what to do with, and today. Granted, I'm playing with a 4-year-old, so death by ceiling collapse or falling off an edge is pretty common for us and probably not the aforementioned players, but it means we've been running on 0 coins pretty much the entire game. It looks like there's no more development going on with this game, but should you be working on any further patches for this game, I'm curious if you would allow for a "casual" mode that does away with the death/money penalty. This game is absolutely brutal when playing with young kids.

[RyanMiller]

Hey there, sorry this has been frustrating! The coin situation and pit-fall penalty hasn't changed since release, though it's admittedly not very friendly to pit-prone players (especially kids). I think you've got the right idea (make custom skeletons and submit them) though I suggest going back to the first few levels to do this. The money calculation skews greatly towards number of bones in a skeleton, not so much the types of bones. Find the earliest level with a lot of spine pieces and make some long long worms for a big payout!

[Dare Wreck]

Is that true? I seem to feel that putting together a 5-bone skeleton somewhere around level 10-20 consistently produced a higher payout than a 5-bone skeleton in the very early levels. I don't have time to test that out right now, but I remember getting a couple hundred gold in the mid-levels faster than trying to do so by going back to one of the first levels, which produced very little gold doing the same thing. Do you get more gold for a skeleton with a higher variety of bones? If so, that would explain why I was getting more money faster further into the game.

Of course, then there's the task of trying to get out of the level with a young kid without falling and losing all your hard-earned money, but that's a different story... :)

[RyanMiller]

I don’t have the exact formula in front of me, but the best strategy (I imagine) would be to start with a high value bone then add as many bones as you can onto it (10+). Doing this in levels before crawlers is much easier, and probably worth the trade off in lower base values.

Originally posted by Dare Wreck:

Is that true? I seem to feel that putting together a 5-bone skeleton somewhere around level 10-20 consistently produced a higher payout than a 5-bone skeleton in the very early levels. I don't have time to test that out right now, but I remember getting a couple hundred gold in the mid-levels faster than trying to do so by going back to one of the first levels, which produced very little gold doing the same thing. Do you get more gold for a skeleton with a higher variety of bones? If so, that would explain why I was getting more money faster further into the game.

Of course, then there's the task of trying to get out of the level with a young kid without falling and losing all your hard-earned money, but that's a different story... :)

Originally posted by Dare Wreck:

Is that true? I seem to feel that putting together a 5-bone skeleton somewhere around level 10-20 consistently produced a higher payout than a 5-bone skeleton in the very early levels. I don't have time to test that out right now, but I remember getting a couple hundred gold in the mid-levels faster than trying to do so by going back to one of the first levels, which produced very little gold doing the same thing. Do you get more gold for a skeleton with a higher variety of bones? If so, that would explain why I was getting more money faster further into the game.

Of course, then there's the task of trying to get out of the level with a young kid without falling and losing all your hard-earned money, but that's a different story... :)