I'm looking at the calendar and I have a few questions....

Why has there been no update for so long? Have we forgotten the game? Nothing of the sort! Although I have to admit that time is passing more quickly than I would like, so let's not waste any more time and get on with the news!
We'll start with the most important one, which is how the QA testing of our long-awaited game is going. While minor bugs will probably be fixed before the game launches, the biggest ones are already behind us. And there is a lot to test because, in my subjective opinion, the content is very broad for such a game. Very! And everything has to be checked again to make sure that we do not make any bugs for the launch.

As for the launch itself, we are so close to finishing the game that we will set a final release date within 2 weeks and announce it on the next devblog!
This means that at this point we have a complete game that is playable and complete. All that remains to be done is to add a few or a dozen hints, improve some of the graphics and, most importantly....

...checking and possibly improving the mission balance!

As a reminder, there will be 39 missions in the game, the first three of which are available in the Prologue and will be familiar to most of you. The rest of the missions have been released for testing through playtests and other closed events, giving us a lot of great feedback that we have tried to incorporate into the game where possible. However, there are still a total of 34 missions that no one has seen because they have not been revealed in any way.

So a question to our most loyal community:

We are looking to assemble a group of people who, after signing the NDA, will have exclusive access to the game and will be able to share their thoughts on the difficulty, balance, difficulty of the random tasks, or any other comments that might influence the final game.
If you are interested, familiar with Builders of Egypt and have a good knowledge of how to play the game, then join our Discord and we will take care of the rest!

The deadline for submissions is 07 March 2024.

[discord.gg]As a thank you, you will receive a copy of Builders of Egypt and your nickname (or real name if you prefer) will be listed in the credits.
(The more veteran of our community you are, the better your chances).

If you're not interested in testing the game, I'd still like to invite you to our Discord, where we'll be running various competitions to celebrate the upcoming launch, with a chance to win your copy of the game, of course.
It's also worth following our profile on TikTok, which, due to the nature of the portal, requires us (or rather Emi) to adapt the videos we show. See for yourself what potential our Emi has :)

Builders of Egypt TikTok[www.tiktok.com]

It is with great pleasure that I present to you an update to the Builders of Egypt game, bringing with it a number of expected changes, as well as some that no one expected, but were worth adding to the game.

• this Saturday [16.12.2023] at 6:00 CET when the patch will be rolled out
  
• this Saturday [16.12.2023] at 3:00 CET on Steam and Twitch, where you'll be able to watch Emi once again as she takes on the new challenges!

Twitch -> official Twitch channel[www.twitch.tv]

If you want to know more about the full version and the expected release date of the game, scroll down. Without further ado, here is the presentation of the changes!

Note that I'm mainly comparing the changes to this year's [Playtest], which I'll refer to as such, but I'll also mention [Prologue], which I'll refer to as such, and for which the list of changes is particularly relevant.
There is a new third map where you will face more challenges. There are new buildings and the ability to use them to satisfy parameters that did not affect the game in previous missions. You may also find that the police station finally has a sense of existence in this game.

Scripted main events have appeared in which there are various tasks to complete. Usually these will involve delivering or collecting products, but in later missions where more mechanics are revealed, things get a lot more interesting.

What do scripted events mean? Firstly, they will not always appear during the game. Sometimes the player has to "overdo it" [annoy Pharaoh and you'll quickly see what I'm writing about here] to trigger an event or reach the appropriate level of city development.

When such an event is triggered, it must be completed to complete the mission. Completed does not mean successful, an event can just as easily fail and then it is also completed. And what effect this has on the rest of the game you will find out in the full version!

An all-new feature that makes waiting for various events or mission completion more polite. From time to time, a person in town will ask the player for the location of a person or item. As you progress through each mission, the variety of tasks increases significantly. In other words, almost every building has a quest associated with it, which can be triggered at different times. These tasks are not mandatory, but they can provide tangible benefits, sometimes disproportionate to the task at hand 😊

A big problem was understanding what was actually happening to the city and what was affecting the changing parameters. From now on, all parameters of the city will be additionally described, but most importantly they will have their own graph. On the basis of such a graph, it is possible to estimate the trend of changes in a particular parameter. Each resource also has a graph showing how much of the resource has been stored, bought and sold, so you can see what has happened to a particular resource over time.

The second major change to the interface is the ability to change important mission parameters. It is now possible to turn off fires completely, or to turn off Desirability - the rating of neighbouring buildings by houses. The latter feature has been a major point of contention in discussions about its legitimacy or how it works. It has been corrected and better presented in the House tab.

The same goes for the Sentiment parameter - it was previously presented in a very obvious way, which has now changed. Of course, in addition to the hints that appear, the house itself will tell you why it doesn't want to raise its level or why people are fleeing. The inhabitants themselves will also have more to say.

Most of you will already be familiar with this, but for Prologue players it will be something of a novelty - in Missions 2 and 3 you will be able to complete an additional tutorial that explains how to complete the mission and solve the problems that await the player in general. This tutorial, unlike what you saw in Mission 01, allows some freedom in planning the construction of individual buildings, while also explaining the super-important relationship between buildings, especially between Production Buildings and Stockpiles.

Seemingly nothing, and somehow it made loading missions more enjoyable. Still no matter that the huge text is assimilated faster, but reading the text is not mandatory and out of respect for the history of Ancient Egypt we could not write less there than you see yourself 😉
Some of you accidentally discovered that the blocked language versions can be bypassed using Prologue. Unfortunately, the effect of this was that the game then was partly in English and partly in the language of your choice. We are now restoring all languages. The quality of the translations has been improved but it is still not perfect, and sometimes probably far from the ideal we would like to achieve. Quite a few errors have been corrected, especially inconsistencies between building names and, for example, commands in the tutorial. No less professional translations and additional proofreading at a level we can find in AAA games is costing 1/3 of the total BoE budget, which, to say the least, we can't afford.

In view of this, if you see a glaring translation error - let us know! I now have a total content lock and a dedicated person to implement all corrections, so any corrections will go much faster than it was before.

A few words about the current state of Builders of Egypt and its expected release. After longer than planned testing of the Prologue update that this post is about, I'm left with a few tweaks to the code, and the whole game will be handed over to PlayWay QA for testing and tweaking. This means that realistically we are about 3 months away from release. This is subject to change as testing all 39 missions is difficult to estimate.

Take care!
Jacek

https://discord.gg/mhT7sqHKk3

Hello Builders!
I would like to give you an idea of what is in store for you in the near future, what changes will be made to the game, and what changes have already been made. But before we get to that, first a few words about the Playtest, which will be closed on Sunday 08.10.2023 at 6 pm CEST.

I am extremely grateful to everyone who took part in the playtest and left their feedback. Not only the good ones but mainly the bad ones, because the tests were not used to make me feel better, but to really improve the game. And without further ado - the conclusion is that we need change. And what kind of changes? A great deal of the feedback has been about the same thing, so let's discuss that below. Some of you have already seen part of this post on Discord, but here on Steam I'm throwing in some more screenshots.

First of all, the "Big Update"® for Prologue will show you the changes that have been implemented. This is expected to happen later this month. After further internal testing of all the changes I am implementing. So, what are we going to change?

1. Changes to the UI - displaying goods, displaying stocks, removing unnecessary information and adding new information, the lack of which made it difficult for many people to understand the game. I have also increased the interactivity of the information panels - now a click on something will usually trigger an effect, e.g. a re-display of the message that triggered the mission to a detailed graph for a particular stock.
   
   this is not the final look! Work in progress!
   
   This means that the player will have full information about what happens to a particular commodity over time. How much of the commodity has been harvested, how much has been exported and how much has been imported, with the cost or profit detailed. A seemingly insignificant change but very important for understanding the game economy.
   
   this is not the final look! Work in progress!
   
   
2. Adding random quests to complete during missions. While there are 3-4 main quests in each mission (which were disabled for the duration of the playtest, which was a mistake), there will now be various additional optional quests to increase immersion and reduce downtime, especially during monument building. It's a lot of extra stuff. The completion of these tasks will always result in some sort of reward in the form of resources, money and/or points at the end of the mission. If you do not undertake the quest, nothing will happen, but you will temporarily lose the opportunity to improve your score or to acquire raw materials that ->by some strange twist of fate<- would just now be useful in your town.
   
   
3. As you have often pointed out: There is a lack of visible people in buildings. And it's not just about static figures doing something in a place, but above all about a specific "representative" of the building doing something. In Pharaoh it was the case that almost every building had such a representative. And this representative actually fulfilled the function of the building. This was especially true for buildings such as the shrine, the temples, the post of the architect, and other similar buildings. These workers usually have no sense of existence in the game, as they do not perform any practical activities, due to the function of the buildings in their area.
   
   Now they will be restored/added to the game. They will circulate around their building not only as an additional visual effect, but also as mobile information and advice points for the player. When the player clicks on such a worker, they get comments, advice and recommendations on what to do to improve the function of the building that worker comes from.
   
   
4. Rebuild of the tutorial to include more of the stockpile, granary and bazaar, especially the upgrading of houses and neighbourhood ratings. This caused the most problems, which is not surprising as it was poorly explained. This arrangement of the production chain, in which the Stockpile is the main building but is partly interchangeable with the Granary, needs to be explained with examples, i.e. to create conditions in the missions so that these differences are definitely more visible.

That's all for today. The next devblog will appear just in time for the announced update to Prologue. Stay tuned!

https://discord.gg/mhT7sqHKk3

We have news for you straight from our ancient world. With the Steam Strategy Festival just around the corner, we've made a number of updates to our game demo.

Here are the main changes:

• We have removed a horde of bugs:
  Compared to the previous demo, we spent a lot of time fixing a lot of bugs. We are proud to announce that the game is now in a state that allows you to progress smoothly through the missions. You are no longer in danger of being held back by major bugs.
  
  Now you can focus on solving problems to win and not on discussing why something doesn't work on Discord :)
  
  
• Updated UI:
  
  A number of changes have been made to the user interface. Your valuable feedback, especially from the ongoing playtests, has been invaluable to us. The interface is now more intuitive and functional, making it much easier to manage your town.
  
  
• Improved Tutorial:
  
  Starting your adventure in Ancient Egypt is now even easier. We've improved the tutorial for Mission 01 and added a brand new tutorial for Mission 02. Now you'll feel more confident as an architect!
  
  
• More guidance:
  
  We know that sometimes everyone needs a little guidance to overcome challenges, especially in BoE. That's why we've added lots of hints and tips to make sure you never get stuck.
  
  
• Adjusted difficulty:
  
  Our work on the difficulty balance has borne fruit. Now the Easy mode is really for beginners, so you will not be overwhelmed by the game's difficulty.

And that's not all! You'll find more details on the changes in our upcoming devblog. If you liked our demo, we invite you to join the playtest now, where missions 03, 04 and the unusual mission 06, where you can build your own pyramid, are waiting for you!
Let the Steam Strategy Festival be your excuse to discover new possibilities in Builders of Egypt!

Hello Builders!

We will make a stream during Steam Strategy Fest, so be sure to join us!
Remember also, that you can join our playtests all the time via main Steam game page.

Hello Builders!

Join our stream and have fun!
We are going to play available scenarios and do our best to make our city grow! ːsteamhappyː

If you want to join playtest, do these few steps:

1️. Go to the Steam page of the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/818520/Builders_of_Egypt/
2️. Scroll down to the “Join the Builders Of Egypt Playtest” segment
3️. Click “Request Access” and wait for an invitation

Don't forget to give us feedback! It's the most important thing during the playtest. You can do that via a short survey in the game.

We are pleased to announce the official start of playtesting for our upcoming strategy game "Builders of Egypt". Your presence at this stage of the game's development is extremely important to us, as your feedback, comments and experiences will form the basis of the game's overall perception.

schedule reminder

The aim of these playtests is not only to strive for perfection, but above all to create a game that meets your expectations and provides full entertainment and satisfaction. We want Builders of Egypt not only to immerse you, but more importantly to give you a good time, and to do that we need your feedback.

As a reminder, invitations will be sent out today, Friday and Saturday. So anyone who is interested will be invited to play on Saturday at the latest. At this point, we expect the tests to last about a month. However, this may change depending on your feedback.

The overall goals of these playtests are to:

[expand type=details]

• Refine the difficulty: Your experience of playing the game will help us to calibrate the level of difficulty. Our aim is for the game to be a challenge for both beginners and more experienced players. It will be invaluable to have your feedback on the difficulty of individual tasks, mechanics and levels.
  
• Find undetected bugs: An extremely valuable contribution you can make is to help find technical bugs and imperfections in the game. The final quality of the game will depend on your reports of bugs or performance issues.
  
• Analyse the way the player is introduced to the game: The game is difficult in itself, no one is hiding that. But difficult things can be explained in an accessible way if you want to, and we very much want to. Your feelings about the first steps in the game are something we are curious about. Is the interface and the tutorial intuitive to use? Do you have a good understanding of the basic mechanics and objectives of the game? Your comments will help us to optimise the process of introducing new players to the world of the Builders of Egypt.
  
• Gathering your feedback on the game itself: Your feedback on how you feel about the overall experience is invaluable. We want to know what you like, what needs to be improved, and what can be added or changed to make it even more compelling to play.

[/expand]

Your active role in this process is invaluable. Thank you for joining us on this journey to create Builders of Egypt. Your passion and dedication are the fuel for our efforts.

on behalf of Strategy Labs,
Jacek Turek
game developer

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The Playtest contains 5 missions to be played in free-to-play scenario mode. This includes the first four missions, which are generally one big tutorial, plus the addition of mission six, which allows you to build a pyramid.

Both the Demo and Prologue have two missions, as opposed to the Playtest, which has five missions. Also, Prologue is a very old version of BoE and does not represent its current quality. The same goes for the technically poor demo, for which we rightly received negative feedback.

At this stage we expect the playtest to last about a month. This is subject to change.

If you want to reach us quickly, the best place to do this is on Discord: https://discord.gg/mhT7sqHKk3
You can also post in the Builders of Egypt forums on Steam. However, the most important feedback for us is the survey, which can be found in the main in-game menu.

https://discord.gg/mhT7sqHKk3

The moment we've all been eagerly awaiting is finally here! We are thrilled to announce the much-awaited Builders of Egypt Playtest Event!

Builders of Egypt is an extraordinary city-building game that transports you to the majestic era of the pharaohs. As the master architect and city planner, it's your duty to construct awe-inspiring monuments, manage resources, engage in trade, and nurture a thriving society along the banks of the Nile. Are you up for the challenge?

We have a huge number of eager people who want to try their hand at Builders of Egypt. This is both an honour and a great pleasure for us - but in order not to spoil that pleasure for you, we have decided to divide the players into three rounds. The most important to know is that all those wishing to participate will be invited. Everyone! So if you haven't received an invitation on Wednesday, wait until Friday. And if you don't make it on that day, you will definitely get one on Saturday.

Why is there a one-day break in the addition of players? So that we have a response time if there are any problems, both in the game itself and here on Steam. Sometimes things go wrong and we give ourselves a day to resolve the issues.

This playtest event aims to gather valuable feedback from our incredible community of players. Your insights, suggestions, and critiques will help us fine-tune the game and make it an unforgettable experience for all. This is your chance to be a part of shaping the final version of Builders of Egypt!
It will also be important to fill in a survey with your impressions of the playtests. The link to the survey will be provided on the day of the test. It will also be available in-game and here on Steam.

Participating in the playtest is easy! Simply follow these steps:

1️. Go to Steam page of the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/818520/Builders_of_Egypt/

2️. Scroll down to the “Join the Builders Of Egypt Playtest” segment

3️. Click “Request Access” and wait for an invitation

As there are tens of thousands of people waiting for the playtests to start - sending out invitations can take up to 3 days, due to technical reasons.

To celebrate the start of the playtests, there will be a stream on our Twitch channel, where we will play the available scenarios together and lead our city to eternal glory!

Drop by our channel and be sure to leave a follow: https://www.twitch.tv/buildersofegypt

Spread the word among your fellow gaming enthusiasts and history buffs! Let's make this playtest event a grand success by coming together as a community to craft an extraordinary ancient world.

Mark your calendars and set your alarms – the Builders of Egypt Playtest Event is an opportunity not to be missed! See you there!

Today we come to you with an important post. This is because we want to summarize the most important changes you will see in the upcoming Playtests! We know you can't wait, so be sure to read on and sign up for the playtests. Be sure to share your thoughts!
We also invite you to follow us on our other social media: {LINK REMOVED}https://bit.ly/m/buildersofegypt

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You pointed out the marginal chances of coming out ahead financially, even realizing the minimum requirements of the mission. There were several reasons why this was happening. First of all, proper rebalancing is a long process that requires a fair amount of effort. And such a process is best done if one has already changed nothing or almost nothing in the game in a fundamental way.
In the case of Builders of Egypt, the balancing was done at the early Prologue build stage, and then as a result of dynamic changes in the behavior of the Trader and even minor adjustments in the behavior of buildings and Stockpile workers, the balance was upset to such an extent that completing the mission was very difficult. In addition, launching and fixing the tax system, under which payments to employees enter, did not improve this situation either.
As you can easily guess this has all been fixed in the new version and in the upcoming playtests you will have the opportunity to test this. The number of goods that a neighboring city can buy has been significantly increased. The Trader himself moves much faster to compensate for the distance he has to cover on the map and exchanges his goods more efficiently. Stockpile workers also move much faster, by almost 80% (while still maintaining a realistic appearance) which dramatically improves overall production efficiency. In Stockpile itself, the order queuing system for goods has been improved, and as a result, everything runs more smoothly.


The construction of the Monument, while impressive, may have bored you with its slowness of progress. Here, two major changes have been made - the Stockpile has priority for supplying the Monument with the goods it requires. That is, if you build a Stockpile that handles only the goods required to build the Monument then the shipping and transport of these goods is lightning fast.
The second change relates to pyramids, as they are mainly where the second problem occurs. You know those ramps that wind around the pyramid to the top? Unfortunately, while this is somehow realistic and looks cool, measuring the time with a stopwatch, it turns out that it takes an eternity to deliver one piece of goods from the Stockpile to the very top of the monument under construction. And, after all, such a worker still has to return before taking another order. In view of this, we proposed a compromise - an additional feature was introduced in the options to be able to choose the behavior of Stockpile workers: a realistic mode, i.e. the same as before, and a simplified mode, i.e. workers leave goods at the base of the Monument in the same way as they leave them at all other production buildings. The difference in the time it takes for the pyramid to be built is downright incomparable, but it was hard to come up with any other solution here besides taking shortcuts which would be to reduce the number of construction stages or the number of goods the player has to deliver. After all, it's a pyramid! It's the result of years of hard work by tens of thousands of skilled workers!

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As you already know, there will be 5 missions available to you during playtesting. There is no need to dwell on them again, but the most significant change concerns the objectives to be fulfilled, the resources on the map, the introduction of animals (which were also there before but were decorative at the time), a change in the list of buildings, a change in the number of neighboring cities, etc. That is, a lot of small qualitative changes that will strongly diversify the gameplay and make the world more lively. All this makes the game experience even better!

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We are committed to making Builders of Egypt a game where there is something for everyone - both veterans of the genre and novice players who are just taking their first steps in city-builders.

Example of the first step of Mission 02

So another big change is the way the player is introduced to the game. While the tutorial in mission 01 is fine and has been slightly corrected with the addition of two buildings, without which the player will not meet the objectives of the mission, the tutorial also appears in later missions but in a different form. We call it such a semi-tutorial because, although strict restrictions are imposed, but the player can build freely in the designated area, which is heavily scripted and checks the correctness of the construction of the resulting city. In this way we want to let the player decide for himself what and where he wants to build, but at the same time provide him with all the necessary information for this. It is important to realize that our game is not simple in general and there are quite specific rules that the player has not encountered anywhere before, such as the need to build a road to the "gate" on the board for the Trader to want to come (the lack of this road is additionally informed to the player in a scripted hint), the need to build the Stockpile as a hub for reloading all goods, what function the bazaar has, and so on. For experienced players with such games, all these rules are obvious, while for anyone less experienced quite a lot of information they need to possess before they start playing seriously. That's why these changes are so important - so that everyone can get the best out of the game!

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Of course, in addition to the aforementioned changes, there have also been plenty of fixes for smaller and larger bugs that you may have encountered during gameplay. We try to eliminate as many of them as possible, but the process of creating the game is so complicated that it is impossible to remove ALL bugs at this stage. We believe that during the playtests you will help us catch new bugs that we can remove and provide you with a stress-free gameplay :)


As always, we thank you for being with us and supporting us. We are constantly working on the development of the game, so you will not be disappointed!