Short Circuits Developer Log #2
Hi Blaseball Fans,
It’s time for our second public Short Circuit. In case you missed the last one, Short Circuits are an opportunity for us to try out changes to Blaseball’s structure and mechanics before our 1.0 release. Each Circuit, we’ll share with you what we’re trying out and why.
Last Short Circuit, we tried out a number of new things (if you’d like a refresher, look here). We received a lot of great feedback from all of you. We’re using that feedback and our data to plan out the next iterations — you can expect to see many of those features evolve in future releases.
For this release, though, we’ve focused on two big changes that we’ve had our eyes on for a while… Two Week Seasons and Onboarding.
Two Week Seasons
- For Short Circuit 2, we’re going to be running a single Two-Week Season. (!!!)
- Each Season of Blaseball has always lasted one week — it’s been part of the structure since the very first prototypes. But we’ve long wondered … what if it wasn’t? What if Blaseball was a slightly different pace? With Short Circuits, we’ve finally gotten the opportunity to test this out.
Here’s what this Season’s schedule will look like:
- Monday, Dec 6 through Friday, Dec 10 — Games 1 through 63
- Sunday, Dec 12 — Election 1
- Monday, Dec 13 through Wednesday, Dec 15 — Games 64 through 99
- Thursday, Dec 16 through Friday, Dec 17 — Postseason
- Sunday, Dec 19 — Election 2
Here’s some of the biggest takeaways from this:
- More breaks! There’s no Blaseball on Saturday. Your Team won’t play every single hour during the week, either. Making Blaseball less of a time commitment will hopefully go a long way toward making Blaseball sustainable.
- Two Elections in one Season! Despite the longer Season, we wanted to maintain the same weekly opportunity to change the league.
- While it may not seem like a huge change, it’s pretty monumental on our side. It’s going to allow us to change the structure and schedule more often and more easily. This Two Week schedule is the first attempt at a different structure, and we’re very curious to see how it plays out.
Onboarding
- Blaseball, a notoriously obscure game, has never had a tutorial. How did we get away with this for so long? How does anyone figure out how to play this weird game?
- Luckily for everyone, an all-new Peanut is back to teach us Discipline and fix all this. When you log in next or create a new account, you may see the cherubic Shelled One show up to walk you through the game as it stands today. Hopefully it’s helpful.
In addition to these two big changes, you’ll see a new weather called Snow and a new Mild Cards rule. You all chose these in the last Election — we hope you enjoy them.
And that’s about it! In terms of the core interactions, this Short Circuit should feel pretty similar to the last one. Enjoy the slower Season, and good luck with the whole Peanut thing.
-The Game Band
