Skip all cut-scenes – you mentioned that you’d like to have the ability to control what you see during gameplay. After each outcome a short scene with Professor Syrum plays. You wanted to be able to opt-out of this permanently from within the game options section. We made this change and also added the ability to skip from within the cut-scene once it has begun playing. This is now live within the game and you can opt-out by browsing to Menu > Game Options > Cut Scenes and selecting “Skip all cut-scenes”.

View gift sender’s avatar – Facebook friends who are also playing Syrum can send you a gift (and if you’re feeling generous you can send them one too).  Now you can view your friend’s Facebook avatar too from within the gift details, my gifts, and gift notifications screen.

There is a lot happening behind the scenes of the Syrum public beta game, including the following which has been developed and is awaiting release:

Cancel an experiment and headhunting request – sometimes you need to cancel what you’re doing, it happens to the best scientists, and the Syrum lab is no exception.  We’ve developed the function that allows you to cancel a current experiment and also a headhunting request.

Logic of the experiment timings has been adjusted – The components that you create in the Syrum lab no longer expire, however they do slowly decay if not used, over time reducing their quality until they are the minimum.

Thank you to everyone who has played so far and provided us with their feedback. We couldn’t continue to make positive development decisions without your invaluable input. Not only does your feedback influence the creative progress, you also earn an in-game bonus just for letting us know what you think.

Team Syrum.

It’s now been just over two weeks since the beta version of the game was launched and we wanted to update you on the development side of things.

You’ve all been very patient as our developers have been working day and night to integrate some of your feedback, and for that we are extremely grateful. Your feedback has been instrumental in helping us shape the way the game is progressing and we’re very excited that, with over 367 pieces of feedback collected through the in-game form alone, Syrum is becoming a real example of a crowd-sourced game that we hope you will love.

We can’t address each and every piece of feedback you have submitted, so we’ll go by main themes. So far, your feedback has revolved around the following:

1.  The need for a “how-to” introduction sequence. We are really sorry this took so long and would like to thank you all for your patience. We wanted this to be as flexible a solution as possible in order to enable us to be able to add new hints further down the line. We’ve now implemented this on the test version of the game. and will be testing thoroughly. We’re doing some final tests and these hints should be included in our next release, which should be being copied over to live right now.

2.  “Harvest Error” error messages: these were by far the most widely reported errors and should now have been resolved. Without getting too technical, it was actually a combination of a bug in the code relating to a certain achievement and a mouse cursor issue enabling the user to start an experiment more than once by rapidly clicking on the experiment Start button multiple times, emptying multiple pipettes over a single slot and various other configurations that played mayhem with out database. Again, this should now be fixed and going live as this if being written.

3.  Persistent failed experiments. Some of you ended up in a scenario where trying to harvest an experiment with only a few seconds left would lead to it failing. Clicking on the failed experiment would display the animation without clearing the slot. This is down to a breakdown in communication between the Action Script front-end and the PHP back-end. Our developers are working on this as we speak, but it looks like the fix for this one will be coming early next week.

4.  Experiment timings: some of you find the experiment too short, as they interrupt your Facebook browsing, some of you find them too long, and report losing interest, others think that there the timings should be more evenly spread, as there is too big a divide between average and hard experiments. We’ll be looking to streamline these timings soon.

5.  Syrum mobile application: A lot of you agree that the game could use a mobile application to keep an eye on all the timers. Now this is a great example of how much you can contribute through constructive feedback. You guys have identified an issue and suggested a solution! Of course, we would love to build a mobile app. Now just let us turn the question back to you before we get planning, would you prefer an app featuring timers, or would you like to be able to start and harvest experiments on the go?

6.  The fact that closing pop-ups is counter-intuitive and should be replaced by a “Next” button. Thanks you very much for highlighting this issue. We take this very seriously and will be going through every single pop-up of the game to ensure that the solution to this problem is as intuitive as possible as well as consistent throughout the game.

7.  Some of you have experienced a bug where the Drug Builder was prompting you to start a Clinical Trial whilst the Clinical Trial desk was prompting you to use the Drug Builder. This was a logic issue to do with Partnerships and has now been fixed.

8.  A lot of you have reported that the Drug Builder’s difficulty curve is too steep and that the game gets extremely hard rather suddenly. Some of you thought that being able to remove the less stable components from your library, but the way the Available Compounds window works is as “stacks”, with the most stable component of a given category and rarity at the top. We’ll be investigating the stability timings thoroughly, but in the meantime we will be making it so that, if a component becomes unstable and expires on the second variant, you won’t have to restart from the beginning, which should hopefully help make the game less frustrating. We’re still working on that, but expect an update at some point next week.

9.  Finally, a lot of our users where confused before even getting to play the game. When they visited the game, they came across a “This application has been restricted” message. This happens when the user is logged out of Facebook or when the user is browsing from a US or Canadian IP address. We’re sorry that this put off a lot of you! We’ve moved the geographic restriction off of the platform, and in to the game itself, which has meant that we’re now able to have more control over the “error” message. This was moved live this morning and should be working now.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your patience and most of all, thanks for your invaluable feedback. We’re truly honoured to have you all involved in the creative process and would not be where we are without you.

Team Syrum.

But don’t feel left out! You can connect with Syrum and keep up with everything that’s happening on our Facebook and Twitter pages.

Your time is coming. And your experience will be even better. Get your lab coats ready, it’s (almost) time to save the world!

Syrum is launching in public beta so we can work collaboratively to improve the game before the worldwide launch next spring. It will launch in the European market first, and players will be asked to submit ideas through the Ideas Lab on the site. Players can vote on ideas others have submitted, and get badges for their ideas as well.

We have already made significant improvements to the game based on internal testing, but by opening gameplay up to a wider audience, we think we can really develop it into something everyone will love!

Watch this space for the latest development news.