- Updated main menu copy.

- Removed isitlegit.xyz - Added blog

- Removed newsletter. - Added isitlegit.xyz (a rating site for NFT projects).

- Removed Dr. Clandestine demo. - Updated newsletter.

Player stat collection has been fully disabled.

- Options menu was covered by side bar making it inaccessible, this has now been fixed.

Crypto Crisis was the first game I developed, released and published. It hasn't seen any love for the better part of 3 years and has been slowly fading away. Even though it's a bit rough round the edges and needs some balance work, I want to give it away to people who want to play it. Please enjoy steamhappy Kind Regards, Jeremy Sik Former Co-Founder of Armoured Beans

The phone vibration and notification tone were extremely annoying, especially when playing in fast forward. They have now been removed from the game!

Finally out of early access! How does a cookie clicker clone that would take a 'couple of months' to build turn into a broad simulation with 3D environments and AI opponents? Armoured Beans started as most studios do, with grand plans of finally working on the masterpiece that one or both of the members had spent the last few years planning for. The grand project that takes 5 years to finish and dies on kickstarter. Crypto Crisis wasn't that game. It was our "first game". Like a first pancake, you can expect it to be a little deformed, bloated and soaked in too much oil. It's a way for us to test our skills, working relationship and dealing with actual customers who play what we create. Stefan originally pitched "The Blockchain Game" as a quick and simple project to cut our teeth and establish ourselves in the industry. A clicker where instead of clicking for cookies each click is one hash attempt. You could buy hardware to click for you and slowly increase your hash rate. The player was the miner, so you could also cherry pick what transactions would go into each block and on successfully finding a block the whole process would be animated on screen. This way the real mechanics of mining for Bitcoin could be demonstrated. On carefully considering the pitch, Jeremy said it was awful and suggested the changes that are now Crypto Crisis. The first playable build was rough. Very rough. Everything was placeholder and there was no design for the interface. The question we needed to answer as quick as possible was "Is this fun to play?". We got the answer, and learnt one of the first big lessons. Yes, it was fun to play but finding people to play test it for us was really hard. Sending a build to friends and then checking in later gave zero feedback past "yea, I poked around. It's okay". That's nice person speak for "it looked awful and I didn't want to play it" Presentation is half the flavour and Crypto Crisis was a bowl of pizza blended up into a smooth paste. Stefan did some brief work building a grid based background so we could quickly build different maps and generate them on the fly. The original plan was to have 40 maps distributed over a tree so you could chose an upgrade path based on your play style. The basics were down and we started building models for all the hardware. Still focusing on mechanics there wasn't a single texture in the game and the UI was a hot mess of developer-art and ideas 'borrowed' from other games. The mechanics were solid and managed to hook players but there was no reason to do anything. In comes our antagonist and star, Gaz. His whole purpose was to create motivation and justify the 'target amount' we settled on during the initial balance of the game. He would call every now and then -leaving a message on an answering machine- to remind you that he wanted his money. Here comes the second big lesson. Story is important. Never should it be shoehorned in to fill a gap. We should have come up with a story and then balanced around that, creating a story from arbitrary number and a setting leaves it empty and without impact. Time for early access! Initial response from the community was a very loud "meh". The first few reviews and articles we read were aligned with the state of the game. All mechanics and no substance. It looked terrible and played okay. While finishing the mechanics we had some good input from the community. The loudest were a few quality of life features, a demand for a better story, and an easy mode. The first few releases were brutally hard and demoralising. Starting on the textures we discovered that the grid system for the maps wasn't going to work. The time it would take to make perfectly tiling textures for each grid piece would blow out quickly. Especially with the number of maps that were planned for. Stefan suggested we drop the grids and make custom models for every environment. This would make things look much better but would limit the number of environments we could release with the game. A tough trade off but based on the initial reception of the game, we could pack it with content but if it looked bad no one would play it anyway. Around the same time, Jeremy started working on the Tech tree. A dropped feature that would allow the player to "upgrade" different aspects that persisted from play to play. This would add some progression and make the game easier. I bit like a roguelite. The feature was eventually dropped as it would be hard to balance and adding a feature like that mid development would be too disruptive. By the way; this was the first half of the third biggest lesson we learnt from Crypto Crisis. The second half was spurred on by a need to create a better story. We tabled many ideas, from animated cut scenes to mini games that would introduce the story. Keep in mind that seriously proposed to rip out the current story and re-imagine it in the last month or two of production. How could some one generate that much debt? Gambling? International political intrigue? We even pursued two professional writers to put a story together. After a few weeks of not getting anywhere Stefan decided to "just expand on the current story". Jeremy proposed a reason for the debt and a script was written, actors were found and the "Phone" was created. Moving the narrative into the background the phone would be there if you wanted but it wasn't as intrusive as the original voice over from Gaz. If you wanted a story, you could get it. If you just wanted to enjoy the game itself, the phone would just buzz mostly hidden away. The third lesson was; Planning. Make sure you have everything in place before you start building the game. Story, mechanics, key events, interfaces, everything! At the end of the build is the worst place to introduce a key part of the game. The last; and probably the most painful lesson to accept is that human desire is infinite in a finite world. With Crypto Crisis, we needed to build a game of reasonable quality that was playable and released within a year. We achieved that goal but we were forced to make a lot of sacrifices along the way. The real truth is that you can't please everyone, not even yourself. If we had another year or two there's a huge list of things we want to do with Crypto Crisis. It would be a much better and more polished game given enough time but you need to move on, take your punches, and apply your lessons to the next project. Want to give a special thanks to 'Ziggie' for helping us track down a nasty bug that plagued the game for months, and 'Chronicles' for his detailed review pointing out the absurdities of the game. Feel free to drop into our discord server if you want to discuss all things Crypto Crisis and thanks to all of you in Early Access that helped us bring this project over the line.

Want a more wholesome, casual, Crypto Crisis experience? Crypto Crisis Education Edition was developed in collaboration with Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne. It's a simplified, easier to play version that has been designed for younger audiences. Learn about the history of Bitcoin as you play with key facts which you might not have known before! Go to store page

So, the loading times sucked. It took us a while to realise this because the computers we used to develop the game are no slouches. When we released the Education Edition we were horrified to see that in some cases, it looked like the game had frozen when it was actually still loading! We added a new loading screen and rewrote how we are loading some of the larger assets. Loading should feel much snappier now!

A major balance update 0.12.0 has been released! Prior to 0.12.0, the game was too hard at the start and too easy once you passed a certain point. In this update we've adjusted the Bitcoin price curve in an attempt to have a more linear difficulty. Have a play and tell us what you think!

A major update 0.11.0 has been released:

• All graphics have been completed! New models and textures
• Added smartphone feature which allows you to track the price of Bitcoin without having to go to the Market menu, you can also sell Bitcoin using the smartphone
• Revamped story and added a story telling mechanism to the smartphone
• Major game balance changes
• Added new copy chassis feature
• Added new achievements
• Added several new music tracks
• Added a tutorial
• Loan mechanic removed, now all you have to do to win is hold $150,000,000
• Global leaderboards have been removed as we have no anti-cheat mechanisms. Friends leaderboards will remain.

Happy holidays and welcome to the new year! We've had our heads down working towards the final release of the game and we're not too far away now. There have been quite a few changes since our last update to the game and we would like to share them with you early!
Some of the notable changes include new quality of life features, a new story telling mechanism with new story elements, updated models and textures, new music and of course a huge re-balancing of the game! If you want to check out these changes you'll need to opt into the beta. To do this:

• In your Steam library right click Crypto Crisis and select "Properties"
• Click on the last tab "Betas"
• Click the dropdown and select the "beta" option
• The game should update

Probably one of the most requested features and for good reason! The upgrade all feature allows you to buy/upgrade all workers of a certain type within a chassis simultaneously.
Any slots which are already occupied by a worker are taken into account when determining the final cost and how the action will affect the stats of the chassis (as shown by the change in chassis stats window).
We hope this helps to make endgame a little less tedious!

A major update 0.10.0 has been released:

• Maps have been completely redone. They should have less of an impact on graphical performance while looking much better complete with textures and better lighting
• New top 10 global and friends leaderboard added to main menu
• Added new and updated models
• Ability to pay off loan with all of your remaining money
• Various minor and major bug fixes
• Localised game to simplified and traditional Chinese

A major update 0.9.0 has just been released:

• New main menu
• New models for utility equipment
• Ability to select equipment slots by clicking on placeholder markers in the room view
• Equipment menu UI updates

A critical, game crashing bug which was introduced with the Bitcoin Market feature (0.8.0) has been fixed. The game would crash if your heat output was highly negative. This could happen if you bought cooling equipment which cooled much more than the heat output of your chassis. This bug was fixed in 0.8.6.

The Bitcoin market feature has finally been released! This is the last major mechanic we wanted to add into the game and it was a fairly involved one. The main currency of the game was changed from bitcoin to fiat and a new trading screen within the finance menu now allows you to trade bitcoin for fiat. As well as making the game more exciting, this update has allowed us to simulate the bitcoin network more accurately by adding in the block reward halving mechanic. Previously this was tough because it would've affected game balance in a weird way. Time to adjust your strategy, to sell now or HODL?