Clickbait Tycoon

A small patch has been deployed to fix a few bugs that have been reported and add in some additional quality of life adjustments. Work is still going strong on the 0.6.0 patch that is coming in September.

Discord Connection

• You can now connect your Clickbait Tycoon account to Discord.

• You get a special in-game reward for doing so: The Daily Ping clickable!

Upgrades

• Added a button to purchase all available upgrades. This buys out the cheapest upgrades first and repeats until you are out of money.

Research

• Added 50 new researches for "Warm Blankets". Each provides 1% Daycare hatch speed increase. Most of these are for the late-late game economy where egg grinding is the most grindy.

• Knowledge Points from Breaking News and Contracts now scale with websites owned and buyouts earned.

Mugs

• Mug inventory is now 30 slots by default. This is a temporary tweak that is going to be changed in 0.6.0.

Bug Fixes

• Golden and Trending notifications should no longer hide behide fact checking countdowns.

• Hire and Upgrade tooltips now appear beside the panel instead of on top.

• The fact check bar can no longer take over other tabs, it stays to the newsroom.

• The custom styles applied to your writer no longer reset on prestige or buyout.

Our first patch in early access! We've had a great start to our launch and to keep the momentum going we're making some early game balance changes to help smooth out the onboarding process and to put good stuff in your hands sooner.

Pals

• Pals now can be unlocked after the writer questing is unlocked. No longer does this require the Office Tower room.

• Daycare room in the Office Tower now unlocks the Pal Expedition mechanic.

• Improved the UI to condense information and make it more clear which Pals are in your party.

• Eggs can now drop from publishing articles... more reasons to click.

• Pals now follow writers when they go on quests.

Quests

• Improved the end of quest popup to show all the rewards earned by completing a quest.

Balance

• Research tab now opens after 5 published articles (down from 10).

• Field Reporting now costs $500 (down from $1000).

• Tutorial Trending Topic now appears at article 3 (down from 7).

• Office room upgrade levels have been made more expensive and now also require knowledge points. More decisions to make!

• Click Bot Network empire upgrade now costs 1 Domain Point but clicks once every 10 seconds at the first rank.

• Click Bot Network empire upgrade has had ranks 2 through 4 see Domain Point cost reductions.

• Each additional website unlocked via empire prestige provides more Domain Points. Existing saves will now have additional points to compensate.

Name in the Game

• Early Access purchases can now use the Clickbait Tycoon website to submit a name of their choice into the game.

• This feature works with Pals. There is a random chance when hatching new Pals that you can encounter a community-submitted name.

• All submissions go through a human to verify they are safe before we add them to the game.

• Note that it requires a game update for us to push new names to the game, even after we accept the name submission.

Bug Fixes

• You can now correctly hit escape when any modal is open to close it. This mimics the controller functionality where "B" closes modals.

• When first equipping a mug the icon now correctly appears in the writer equipment frame.

• Fixed an issue with how Typing Speed was being calculated.

• Mugs with Caffeine now correctly apply stats.

• Mugs with Clout now correctly apply stats.

• The Click Bot Network empire upgrade now correctly progresses the publish bar.

We go silver instead of gold for an early access launch, right? Thank you to everyone who provided feedback during the closed beta test. It was invaluable in finding bugs and improving the user experience <3

This is our final major Early Access build for Clickbait Tycoon (Official Site | Steam). Full launch is next Friday, August 21 at Noon Eastern! It has been a journey and a half to get here and we can't wait to continue developing the game during early access and into the 1.0 release next year.

Visual Polish

• Best Value tags no longer cause hire buttons to increase in size when upgrades have been purchased.

• Moved the name of the quest you're on to keep the box the same size.

• Writer tab now has a more character sheet feel to it.

• Writer tab glows while any writer has unspent attribute points.

• Every research project and every achievement now has an icon.

• Questing now shows stats and rewards associated with that quest after first completion.

• Every quest now keeps a permanent career record

• Added a "Fog of War" to the quest interface so you can't see very far...

• Improved the appearance of our patch notes in the client

• Added comparison tooltips for items.

• Increased some character-related font sizes.

• Reworked the paper doll frame for gear and stats for each character.

• Inventory is now a grid with comparison tooltips. This works better if you have lots of gear.

• The Lab / Research tab has an updated appearance.

• Researches that require knowledge points will now show KP in red when you don't have enough.

Stats

• Words Per Minion increases your auto-attack speed.

• Plagiarism steals life from enemies.

• Renamed Serendipity to Luck. Yeah, it was a cool name but it wasn't immediately obvious what it did.

Accessibility

• Added an option for reduced motion (combat, news ticker)

• Added a new option for "boss fight pace". You can slow down combat to make it easier to hit attacks. This does not make fights weaker.

Boss Fights

• You can now switch between Weak Spot boss encounter style and Typewriter style.

• Typewriter is a DDR-inspired mini-game that instead of clicking on the boss weak spot, you instead can press keys on your keyboard (WASD or Arrows)

• Added new controls settings tab with rebindable fight keys.

Balance

• Building office rooms now costs Knowledge Points on top of money - 1 KP for your first room of a type, then it scales up

• Some researches now require Knowledge Point in addition to burning funds.

• Field Reporting (the quest unlock) costs $1K now, was $4K.

• Seed Funding is now useful: each rank starts every new website with $10K x rank x your website count.

• Six new permanent Domain Point upgrades keep gear through prestige.

• Hire mastery researches: own 30 of a hire to unlock its "Squads" project.

• Quills now drop from publishing! Also added research to make it more common.

• AI Summarization Tech is a newsroom button that makes your next article click ship the article out immediately.

• The Pen is Mightier I-X research now increases critical damage - helps fights!

• Boss money is now scaling based on quest length.

• More total Pal eggs can drop from more difficult quests.

• Quests will now always drop a piece of gear on their first clear.

• Early quests can drop 0 pieces of gear on repeated kills - go farm past the first few!

Fixes

• Clicks no longer pass through the pause menu (or any modal).

• Styled the dropdowns in settings to match the theme of the game.

• Steam Deck now defaults to Typewriter style fights with ABXY support.

• The writer now properly auto-attacks during boss fights.

• Added missing achievement icons.

• Writer experience gains from the gym are now correctly applying.

• You can now discard gear you no longer want in your inventory.

• Fixed a bug where the audio would be loud when you first open the game before adjusting to your volume slider preference.

• The writer tab now correctly scrolls.

• Made improvements to tooltips to help prevent them get stuck.

• Proof Reading now provides a popup asking if you want to turn on the accessibility option for it

• Fixed a resize issue when first unlocking quests.

• The Dressed for Deadlines achievement now asks for all 7 gear slots.

• Fixed a crash when equipping a mug.

• Removed old references to "Producers" (they're "Hires").

• Tooltips for Hires are no longer so tall and narrow - omg readability!

• Tooltips can no longer go beyond the bottom border of the game.

• Tooltips no longer cling to the edge of the game.

• Fixed quest map bouncing back to bottom on scroll

• Mugs now tell you what they do.

• Fixed the room building modal from appearing under the rpg strip.

• The Legal Department finally has its own icon.

• Attribute buttons on paper doll now align correctly.

The latest edition has unveiled the story of the year: Clickbait Tycoon has been officially announced!

Check out the store page to get your wishlists on and to learn more about the game. Clickbait Tycoon was supposed to be a smaller-scale game in the Out of Games Arcade but grew into something larger that simply required a full release on Steam.

Thank you to everyone who helped provide feedback and tested during our closed alpha and got us to this point so that we could launch into Early Access. There are still some systems that need more work which is why the game is entering EA, but it is is expected that we will have the game feature complete in 6-12 months.

A 10% discount will be available at launch, so August 21 through August 28 is your time to pickup Clickbait Tycoon at a great deal. We will be increasing the price when we leave early access and we will let everyone know in advance of that happening.

Thanks all!