Greetings! Today’s news are full of small, but still pleasant bits and pieces:

1. Hundreds of shiny new artifacts for your heroes to pick up.
2. Astrologists have learnt a few more new things that they are eager to share with you. Don’t miss new forecasts about godpower accumulator and arena teleportation in the upcoming issues of Godville Times.
3. Godville invites are now more straightforward – your hero gets an invite item, then you can activate it (from now on – for free!) to increase the number of available invitations, and then you can add a friend any time your want. So no more automatic increase/decrease trickery when your hero gets/sells a Godville invite.
4. In desperate attempts for survival, the boss monsters have developed a few more abilities. Two of them are rather nice, while the other two counterbalance them with some nastiness.
5. In addition to the named ears, heroes can now pick other special boss trophies and some of these things will surely be of greater value than others. Keep an eye on the inventory when your champ beats his next boss.
6. The progress meter when your hero waits for a duel opponent should now be way more accurate.

And here is a good news for those who tired of “wasted” encourages when the hero is already at his full health (and opposite is true for punishments). While these outcomes can’t be removed completely, from now on they will occasionally give a nice bonus – a temporal aura of rage (or bliss for evil heroes).

Lastly, rumor has it that tribbles love to make their home in mystery boxes and the like. Be careful with these things.

Some time ago, almost by accident, we’ve got hold of a Windows Phone device. It turned out to be surprisingly good, so we thought that we’d like to have a Godville app for it. Fast-forward a few months, and today we’re happy to announce a full-blown, native Godville app for Windows Phone 8!

Not only does it supports all the bells and whistles you can find in other Godville mobile apps, it also utilizes the power of the platform with support of don’t-call-it-Metro UI, live tile notifications, lock screen support, etc. It even features a new experimental Remote Control to make poking your hero even more enjoyable! So, if you have a Windows Phone, get the new app from the store and let us know what you think in this forum topic or via Ideabox.

Regardless of the mobile news, make sure to check out this dueling tournament organized by our fellow players, with some nice prizes involved!

This time around we want to talk about Ideabox. User submissions and community participation were always an integral part of the game and today we are introducing some nice perks to it.

In a day or two, the players actively participating in Ideabox voting will start getting a new special bonus – their heroes will be more effective in town prayers, restoring twice as much godpower as usual. Once activated, the bonus will work for a few days and it’s likely to continue to work as long as the god continues to actively participate in the voting process. You’ll know that the bonus is active if you find a special phrase in the diary when your hero prays in town.

There is some under-the-hood trickery, so mindless clicking won’t do any good, so please vote wisely! This feature is an experiment to increase community participation and we hope we won’t have to kill it off due to abuses. In the end, just keep in mind that every single vote you cast in the Ideabox helps to make the game better!

To make it even better, the game has just been updated with a lot of diary entries, hundreds of new monsters, and finally it got a shipment of long awaited high-level equipment.

Lastly, the news for those playing in a web browser:

• you can check the town nearby by hovering the mouse pointer over the milestone counter;
• if you use Firefox, make sure to update to Firefox 22 to get desktop notifications on superhero page (if enabled in page settings).

…in a frosty kingdom predominantly famous by its bears, vodka, and balalaikas, Godville was born. It was the year of 2007 and back then Godville was mostly in Russian, just as we are (surprise!). In 2010, after several years of steady development the English Godville came to life. It happened to be precisely three years ago, which means that today is the day of our Three Year Anniversary!

So, let’s raise our newly replenished remote controls and celebrate this very special and dear occasion. Long live Godville, its towns, monsters, heroes and, of course, dear gods and goddesses! May the Godville divine force be with you!

Obviously, Godville improved a lot through all these years and today it’s a great cause for a few more nice additions. The “Godville Times” has got a cruciverbalist and an astrologist on staff, so from now on there will be two very important new columns in our Beloved newspaper:

• Daily Astrology Forecast – Check out this new pseudo-scientific report to know what good, bad or just weird stuff is coming to your hero today. The heroes are quite credulous to astrology, so if your champion is not acting as usual make sure to check the daily forecast for an answer.
• Daily Crossword – Show the world your knowledge of Godville game world by solving this word puzzle AND give an aura as a reward to your hero too! The faster you solve the crossword the longer aura might work.

In the meantime, spring is already in full bloom, which means it’s perfect time for Spring Content Cleaning. Check out this forum topic to suggest which game content should let go.

Thanks for being with us! Happy New Godville Year!

Greetings, humble Godville gods, long time no hear! We have quite a bunch of news which we are eager to share with you.

Long cold nights of the past winter were spent on improving the Godville app for Android. The original app was developed back in the day when most Android phones came with the 1.6-2.0 OS version on board and due to that, the app had some inherent design limitations, which recently started to show themselves on the newer phones and tablets. We tried to improve it, but after beating a dead horse for a while we just gave up and rewrote the whole thing from scratch, and boy, do we like the result! The new app is snappy, follows Android design guidelines and should work especially great on both Android 4.x phones and tablets. It also features new color themes (with auto-switching) and a brand new app icon. The new app looks a bit different (mostly due to adherence to Google design guidelines) and may feel a bit unusual at the beginning, so please give it a try for a few days before jumping to conclusions. Feel free to share your feedback in this forum topic and report bugs and problems via the Ideabox. (The app has been uploaded to Google Play Store and should be available for update over the next few hours. Godville App in Amazon AppStore will be updated in a few weeks).

Meanwhile underground bosses have become a source of endless fun, gold coins and lots of other goodies. However, digging for them could be a bit confusing, so now there is an alternative option – a new activatable artifact that sends the hero off to a search for an underground boss right here and right now. So if you always wanted to check these fights out, but were too busy to dig – here is your chance! Btw, these bosses have just gained a new nasty ability that allows them to strike twice per turn, which should make fights even more thrilling.

In other artifact-related news: teleporting items will now move the hero into a random town, even if this town is far away. This opens up some interesting possibilities, right? We also have plans for two nice new towns: Herowin and Lostway, but still have not completely decided where to put them. Any suggestions?

The latest Godville Health Assembly examined the most important health issues and came out with two resolutions:

• due to a possible risk of vertebral injuries heroes are now prohibited from carrying more than 50 items at once;
• it has been decided that having a permanent set of skills in the otherwise random world of Godville is a bit strange, so healers are now allowed to occasionally replace one skill to another one of the same level. So don’t get scared when you see the result of this “knowledge exchange” operation on your champion.

And last, but not least, the game yet again has been updated with lots of new content. Some really sweet phrases are already pouring into the heroes’ diaries, with even more to come over the next few days. Btw, we’ve heard that it would be great if we could tell what types of content are needed most, so we’ve just created a new forum topic just for that. Check it out, especially if you’re an active Ideabox submitter.

The End of The World is coming, but there is still some time left to update the game with something new and exciting.

Completely ignoring the upcoming doomsday, our champions have learned a new trick – crafting! It allows heroes to make new artifacts using whatever stuff they have in their backpacks. Heroes are too lazy to do that on their own, but a proper god voice, like “combine X and Y”, should give them a much required push. Keep in mind that according to the Godville’s twisted laws of physics, only the items that start with the same letter could be successfully combined into a new item, which will also start with the same letter. Not only it could be fun on its own, it also give a chance to craft a certain item that a god might want.

As the winter makes its way into the heroes’ quests and diaries, hordes of nomadic Satan Clauses with treasure bags are migrating into the Godville snowfields. Eager for presents heroes are hunting these creatures down and hopefully, even more heroes will find their gifts in the Christmas Eve.

By the way, do you want to see more winter phrases in the diary? Send your texts into the “awesome idea” Ideabox section (with “[winter]” prefix) and we’ll review them out of the common Ideabox/ER queue, over the next few days!

Strange things are happening throughout Godville as All Hallows’ Eve approaches the doorstep. According to recent field reports, some monsters have discovered new undead powers, forcing the heroes to kill them twice. The dark powers have reached underground bosses as well, empowering them to make profit off divine encourages and occasionally even turning everything into gold.

Meanwhile, heroes are becoming more afraid of death themselves, due to more frequent reports of resurrection side effects. These can leave lingering traces on heroes in the form of a new aura. This power is capable of killing some sensitive monsters-species on the spot, taking away from heroes the good old pleasure of fighting.

Have a spooktacular Halloween!

Not everyone knows that heroes are not only good at questing and fighting, but treasure finding as well. Whenever they hear a “dig” voice from their god, they grab whatever lies around and zealously start rummaging in the ground, searching for gold. This could be helpful for melting a golden brick, healing a pet or just to help the hero get more money.

It seems that even-deepening excavations have unleashed something unheard of – the underground lairs of new boss-monsters. These rare creatures can only be met by synchronized digging, are stronger and have incredible abilities that other monsters don’t have. For the first time in Godville, it will take joint efforts of multiple heroes to defeat the beast once it’s unleashed! These guys are also quite rich, so the heroes who manage to get through the fight and win will be rewarded very nicely.

Note: if you play on a phone, make sure to update your mobile app to see these new fights completely.

In other good news, the game finally got a big and long-awaited update for the duel related phrases. To further embrace the content-related activities, Godville Times now features new daily section with updates from the Ideabox and ER. All hail to the ER participants and new game content!

UPD: Forum topic on new boss monsters.

It’s time to add a little bit more purpose into post-temple heroic existence. There’ve already been some things to do, but now there is another big mindless goal – after the great construction for their god is complete, it’s time for heroes to think about themselves and save for a prosperous future! Heroes will now start saving some of their drinking money for retirement and, since heroes whose gods have temples are not the poorest and have high standards, they will need a lot – about 30 million gold coins. Does this number seem unreachable? Well, at one time 1000 bricks seemed unreachable too. In the meantime, you can check out the new pantheon to track your progress.

Another change that we’re making today is about the Ideabox. Here is what’s new:

• From now on all ideas will be voted on for 24 hours from their initial appearance instead of the old 100 votes limit. More votes per idea should better reflect community opinion, so make sure to cast your vote!
• ER acceptance of ideas is determined by the relative number of up votes. The threshold for diary and earthly news submissions stays the same – 50%, but for other types it’s been decreased to 40%, which should increase the chance of these ideas making it into the game.

More details about the approval process can be found in this forum topic. We hope these changes will make idea processing simpler and increase the number of approved ideas. Thanks to all ER participants for the great job they did over the last few months!

PS: We’ve also created new mobile pages for pantheons. Hopefully those on mobile phones will like them.

The last few weeks turned out to be quite productive – pet variety has increased (thank you all for your suggestions!), the game got yet another bunch of new phrases and content (credit and thanks to all players and ER voters) and the forums finally became more mobile-friendly (if you have any thoughts on mobile forums please share those in comments).

Everyone loves it when things work better than they did before and we’re no exception. That’s why in a few hours we’re going to fiddle around a bit with our servers to make them work better. That will cause interruptions and game availability issues, but hopefully most of you will hardly even notice :)

NOTICE: Due to the maintenance, the game won’t be available on Aug 4, starting at 3 AM (Pacific Time, GMT-7) for approximately 2 hours. We’ll update this post once everything is finished.

UPD: Everything seem to be up and running, but if you run into new issues let us know via ideabox.

UPD: Sorry folks, but some heroes were inaccessible today due to some sudden server hardware uprising, Luckily, humans have won this time, so everything is back to normal.