What happened to Appsomniacs and Miniclip?

**IP Transfer between Appsomniacs & Miniclip**

**Q: What happened to Mini Militia?**

A: Back in April 2018, Mini Militia was bringing in 3.5 million players a day. For just two developers, that was pretty overwhelming. We reached out to offers to help out and Miniclip came in. For the next 2.5 years, our role reduced to essentially being consultants and Miniclip took over as day to day and strategic managers of the Doodle Army franchise and all titles associated with it. The great experiment had begun.

**Q: What changed?**

A: In Oct 2020, Miniclip decided the franchise as a whole was not something they wanted to continue working with so the rights flipped back to Appsomniacs in a contract renegotiation. Fear not! Miniclip will keep the version 5 (v5) app up and running as long as it stays viable, and they have been adding content as they see fit, and the app is still there, and we hope the market supports them for years to come. But that decision is truly out of our hands. The Mini Militia trademarks have returned and have been fully licenced back to Appsomniacs and going forward is now back in our control, including full control of the Doodle Army franchise once again.

**Q: What is Mini Militia Classic? How is it different?**

A: Appsomniacs first step is to take a step back, assess, and then go forward in a slightly different direction to develop **Mini Militia Classic: Doodle Army 2**. For example: we are returning to when Mini Militia had offline capability, was friendly to the eSports community, and had more of the customizable experience before the Miniclip v5 version was developed. Players will notice scores are gone. We are contractually and not allowed to take that old data into the new app. BUT hear us out, a new score system will come back as something more interesting and valuable to build up upon. Leaderboards will no longer be through Google Play or Game Center nor easily hackable. We have dusted off our old road maps and are looking to the future. The initial release has already brought back a bunch of the old features from the past like custom servers, capture the flag, and offline WiFi. We aren’t stopping there.

As aforementioned, Miniclip has their version of the app in the stores (known as Mini Militia - Doodle Army 2) that they are continuing to develop and maintain. All the user data associated with the Miniclip version is being 100% managed by Miniclip and is not something Appsomniacs has access to. Apple/Google doesn't allow cross data sharing between apps published by different companies. We will not have access to any of the old scores and purchases.

We are also not allowed to directly use Miniclip assets. It's part of our agreement. We don’t mind if they take our ideas and adapt them into their version (can we stop them?) Appsomniacs will still profit off their success and it fuels the development of our future titles like Mini Militia Classic: Doodle Army 2, Doodle Army 3, etc. For those of you who like the Miniclip managed game, by all means keep playing the version you love, or both! Your patronage there is funding this venture, so please play them both. We don’t mind!

**Q: What are the differences between the apps? (As of June 2021; If this needs updating let us know.)**

\*Pretty sure we never will, but never say never…

**Q: What is the plan for Mini Militia Classic going forward?**

A: It takes time to get a new app out the door and the scope of changes we have planned is no exception. Mini Militia Classic is going to go through a long series of releases within the Alpha (really janky) and Beta (less janky) phases before there will be a public release. The entire game is being modernized from the server architecture to game play. One of our take-aways from working with Miniclip is with only two developers we can’t reach that far with new content while also supporting the game so our approach is to create more tools that let people create their own content. Back in 2018, that was something we saw a lot of with offline play. There were no limits to what you could do and we really liked that.

Some of the first changes you will see is that the store will be absorbed by a loadout system to choose what items you will bring into the game with you. The options will offer players choices, with some limitations, and a chance to develop strategies around that gear/card choice.

We will still keep the app ‘Tiled’ available for people to make maps with. The other configuration portions of it, things like where are the CTF or general Deathmatch spawn points, what weapons spawn and where, will need to be adjusted for people to set up highly customized games. The end goal is to eventually not require a mod client to have a unique map that is fun to share with people and everyone’s clients can ingest that modified game data on the fly. These are huge challenges and risks to security that have to be overcome and will take some time to develop.

By the end of Beta, there should be a much more highly customizable system. We want Mini Militia Classic to support game modes beyond just CTF. In the future, going into Custom should give you the option of joining a Deathmatch, CTF, Payload, Mini Royal or any other fun creation. The investment we are making in deep changes to Mini Militia Classic’s app architecture means we will finally be able to try out more ideas faster and adopt popularized game modes.