Post-Mortem Screenshot by HexaaeHere we go, the time has come for a complete Post-Mortem. Sales have started to dry and memory has started to fade We’ll cut it into 2 parts: 1 for the development, 1 for the marketing & long-term support.
Development What went right? Choosing Unity Although it’s obvious afterward, it wasn’t years back, around 2010, when I decided to give it a try. I can’t see how I could have done the game without using the Unity engine. It has some serious & annoying flaws, but all in all, it has been great to work with, and a huge time saver. I already wrote a complete post about the issues I got with it here:. Use of stock assets All enemies in DG are from stock assets.
The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians is an RPG Dungeon Crawler game, in First Person View, inspired by classics like Dungeon Master™ and Might & Magic®, but featuring a modern combat system based on the triptych “tank/damage dealer/healer” mechanism.
Before to do that, I had big doubt about the visual unity of the result: many different styles, would it look silly or even super bad? Actually, it didn’t! Once everything was together inside the same environment with the same lighting, it got a lot smoother and 95% of the enemies looked great. The only real little miss is the 1st boss because he’s too low on poly and his texture is of low quality.
Also, although no user complaining about his quality, a few wondered about his style (he’s a bit of a Japanese samurai), but it was more of a background story issue, as they hadn’t read the in-game dialogues. Another little downside is that I die a little bit every time I see another game using the same stock models Use of stock icons was also a good choice, as it’s very expensive to produce original ones, although it has been a challenge to find the correct one for each of the abilities & talents. Motivation I have been able to keep a high morale for most of the development. I didn’t work too much every day, but my best & most productive hours almost always went into the game.
At end of development, I also worked 6 days per week on DG. However, I have been careful to keep 1 rest day per week to avoid any burning out. It’d have been better if I didn’t have to take care of my customer services for my other games on that day, but they funded DG, so I had to do it Level Design Although I had never professionally designed levels, the result is very good (a good bunch of players has praised it). However, I had designed for fun many Doom levels and a few ones for Quake 3, in my younger years.
The whole thing could have used a better planning, though. I created level 1 be 1, without thinking much about what was coming next, especially in the 2nd part of the game, and thus it lacks a bit of unity and global goal (which is bad story-wise & motivation-wise for the player). What went wrong? Out of Steam, hurry to release Despite my relatively good handling of my motivation, I ended the development very tired (partly because I had a lot of sleep issues from a noisy environment), and I couldn’t release the game with all the features I wished. Fortunately, I fixed that in the following couple of months. Also, I spent a good part of the development to lie to myself about the time required to finish the game, in a totally unconscious way. It’s relatively funny to think about it afterward, especially if you know I’m usually pretty good at estimating the time required to do things.
For example, in November 2014, I thought I’d have finished the game by February 2015, 3 months later. The game was actually released in November 2015, 12 months of hard & intense work later.! To achieve that, I completely ignored the time required to do certain tasks (ie: asset integration) despite the fact I already known it was taking much more time than I initially thought: as it was the 1st time I did that, I badly underestimated the huge amount of grunt work it is to get assets (either stock assets or produced ones) ready for the game. I also didn’t put in my planning other tasks that were required to complete the game. Looking back, I did the right thing: I think I couldn’t have stomached being 1 year from release in November 2014. On another hand, from 1 year before release, I started to work with mostly the release in mind, instead of taking pleasure in what I was doing at the moment. I was always focusing on finishing what I was on, and wanting to switch to the next task and so on.
It helped to release the game in a decent state, but it’d have likely been better to downscale a bit the project at the start, especially when we see the following issue. Lack of Polishing The game lacked polishing especially on game release. After 2 years of tuning, bug fixing and improvements from user feedback, it is pretty neat, but still, now visually it feels instantly less polished than the best Indie titles, especially for the GUI.
There, there’s no miracle: I worked mostly alone on a big game with a tiny budget for the freelancers. I’m afraid there was no way to do better without putting more work or money than I could have. Story I don’t think DG was ever destined to get a great story, but things even got worst with the release of Legend of Grimrock 2. They did more or less what I originally thought to do for DG: the dungeon master was there to test your skills so you could take his place. At that time that part of the story was still not in the game, so I changed the end, and it got kinda darker, but more open to a sequel.
I also tuned down the ambition for the 2nd part of the game, especially (ie: something that’s more than a few notes here & there). Lack of Beta Testers With the Indie apocalypse, now there are more games in development than available Beta testers (without counting the hundreds of thousands of games on mobile!), and it’s a real challenge to find some players to intensively test a game and give some useful feedback, especially with no previously released game in the same genre. I got about 10 people answering my call posted in several dungeon crawler forums, but only 1 really got into the game and gave a lot of very useful feedback.
1 is infinitely better 0, but it was not enough to represent the tastes of the dungeon crawler fans, and I missed out a few things that could have been fixed during the development. I got most of them in a couple of weeks after release on Steam, but it has been quite stressful. Lack of impact So in the nowadays flooded market, the game is too long to get into, as the rules are pretty special (which is also a strength). It’s also too repetitive, especially in the 1st four levels: they are full of skeletons with few other types of enemies, and the environment doesn’t change before the 5th level. Also, there are no real strong moments to capture the player attention and curiosity once the intro is done. Moreover, the 1st level was done for the alpha version of the game, to show what the game could do, and then was used for the final version almost without any thoughtful reworking. So all in all, the game fails to impress some players during the 1st couple of hours.
The positive is that the players who stick with the game are rewarded as the game gets better, but many players gave up after a couple of levels so it didn’t help the word of mouth. Too Long Initially, I wanted the game to offer about 20 hours of gameplay. I calculated it should take about 1 hour to complete 1 level, so I decided to create 20 levels. But due to the numerous enemies and the active-pause based combat, for a lot of players, it takes around 2 hours to complete a level. This makes Dungeon Guardians one of the longest dungeon crawlers to beat, and for the average player, it’s clearly too much, as only 3% of the buyers finished the game. Game value would have likely benefited to have only 15 levels and the saved time could have put to polish the game more before release and build a more captivating story.
However, in my heart, I’m happy the game is like that long as it offers a good variety in the level design all along. So for the sequel, I’m thinking to keep the same length, but build the whole world in a more engaging way, with even more different sections to explore, and with a better story to motivate the players to go through the whole adventure.
Unbalance To complete the Level 1 after its Alpha stage, I added an extra zone to it, before the final boss, and made it optional with its entrance being not obvious. The result is that some players never did that zone and thus didn’t get the required experience to level up before that Boss and the next ones in the following levels.! Thus, some of these players ended thinking the game was unbalanced, as the Boss fights were harder than normal. With the game rules being hard to apprehend, this leads to a series of negative reviews on Steam.
For the sequel, I’ll give an XP bonus at the start of the 1st Level, so the party members will level around the middle of the level instead of near the end, which will allow having a few optional zones without unbalancing too much the Boss fights. Legend of Grimrock resemblance DG 1st environment, the mossy stones, on 1st sight (when checking more carefully, they are obviously different, though). This brought some heat (even hatred?) from some players on game release. We often say “there’s no bad advertising”, and other dungeon crawlers are very often compared to LoG anyway, so I’m not sure it was a bad thing.
Overall, I’d say the result is 50% positive/50% negative on the players trying the game because it looks like LoG, as some didn’t like it and others said it was just like LoG; this shows that some players are very strict on what is LoG and some other are more open to the dungeon crawler genre. Lack of puzzles On initial release, the 1st true puzzle was on Level 5.
There was also a dexterity puzzle on Level 4 that didn’t require much thinking. And some very very simple puzzles on the way. This was not enough for many fans of the genre who like the grid-based dungeon crawlers for their puzzles. I fixed that after released by adding 1 puzzle in the Level 2 and 1 in the Level 3, which gave a better balance. It’s still far from being enough for pure puzzle fans, but they are not in the target, as I’m targeting exactly the opposite gamers: the ones who don’t like puzzles much, but don’t mind a break from the combat from time to time Too complex level The 2nd level is one of the hardest levels as it’s a maze on 2 floors. I wanted to show the verticality that offered DG, which is unique in the genre (other DCs have usually only flat levels), but it was a bit too complex for the average gamer.
It’d have been better to introduce more gently the challenges brought by the verticality by tuning down a bit the maze aspect. Marketing & Support What went right?
Decent Reception Despite the game offering an unexpected combat system, most players liked it or at least were not too annoyed by it, which lead the game to get a decent 85% positive ratings on Steam. However 85% is not great as the median score on Steam is 81%, and the game got only 301 reviews at the time of writing. Overall, as of today, Dungeon Guardians is the 1st-person grid-based dungeon crawler that sold the most units on Steam since Legend of Grimrock 2. (source: Steamspy) Ok, that sounds cocky, but actually, it’s a not much of a feat, even if it’s better than nothing.! 1st, Starcrawlers likely grossed more than DG, which means either I discounted DG too much, too early, or that DG didn’t attract the players strongly enough and couldn’t sell decently at its price point. 2nd, LoG2 sold about 8 times more units than DG (it’s hard to count exactly now as they did some bundles), which is a huuuuuuge gap. 3rd, this micro-genre got less than 10 games after LoG2.
4th, Vaporum seems to be on its way to beat DG within 1 year, as after a weak start (a bit under DG start), it got strong sales during the Winter sales. I made enough money to pay me a decent salary for all my work on the game. In today Indie apocalypse, it is quite a feat. To go on with the comparison with the other games mentioned above, they either got several developers on them and thus are less profitable, or a single developer and sold a lot fewer units and thus are also not much profitable (even if some got shorter development time than DG). So it’s good but not great, because total income is not enough to fund a more ambitious sequel.
But it’s enough to fund one similar to DG1, with a big chance to lose money, though, as my guess is that selling an Indie game will just get harder and harder with the time, due to market over-saturation. Updates with impact I did a good bunch of updates after release of the game, for almost 2 years, not full time ( obviously ), but it likely took me about 3 months of additional work, till the point I could add “Enhanced Edition” to the title of the game, and got better reviews and more happy players (score average on Steam since 1 year is above 90%).
Most updates have been done from user feedback and it has been very nice to see the players enjoying them. The game feels more complete and polished now and as a game author it’s a fulfilling objective.! What went wrong? Missed a good part of the target DG is a mix between a tactical combat game and a dungeon crawler, inspired from WoW. At 1st, mostly only dungeon crawler fans bought it. Few WoW fans bought it and even less tactical fans.!
I partially corrected that about 1 year ago by changing the game tags & short description, so it made it clearer it was strategy oriented, with However, the game never got any attention from the mass of WoW fans (no news, no forum posts on WoW forum, etc.), although a few WoW fans bought and enjoyed the game. At this point, I’m really not sure how it could have been better without having a much bigger budget, both for the game production value and the marketing. Too much hasted negative reviews This one is really painful. As already explained in this blog, a lot of players gave hasted negative reviews, for various reasons, and it took a toll on my mood and my energy to try to explain the game rules, the options, etc, and sometimes show them that if they had read the game description, they just shouldn’t have bought the game. All in all, without that work, the game would have been nearly down to 75% positive ratings instead of 85%.
So it was important to do it, but I really don’t enjoy that. With some players, it’s ok as they are happy to get the support and the explanations, and pleasantly surprised to meet a developer eager to help the players; but with some other ones, who are full of negativity or just don’t care about trashing a game, it can get really unnerving. However, even if in the past I was sure it was extremely important to keep a high total score, I’m not sure it’s totally the case today. The Steam global score is nowadays mostly a bad joke for many reasons (that are out of the scope of this Post Mortem ), and it’s possible that more and more users realize it. As a whole, for the game industry, and especially Indies, it’s a bad news as the global score used to be an efficient way to promote a game without a marketing budget.
One last important thing is that as the game is too long with a low completion rate, it’s missing a lot of positive reviews to compensate the negative reviews: there’s a lot of players who usually review the games only once they have beaten them, and thus as they never finish DG, they never review it. Conclusion We can say that Dungeon Guardians is a decent success, but far from a huge one. Its development had issues but nothing nightmarish. The gameplay is good but could use more variety. For my 1st RPG, I couldn’t pretend to much more It was nonetheless a great and fulfilling adventure for me and my only hope is to be able to do a sequel offering an even better gameplay, if not a significantly higher production value.!
Except in case of a big surprising event about the game, this is my last post on this blog till DG2 development starts within next couple of years (if it ever starts), so thanks for reading it and farewell; may you explore many huge dungeons, 1 cell at the time! Teleporters Puzzle (screenshot by Logort) Here a post to do a recap of what happened to the game after its release, and some words about marketing & sales. Updates I just released a few days ago the version 1.0i of the game, which may (or may not) conclude a long series of updates done since the release of the game, mostly based on user feedback, requests & suggestions. And one of the users on Steam suggested I should promote all the things I added to the game since its initial release.
Skeletons & Fireball After a lot of thinking, chatting with people liking the game and a few ones not liking the game, I’m finally able to understand what’s right and wrong in Dungeon Guardians in term of gameplay. So in short, almost nothing is wrong. Like already hinted in my, people not liking the game and vocal about it are usually just mighty idiots (with a few exceptions). Cons But let’s put them aside for a while and check what people who liked the game had to said about its shortcomings:.
Enemy abilities lack a bit of variety. This is likely the biggest issue with the game, as it means the combat lacks of variety, and thus is less engaging and more repetitive than what it could have been. For the possible sequel, a big objective will be to emphasize different new enemy abilities which will bring new tactics and strategies during the adventure. Combat system is hard to get into (it was also explained in Review of Reviews), and not understanding it makes you think it’s too much Random Number Generator (RNG) based. This is one is tough to fix because it’s the flip side of the strong point of the game: its combat system is unique, although it’s strongly derived from MMORPG and more especially from World of Warcraft one; but in Dungeon Guardians you control 4 characters, not only one, and it changes a lot of things. For WoW fans, it’s not too hard to get into it, but for the average Dungeon Crawler fan, it’s a lot to take, but it’s doable if they take the time to read the in-game tutorial and the different ability descriptions. So for this point, I don’t see any solution to fix it except maybe reworking a bit the tutorial to make it more clear.
Story & Lore are too basic. Although not directly influencing the gameplay, a stronger story and lore is always more engaging for the player and can help motivate him to stick with the game when things are hard on start-up (and even later on ). Dungeon Guardians is in par with the average Dungeon Crawler in this area, but it’s true that compared to full scale RPGs, it’s thin. There, the main issue is the lack of budget.
As explained in ““, it’s very time consuming to build lore & story into the game, and it often requires special assets and thus increases the cost of the game. For the possible sequel, I’ll see what I can do, which will be hopefully more if I can get a bigger budget Add that’s all for the shortcomings.!
When browsing positive reviews on the of the game, most players have none or very few complaints about the game. But the game has only a 83% positive rating; ok, it’s really not bad, but when you read the positive reviews, you might wonder why it’s not higher.
A tough Boss! Ok, I’m still not ready to write a full post-mortem, but after seeing this thread, it made me want to write a list of all the technical issues I got creating Dungeon Guardians, most of them being tightly tied to using Unity3D (real name = Unity Engine; Domain name = Unity3D.com ).
Before to go further, I think I need to make this very clear: Unity is a great engine and without it Dungeon Guardians would either not exist at all, or look way less good than it does; and having used it made me save a lot more time than it made me lose. Thus said, I have built my game engine using the minimal stuff possible from Unity, and every part I used had a least one really annoying issue, if not several. Let’s start with a painful task that almost no one can do without: debugging Conditional Break in the MonoDevelop Debugger never worked. It makes debugging much tedious as I had to add some lines of code and recompile everything every time I need to check a special case. Later on I switched to Visual Studio and its debugger which was technically working, but often terribly slowly, so not much more usable actually.
Though this last point is likely the wrong of C#, not Unity. To stay with the debugger, pressing the “Play” button while the Debugger is attached makes Unity stall for 20-30 seconds instead of starting in less than 2 seconds. After that, it executes normally. Moreover, Live recompiling (ie: changing the C# scripts with the game running) isn’t practical and thus I never got it working. This is the thing I miss the most from developing in C.
Let’s continue with some isolated issues Physics engine handles really badly small fast moving objects; I had to use & tune this to fix the issue:. The FPS counter in the stats doesn’t actually count the FPS; it estimates them in the most idiotic possible way and thus is completely useless and misleading.
There’s no built-in decal shader, nor shadow-receiving transparent shader; so for putting spider webs on my wall, I had to grab an. GL rendering stops to work in OnGUI after an alt-tab (ie: switching to another application), but it works again after a couple of alt-enter (ie: alternating between fullscreen & windowed mode). There’s no fix nor bypass for that. This is one of the rare bugs left in the game. There’s no documentation on how to handle a lot of sound sources.
The sound parameters would let you think it’s automatically handled, but it isn’t. Fortunately, I have been able to just cull the sound sources with my custom-made occlusion system for the rendering. And now for the big part: animation & importation Legacy Animation system was duplicating the animation clips assigned at realtime, instead of referencing them, which leads to a gargantuan amount of wasted memory (more than 1GB!). I had to swap to the new Mecanim animation system which was severely feature limited.
Fortunately, the possibility to change the speed of the animation per layer came with Unity 5.1. Unfortunately, this version made the legacy immediate mode GUI way too bright in editor mode (but luckily not for the built game). 5.2 fixed that issue but destroyed the animation system, making everything jerking around when using multi-layers. 5.2.1 fixed that but not completely, and 5.2.2 didn’t change anything, thus final version of Dungeon Guardians is built with 5.1.3p3 and I kept on burning my eyes every time I launched the game in editor mode (which was all the time till recently). Disabling & re-enabling the Mecanim component of an object removes the current playing animation clip instead of only pausing it; ie: it completely empties and then resets the internal state of the animation.
It brought me a lot of issues and it has been very hard to figure out a solution. But the hardest part has been to understand that behavior, because it is not documented. I have requested it more than 1 year ago to be added to the documentation, and as of today,. Still in the animation department, it is not possible to select multiple animation clips and change their import options all at once. You have to do it for each clip, which can have near of 10 parameters, 1 by 1!
There are hundred of animations in Dungeon Guardians, I lost hours if not days doing a stupid grunt work that should have taken less than a hour.! To go on with the resource management, the texture re-sizing on importation is done with a very simple algorithm which has the double-perk of being both too aliased and losing contrast. The 1st one happens when resizing to a much smaller size and the 2nd one when dividing the size by only 2 or 4.
Using “Bucibic Sharper” with Photoshop gives a much better result. It means I had to do an awful lot of grunt work to get the best of all the HD textures I had, instead of relying on the built-in scaler.
And now, the true Unity specialty: Half-cooked Features It’s really the plague of Unity. They’re in a race to always add more & more features, while regularly never really finishing the existing ones and letting them with blatant missing possibilities.
The most patent example is the “new” animation system Mecamin (it was released with Unity 4 in July 2013), as explained above, which needed nearly 2 years to get a layer & clip based speed setting. It’s something that a lot of games need. Think for example at an adaptable run speed animation for the legs and a defined speed for a fire animation for the torso.
In the same vein, the Unity Input doesn’t allow to be set in-game. It’s even not possible to know what key is assigned to an input! Which means any developer wanting to offer in-game configurable input (instead of the default Unity launcher setup) has to redo the Input from the ground up, as I did for DG!
In bonus, the text input field doesn’t work on Linux. It may or may have not be fixed in latest version of Unity, but as I couldn’t use it (see above), it meant I had to re-write my own (which doesn’t support Ctrl+V & stuff like that): you’d be surprised at how much people actually want to enter the name of their choice for their character in an RPG, even if they use Linux.!
The “new” particle system, Shuriken, released in February 2012 can’t use a skinned mesh (ie: an enemy) as source for its particles! It has been fixed in Unity 5.3, released at end of December, nearly 4 years later. For DG, I had to use an external add-on (and yup, I had to paid for it). Conclusion I skipped a good bunch of issues which were also annoying but have been fixed before releasing the game, and that didn’t require extra work on my part before that. I also skipped a dozen of little issues which were more or less trivial to fix once found.
I also had several undocumented changes of behaviors, some really strange. All in all, I feel lucky I had a version that let me built the full game without any major bugs nor important missing features, but I’d have liked to make it without the GL render & Text Input on Linux issues.
Maybe someday I’ll try to update to Unity 5.3 and check if it doesn’t break anymore my animations, without breaking some other new stuff. For now, I think I’ll be still using Unity for my future games, although for the very next one, I’ll still use my old custom framework so I’ll be able to use my old game engine without porting it to C# right away. And to end on a positive note on Unity, it has been really fast & pleasant to be able to build all versions (Windows / Mac / Linux all for Steam and for Mana Games, and the Mac AppStore one), while it was really cumbersome with my old homemade framework. Hey, that’s me!:-) And this is the final weekly update. At least for the time being; maybe in the future I’ll come back to add a Rogue Mode to the game.
Or Dungeon Guardians 2. We’ll see But for now, let’s see what has been accomplished the past 10 days. I finally found the energy and the time to put the Treasure Hunt in the game. This is a chained series of riddles, more or less easy, designed mostly to test the player’s memory and observation skill.
Game Design
This hunt features a new extra non-combat item, as well as alternate weapons (eg: 2H tank weapon). This little extra in the game makes it now really complete, especially as there was a series of rooms & places that didn’t make much sense till now, because they were destined to be part of the Treasure Hunt. I also wrote a complete documentation with a mini-tutorial for the Map Editor:. On the Steam front, I added the Trading Cards. And in bonus, you should be able to get the OST as free DLC on Steam within a few hours! At last, the after-release service is also more or less done, as I got only very few bugs and requested features to add in the game since a few weeks.
So the main work is done now, almost 4 years after the development started, back in February 2012. I will still take care of any reported bug, and will very likely add some extra requested features if they are easy to implement, but my mind will now be able to switch to my next game (Tennis Elbow Manager 2, a tennis manager game). I’ll still likely write a postmortem for the game at some point: maybe in a few weeks, or at a milestone for the sales (ie: when the game will have paid me a somewhat decent salary ). I will also maybe write a mix between a game design analysis and a game theocrafty article on the game.
A full game design analysis would feel too much of self-cannibalism, as I don’t have enough distance to be objective enough on the perception of the different gameplay mechanisms. I will also try to contact GOG again, now that the wishlist got more than 300 votes. Maybe it’ll be enough to make them change their mind. If not, maybe knowing that Dungeon Guardians is the best selling FPV Dungeon Crawler released recently will help as well (ok, this is a relatively easy feat, as there’s not much FPV Dungeon Crawlers, but still, it’s nice ) That’s all for now.
Thanks to have followed this blog, I hope you have enjoyed the ride. Me, I surely enjoyed it, and I’m a bit sad it’s kinda over now. DG took the best part of my mind for most of the past 4 years, and it has been an incredible experience! See you in not too long time (hopefully!), and Happy New Year! (I’m french, we have till January 31st to wish it!
Highway to Hell! (screenshot by Logort) I did nearly nothing last week, so no weekly update today, but instead, let’s plunge into some overall analysis. And more precisely, let’s review the reviews of the game!
At heart, I’m a game designer, mostly because I love video games, play them & analyze them. What I do best is find something I like, see what’s wrong, and make it better.
For my taste. I learned since a long time that my taste is different from many other people’s taste. And thus, if I want to say to someone that something is great, it’s better to explain why it’s great, instead of only saying “it’s great”. It works same when it’s bad.
Because my great and my bad can actually be the bad and great of someone else. The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians has now got, and unfortunately some reviewers mistake their taste for an objective truth. These reviews didn’t make their way in the Review page I just linked, though The particularity of Dungeon Guardians is its Tactical Combat system.
It’s unmatched in solo video games, so it requires some serious learning if you never played any MMORPG before. It means you have to read 5-10 minutes of explanations during the tutorial, and then read the descriptions of your Toon abilities, and then do some thinking to understand how everything work & fit together, and finally experiment all this and see how to optimize your damage, your healing, your aggro, and your damage mitigation during the numerous fights of the game. This is passionating if you’re into this kind of game, but it’s a lot to take for the average Dungeon Crawler fan where the combats are usually pretty basic (ie: strafe, turn, wait for the grayed buttons to not be gray then hit; repeat over & over again). Fortunately, you can easily lower the difficulty of Dungeon Guardians at any time, but if it’s too low, it means you can do anything and you won’t die, or if you really didn’t understand anything, you will still die and rage quit, usually blaming the game for being unbalanced instead of recognizing you didn’t make the required efforts to understand what was going on. What I wrote in these last 2 paragraphs, you won’t find it in any review of the game (you’ll find parts here & here though, but not as a whole). It’s ok, a review & a gameplay analysis aren’t the same thing. But the reviewers should have that in mind when writing their review, but a few of them didn’t.
I finally will be able to rest a bit! (Screenshot by Logort) Last week got its up & downs. I’m nearly dry, and working on system stuff (ie: the Steam Workshop integration) is really not as fun as creating games. But I did it, I’m finally finished with it: the game now loads Workshop Dungeons, export and then load Mods to & from the Workshop. Hopefully, it’s bug free. It may require a bit of polishing, though; I’ll see what need to be done depending of user feedback.
Right now, in the Workshop, there’s only the No Spiders Mod that I have uploaded by myself (for our arachnophobic friends ):. Note: to see the workshop items, you have to own the game, as it’s still not officially released at this point.
I’ll do that once I’m sure everything runs smoothly, hopefully for Xmas So now, I guess I’m good for some serious holidays. I’ll stick around to fix any reported bug or glitch, though. I might also take a few hours to add Steam Trading Cards & Badges to the game. Hum, that sounds like half-holidays, but I’ll take that, that’s better than what I got lately.!
I’m still thinking about the Scavenger Hunt, but still no plan nor release date for it So I’ll do at least a couple more Weekly Updates, plus a Post Mortem by February 6th at maximum, to celebrate the 3-month anniversay of the Steam release Cya soon! Maneuvering around big Dragon boss (screenshot by MardoG) Ok, on last week, my productivity lowered to the average one of a corporate employee I took care of the Mac Appstore version on last Monday, managed to do a couple of small updates, but I didn’t have too much mood to get into Steam Workshop, so I only started the heavy work on Friday, and on Saturday I released an update that allows you to upload your custom Dungeons to Steam Workshop, but now it’s still not possible to play them for other users. It should come very soon, though. But don’t run away right now, I have 3 important news! Dark Crypt (screenshot by fR0z3n.s0u1) Last week went smoothly. I still did a little bunch of bug fixes, but they were mostly for very special cases. So I had time to finally work on a new important feature: the Modding SDK, including multi-mod & incremental mod support for the game!
The Fall Of The Dungeon Guardians Maps
You can find the SDK here:. It even comes with 2 small Mods: 1 to replace the spiders by skeletons, for players with arachnophobia; and 1 with all the built-in portraits of the game, to change them or add new ones. Except that, I got the answer from GOG: they said it looked like a good & interesting game, but were afraid it was too much of a niche game for their store (translation: it didn’t sell enough on Steam). Actually, sales on Steam are not too bad and I’m relatively confident we’ll get to the point where the game will be worth the money and time invested in it. Now, only the Steam Workshop support is missing. I hope to able to do it all this week, although I don’t have much idea of the amount of work it represents: it’s going to be a surprise.!
I also should be able to publish the game on the Mac AppStore. After that, I’m not sure where it’ll go. I still want to add the Scavenger Hunt to the game, so maybe I’ll finally do it Or maybe take intensive holidays Or maybe start to fiddle with my next game (ie: Tennis Elbow Manager 2, a tennis management game) Or write documentation for the Level Editor and Modding the game Cya next week to see how everything will turn out! Xmas in a Haunted Dungeon?
(screenshot by Hellbishop) Exactly 1 year ago, I wrote the 1st post of this blog. Development had started more than 2 years before that, but that post can be seen as the limit between “I’m doing that to enjoy myself” and “I’m going to have to sell this game if I want to do more like this; and to do so, I have to finish it”.
After that post, I almost never stopped to hurry, or at least feel impatient to finish the part I was working on to switch ASAP on the next one, hoping to finish the game soon. Now, the game is released, but it’s still a bit early to do a real Post Mortem, especially as I’m still not sure where we are headed in term of sale volume. So let’s talk about past week. Work rhythm finally noticeably slowed down: most of the days, I had free time between end of my work and going to sleep! I still did a good bunch of little fixes, changes & enhancements, as you can see in the ChangeLog here:. I finally fixed the Linux input issue (by doing my own version of the text input), but I still didn’t start to work on the modding stuff. It should be very likely for this week, as the bug reports & the feature requests start to dry down I still didn’t hear back from GOG.
I’m not sure if it means they’re not interested, or if they are crawling under the game submissions, or if they are just very busy with the end of year business. Hopefully, I’ll know soon enough. Cya next week for more news!