dislekcia
Momentum
There’s something to be said for that feeling you get when you’re really into a project. When you wake up with code pouring out of your frantically twitching fingers. When the team leaps from problem to problem, gnawing them into bite-sized chunks and crossing off multiple tasks a day. That’s a great feeling.
We hit a wall a few weeks ago. Obviously the whole cloning thing had a lot to do with that – yes, the responses were overwhelmingly positive rather than negative – but dealing with lawyers just takes so much time. Plus having a spanner thrown into our schedule like that made us question a lot of the assumptions we’d made about what people were willing to pay for DD. Suffice to say that I think we’re more comfortable erring on the side of polish rather than release buggy games (and y’know, with really poor difficulty ramping), but that’s all I’ll say about that 😉
My trip to Kenya for the Open Innovation Africa Summit sort of landed directly in the middle of all this, and while the summit was an amazing experience (I kept worrying that because everyone else was so bloody interesting and creative, I was going to turn out to be the boring one, but I ended up meeting him on the last day so I dodged that bullet) few things wreck a schedule like being inundated with ideas and cool totally-need-to-happen-yesterday type projects*.
So the past two weeks have been us getting that old momentum back up. We’re starting to get things rolling again: Art is flowing in at a rate of knots – boy does it look GOOD (will have some for you later, honest); The god systems are revised and finding their way into the Unity build pretty fast, nearly ready for balance tweaking; Rolled out the last of the systems that’ll make adding late-game content a ton faster – effects plus schneaky C# hax, woo; Building for Mac is now part of the drill, next step iPhone builds; And hopefully we’ve reached the last of what we need to feed the lawyers (I could totally go on about how little IP laws do for people like us and how 90% of the internet really just doesn’t get it when it comes to copyright, but I won’t. Yet).
So yeah, things are on the up. Now we’ve just got to survive this ridiculous time of year, although I must say that Cape Town is looking pretty friggin amazing at the moment. Also, you really do not want to know how much iPhones cost in Africa. Argh!
* – Amazing projects, seriously: There was this guy who invents solar-power solutions and writes off 75% of the cost by selling carbon credits, you should see how much airtime Masai warriors go through! I met a girl that uses traditional storytelling to produce great user testing feedback for apps where rural people would otherwise be too polite to criticise. Then there are all these ideas for educational games across Africa, you have no idea how many cellphones there are out here… Yeah. Things to do, right?
December 17th, 2010 at 9:23 am
IP laws shouldn’t really do anything for people in your position, they don’t need to. people buy good games, they don’t really care about who had the idea first or who got their game out quickest, they care if the game is good.
December 17th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Will you release this for Android?
December 17th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
You’re one of the games of the year for RPS:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/12/17/the-games-of-christmas-%E2%80%9910-day-17-2/
December 17th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Glad to hear you guys are moving forward with positive attitudes. Keep up the good work and focus on making your version the superior one it is.
December 18th, 2010 at 11:57 am
We love RPS so very, very much 🙂
@Blurg: Android release is on the cards yes, that’s part of the reason for redoing everything in Unity.
December 19th, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Thanks for the update guys, sorry to hear about the issues your currently facing and I wish you luck in your current law issue. Please continue the great work, and if your going to get us to pay for DD, will there be alot of customization options for characters?
– P.S. Sorry for pushing you into an update, I didn’t realise how things were for you
December 20th, 2010 at 4:00 am
Dont let it get you down though! I showed my friend your game, and he is a very picky gamer, and he hasent put it down yet, and neither have I! Keep up the great work, and you could sell this game for 100 bucks, and I would buy it ;P (not happily mind you! lol)
December 20th, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Just wanted to drop round to say I found your development copy of DD on various blogs and love it.
I will be buying your full PC release along with the iPhone version, this is a great game. Really accessible and offers long term goals and unlocks, brilliant.
The art work is looking great too
January 4th, 2011 at 8:34 pm
Excellent “little” game – I’m a wee bit late to the party (thanks to the DD addiction), but here’s a review link:
http://fanboydestroy.blogspot.com/2011/01/review-desktop-dungeons.html
Best of luck with the legal stuff. May the cloners fail miserably, wither and choke, I say. Now, If ONLY something like this would pop up on a portable console (not to pressure anyone any further!) that’s not an iOS device or smartphone…
g.