next »

[Greipur]

Christoffer decided to experiment with animation on the follower's housing to give it some life, so now we have small animated blacksmiths, which we will implement soon. The brown pumping things are an African precolonial form of bellows.

[JobLeonard]

Cool. Bring that game to life!

[oldblood]

I agree. It's the small visual things like this that really add up and bring the game to life.

I spent some time and watched some Let's Play videos I found on YouTube for the game and definitely have a better feel for what you're trying to accomplish with this game. Some cool ideas and features. Will definitely be buying thist... Hopefully you hit some of those other goals you're aiming for.

[Greipur]

Thanks, JobLeonard and oldblood!

I'm thinking that it would be nice to have small domesticated animals running around in the cities as well. I always liked when you saw poultry running around the hovels in Stronghold 1. In this game Helmeted Guineafowl would probably be a good idea since it's an indigenous species for the African continent.

[JobLeonard]

Yes!

[Greipur]

We decided to redesign the main building in the city to give a bigger sense of progression. So a new city would have tier one and as the city grows we will increase its size. Right now we're using the fourth one to iterate further on. I asked Christoffer to make it less fortified and more smooth and organic.

[JobLeonard]

Some of those look straight out of Africa. I like the round shapes of 8

[Greipur]

Some of those look straight out of Africa. I like the round shapes of 8

I'm glad we give that impression. For the architecture in Crest we mainly take inspiration from the Dogon culture. One famous example that isn't traditional Dogon but still the same style (and also in Mali) is the Great Mosque in Djenne, which is a fascinating building mostly built with clay and wood. There's also some inspiration from the buildings from Mesopotamia (Ziggurats) and Ancient Egypt (smaller buildings in general), among other things.
















We have just released the art book and soundtrack on Steam as dlc as a way to support our Early Access effor. It's aimed at people who are already "invested" in the Early Access and want us to grow. This is the first time we release DLC on Steam and I didn't realise that they counted for individual releases on the store page, and will be seen as "Newly Released". So in a way it's free visibility. If we didn't already promise these "support packages" for some time for our fans we might've parsed them out to give us more visibility at different intervals. Oh well, a lesson for next time.

[oldblood]

Great DLC ideas. In addition to the front page "re-exposure", its a great opportunity to leverage some of those front-page pushes you get from Valve for additional exposure. Perhaps waiting till after you've fallen off the new releases to post an update on Steam that leverages the front-page push to create a 1-2 punch of marketing...

I've seen some devs have mild success creating a special "Dev Supporter/Collectors Edition" of the game that includes all the DLC like soundtrack, wallpapers, artbook, special item in-game etc. plus a few extra dollars padded-in to help keep the developer afloat. Not geared for the mass-market but for the consumers who want to go above & beyond to support the developer...

[Greipur]

Great DLC ideas. In addition to the front page "re-exposure", its a great opportunity to leverage some of those front-page pushes you get from Valve for additional exposure. Perhaps waiting till after you've fallen off the new releases to post an update on Steam that leverages the front-page push to create a 1-2 punch of marketing...

Thanks. Though, DLC are not counted as totally separate products in all matters, at least not when it comes to visibility. The pushes we have comes from the main product (the game), those that are left have been saved for our module updates during the autumn.

I've seen some devs have mild success creating a special "Dev Supporter/Collectors Edition" of the game that includes all the DLC like soundtrack, wallpapers, artbook, special item in-game etc. plus a few extra dollars padded-in to help keep the developer afloat. Not geared for the mass-market but for the consumers who want to go above & beyond to support the developer...

Do you have any good examples?

[ryansumo]

You've definitely got my attention with the what the game is going for.  Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!

I'm curious as to whether you are all working on this full time, or if you're doing it on the side? 

[Greipur]

You've definitely got my attention with the what the game is going for.  Looking forward to seeing how it evolves!

I'm curious as to whether you are all working on this full time, or if you're doing it on the side?  

Thanks Ryan! Regarding work, yes, we've been working full time on the game since September, 2014 (so almost the whole period this devlog has been up). Though, we spent a year before that without any pay. Feel free to look at this infrographic I posted earlier.

We are of course not highly successful yet, which is understandable. So we've decided that we need to sell more in order to justify continued development of the game during the autumn. As it looks like right now it seems we'll manage a few months further, what we and our PR agency hope for is that we will increase exposure and sales exponentially, which seems to be the case. The last concerted PR push in July garnered about half of our total sales. And I'm not talking about day to day, but that each PR push we do reap a bigger and bigger reward. I guess the sales chart below is kind of telling.

I realise that my answer goes well beyond your question, but I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about some of the economical aspects.  

[oldblood]

Do you have any good examples?

First one that comes to my head is "Battle Brothers" (they have a devlog on here as well). They have a "Supporter Edition" thats $39.99 vs. the $19.99 regular. Not sure of the sales numbers behind it, but thought it was an interesting idea to directly call out supporting the developer with a more expensive edition... You don't need a lot of sales but gives people who want to help more- the option of spending extra. Only really suitable to Early Access I suppose-- but an interesting idea.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/365360/

[ryansumo]

Hey Martin no need to apologize for the detailed reply!  Actually part of why I'm asking is because my friends and I are also working on a game and looking at Early Access next year to be able to work on it full time.  So I really appreciate how open you've been with your information.

With regards to expanding sales one thing you might do is have a steam store widget on your devblog? For example another early access game called curious expedition basically Has the widget feigned near the top of their blog. Whereas with your blog (eatcreatesleep.net, not the tigsource blog) it would take me some time to figure out if it was even on early access. Although based on how many hits your devblog makes it may not make a huge difference.

In any case, good luck with the game!

[Greipur]

"Battle Brothers"

Ah yes, that's a good example. Thanks!

Hey Martin no need to apologize for the detailed reply!  Actually part of why I'm asking is because my friends and I are also working on a game and looking at Early Access next year to be able to work on it full time.  So I really appreciate how open you've been with your information.

I understand, I guess it's another project than Party Animals, or? My number one recommendation would be to look at Early Access as a sleeper hit deal, if you haven't been super succesful on Kickstarter before the EA launch (Armello, Darkest Dungeon etc.) I think you need to be aware that you're going to be an obscure ugly duckling for quite awhile. I'm not saying that it holds true for everyone, but that it's our own reality at least. I simply mean that you can't count on stable sales the first months if you don't hit big the first few weeks, which in my opinion is a fickle thing.

Regarding the website, yes, it could need a major overhaul, though as you've already touched upon our traffic is minimal right now. We will adress it, it's just a matter of when. Those pesky priorities...









Here's a more pedagogical gif of our new pathfinding system that uses Johannes own variant of HPA* (Near-Optimal Hierarchical Pathfinding). In general terms an entity wants to navigate to regions before it decideds exactly where it will go in a particular region, which reduces the lag spikes we've experienced considerably. Hopefully we will implement this in the next build.

[JobLeonard]

Nice

[Greipur]

Here's our new association feature in effect in our current internal build. When people do things they will associate the triggering word with other words. So for example in the screenshot below people have associated food with deserts, since they've gotten food from the desert. As such they reinterpret what you say and might eventually rewrite it (it depends on if they have enough "votes" in the community to change it).










This can eventually lead to very interesting reinterpretations. I usually joke about how many associations they'd need to eventually turn cannibalistic.

[JobLeonard]

This. This I like.

Is there going to be some kind of log feature? Like a scroll or cave paintings in an endless cave perhaps? 

[Greipur]

This. This I like.

Is there going to be some kind of log feature? Like a scroll or cave paintings in an endless cave perhaps?  

That I like.

Yes, there's been many odd ideas flung around "over the years", the one that has stuck is ancestor worship, which is our planned stretch goal module for December, 2015. So basically you would have ancestors acting as a go between the people and god. They would act as advisors and chroniclers. They would record major events and all of your commandments, which could help building up an abstract narrative (akin to Boatmurdered, but procedural) and help the player with understanding the causality long term.

[Pitxardo]

Subscribed to the thread.

This looks amazing! I love god games!