Hey Kyle!

I've probably mentioned on my blog but I certainly don't belabour it ; but I am in fact holding down a regular day job in addition to being married with a child(they demand time too). 

So yes I have done all this on a part-time or less basis.

I'm super glad to hear this project inspires some nostalgia for classic dungeon crawlers, thank you that's a big compliment!

As you can imagine getting that feeling right is critically important to appeal to the niche of gamers who love this style of game - so hearing people call it out from time to time is a nice affirmation that things are going in the right direction.

I apologize if you've already answered this, is this your full-time project? If not, kudos if you kept a day job while managing to get all of this work done man. Your project definitely makes me feel nostalgic for the classic rpgs so many of us loved playing back in the day. Can't wait to play a demo 

Yeah I also do not have a title on steam - I have iOS and Android apps, and had a game on Wildtangent for 3 years (they finally took it down as sales were getting pretty low).

Interestingly enough on Wildtangent my game was rated I think 4.5 or 4.8 out of 5 stars by something like about 95 people? I was kind of surprised as the game was super simple.  A few people even down voted me for the simplicity but apparently enough people liked it that it did well for a while.

For me though - no matter what the steam tools are - the first step is going in prepared for dealing with EA content for your customers. No developer in todays environment should be surprised to find that players want content even in EA!

hey  io3 creations , thanks for the links much appreciated.

Yeah early access (EA) is a super touchy subject; I've certainly bought in to EA for a few games on steam, and added other EA games to my wishlist and seen them go through massive amounts of drama through the developer not being able to keep up with content demands.. its a  scary topic!

I'm aware of the crowd on steam .. they can be incredibly toxic to a games feedback .. the FPS crowd in particular can be just acidic/toxic/vehement and I can only imagine how to cordon their style of feedback off in a way that is constructive and find the more target audience players (classic RPG gamers in my case) to get appropriate feedback from? 

I'm just one dev and handling that is something that wont be trivial.. its enough to not want to go in to EA honestly.  I'm still considering (and will be for some time) whether I can deliver a content chunk big enough for EA.  I'd like to .. it has appeal ; but I definitely don't want to crash my product just to do it!

Thanks Deab!

Yeah - I'll be completing the project no matter what ; the scope could change due to funding differences and quality of course could as well as hypothetically when paying for artists to produce art it would be higher quality than what I could do myself!

In any case though changing directions a bit to tailor to bringing fans in earlier should have multiple benefits including building a fan base and energizing me from having an audience whos engaged in the game and giving active feedback, etc.  But well see!

Thanks for the comment/feedback!

As you may have heard (probably not because no one reads this anyways) my Kickstarter failed!

I had a particular roadmap planned out to reach video production gameplay goals for the Kickstarter campaign but now that the campaign has failed I have had to re-evaluate what features I need and in what particular order.

Had I been able to fund my project I would have proceeding in particular direction and had considerably more resources available to me.

Now that those resources are off the table the question at hand is given this is a single player RPG can I go to early access? 

I feel that going to early access with part of my single player campaign is a fairly bad move - players will grind through that rather quickly and then be crying out for more content that is going to take a considerable amount of time for me to produce by myself.

Doing that would hypothetically result in an initial good release but would be followed by a lot of negative feedback/reviews from customers who might not be happy with my pace of updates.

User created content can far outstrip my personal ability to produce content ; but without a level editor there will be no user created content!  Given this I felt the best way to proceed forward would be to pivot my focus towards the level editor.

The first step of doing this was to tackle a task I had been putting off which is to "refactor" the level editor into a much more manageable architecture.

I had designed it on a 'as I need' basis and literally thrown functionality in anywhere I could to get things moving for the Kickstarter.

But now I need the Editor code to be solid and easy to work with in the sense of extending it and adding new features, but also in the sense of troubleshooting/debugging any issues that come up.

So I spent approximately the first 30 days after the Kickstarter refactoring all the core level editing functionality to point at the Level Loader class.

The Level Loader of course .. was meant to load saved levels in to the game.  But as you can imagine as you are editing - you are literally loading a level ... on the fly!

Previously I had "on the fly" editing being done in an Editor class, and final "in game" loading only in the Level Loader.

There was also another type of loading which was "inspector based loading" where you get into the individual details of any one grid square and change those details.  This represented a 3rd place code lived to load elements of a level.

So after refactoring all this - all loading is done in the LevelLoader now!

Having achieved this I then added several new features which I demonstrate in this video:

- ability to have an in-game preview window
- ability to toggle to a full screen gameplay mode
- ability to drag & drop monsters in to the game
- ability to toggle a skylight for ease of editing or previewing actual dungeon lighting conditions
- new create level dialogue with configurable elements
- a new player arrow icon - with a emissive texture to make it easy to see regardless of lighting conditions

Other work I did that is not shown:

- refactored the save/store/loading of levels into the local users directory structure ; this ensures users can save their levels to disk where they have permission ; it also gives a default place where I can look for levels to load that the user has created
- added ability to set custom save level names
- added loading dialogue that presents a drop down list of all levels available to load
- fixed quite a few bugs
- refactored the GUI to be more streamlined/minimalistic (more work to do here in the future)

So my next set of goals is to add even more functionality to the level editor; some of these additions should happen pretty quickly because they are just similar to functionality that I've already demonstrated here.  Other items of course are more unique and will require specific work to implement.



Thanks for reading, see you next time!

And.. the Kickstarter has been cancelled.


So I have cancelled the Kickstarter just short of the first week.  Trajectory on Kicktraq made it very clear that I wasn't going to get near enough funding so went ahead and cancelled.

This is the message I posted to the campaign and serves as well here as a dev update:

Hello,

Firstly I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's pledged your support, I truly appreciate your support and the passion and excitement we've seen for the project!

It's been clear for several days now that I was unable to bring the proper marketing and social backing to this project at its onset and we are not going to reach the fundraising goal at this point.

The good news is that we had a 13.6% conversion rate amongst those who did get to see the project. 

For those who don't know what a conversion rate is : basically for each person who visited the project how many decided to back it?

Depending on the kind of product or site you have a conversion rate of 2% is often "good" and 5% is 'great!'.   A conversion rate of 13.6 is outstanding!

So we do have an excellent project that is highly appealing and I strongly feel once I'm able to build the proper social network behind it that we can come back and try this again and succeed.

Once again thank you for your kindness and support of The Rise of Dagon.

wow thanks deab, I appreciate your support!

[BREAKING NEWS:]

BREAKING NEWS:   The Rise of Dagon is now live on Kickstarter, please show your support for this project and pledge today!

After 18 months of preproduction work we've finally brought the project to the place where we feel we are ready to take it to Kickstarter and see if we can build community support to bring it to the next level.

We have a product launch page here.

Also our launch video is available on Youtube for sharing/embedding here.

$400k is NOT a large budget for a AAA game - in fact, it's an incredibly small one! That said, nobody who's donating cares about what the game actually costs. They care about how much they want the game, and they care about how likely a given developer is to deliver; not many people are going to want to risk giving $400k to an unknown developer making his (first?) big game. I read through the topic, because I actually think your game looks really cool. Just a few months ago, you were saying you were ready to give up on this project. That's not what people want to hear when you're asking for half a million dollars! You're welcome to ask for whatever amount you'd like, but I follow Kickstarter games constantly. It's *really* tough to get to the $400k mark right now, especially with the high-profile catastrophic failures we saw last year.

That's weird I do not have any recollection of saying that I wanted to quit - I do recall blogging about fatigue and dealing with slumps.

I think all developers have those and this blog has been written for the indie game dev audience I personally felt being honest that I also experience fatigue and how it makes you question motivations is a very honest approach that fellow indie developers would relate to and share is why I spoke to that in some updates. 

I would categorically call that different than saying "hey I think Im giving up and I'm pausing this project" or some such comment - which I do not feel I've made. If I gave any such impression let me clarify now - it was unintended!

There are a few things I'd change about your trailer, too...the logo itself could be a bit fancier - it doesn't match the polish of the rest of the game. The music just kind of goes along with the trailer...it sounds like it's probably a free piece of music? I'd get something hand-tailored for the actual KS campaign. The last problem is that the trailer ends too abruptly! Give it some build up and cut it off quickly with the logo or something, hahah! You might want to add some flashier magic attacks, too. People love shiny things!

All that aside, I don't want to sound too negative, here. I used to love these kinds of games as a kid, and I think your game is looking pretty awesome. I really hope you get your funding - these kinds of games don't get made often anymore, and I think they should. Because it's such a niche genre nowadays, you might even get much more than we're all estimating, here. Best of luck to you!

Thanks for the feedback.  I've had GIGANTIC problems rendering a good logo. I spent a full week trying to get a really good render in Blender and utterly failed. The end result was a very washed out crappy one that looks much worse than what I have now. 

I fully agree it needs to come up about 4 notches in quality before its production ready.  And its certainly not from lack of effort on my part .. its just another set of challenges to deal with before release.

I didn't feel it was so bad to block the actual Kickstarter campaign however... do you feel that the logo would be a detractor at this point? Or cause people to not click through based on its current production quality?

From a market perspective, most game projects are in the range that @gmicek mentioned (tens of thousands).   So when people look at your project and see that the amount is a lot higher than most, there'll be considering it more carefully.

I think this is probably the most cogent take away that I need and needs more work and reflection on the page ; if people's assessment is a risk based assessment based on my track record then I have more footwork to prove that I'm worth the investment.

Thanks for phrasing it that way - helps see it through a different perspective!

Hey there!  Game looks great!  I'm not a dev, but cover a ton of Kickstarter campaigns so figured I'd chime in.

Great thanks for all the feedback, and sorry for the delay in my response!

- I like video cover image.  I love that the video shows a ton of gameplay footage.  However, the aspect ratio is kind of jarring, what with the black box around it and all.  Particularly noticeable once it goes to a different aspect ratio once you start talking.  The game looks great, but the video quality is a bit blurry and grainy.  This is also much more pronounced when compared to the quality of the video of you talking.

I had major video production problems. I had hoped to use a program on my PC called OpenShot but it ended up having a bug where I could not  save!  So I tried Microsoft Moviemaker and that was fairly pathetic and couldn't cover tracking the audio with the video so immediately dropped out.

After that I scrambled to find other solutions that I could afford - and as it turns out my 5 year old Mac Mini I could purchase the most recent iMovie and that worked out.

What DID'NT work out is iMovie no longer supports 4:3 ratio ; however the Kickstarter help pages claim that your video will be forced in to a 4:3 resolution when you upload it.

As such I recorded all my video of gameplay in 4:3 and then by the time I realized my production app wouldn't support 4:3 I was stuck in a crappy letterbox. 


Long story short : Your absolutely right that sucks!

- The video content showing the game was great.  The only other thing I would have liked to see would be something on character creation, and also any sort of boss monsters you might have.  The talking portion really lost me though.  You're a nice guy, I'm sure, but talking to the camera for that long lost me.  One thing I might suggest it either cutting out the talking portion completely and having that be a separate video on the page, or chop the talking portion to a minute or less and show gameplay or artwork while you're talking in cuts.

Thanks for the honest feedback. Several people have noted the talking portion was either boring or just no where near as motivating as the gameplay video. ALong with the cut from 4:3 being jarring I have now edit the video and removed the speaking portion altogether.

- I'd encourage you to add more animated gifs.  The lighting and the monster movement in the game are great, so let gifs show them off.

I spent the evening last night also editing the video to be shorter based on audience feedback as well. So I'll try to get more animated gif's up but it'll be in the next day or 3.

- Your intro line "A classic single player dungeon crawl Computer RPG in the vein of Eye of the Beholder and the Legend of Grimrock." draws me in because I'm a huge fan of those games.  Not sure why "Computer" is capitalized, or even there (guess it's there for SEO?)

Because  "CRPG" is a very well recognized genre and at first I put CRPG but then I realized millennials may not all have heard that term - so I decided to break it apart a bit and left the capitalization. Unclear now if thats a good thing or not

- The budget breakdown is good, but the funading goal seems extremely high.  I understand things cost what they cost, but without being a big name this project seems closer to $50,000 - $80,000.  Maybe $100,000 - $120,000 if much more of the game were to be shown.  Again, not trying to insult you or pretend to know what things cost, it's just that when people look at a campaign they have an idea of what it should cost; even if that feeling is based on ignorance.

So quite a few people have mentioned this - but your probably the most non-attack oriented person to do so ; therefore I'd like to discuss this a bit.

Firstly I got quotes from sound engineers, artists, asset stores, print shops, DVD authoring services and so on.  The number I came up with is a real number for the game I want to produce. Its not a pie-in-the-sky wish for a random number that I'd like to have.

Secondly producing video games is in fact expensive.  I don't know what people expect me to do - put myself down to $4.25 an hour,divorce my wife, put my child in an orphanage, move in with my dad in a trailer park in south carolina and make them a game as cheap as I possibly can?

I get paid $88k a year right now at my day job - and like most people in the world I have bills, a mortgage, car payment, credit cards, internet service bill etc.  I can't take $4.25 an hour as my wage to produce the game.

So then you have two things that can be done:

A) I can build a campaign that is the bare minimum to only buy from others what I need such as paid art and sounds but continue the way  have been doing and putting in about 1 hour a night on weeknights and about 8 hours on a weekend and the game will be finished in about 5 years completely pissing off any backers  OR

B) I can ask for what I need to seriously set aside time without completely destroying my life and producing the game at a level that I think will maybe not be AAA but at the very high production value that I'm aiming for. I can ask for the amount that will let me quit my dayjob and spend 10 hours a day here at home working on this game and deliver it in somewhere between 1-2 years.

In reality 400k is *not* a lot of money to produce a game. I'm completely flabbergasted that people think this is a huge amount. The only reason I can think that is the general public's consensus is that they have no idea what it takes to pay a software engineer nevermind producer, artists, sound engineers, level designers, and all the reward product.

If people respond and like the game - I want to produce it right and comfortably both financially and timewise. 

If they don't - then honestly Id rather not have 10,000+ backers crawling up my hind end asking me why the games taking so long and I'm busting my butt 10 hours a day at work come home and take care of my family, eat dinner, play with my son for 30 minutes and then get 1 hour of programming before bed.

Some of my "expensiveness" probably also comes from the fact that I'm a one man team right now and I'm going to have to pay for just about everything. I made sincere efforts at recruiting people but honestly there's a gigantic amount of competition to get people in on projects and no one wants to work for equity anymore. It's incredibly hard to create a team and after spending 6 weeks focusing on it and NOT making much progress on my project I moved forward hoping crowd funding would put some money in my hands - because that is what people respond to not equity deals.

So yeah .. thats my number. I do appreciate the feedback but either I do this realisticly or I don't want the stress and deadlines that come with a crowd expecting a product.

- I'd encourage you to have one or two early bird reward tiers.  A $15 one for a copy of the game, for example.

I've seen a lot of contrary advice especially some noting it pisses people off. Instead I am going with advice that someone gave on a kickstarter site (can find the link if needed) that recommended making an 'irresistible $1 offer' as a sales technique. As you may know the hardest part of any transactoin is getting someone to say yes to any part of it. But once they become engaged they are much much more likely to make a purchase.  My $1 beta access of the first level is designed to get a lot of people to come in at $1 who will then go "you know, 20 bucks is nothing I just want the full game" and then upgrade.

- Do backers at the $5,000 not get to be in the game?

I've removed that level based on other feedback.  I don't have the resources to jerk rich people off in the bahamas and they can buy their own vacation packages (sorry - real feedback given to me by others) so I'm dropping that in favor of focusing on gamer centric packages that are lower priced.

- I'm not convinced that increasing the volume of prizes per tier is the best way to get people to back at higher levels.  For example.  The difference between the $25 and $35 tiers is an extra copy of the game.  Given that it's not multiplayer I don't feel a desire to get an extra copy.

I appreciate that however I had feedback otherwise as well. Quite a few people like to get a game and give one to their son, daughter, spouse, buddy at work etc. Or get a steam key and give it as a gift to someone at christmas. There's lots of value in a discounted second copy and giving out digital keys has no cost to me after the primary production is complete.

- What's a Level 1 Beta?  Is there a Level 2 Beta I can get?  Is there an alpha that you can offer?  Alphas are usually offered in the $75 tier range btw.

I could do a better job on this you are correct.  Its just a beta build that only has the first level in it. I'll clarify that in the campaign thanks!

- I'm confused by the $5,000 aspect of the $25 tier.  I understand that you're seeing that as your money spot for backers, but it's a stretch goal with a different (more confusing) name.  I like it in theory, but has the potential to be confusing and could easily get out of control if you get a ton of people on the tier.

Essentially its a way for people to give $5 extra if they feel they want to be community contributors/designer feedback and vote on the new classes I'll be adding to the game.

Kind of funny but I showed a dozen people in person the campaign and they  immediately got this without any prompting from me - I'll watch out if anyone else calls out the confusion and if so make further clarifications on the page. I appreciate calling it out!


Okay that's all I have time for, off to work again.

Thanks again!

Hi io creations,

Thanks for the feedback post as well, yes that helps very good feedback!

As noted previously I'm at work so I can't make detailed responses at the moment but I'm definitely reading and appreciate the time and effort to provide the feedback!

Thanks!

Hey Greg!

Thanks for the detailed and great feedback - I've read it all but can't respond in length as I'm at work right now. I agree with many of your points but wanted to engage in conversation about a few items which I'll have to do later this evening.

But I did want to say thank you for taking the time to write this up, much appreciated!

Hello fellow game devs!

Over the years I've read a lot of good feedback for Kickstarter campaigns, and I've provided some feedback for a few as well.

After 4 years as an indie I've finally brought a game to the point where I'm ready to Kickstart and I need your help!

I was hoping you would take a look at it for me and provide any feedback you can.

The Rise of Dagon Kickstarter Preview Page here

The areas that I'm curious about specifically are:

* your video reaction?
* did you find the video boring or were you tempted to stop watching (too long etc)
* anything you find poorly done on the page?
* anything confusing?
* is there any questions you have after reading it all that are unanswered?
* anything about the campaign you think that could be better designed
* what did you like least about it all?
* what did you like best about it all?

I'm hoping to launch this on or about March 1st so I really appreciate your feedback , its a gigantic big deal for me and I've been working on this for almost two years

Thanks for taking the time to check it out, I'm eager to get your feedback!

I'll monitor this throughout the day - although I will be working so responses may be sporadic. 

Hey deab,

Yep you called it.. point lights only!  Hypothetically I could use some emissive textures and spotlights (and probably will) but right now its all point lights

I have done some animations on the point lights to make them "glow" and "flicker" so they are feeling pretty nice at this point.

I've recently tried upgrading my project, The Rise of Dagon, to Unity 5.4 beta 3 and it was such a disaster I lost a complete day of productivity and I had to revert my backups and go back to Unity 5.3.

The biggest problem was Substance support seemed to have gone completely out the window with the normal maps of substances not compiling at all and the metal/specular side of things gone completely through the roof so everything looked 100% shiny/metallic and therefore almost black with shiny reflectivity.

Despite that I did want to see what screenspace reflections might do for my project so I went ahead and gave this another upgrade try this weekend and things went a little bit better.

Substances still do not upgrade correctly - although the normal maps are compiling.  I had to bake the substance texture out and create my own material for the material to work in the game.

While I have not had a chance to really play with screenspace reflection feature yet I did notice some really dramatic (and good) differences in the lighting and shadowing that's going on.(Check out my comparison screenshot at the top.)


The Rise of dagon  uses almost completely real time lighting because the level is built at run time and therefore can not be baked. The reason for this is to eventually permit my players to have a level editor and built their own levels while in game - so they do not have to download Unity and build a level out and bake the lighting themselves.


For some reason in 5.3 real time lighting has consistently had problems with drawing good shadows, and spotty results in lighting where things would get washed out .. almost blurry.

In 5.4 beta things are looking really sharp and good - almost exactly the way I would like them to so fortunately this time it was worth the work of upgrading to the beta.

This is particularly fortuitous for me because I'm hoping to start working on my kickstarter video in the next week or so and having really shoddy lighting and shadows was going to be a complete nightmare from my perspective.

I had really hoped the lighting in Unity 5 would be a slam dunk out of the gates but it's been a real roller coaster ride, trying to get some level of consistency  and it seems each .x release has made significant changes - but never really 'getting it right'.  Many of those changes really seemed focused on the GI baked problems - particularly trying to bake lighting can take an exorbitant amount of time!

I had considered a hybrid approach where I would build my levels one way with baked lighting, and permit my customers to build it at runtime and use only realtime lighting but I realized this approach would cause me to let the realtime side of things slide out of sight while I focused on the baked approach.  The fact that baked lighting has been almost impossible to work with made that decision much easier though.

At this point I truly fear Unity won't get lighting 'right' until the 6.x cycle - I'm hoping I can get my game on some build like this 5.4 where it gets it close enough to the look and feel I need and then lock in and finish the game up.

So my first post of the year comes rather late ; but I have lots of great things that have been going on!

Firstly I have been integrating a new dungeon set into the game!  I purchased this level set and I was very surprised to find something of this quality level that suited my game so well!

Here we have an example of the new level set with the Servant of Dagon meeting his end by the Cemetery Gates spell:



As you see it looks just brilliant! The materials are well done and high resolution and as you see the lighting and shadows from the spell really show off nicely against the rich texture set.

Furthermore I've been spending quite a bit of time polishing the lighting in many different respects.

One thing I've been working on is getting the right mix of dark and light in the dungeon.  This shot shows off something close to what I want when the player has no light :



As you see the dark is truly rich and foreboding ; the player has very little ability to see outside of the given light sources and would create a good level of suspense forcing the player to stick to the lit areas in fear of what lies in the dark!

What you can't see in these stills is the work I've been doing on the lights to make them softly glow and pulse to simulate an actual fire. Each light source has 2-3 point lights that are colored and animated different giving different yellow/orange highlights and pulse/flicker at different rates as well as cast shadows that move.

All together its looking really good !  There is some difficulty of maintaining perfect lighting when swapping level sets though ; supposedly PBR materials are supposed to help solve this problem but at this time I still find it tough with my 2 level sets to get a lighting level that makes them both look absolutely perfect..

It's a tough decision that I'm putting off right now but I could hypothetically create some "per level" kind of lighting variables that get updated when you load between level sets.  This would allow me to really nail the lighting levels of course but I'm being stubborn and working with the materials and the light settings themselves right now to try and achieve that rather than resorting to this shortcut.

While there are still many other items to show off  I'm going to swap gears and discuss what's really been keeping my head down for the last month or so and that is I've been working very hard on composing my Kickstarter.

I've run into enough surprises and challenges while working on it I'm considering writing a few blog entries on those challenges.

Some areas of interest that I think might be interesting is Taxes (yeah ugly topic but very important!), Rewards & Fulfillment (slightly more exciting but risky and complex), and the Fine Art of Estimating Your Project Goal.

The actual project goal has been incredibly enlightening to me - I really always thought it was just a matter of filling in blanks on a spreadsheet but I've now done 5 different sets of spreadsheet calculations based off of different assumptions and come up with different numbers.  Each set of assumptions could be totally legitimate or completely wrong!

Anyways.. I'm unclear on who reads the posts or what interest level there would be on these kickstarter articles ; I know a lot of people see the word Kickstarter and close the page right away so please leave a note or drop me a line if your interested in such material!

[Indie]

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/10/30/indiecade-co-chair-john-sharp-steps-down-says-the-conference-doesnt-really-help-indie-devs/

This is an interesting and refreshingly honest take. What do you guys think? Personally, I've always been a little puzzled by the gamedev / conference ouroborous.

Yeah I also am confused by very especially the Indie GameDev / Conference Ourobourous myself!

Most indie's don't have enough money to do these things; and what money they do have they could be better spent on production quality of their game.

To spend thousands on a conference that is unlikely to change the overall reception of their game seems foolhardy at best and at worst career ending. I wonder how many people have completely busted their budget and failed after over-extending to go to a conference/expo?

I certainly won't do it until my game is already making buckets of money and I feel the investment will likely result it a lot of media attention and further my sales/bottom line. At the current rate this means never :-) But still I'm just saying ..

QuestFlow with new XML support has been pushed to the repo

https://bitbucket.org/erebusman/questflow-1/overview

Enjoy!

Only one time in your life will it seem like a good idea to make a gratuitously for-shock-value-only novelty game: don't half-ass it. Give it your all!

This.