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[lithander]

I'm lurking around this devlog wanting to make another update but I just can't imagine what's interesting news that's not allready covered elsewhere (e.g. kickstarter updates or facebook page)

I meant this to be a more technical devlog. So... any questions, maybe? AMA

[oldblood]

I'm lurking around this devlog wanting to make another update but I just can't imagine what's interesting news that's not allready covered elsewhere (e.g. kickstarter updates or facebook page)

I meant this to be a more technical devlog. So... any questions, maybe? AMA

Been busy with my own launch so haven't had a chance to read as many devlog as I should but just wanted to chime in and say congrats on the Kickstarter. You guys ran it beautifully. Lots of backers, updates, great average backer size, you guys really knocked it out of the park... I hope you guys consider doing a post-mortem on your campaign reviewing what you feel like worked or didn't work.

[lithander]

I can give a mini post-mortem here.

The one constant in my 10+ years as a game developer is change. Not long ago kickstarter wasn't even around then there was the big hype where running a kickstarter campaign for a game was in itself newsworthy and where you could hope to gather all the required funding from one successfull KS campaign alone. Now with our third KS I can't help but feel that there's a kickstarter fatigue. There are a lot of campaigns and most of them (including ours) are doing a KS as a logical part of the developing process but not to kick start the project into existence but rather get some extra press and some additional funding. It's not that exciting anymore.

And at least for us the press thing didn't work anymore. We got almost zero international press coverage. Press coverage from germany was allright but that's a different thing - we are a german developer doing a game for a book of a german author that was highly successful in germany. But internationally? Nothing.

The formula is this traffic + conversion rate = cash and the conversion rate you can influence by having a well thought out campaign with a good game, a good video and all that stuff. I think we did that quite well (only waiting a bit longer to have a more complete game to show would have helped maybe). And the traffic thing? That you hadn't much to worry about. But this time we worried a lot. Basically we had to drive that traffic ourselves. The solution was to get people to "like" our facebook page and then hope that they turn into backers on kickstarter. We invested in consulting to get a verified FB page in both german and english. (thats not as easy as it sounds) and spend a couple of thousands on advertisement. I'm not sure that with that community on FB (~15k likes) we could have hoped to reach the funding goals.

The conclusion is that you can't expect automatisms to market your game for you. There are so many games in development right now (with the entry barrier being on an alltime low thanks to powerfull free tools like Unity and Steam having opened the floodgates) that most projects don't get coverage. Journalists aren't doing their jobs like they used to. They don't try to get *all* the news covered. They filter. And sometimes that filtering seems arbitrary. Not even paying professionals with press-contacts (the same guys that did the US marketing for withcher afaik) helped us with that.

We had to invest more time and money and effort into turning the KS into a success then ever before. Conclusion: It's still hard to be a successfull game developer!

[Eniimal]

I agree with a lot of things you said in your mini post mortem.

I guess, to keep making games and live from their work, developers will always need to find new ways to promote themselves, to exist.

Maybe Kickstarter will fade and a new thing will replace it.

Marketing and communication are becoming a more and more important part of the work of indie devs.
If Journalists haven't the time to talk about every games, we will have to compensate by working even harder to tell the world that our games exists.

[lithander]

I've been a little lazy with updates but we made a update video today for the kickstarter backers to show off some of the progress that has been made.

[lithander]

By now those who backed >45$ on kickstarter can play a first alpha version of the game on steam. I'm curious what the gathered feedback of the first round of external players is like because, still early in development, we're in the fortunate position of still being able to adress a lot of it. Anyone on this forum who played it yet?

[naezith]

How didn't I come here before, damn I really loved this as a LOTR fan. I will spend my night watching your youtube videos I guess! 

[lithander]

Alpha 1 went well. About ~50 players took the time to post their feedback and overall we're happy with the feedback. Of course there's a lot of stuff we need to work on. And the alpha did a great job to poin that out because after a while of developing a dev loses the ability to judge what "first impression" someone not familiar with the project might have. but the core of things we can't fix. But overall we felt like the players were appreciating the general direction we're heading in and are happy with the production quality. (beyond bugs)

Speaking of production. The cast is nearing completion and the calibration scene is slowly filling up with more and more characters.

[lithander]

One of the most controversial design question in house just got settled. It was wether to include a key that allows players to pause the gameplay so they can plan and give orders without pressure. We've no decided to add that feature. This really changes the feel of the game but it's what players come to expect and it enables tactical decision.

Of course that's not the only thing we did.

Here's an imgur album with up-to-date screenshots:
https://imgur.com/a/5Bqnv

The atmospheric effects like weather or smoke look best in motion, though.

[hyperduck]

Wow that is beautiful I'm a bit out of the loop but did you get freakin BLIND GUARDIAN TO SCORE THE SOUNDTRACK!? One of my childhood favorites, in fact still a favorite, really amazing if so.

Now if you can get the original lineup of Lost Horizon in for the sequel, we'll be golden.

[lithander]

did you get freakin BLIND GUARDIAN TO SCORE THE SOUNDTRACK!? One of my childhood favorites, in fact still a favorite, really amazing if so.

Not the complete score but one song written and performed for the game by Blind Guardian. There's a location in game where you have a wild party (viking-valhalla style) and the song is playing.

My very first Metal CD was from Blind Guardian. (In the late 90s O_o)

[hyperduck]

did you get freakin BLIND GUARDIAN TO SCORE THE SOUNDTRACK!? One of my childhood favorites, in fact still a favorite, really amazing if so.

Not the complete score but one song written and performed for the game by Blind Guardian. There's a location in game where you have a wild party (viking-valhalla style) and the song is playing.

My very first Metal CD was from Blind Guardian. (In the late 90s O_o)

Oops my bad, but STILL holy frak that's awesome. The best music to party to, dwarf or not. That is a fantastic first CD, no matter which one you got. Great, great band.

[Tuba]

This looks good.

HOLY SHIT BLIND GUARDIAN!??!? 

[lithander]

HOLY SHIT BLIND GUARDIAN!??!?  

I can prove it    
 



Basically they are friends with the author of the book.

[lithander]

PAX East begins in 5 Minutes! And a fresh build of The Dwarves is playable on a couple of computers here. So if you're there give it a try! And if you see a long haired guy with a black dwarves shirt - that's me.

[lithander]

Today another batch of character portraits came in from our Concept Artists.



We had "your face in the game" as a Kickstarter Reward but everyone in our team who wanted to could hand in a picture, too. Way cooler then just being mentioned somewhere in the credits if you ask me!

[lithander]

We're about to launch the Beta anyday. And I've just comitted the most balancing-affecting changes of the last 2 months. (Auto-Attacks not contributing to triggering stun and knockdown states) #yolo

[lithander]

The Beta is life on steam!

And that Gameplay Trailer is worth watching! (very action oriented with music from an audio engineer.... inspired.... by playing too much DOOM recently^^ but shows off the game rather nicely)

[lithander]

Beta launch went smooth enough. Trailer seems well-received. Now starting on some hardcore performance optimizations. Been dreading and anticipating that for the last year... using multi-threading in unity feels like you're doing something forbidden. (at least something unsupported and uncommon)

[We Are Bots]

Looks awesome! I can not wait to test it cause I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole. (10 hours version is the best)
Good job!