Monthly Archives: November 2015

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 !

You can find the SDK here : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/discussions/2/492378806378228784/ .

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 : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/discussions/0/490123727974362306/ .

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 !

Pally vs Skeleton (thanks to Agent Cooper for this nice screenshot!)

Alright, it’s getting better !

I still worked a lot last week, but less frenetically (at least since last weekly update) and got some well deserved sleep, but probably still not enough rest, because I spent a lot of time watching Let’s Play videos on Youtube.

These videos shown me that a lot of players don’t want to spend 2 minutes to read in detail the description of their abilities, and thus just smash the buttons without much idea of how to organize their fight. Game is forgiving at start, but the difficulty quickly raises up so I wonder if they’ll make it to the level 5 or not.

Except that, Dungeon Guardians should arrive soon on the Humble Store (but still through Steam Keys), and I contacted GOG but still haven’t got any answer from them.

So next step is to put the game on the Mac AppStore, but before that, I’d like to add the Modding support to allow adding custom portraits.

And even before that, I have to create my own text input field for the Linux version, because my attempts at bypassing the Unity3D bug seem to have failed…

Cya next week for more news !

Hungry Bone Dragon!

Pffffffff (again), I finished the Rogue and I’m glad I did because I’m near implosion !

The week has been ok without too much bumps (except in my neighbourhood, but that’s another story, hum, stories actually, which include birds, dogs, bugs & dead mouse amongst other annoying things), so I managed to do the 2 final specializations of the game : the Duelist, a Rogue tank spec, and the Ranger, the only spec able to use bows & crossbows in the game.

For the Ranger, I cheated a bit…   I didn’t do anything too special for him (except the bow/crossbow) so he’s kind of a patchwork between several other specs. But except if you do plenty of runs with many different parties, you will likely never notice that…

Anyway, the game is now fully done ! It just needs to be proofread by an English native speaker, as well as to get the French translation (I’ll get to it ) and the German translation, and then I’ll need to build all the different versions correctly (Windows / OSX / Linux) and it’ll be all set to be released for next Friday on Steam, yippee  !

Cya soon for more news !