Feudal Kingdoms - Last days before kickstarter
It seems like it was last week where we discussed on when we want to start our kickstarter campaign.
"Yeah, in 2 months seems reasonable. Time enough for everything. So let's head for end of may" we said. Damn... that's like in two weeks and there is still so much to do...
The good, the bad and the ugly
Even if everything fails, at least we have learned a lot. But we won't fail so lets dismiss such thoughts. But something we definetly learned is that game development is not only about shit and giggles.
Of course, we still have a lot of fun doing our work, but as soon as you decide to publish you game to a broader audience things change.
Your game crashes at some point? - A no go!
Your UI seems unintuitive? - A no go!
Some attributes are not calculated exactly? - A no go!
Things that you considered as "not that bad" as a hobbyist, suddenly became show stoppers. At least if you want to provide a smooth game experience (yes, I look at you, random AAA studio!)
But it is actually a good feeling to be able to polish things out ... sort of.
The downside of all this is kind of exhausting "monkey business". Over time we implemented a quite large bunch of buildings and units the player can choose of.
And each building has various attributes like building costs, running costs and production values. And all of this need to be written down.
So we end up writing hundreds of lines of code just to describe all this buldings
Actually, we are over 1000 of such lines now. Drives you mad after a few hours. Not because it's hard, but because after 4 hours of writing you basically don't see any changes in games. Except some numbers. Not really that satisfying.
Last but not least, contracts hit us critically. Not in a bad way luckily.
To be on a save side we set up a contract to define rights and duties for each on of us. After putting everything together we went to a lawyer for a review.
His words: "Yeah, actually pretty good for non-lawyers, but you can't sign something like that.
Leaving us with a list of items we missed in our contract we left and need to rethink some parts.
After all we just want to create a game and let people play it and not fiddling around wirth legal contracts...
But however, things need to be done in order to not end up like the early years of Facebook and other prominent examples of lawsuits.
Finally we also came up with a Road Map for our game providing additional information on how we hope/expect our game to develop in the future.
For now we concentrate our efforts on bug fixes and balancing out game data. Allthough the balancing will be an ongoing process based on the feedback of our beta testers.
In the meantime check out our other social media channels to stay up to date:
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