Xianxia isn't the same as western fantasy. Cultivation isn't just another version of magic, it's an entirely different concept. It might be a good cultivator simulator, but it's nowhere close to a mage simulator.
Coming Soon in Update #1: Townsfolk
Hey everyone!
We are close to the release of our first major update since we launched to Early Access at the end of April. We're excited to share details on what to expect in the update!
Before we dive into features, lets talk a little about our goals.
NPCs in games are too unrealistic...
NPCs in a lot of games, including Archmage Rises, feel flat and it breaks immersion. Real people have goals, responsibilities, habits, emotions, reactions, likes, dislikes, opinions, etc, all of which are contextually aware of their surroundings.
Our goal in this first major update is to lay a foundation in creating NPCs that are each unique, individual, and special in their own ways. You can connect and interact with the NPCs in a way that builds a unique emotional attachment to each NPC that matters as you share in their successes, joys, failures, and losses, driving your own behaviour as you impact each of their lives.
New in Update 1: Townsfolk
NPC Schedules
The first major change coming to Update 1: Townsfolk is that NPCs are no longer static. In games we often see NPCs in the same places doing the same things.
After the update, NPCs in Archmage Rises will have their own schedules. They have places to go and things to do based on their own personal goals and responsibilities! They might have a job to get to, maybe run out to the market to do a little shopping during their lunch break, stop by the armorer to say a quick hi to their friend, return to work. After work, you might find them hanging out and having a bite at the inn.
We aren't just talking about daily or weekly static scripted schedules either. The tech allows each NPC schedule to change based on season, economy, town events & festivals. They can take trips out of town, flee from a town attack, etc.
At first the schedules will be coarse and general, but over time as we get more familiar with it and our tooling gets better, get more specific and detailed.
NPCs have Strong Feelings
In this update, NPCs will have likes and dislikes about each other based on traits. This will later affect how you might relate to NPCs or how you make your decisions in interacting with them.
NPCs Can Express Emotions
I didn't think it would be practical to get emotions into our procedurally generated portraits, but Rubi found a way! So now NPCs can express their emotions visually. If you are talking about something they like, their portrait can now express happiness. Conversely, if you anger them or talk about something they feel negatively toward, you'll see that on their face.
Deeper Conversations & Interactions
Up to this point, conversing with NPCs in Archmage Rises has been pretty limited. In this new update, NPCs will be a lot more knowledgeable about things and the world. We like the idea of learning about the world through people.
As you dialogue with NPCs you will learn 'subjects of interest' (keywords like people, places, events, etc). You will be able to ask about people, places, resources, services, and historical events. They will happily share what they know, give their opinions, or direct you to someone who will know.
Job Skills & Job Quests
This update introduces a new feature for NPC's:
job skill
. Each NPC will have a "job skill" stat which determines how good an NPC is at their profession. The higher the NPC's job skill, the better options they can offer (better quality rooms at an inn, better/more food and drink options, better weapons, etc), along with opening up new quest options.
While we've had some form of job specific quests in the starter town before, this update will also include a deeper layer when it comes to our questing system. There are 2 main types of job quests:
1. General Job Quests
- These are job specific story quests, like an inn keeper or outfitter. The main purpose of these quests are to build relationship with NPCs by doing favors for them.
2. Job Skill Quests
- These are more involved quests with the goal of improving an NPC's job skill. An NPC's job skill will increase incrementally over time, but completing Job Skill Quests will help boost their job skill significantly to the next tier.
By building relationship and completing job skill quests, NPCs will in return give favor and gifts back to the player according to their relationship (for instance: a permanent discount for his friend, the player).
An NPC with a higher tier job skill has better offerings of goods and services. An innkeeper has better food, drink, and entertainment options. A weaponsmith crafts better equipment.
We think the perks, favors, and gifts NPCs provide will give greater dimension to relationships and help you feel more connected to the world.
Revised Relationship Levels
With all of these new changes to relationships with NPCs, we've also revised the relationship scoring system to better balance how relationship tiers are obtained and affect the other systems in this update.
Enhanced Economy
With all of the new job skill quests and relationship perks coming in this update, we've made some extra enhancements to towns and economies. Now each town is generated with a theme, just like real towns. You might find a mining town which bases it's economy on the available natural resources surrounding the town and might be rich in metals and metal working, versus a brewing town that makes most of it's income based on alcohol production. Goods can travel between towns, so those near a brewing town will be stocked up with varieties of alcohol produced by the brewing town, etc.
Towns can also vary greatly in their wealth levels. Some towns are rich with resources, materials and goods to sell, while others struggle to make ends meet and have little to offer in terms of goods and services. But those towns can also benefit from a little help from their friendly neighborhood mage who might be willing to invest time and resources to help boost their economy.
Those are the major changes coming in the Townsfolk update, which will be launching on June 28th!
We'd love to hear your thoughts and what features you are most excited about!
No problem, I'm both baffled and fascinated by this project. Having such a scatter-brained developer making it is almost a crime against game-dev itself, but on the other hand I was dreaming of game such as this for years, so there's nothing else. Eventually delivering on only half the promises would make for a decent game, so I remain hopeful.
This week's plan in Archmage Rises (Jun 19 '23)
I'm on a plane flying to the US west coast for a game dev conference for the next couple of days. It will be good to see other game devs and studio heads in person again. I won't be on Steam much this week.
The team is wholly focused on delivering the awesome we promised in last week's announcement: Update #1 Townsfolk.
Archmage Rises Announcement 14 Jun
Coming Soon in Update #1: Townsfolk
Hey everyone! We are close to the release of our first major update since we launched to Early Access at the end of April. We're excited to share details on what to expect in the update!
Our goal is to have all the systems working, internally, late this week so we can test, polish, and ensure it has content for next week. It's tight, but when isn't game dev? This plan is superior to what we've done in the past where we finish a feature and ship it pretty much next or same day!
Thanks for your time, attention, and for playing! If you enjoy Archmage Rises and haven't yet left a review, please do so. It really helps us.
- Mark continues to lead the game design, finishing up NPC job skills and how that benefits the player. He's also working on the combat rewrite, but the NPCs take priority.
- Jessi finished up the UI for the new Subject Question interface and is now working on the new relationship screen.
- Rubi is also travelling this week, but she finished up all the emotions for the portraits in the game before leaving. When she returns later this week she'll continue making new portraits.
- Josh finished the emotion reactions and will now make the programming changes to the relationship screen. He is also working on adding new items to the game for Weaponsmiths, Armorsmiths, and healers based on Mark's designs.
- Zach finished the Job Quest system and is working on implementing the Question Interface answer code. We came up with a data model that should work.
- Nolan has finished job levelling quests for 2 of the 4 professions we will launch with next week. Sadly a tool issue caused him to lose a quest. We're still trying to figure out what happened there.
- James is working on the audio experience for the NPC responses. He's taking a page out of Zelda Tears and we're going to use Interjections. He's already made up an internal demo and it works well!
- Besides keeping the team marching forward in the same direction, I updated some of our quest tools and combat design tools.
- D2 is working on the dungeon issues that have been plaguing us. It's like lairs are being double generated or something. He feels close to a fix.
- Phil is doing double duty this week making sure the internal milestone for NPCs gets hit as well as getting a patch out on Thu Jun 22 to solve our dungeon issues.
- Jonathan is working on the NPC timeline movement. He's already got it working, he's just trying to make it faster and more reliable.
- Michel and Tyler continue work on the combat rewrite. We're trying to keep them focused on it, but they will be jumping in to assist on NPCs to keep it on track.
- Jeff is off this week, attending the conference.
I disagree, its magic by another name.
Update #1: Townsfolk Part 1 Now Released!
Hello fellow adventurers!
Our first major content update is now available. We worked hard to bring the people of Vaelun to life for your enjoyment! Please see note below about previous game worlds and save files.
New
- Relationship Perks
- Building relationships with NPCs offers new relationship perks as you increase your friendship level with them, giving you perks such as discounts on goods and services, etc. This is a significant system we can expand on going forward.- NPC Job Skills
- Now several of the vendors have a new job skill stat that indicates how good they are at their craft. As their job skill increases, the quality of their goods and services will increase as well. This is a big system and lays a foundation we can build further from. For now it is implemented for Innkeeper, Outfitter, Weaponsmith, and Armorer. This is why we call this "Part 1".- Job Skill Quests
- New job skill quests are now available that will significantly boost an NPC's job skill, allowing them to level up.- Ask NPCs Questions
- NPCs know a lot more about their world. You can ask questions about specific subjects such as people, places, resources, services, etc. They give more in depth responses such as what they know about the subject, how they feel about people, where to find things, how long to reach certain destinations, how safe it is, etc.- Known vs Unknown NPCs
- When encountering NPCs in buildings, known NPCs will have fully visible portraits, while unknown NPCs will show up as silhouettes.- Gifts
- NPCs who have become your friends may now possibly send you gifts via letter- New NPC Portraits, with Emotions
- We updated all of our NPC portraits with high quality art, adding the range of emotions for reaction to what you say and do- NPC Schedules
- NPCs are now no longer static in their workplaces. They can move around throughout the day off hours, grabbing something to eat or hang out at the inn, study at the conclave, run errands around town, etc.- New NPC Trait System
- NPCs have traits and opinions of those traits in others. This creates consistent reactions between NPCs. This is just the tip of the iceberg, we can do much more with this.- Improved quest system - we had a technical constraint where a quest chain could only track killing something OR collecting something. Now we can do both, allowing for more interesting quests.
- 15+ New Quests
- enhanced with emotional responses and additional trackers- Revised Relationship Screen - Hey, it actually works! It is cleaner and shows more valuable data: people's jobs, hometown. It also provides filtering options - current town, friends, enemies - and sorting alphabetical or by relationship score high/low
- New World Creation Screen
- updated to the new UI look and feel. You will see several new tabs and settings (disabled for now) allowing us to add more options later- Revised Relationship Tiers
- It is easier than ever to make friends in Vaelun. The new values are:
Casual Friend 75
Good Friend 225
Close Friend 450
Best Friend 900- Time Stands Still In Conversation
- Time no longer passes during conversation. You're welcome.
- Town Economic Themes
- Towns and their economies are now categorized into themes based on their geographic locations and the available surrounding resources, which also affects trade with nearby towns.- New Items
- like enchanted pickaxes, armor padding, weapon wraps, and fluffy towels.- Custom NPC portraits
- customize a person's portrait by right clicking the portrait and selecting a local image from the "%appdata%\LocalLow\Defiance Game Studio\ArchmageRises\CustomPortraits" folder.
World and Save Game Incompatibility
To make all the new stuff above, we had to significantly change the file format for NPCs. Sorry, there was no way to migrate data across. We try very hard to maintain file compatibility within minor versions but will likely change it significantly across major versions.
A prompt will appear when you start the game asking to delete your incompatible files for you.
Known issues
- Some of the pricing is wacky. Will hotfix it tomorrow, didn't want to hold up the whole release for that.
- We're investigating a performance / lag issue sometimes when talking to certain people. It seems to be based on quest pool selection behind the scenes. We're working on it right now will patch soon as we can.
- This is a big update, we probably introduced bugs we didn't catch. Thanks for your time and reporting in advance. We appreciate it!
Thanks so much for being on this adventure with us! We really hope you enjoy this update!
PS. It's still Jun 28 EST when I published this. 4 minutes more and we would have been late.
This week's plan in Archmage Rises (Jul 1 '23)
Preamble
Last week it took the whole team and some late nights to deliver our first content update: #1 Townsfolk. As of this writing, it seems to be going well, not too many issues reported. We've put out 2 patches addressing the core issues.
July 1st is a holiday in Canada, so we are taking the Monday July 3rd off. We didn't plan it that way, but a long weekend after a big release feels nice.
Design
Update Part 1 contains four NPC jobs which can be upgraded. We're going to add four more. We're still figuring out which jobs make the most sense but one of them will for sure be the Healer.
In order for the Healer to matter, we are introducing a revised Injury system. This ties in nicely with the forthcoming Combat rewrite.
With Update #1 out, we're starting immediately on Update #2 Mage Tower. For those new to the project, we have a fully functioning mage tower building system already built and was part of our Next Fest demo earlier this year. BUT, the UI/UX of it was horrible so we took it out until we could revise it and make it function well.
Three people started on the mage tower today! Of course no ETAs yet... we're only 1 day in! But like before I think we'll give a 2 week notice ahead of when it launches.
The Work
We'll see what issues are reported this weekend. If there isn't a critical error we have to hotfix, we'll return to our weekly Thursday patches.
- Josh and Zach are working on Townsfolk Part 2 and any bugs that are reported
- Nolan, Jessi, Phil, and Rubi are writing more job quests.
- Rubi is working on 6 more portrait bases for the NPCs.
- Mark, myself, and Jonathan are working on the design and programming of the mage tower
- Jessi is working on the mage tower UI
- Having hijacked them to help finish Townsfolk update, Michel and Tyler return to the combat rewrite
- James is working on combat design
- D2 is working on bugs
- After a week of travel and some serious crunch, I'm returning to the forums to answer any questions.
- I am working on our Quest Tool: Bard. There is a backlog of feature requests from our quest writers I now have time to address. As this tools gets better and better, so will our quests, and our quests will become more procedural and dynamic.
As always, thanks for being with us on this journey!
IIRC the main dev had a succesful bussines for many years and made games for other companies in the meantime, hiring more people only within the last year or so. All of that's described here:
The real question: Will I fail?
It's a little surreal to have one's life and decisions discussed online, so I'm happy to provide some clarity and facts to the discussion.
I started full time on Archmage Rises August 2014. I worked 2 days a week on a prototype prior to that, but in my mind that is when things got really serious and I count from that date.
I had to go to a website to calculate the duration and they tell me:
3,175 days or 8 years, 8 months, 10 days
Not quite 10 years but at these kinda numbers does it really matter?
At this point I just want to beat the poster child of ridiculous delayed failed game development: Duke Nukem Forever!
Along the way I've accumulated a fanbase in the thousands (not Dwarf Fortress numbers, but good people I've enjoyed none the less).
I've also been pretty transparent about the development costs and process because of those fans. I feel I owe it to them as stakeholders. So for several years I provided "annual reports" to them and my wife. You can see the latest one I did in early 2021 here:
YouTube™ Video: Update #129 Business of Indie Game Development: Archmage Rises Annual Report 2021
Views: 462
Today I tell my wife how much of our money I spent making my dream indie game. In this annual report we review effort from 2014-2020, expenses and revenue, and the road ahead to completing the...
What does 8 years and 8 months say about a person?
People abandon all kinds of things. A diet, an exercise routine, a musical instrument, school, companies, stocks, marriages, hobbies, and careers. Almost 9 years is enough for a degree, masters, and PhD!
1. Either extremely tenacious, or "not right in the head" (a favorite line in Braveheart!)
2. Either a capable developer who's doing something very difficult, or incapable and simply doing something beyond his abilities
3. Either really wants to do this, or can't (or won't) find a job and do something else
4. Either extremely resourceful, or at the brink of bankruptcy
I'll try and fill each of these in a bit.
1. Tenacious or "not right in the head"?
I was reading a lot about game dev in 2014 and all the advice said "start marketing your game right away!". So I hired a PR firm to give me some advice and they told me to announce and publish my story, my reason for making Archmage Rises, on Gamasutra.com (now GameDeveloper.com) a game dev trade website where all the AAA's hang out (the company that does GDC runs this website). I didn't think much of it, so wrote a post laying out why I was making this game and why I was doing it now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140810202812/https://gamasutra.com/blogs/ThomasHenshell/20140807/222732/Why_Ive_Said_Goodbye_to_Mobile_in_Favor_of_PC.php
What happened next I didn't expect at all:
It become the #1 article on Gamasutra in about a day.
It became the most commented article until that point (200+)
Lead designers on Halo, World of Warcraft, and other started tweeting me and sharing the article. I got tons of publicity for this little nascent game idea.
For 4 days I was "famous" in game dev.
Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers, read it.
He told Frank, head of Alienware "Hey, go help that Thomas guy out. I like the cut of his gib."
So Frank got a hold of me and we struck a deal to do a beta key giveaway and he gave me all new alienware computers. Contractually I'm not allowed to demo Archmage on anything but an Alienware computer, which they provide. So hopefully the 17,000+ people who downloaded the demo owned an Alienware.
But that moment did two things:
1. I felt I was onto something special. It doesn't seem this happens to just anyone.
2. I picked up a fanbase of about 4,000 people spread across twitter, facebook, steam, and a newsletter. To be clear, no one gave me any money, but they started following.
The thing about game dev is it is really really hard. Like excruciatingly hard. I know because I've done other things (more on that in a minute). Sometimes people come to me for advice sometimes. I tell them:
Listen, if you can do anything else: go do that. Cuz this career path is awful and exhausting and terrible. You can make more money with less stress and more vacation doing most anything else. Go do that.
I have, and remain, unpaid for 8 years and 8 months of effort.
And here is the thing about getting up every morning, 3,175 times in a row, to work unpaid. I have to decide:
Do I keep going? Or throw in the towel.
And to be clear: not a cool towel like the one in hitchhikers guide the galaxy that shows you are clearly a man to be reckoned with. I mean the bad towel in a boxing match that says “it’s over I give up! It’s too hard!”
The option to give up has presented itself 3,175 times and I said “No.”
I keep going because I made a promise. “A promise Mr. Frodo!” A promise to a bunch of strangers in 2014, who gave me nothing but their faith, that I was going to make this game with a specific set of features.
When it got really hard, when I wanted to give up, I thought about them. There are people out there who want me to keep going.
For me it is an integrity issue. Either I’ve been running one of the longest cons in game dev, or I’m really dedicated to making this thing happen.
2. Capable or Out of His Depth?
I don’t know any other Early Access devs. Any you may know or have encountered. If there is a secret club where they all hang out, I never got the invite. But I do know dozens of indie game devs. The reoccurring theme seems to be “early 20’s, first time out, lots of passion but not a lot of experience, and not a lot of resources”.
I’m 46 right now and have been working full time since I was 18. Here are some highlights from my 28 year career history:
Retail
1. I started as a clerk at Canada’s largest electronics retailer (Futureshop) but pretty soon they moved me to the head office to train new recruits in computer tech and sales technique. I learned a lot about customer service here. I got yelled at by people tall and small, fat and skinny, well dressed and stained sweatpants. Some people have said some terrible things about me and too me online but nothing matches the eye to eye berating of a haughty customer venting all their frustration on you in person. I learned not to take it personally.
E-commerce
2. Early 2000’s I was the lead dev on Canada’s largest e-commerce company (at that time) GroceryGateway.com. About $130 million was invested into the company. I had the typical silicon valley experience of high tech, stock options, pool table in our fancy pants offices. Worked with a team of 20. Learned a lot about UI, big data, QA, distributed servers & uptime, because the website processed about $1m/week. I was the manager in charge of software reporting to the CTO, so if something ever went wrong I was the guy they called. I was there for 5 years, won some tech awards (really liked the Microsoft MSDN one for our C++ tech stack). When I started at the company I was about the 27th employee, when I left there were 400 employees. Learned a lot about corporate politics.
Enterprise
3. In 2004 I started my own software company. We built custom enterprise mobile systems for many of Canada’s largest companies, combining web and mobile tech (all pre iphone/android). I grew the company from just me and a photocopier to 15 employees and $2.5m in annual revenue. Some of our client were billion dollar companies with operations around the world. I learned a lot about leading teams and putting my own money and guts on the line to make mission critical million dollar projects done on time and on budget. We were really good at it too!
(The story starts to get a little complicated here as things overlap, but I’ll do my best to keep it clear)
Tabletop Games
4. At the same time I decided to open a table-top gaming store specializing in Magic the Gathering, miniature games like Games Workshop and Privateer Press, and RPGs like D&D and Pathfinder. The dream was to use my tech skills (and retail skills from Futureshop) to make a franchise chain to rival Games Workshop. We opened our first store Hobby Kingdom in Burlington, ON in 2006. Our store was awesome and I got to meet and know some 4,000 hardcore tabletop gamers. Both Games Workshop and Wizards of the Coast sent their Retail heads to come and see our store. I remember the GW guy kept saying “Wow this store is better than ours.” Over and over again. Sadly the tabletop games business is very hard and not very lucrative and I wanted to do other things. I sold a majority share to my store manager who was excited and started making changes. Unfortunately, he also suffered from depression and I don’t know all that happened but in about 8 months he ran it into the ground. We also got Amazon’d because up until that time you couldn’t get eurogames from website, just the local gaming store.
Mobile Games
5. I liked the software and the games store, but really deep down, I just wanted to make Games! That’s the whole reason I learned how to program in the first place. It was time to get living my best life now! So I sold the store and retired from the software company (but remained the sole owner) and went headfirst into games. Built my own engine in C++ with some tools I thought were cool. You can read more about that time in the Gamasutra article linked above. Making casual games wasn’t for me and I lost a lot of money. It was so bad I had to go back to my software company and work as a junior programmer for free for a while.
Groceries?
6. Uh, then it gets really weird. My wife accidentally bought a small town grocery store in 2014. That story is too long to get into, but between the two of us I knew more about retail and business than her so I got put in charge of this grocery store with, at the time, revenue of about 700k/year losing about 70k/year. Over 8 years I grew that store into a profit machine with revenues doubling to $1.6 million and making about 100k/year. With good management in place, I only had to work at it about 5hrs a week overseeing things, freeing me up to do other things.
Defiance Game Studio
7. Which brings us now to Defiance, the little game studio that could! I left full time management work at the grocery store August of 2014 which is why I know the date so well because I was sick of all these distractions when all I really want to do is make a cool open world proc-gen RPG.
3. Passionate or Can’t/Won’t Find a Real Job
Of all the things I’ve done, Defiance, and specifically making this game Archmage Rises, is the hardest. And yet, I feel it is the best job I’ve ever had (except for being unpaid, gotta take that up with HR!). I feel like this job, right now, writing you this probably-too-long response is the best thing I can be doing with my limited time on earth.
4. Either extremely resourceful, or at the brink of bankruptcy?
As you see above, I’ve had some wins along the way.
I grew a startup from nothing to $2.5m/year.
I bought a failing company and turned it around by doubling revenues to $1.6m with nice regular annual profit.
In 2021 I sold the software company to another software company for pennies. Covid really killed it, no one wanted to start big software projects during the pandemic.
I just sold the grocery store to some lovely new owners Nov 2022.
I sold the goose laying the golden eggs!But I need to focus ALL my attention on the growth of Defiance and finishing this game!
Along the 8 years and 8 months I’ve twice shutdown Defiance to take on contract game work for other game studios. The first was for 3 months to work on a big book IP mobile game. The second was for 8 months to help a US game studio get off the ground with 2 mobile games. That last job was quite lucrative and I managed to save $300k in the bank when it ended Mar 1 2022.
Also, for some reason people think my high school education + life experience makes me a good teacher, so I picked up a professorship of Game Design at a college and now as an instructor at a university.
So between the teaching jobs and the money I saved up from the contract work, I was able to fund an expanded team at Defiance from Mar 2022 until today.
Macro Team Timeline:
- Started 2014 as just me. (Sadly, the photocopier decided to stay at the software company, probably thought this was too risky)
- In 2016 I hired a programmer friend, Nic, who helped me a lot until 2018.
- 2018-2020 back to just me.
- In May 2019 I hired a programmer, Daniel, and Sep 2019 I hired Michel.
- In 2021 I hired Josh as a programmer. Daniel left. Tyler joined as a programmer in Jun, then shortly thereafter Rubi as an artist. Then in Sep James our audio director + game designer.
- In Jan 2022 Zach joined as a programmer, then Jessi as an artist and now UI specialist. In Nov Nolan came onboard as a narrative lead to help with content. Anything you’ve read in game you liked is from him, and anything you didn’t like is from me.
- In Mar 2023 Phil joined us in digital marketing and community management.
You can see everyone’s mugshot on our poorly made website I did in 4hrs:
https://defiancegamestudio.com/index.php/home/team/
We are now 10:
- Programmers: Michel, Josh, Tyler, Zach
- Artists: Rubi & Jessi
- James: Audio & Design
- Nolan: Procedural Narrative
- Phil: Digital Marketing & Community
- Me – whatever it is I do… apparently just write long winded forum posts about myself.
Next week on May 1 we have a senior programmer joining us to make us 11.
So where am I at financially?
Well I can tell you my wife is sick of me not contributing to the family finances and just blowing our lovely savings on this game. It’s time for the game to start paying for itself. So, we launched into Early Access. To be sustainable we needed to sell 400 units in April, 800 in Jun, and 1,600 in Jul. We’ve already sold 2,500+ in just over 24hrs, so we got at least a 6 month runway already.
Let me talk very seriously now (I’ll put on my Jim Collins biz hat).
I’ve been around a lot of different kinds of businesses. I’ve had success and failure.
I’ve been so outta money I had to make payroll by cash advancing my mastercard for $1,500
And I’ve had 800k in the bank with nothing specific to do with it.
I really believe we got a winner here. There are key indicators (KPI’s) one needs to see. Some were confirmed by Splattercat doing a 200k+ view video in Feb. Just yesterday Retromation made one which just passed 15k views.
YouTube™ Video: Extremely Ambitious Open World RPG Roguelike!! | Let's Try Archmage Rises
Views: 58,803
Get Archmage Rises: https://store.steampowered.com/app/506480/Archmage_Rises/ Experience the freedom normally only found in a tabletop RPG.
This game is an iceberg.
I’ll grant it looks like it could be done by a 12 year old over a summer.
But there is so much tooling and tech under the hood to make it run it’s insane. Much like how Amazon tech goes so far beyond just a simple shopping website.
But as we add features with our updates, word is only going to spread more, and more, and more.
We could have the next Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress or Prison Architect here.
In Games we talk a lot about longtails. I believe this game has a growth tail. Our sales in Sep will dwarf what we are seeing here in April. Why?
Because every Kaylo7 who finds us and is amazed, will keep bringing in more and more people.
We love Kaylo7 and want to make features he likes and keep him playing.
We haven’t even started to market this game. I have to keep telling Phil "Slow & steady wins the race. Let's just focus on smaller streamers right now until we stabilize the EA and get a few feature updates done."
Conclusion
Clearly I have established one indisputable fact: I can write semi-coherent reams of text about myself.
It was bound to come out somewhere, sorry it happened to you!
I can't answer the Original Poster's question.
But I hope I provided a little color to help them make an informed decision.
If you want to join me now on this adventure, great! Love to have you.
If now isn't the right time, that's cool too. I hope I'll see you again real soon!
I am not even kidding, $6.99 for Constructs is in the roadmap. I don't mind paying if the game is deep, but according to reviews, it doesn't seem to be the case. Unless codexers who have played it recently prove me wrong.
It's not because we are starved for RPGs and many indie developers are creatively bankrupt that we must accept everything. When you read Steam reviews, the positive ones simply state, 'Great, it has an ambitious roadmap,' while the negative ones are full-length reviews discussing missing features, bugs, and a complete lack of content.
