Aterdux Entertainment
Aterdux Entertainment
Combat logs are coming soon, not there yet
Remember we said a year ago: “This next year (2014) will be very important for us because that's the year when Legends of Eisenwald will be released”. Unfortunately, we were wrong once again with our estimations and we decided at about the middle of this year to not give any more exact dates or plans when we will release.
Having said all that, we have no other choice other than to release Legends of Eisenwald pretty soon. This time things look much better - the game is content ready, all eight chapters of the campaign are playable and there are currently over 20 people who finished the main story at least once in our closed beta (which is ongoing in Russian). Average playtime seems to be over 40 or even 50 hours, and everyone seemed to really like the story. The English beta will be starting in about two weeks, and the signup is here.
The beginning of 2014 was good, but the more we went towards the end of the year the harder it got. Denis had heart surgery done then crunch time to try and wrap up development but that didn’t go according to plan. One of the reasons is the brand new UI - and while the redesign didn’t take a lot of time, the reprogramming did (the UI code is now 25% of the entire game code, and more than half of it had to be programmed anew).
Closer to the end of the year the money was starting to get tight and for a moment we even considered running a 2nd Kickstarter campaign to raise some funds for marketing but decided against it. (We wouldn’t have done it without asking your opinion first anyway).
Why marketing? This needs a bit of an explanation.
This year of 2014 is a year where many things changed. While we were really happy with our launch on Early Access, Legends of Eisenwald was one of the last Early Access titles that got featuring on the main page. More and more games were released (in the first four months of 2014 more games were released than in the entirety of 2013). In order to attract more attention to our game we tried to participate in the summer sale but Steam didn’t get us any space on the front page. Then we were lucky to have a Daily Deal in August. We didn’t get a spot in Halloween or the Winter sale probably because our sales since the beginning of Summer were far from great. In a month or so I plan to write an article with a breakdown of our costs, units sold etc. In short, a few months at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 were the months we were doing alright. We didn’t raise our salaries or anything like that but we participated in two game expos - GDC Play and Igromir - and it was a mistake.
With all these changes, we are now trying to see what else can be done for the release. And that’s why we are thinking to get some funds for marketing. One might argue that if a game is good it will find its audience and there is no need for any paid marketing activities. But right now we disagree. To show Valve our game is good, it needs to sell better in order to have some visibility at the launch and while we have good hope for our PR activities, we feel some marketing would give us a bit more. The Legends of Eisenwald release will determine the future of our company. If it goes well, we can continue working on the game and add all the nice features we wanted to have and even more. And if not then it will be hard to predict what’s going to happen. We don’t want our game to be lost or go unnoticed. And we will use all necessary options to make our game survive.
And about doing sales - we want formally to ask you for forgiveness that we participated in a few. We wish we had enough funds to continue development without them but longer times require more funds. I wish we were like the Age of Decadence (a really good hardcore RPG by the way) developers, they have enough funds not to make sales during the Early Access phase of their project. That is not our situation unfortunately and we want to make up for this.
We’d like to offer all of you an extra key for the game if you feel the value of your pledge was diminished by these sales. PM us here on Kickstarter and we will send you one as soon as we can.
To conclude, we wish all Happy New Year, and we will release the game as soon as we can.
Alexander and all of us at Aterdux
Oh, and one more thing: impossible to see entire content in one play through. Minimum of three is required.
Sign up for the closed beta and see for yourself I don't think spoilers would be very welcome here. And it seems our game will have more gameplay hours than we thought initially. Seems like 40 hours is a bare minimum, most of the testers report 50-60 hours.Eisenwald turns blue, green or red at the end?
The game is not released because it is not done yet. We underestimated greatly the amount of work needed. Interface redesign took a lot, content took a lot too and English version of the campaign is still in the process of being edited, German and French a bit more behind. SFX are still not working, and there are bugs we need to fix and things we need to polish.
This time the end is already in sight and as soon as we can, we will announce the release date.
You should look at crowd sourcing additional translations,I believe this is what Beamdog did with their enhanced BGs, and inXile did for W2 (I think).If anyone translates the text, we can include it. But - it's the size of a large novel. We trying now really hard to make German and French on schedule we set up for ourselves...
this could be a nice aditional push to make future buyers more invested by participating more and all thatYou should look at crowd sourcing additional translations,I believe this is what Beamdog did with their enhanced BGs, and inXile did for W2 (I think).
Mystic can damage armor of enemies, increase armor of own units, increase initiative of own units, decrease the enemy, and there is a mass damage spell that requires a setup spell before that.Can we now know what kind of spells the Mystic class will have btw, aside from the ability to heal?
Where do you this kind of thing? I think it will be late for the full release but we should do it for later for sure.You should look at crowd sourcing additional translations,I believe this is what Beamdog did with their enhanced BGs, and inXile did for W2 (I think).
inXile used Get Localization (https://www.getlocalization.com/), but I can't find what Beamdog used. I'll send you a PM and try to connect you to a representative of Beamdog and inXile, maybe they can provide more info.Where do you this kind of thing? I think it will be late for the full release but we should do it for later for sure.
I'm a bad codexer, what does that mean? You're using an alt account?:andhaira:
We are happy to tell you that only one large step remains until the game is released because Legends of Eisenwald receive a patch version 0.99. Below is the list of changes in the game. And like we did often recently, the bigger part of the changes concerns the closed beta test and we publish only things concerning the version available for everyone without spoilers: