Dragon Rage
SPOOPY HALLOWEEN MODE!
30% OFF FOR THE HOLIDAYS!!
:dr_angry: Happy Holidays everyone!! Thanks for all the support this year, it's been an awesome experience launching my first solo game and I'm pumped to keep putting out more games through 2017 and beyond! Dragon Rage hasn't been any crazy million-seller success story or anything but it's kept my rent paid for a few months now and people who've played it seem to like it and it's sold enough for me to afford a flight back home to visit my family for Christmas this year (where I'll spend most of my time coding and drawing for my next game anyway lol) so personally I consider that a success! :) I've been working my ass off on my next game and I'm hoping to get it launched in early 2017 so stay tuned!
- Jeff
SPOOPY HALLOWEEN UPDATE! And 30% off during the Halloween Sale!
Took a break from working on my next game to throw together a little Halloween update for Dragon Rage! :dr_angry:
Now to go stockpile my cupboards with those giant bags of Halloween candy for the kids...and by Halloween candy I mean 100% REESE PEANUT BUTTER CUPS. And by for the kids I mean for ME. MINE. ALL MINE.
- Jeff
DRAGON RAGE SALE & NEW TRAILER
A huge thanks to everyone who's picked up a copy of Dragon Rage! It's been awesome seeing people all around the world playing my first solo game! I'm workin my ass off on my next game (and thanks to you all I'm able to actually pay my rent/bills/food for a couple months so I can focus on it!) and planning to add more content to Dragon Rage when I get a chance! :dr_angry:
- Jeff
MOAR CONTENT ADDED!! 15% OFF ON THE HUMBLE STORE TILL AUG 15!
https://youtu.be/rLvdyY_rqJ0
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Humble Store
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/dragon-rage
Grab it quick, the Humble Store sale is about to end!!
:dr_angry:
Content Update
You wanted it, you got it: A Story Mode that takes you through multiple levels with increasing difficulty to get to the King, a Time Trial mode to rack up as much destruction as you can as fast as you can, an Endless Mode that increases in difficulty forever, a bunch of new art, tweaks to the Hunger Meter to improve game feel, and other stuff I'm too tired to remember!
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Localization
I'll be sending the localization doc out as soon as possible to everyone who's volunteered to help with the sad Google Translate text for their language lol I just wanted to make sure the new build goes up before the Humble Store sale ends!
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Thanks Everyone!
Thanks to everyone for being patient waiting for this update, and to everyone who's supported my first solo game launch! Dragon Rage has made just enough to fund a few months of rent/food/bills which should be enough time to make my next game if I keep my nose to the grindstone, so any success it has from here is a bonus cherry on top to me. I just want to be able to make cool games for the rest of my life and this game is the first step toward that!
- Jeff
DRAGON RAGE 15% OFF ON THE HUMBLE STORE TILL AUG 15!! Progress news on the Content Update!
Humble Store
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/dragon-rage
From last update: Humble said they liked the look of Dragon Rage and approached me to join their store so now you can get Dragon Rage on the Humble Store with the 15% launch discount for the next 2 weeks! If you bought it at full price after the Steam launch sale ended, feel free to return it and grab it from Humble instead to save yourself a dollar, I won't hold it against ya! Note that it's not in a Humble BUNDLE, it's just on the Humble STORE.
No plans to put it into an actual bundle because, well honestly, I'm a solo indie dev with no money and a bunch of debt so I need to make enough from Dragon Rage to be able to afford to make my next game. My next game should take about 4-6 months to make, so if Dragon Rage can manage to cover rent/food/bills for that long, I'll be a happy dev! :)
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Content Update
Thanks everyone! The art is taking a bit longer than expected (lots of it to do!) but otherwise pretty much everything else is ready to rock! I figure a day or two at the most now (about to pass out for some much-needed sleep, then back to drawing all night).
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New Modes
The main game has become a Story Mode split into multiple levels that keep carrying your score forward, with different backgrounds and increasingly harder enemies (I'm adding art details/variations (spikes on armor and that kind of thing) for each difficulty level of the units instead of just quickly color swapping them, that's why it's taking longer to draw) so a full run-through should feel more like a full game finally lol
There's Time Trial mode (it won't end until your combo ends and starts calculating, so if you're good and can keep your combo going you can keep racking up points past the default time limit) and Endless mode (no textboxes popping up and when you get through the first set of all the enemies, the next level of harder enemies start spawning, etc until all of the enemies are the hardest difficulty and you survive as long as you can), along with Leaderboards for Time Trial and Endless Mode.
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Hunger Meter Tweaks
I've revamped the Hunger Meter's math a bit because watching people's videos I felt like when things got hectic death was seemingly coming out of nowhere blindsiding people unfairly (going from full health to dead in 0.1 seconds because by sheer timing fluke a huge group of enemies would all land their attack on the same frame) so that's been smoothed out and feels way more fair. And there are some other little tweaks that I'm too tired to remember right now lol
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Localization
Proper localization will lag a little behind because I can't send the localization doc out till the needed text is all 100% finalized to avoid wasting anyone's time, and then the volunteers have their own lives going on of course, but I'll Google Translate the new text so I can get this update out ASAP while the game is still on sale on the Humble Store and then drop the new translations in as they arrive.
- Jeff
DRAGON RAGE 15% OFF ON THE HUMBLE STORE TILL AUGUST 15TH!! Also upcoming Content Update News!
:dr_angry:
Humble Store
Humble said they liked the look of Dragon Rage and approached me to join their store so now you can get Dragon Rage on the Humble Store with the 15% launch discount for the next 2 weeks! If you bought it at full price after the Steam launch sale ended, feel free to return it and grab it from Humble instead to save yourself a dollar, I won't hold it against ya! Note that it's not in a Humble BUNDLE, it's just on the Humble STORE.
No plans to put it into an actual bundle because, well honestly, I'm a solo indie dev with no money and a bunch of debt so I need to make enough from Dragon Rage to be able to afford to make my next game. My next game should take about 4-6 months to make, so if Dragon Rage can manage to cover rent/food/bills for that long, I'll be a happy dev! :)
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Content Update
I've been working on the Content Update and am hoping to have it in there on Friday if I don't run into any unexpected problems! I found the biggest concerns for most people are that once you finally start getting good at the game it suddenly ends and there's nothing else to do with your badass Dragon skills, and that the game isn't NEARLY as challenging for people as I thought it was going to be. I had NO idea everyone would just pick up and finish the game on their first try lol I think I was too used to working on mobile games where the audience's skill level is a lot more casual...the default PC Gamer is pretty hardcore by comparison and I'll take that into account from the start in my future game designs. ;)
There are going to be new units to fight, multiple villages with increasing difficulty, and I'm going to try putting in some challenge modes (like Endless Mode and Time Trial) because everyone has been asking for those. The whole thing should feel a lot more like a full game when I get this stuff in so if you bought it and were like "this is fun but kind of short", stick with me for this next update! I'm going to extend the "early supporter" in-game reward thing to August 16th because that's about the end of the Humble Store launch sale and also coincidentally my birthday, so if you grab Dragon Rage by August 16th you'll get some kind of in-game reward (I gotta come up with something!) as a thank-you. :)
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Localization
The localization always has to wait until after the new stuff is all coded in so I know exactly what text is needed, but I have a handful of awesome volunteers that want to help make the game not be sad Google Translate text in their language and I'll hit all of you up as soon as I've got the text finalized.
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Trading Cards
And I have no idea what it does but I switched the Trading Cards setting to "Released" instead of "Approved For Release", so there should be Trading Cards, Badges, Emoticons, and Backgrounds in there for anyone who likes that stuff. I didn't realize it wasn't set to Released before so I have no idea if anyone was getting Trading Cards already or what lol
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Cheesy Thanks
Launching my first real game has been an awesome experience all around and I can't say it enough: thanks again to everyone for the support! It wasn't the smoothest launch, but overall everybody has been ultra cool about sticking with me through it and giving me a chance and that's been extremely motivating...it's scary to put your work out there for public scrutiny and as a dev you hear a lot of horror stories about how you'll be eaten alive by hordes of rabid haters that are impossible to satisfy (and who knows, maybe I will when my games have more exposure down the road lol)...
But personally I get the impression that everyone is just tired of being jerked around by big devs making bad ports trying to squeeze every last penny out of their customers with overpriced DLC content, and tired of smaller devs making half-assed clones of whatever's popular at the moment...but it seems like there's a lot of legitimate genuine support for new indies who are trying to make fun games (whether they pull it off on their first try or not lol). I can't wait to start my next game and part of that is because of the awesome support from you all. :)
And now to crack open another energy drink and get back to work!
- Jeff
CONTENT UPDATE ON THE WAY! :)
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General Content Update
After watching people play on YouTube/Twitch (how come no one ever jumps during Rampage Mode?? lol) and reading reviews, feedback etc, I've got a list of ideas for more stuff to put in the game. Thanks to everyone who's been understanding! This is my first game and, well, I ran out of money completely in real life, so I thought okay well if I can at least nail down the general gameplay and make sure that the core game feels fun, and I can make enough to pay my rent/food/bills for a month, then I can always add more content if people enjoy chompin & stompin!
I'm really surprised and overwhelmed at the positive response in general. Everyone warns new devs that haters are going to fly out of the woodwork and hate on your game no matter what you do, even if it's some million dollar AAA title, and ESPECIALLY if you make a mistake or don't have the smoothest launch...but my experience so far has been the complete opposite: Almost everyone has been supportive and encouraging and eager to see more...which is a huge relief because when you play a game over and over all day for months during development, it's hard to objectively tell if the game is actually any fun because you get so used to it and all you can see are the little quirks and flaws that no one else actually cares about when they're having fun.
Everyone I've seen playing so far cracks a smile when they first get dropped into the poor unsuspecting village to start chomping down on villagers, and gets pumped up when they go into Rampage mode for the first time (usually with involuntary headbanging which makes me lol every time), so I'm pumped to get some more content in there for you guys ASAP!
If you're on the fence about buying it because it looks short, hold off for a week or so, or throw it on your Wishlist till I get the content update in there and check it out then instead! I don't want you spending your money on a game that you don't think is worth it. I'll just keep adding cool shit to it until you go "okay FINE, you win, I'll buy your damn game!" ;)
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Better Translation
Also some awesome fans have offered to re-translate the game's text for other languages because the crappy Google Translate text I used isn't cutting it lol I just didn't have money to afford translators but wanted everyone to be able to play the game and did what I could. I'm filling out a Google Doc (thanks to the awesome help of [URL="http://steamcommunity.com/id/d3m3trios/"]Demetrios[/URL] from [URL="http://translation.steampowered.com/"]Steam Translation Server[/URL]) with all the text in the game and columns for different languages so that anyone who likes the game and wants to make the text read more natural in their language can shoot me an E-Mail and fix Google's sloppy work (with credit in the game of course). I've got volunteers for Italian, Polish and Brazilian-Portuguese (and Demetrios arranged the Ukrainian translation).
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Community Discussion
And lastly a lot of people have been posting or messaging me with ideas for the game so I decided to make a pinned Discussion thread where everyone can share and chat about eachother's ideas called "What kind of stuff would YOU like to see in Dragon Rage?":
http://steamcommunity.com/app/498190/discussions/0/352788917752475385/
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Steam Stats
Oh and lastly for real this time, if you've looked at the Steam Stats page in-game you may have noticed that the "STEAM" numbers are the same as your own personal "YOU" numbers...It turns out the version of GameMaker and/or the Steamworks SDK version that's compatible with it may not support Aggregated Stats (like checking how many villagers have been destroyed by everyone in the Steam Community combined), which is a bit of a bummer because I thought it would be cool to have some Community Achievements to encourage people to work together toward group goals (the ones in there so far were just the basic test run of the idea). I'm currently looking into this to see if I'm right or if I just messed up the code somewhere, but it's looking like I'll probably have to cancel that idea. If I have to take it out then I'll keep the personal account Stats in there and just tweak the Achievements to be based off smaller personal goals (don't worry you won't have to kill 2,000,000,000 villagers by yourself lol)
And that's all I can think of! Thanks to everyone who's helped spread the word, every Tweet and recommendation and shout-out helps a ton, it's been awesome to see people playing and talking about my game as if I'm an actual real game developer now! ;)
Ok no rest for the wicked, time to get back to work!
- Jeff
P.S. No wait, I thought of one more thing! I'm going to put in some kind of "Gold Dragon Supporter" Achievement for everyone who's picked up a copy of the game before August 1st as thanks for taking a chance on a new developer! You're the reason I'll be able to afford my rent/food/bills next month which gives me the opportunity to do all this updating without having that stress weighing on my shoulders all month...I've earned myself enough grey hairs the past few months as it is!
(edit: freezeman42 pointed out that an Achievement would mean that later players wouldn't be able to get 100% Achievements, so I'm going to look into making the reward be something else instead! If I can't find something that people can show off in their Steam Profile then I'll add something special in-game as a thank-you instead!)
DRAGON RAGE NOW AVAILABLE!
Thanks for all the support! This is my first solo game and I'm psyched for everyone to finally get to play it!
Now what are you waiting for, there are villagers that need to be eaten! ;)
- Jeff
Release date set! This Friday (July 22)!
Submitting a build for Valve approval today! Just got a few last minor things to tidy up and Steam Store assets to make, but everything is on track to launch this Friday woo!! :) Spread the word & Wishlist Dragon Rage today!
Thanks for all the support everyone! I'm nervous as fuck about launching my first solo game but I hope you enjoy it and I can't wait to start on my next game!
- Jeff