This new update will includes new modding abilities, a new guard room and a lot of bug fixes and smaller features. James and I will also make another live stream explaining and showing of all these new features that are being introduced with this version, we will also discuss how the UI could be made better.
Dwelvers livestream
[IMG]http://i955.photobucket.com/albums/ae36/ralleman/Dinning.gif[/IMG]
You are welcome to join our live stream discussion Wednesday 9/3-16 at 6 pm CET here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXscWf1lRkk
Now all those quick messages that pops up on the left side of the screen explaining for the player if something of importance have happened in the dungeon are clickable. When clicking them the camera will auto-zoom to that location.
I don't know if this really should be included as an update. But I have added an information window in the launcher so that it will show the player when something of importance is going on, like the Kickstarter that is going on right now :)
If a block is unreachable but are still selected to be dug out, then it will be highlighted in red color instead of cyan color. This should make it easier for the player to know if something is wrong.
If a building has problems such as it is blocked in, or that the production is low, it will be colored with a transparent red color. This is so that the player easier can see what building is having the problem.
Smaller feature updates and fixes
Fixes so that the viewing distance fog isn’t affected by the camera height.
Fixed Piggeh walking animation, it was not synced with how fast the creature was moving forward.
Fixed Cyclotaur walking animation, it was not synced with how fast the creature was moving forward.
Battle messages are now less frequent.
ESC key can now also be used to deselect current tool.
Rooms doesn't cost resources, only furniture does.
The player can no longer select characters when using a tool (players selects creatures when trying to build)
All difficulty changed so that each wave are less frequent.
The player can now see which way the gate is being placed for farm.
Fix the surface world so that the whole map is reachable.
Stairs can now be rotated.
Please, tell us what you think about this update :)
One week into Dwelvers Kickstarter
Hi guys!
It has been one week into the Dwelvers Kickstarter and I would like to thank all of you that have supported the campaign so far :)
After the stream with James we compiled a list of updates which would help improve the basic game play a lot and I'm happy to say that I will release a new update on Wednesday. This new update will including some new modding abilities, a new guard room and a lot of bug fixes and smaller features. I will release additional details about the update as the new version goes live on Wednesday.
With this release we will also do another lets play stream and talk about the KS campaign and what needs to be done to make it succeed.
In the meanwhile we keep hunting down reviewers, what Kickstarter campaign needs the most right now is publicity to make it succeed, and I may add that I have only used one of Steams five advertising boosts so far, so that is something that we will use as well to make Dwelvers more known to the public.
Please let your friends know about the game and tell them to support us :)
We have reached 5% of the Kickstarter goal these last two days, which is a nice little start. Right now I am working on sending out mails to reviewers and magazines which will hopefully start a little Dwelvers buzz.
If you haven't checked out the Kickstarter page yet you can do it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dancing-devils/dwelvers
We need your support if this is going to succeed, and please tell your friends if you haven't already ;)
The Kickstarter stream is now live!
The Kickstarter Let's Play stream is now live and my nerves is on the edge, one hour left until the Kickstarter begins :D
During the stream my friend James (who has never played the game before) will play Dwelvers and ask questions about the current game mechanics and game features and I will try to answer all his questions the best I can. We will also go through the Kickstarter campaign and talk about the content and the Rewards there. Please join us and talk with us about the game :)
During the last week Ben, James and I have been listening to all the feedback that’s been coming in from all the social forums about the Dwelvers upcoming Kickstarter campaign. The feedback has been great and we have tried to please as many people as possible with our changes to the campaign.
It’s only one week left until the Kickstarter campaign starts and it’s important that everything is in order and as good as possible until then; therefore I’d like to ask you:
Do you think the description of Dwelvers works well for both someone who’s never played a dungeon lord game before, and those that have?
Do you feel like we managed to mention the key features of Dwelvers and distinguish it from similar games, or is there something else we should mention?
We added a few DLCs to spice up the rewards on the Kickstarter. The DLCs are all decorative and will not change the mechanics of the game. Do you think that the DLCs are attractive enough for both existing and new players to pick a few of them up in order to support the develoment of the game? Should the DLCs include more/less and/or should the prices be adjusted? Should we replace any of the DLCs with something you think would have a greater success?
There’s a bunch of stretch goals added in the Kickstarter and a few of them are things I really want implemented no matter how the Kickstarter turns out. The Kickstarter however, can secure the funding for me to work on the game full time until the features are implemented.
What do you think about the stretch goals listed? Is there something unclear about them? Is there any additional stretch goals you’d like to be added?
The financial breakdowns should bring clarity to how my economy has been since I started working on Dwelvers up until now, and it should show why the Kickstarter is needed and how it will help me being able to work on Dwelvers full time. Is the financial breakdown clear or do you feel that there’s still some questions unanswered regarding the economy?
We’ve added a bunch of screenshots to show people what Dwelvers is, we’d like to know if any of you have any cool screenshots you’d like to share that we can use on our Kickstarter?
How do you feel about the rewards? Is the pricing ok? Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Why do I have two rubber ducks on my monitor?
What is Thunderclap?
Last post I mentioned Thunderclap which will help us reach a broader audience with the help of people who’d like to support the campaign. It was my friend James, who’s helping me with the Kickstarter campaign, that told me about it. Before he mentioned it I knew nothing about it and had no clue it even existed and I figure there might be more like me amongst you that still don’t know and need some additional information before committing to helping us via it.
The way Thunderclap works is that we need to get 100 people to sign up to support Dwelvers, otherwise the Thunderclap campaign fails and nothing happens. If we do however get 100 or more supporters, the Thunderclap succeeds! This means that each person that supported the Thunderclap will have their social medias they signed up with, post ONCE about the Kickstarter campaign.
This way you and everyone you know will get notified when the Kickstarter campaign goes live and will be able to check it out as soon as possible.
If we get enough people to check it out once it goes live, and to support the Kickstarter, it will give the rest of the Kickstarter campaign a better outcome. So please, support the Thunderclap campaign so that we can kickstart our Kickstarter campaign with a loud BOOM!
We’d love for all of you to join us when I and James play Dwelvers via our livestream. James hasn’t played the game before and will ask a lot of questions regarding the basic game play and we’ll also talk about the future of the game. If we’re lucky, Ben might join us via Skype as well. During the livestream you’ll be able to ask questions regarding the game and discuss any of the game mechanics. The stream will be available via the link below the 27th of February at 19:00 / 07:00 PM (GMT+1), which is one hour before the Kickstarter goes live. We’ll try to keep the stream online for 2 hours.
Before the Kickstarter starts we’ll try to reach all the people that have reviewed Dwelvers at some point and ask them for help with spreading the word about the Kickstarter campaign; hopefully the response will be positive and they’ll help us.
We’ll also spend a lot of time going through the Kickstarter a 5th time once we’ve got additional feedback from you guys.
During Monday we’ll need to send the campaign to the Kickstarter team for approval and during that time we’ll be preparing for the Let’s Play that we are doing during the start of the Kickstarter campaign. I need to keep James off Dwelvers so that he hasn’t any past experience playing the game before we go live.
So what do you think? We would love to hear your feedback!
I'm back!
Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a good christmas, hanukkah and/or a good new years eve. Last time I wrote here on the forums I talked about being away for a while since I had to take a job in order to stabilize my financial situation, and now I’m back. The plan for now is to work half time on Dwelvers and half time at my other job until the end of April.
What will happen after that? Well, let me tell you.
Me and my friend James have been working on a big list which includes everything I want to have completed on Dwelvers before releasing it as version 1.0, thus ending the early access era of it. The list is quite big and according to my calculations I should be able to finish it after one year of full time work. But as you understand, I can’t work full time on the game due to my current financial situation. To change this, we decided that we will launch a Kickstarter the 27th of February at 20:00/08:00 PM (GMT+1) where we will try to sell additional copies of the game + additional special rewards for those who help me out, so that I may focus on the game full time for one year. Everyone contributing to the Kickstarter will get exclusive insight into the immediate process of the development and be able to vote on which features I should pursue in what order. Just know that 1.0 is not the final version of the game as I will keep working on the game beyond that, but it would give me some peace of mind knowing that what's out there is good enough on it's own, and everything on top of that is just a bonus.
We will need your help to get the ball rolling on this and there’s many ways you can help, with or without contributing financially to the Kickstarter.
For starters, you can sign up on our Thunderclap campaign and invite your friends to do the same. Thunderclap is a marketing tool which allows people to help you market something by signing up to send out a social media message at a set date.
https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/37417-dwelvers-kickstarter
You can check out a preview of the Kickstarter campaign and ask me questions or give me feedback on it to help me improve it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1581571237/1517733387?token=7bc1eb66
We also want to invite you to our Let’s Play of Dwelvers where me and James will both play the game and talk about it and it’s future. We’d love for you to join us and discuss what you like about the game and we’ll answer any questions regarding it. The stream will be available via the link below the 27th of February at 19:00 / 07:00 PM (GMT+1), which is one hour before the Kickstarter goes live. We’ll try to keep the stream online for 2 hours.
https://gaming.youtube.com/user/dwelvers/live
So tell us, what do you think of this?
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If you’re a game developer like me, you might want to check out James’ huge game development event where people from all over the world come to spend 1 week in a beautiful Swedish castle and develop games. While there you can meet not only me, but also people such as Brenda and John Romero, the developers behind games such as DOOM, Quake, Jagged Alliance and Wizardry. Check out his event on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/events/1471374316501334/
A little break
Hi all,
It has been a little quiet since the last update, the reason is that I was working on my to-do list, and fixing with making the buildings as mod able as possible as I mentioned in my last update. But that is not the only reason, I have been developing Dwelvers for almost 3 years now and the plan is to get the game finished within a year from now. During these three years I have been able to live on the sales from Dwelvers and have therefore been able to work full time on the game. But as the game isn't a finished product and because it has taken some time to develop it up to this point the sales has gone down, and my economy has been a little on the edge to be honest.
I am telling you all this because I want you to know that I am taking a break from developing Dwelvers until the beginning of February, and that the reason is that I am working full time on another job to be able to get my economy back on track so that I can keep on developing and finishing the game before the end of the next year.
Many of you may take this as a set back and I suspect I will get some "I told you so" from those of you that have been against early access development from start, but know that I have been working on it full time for three years and I have no intention to stop working on it as we are so close to seeing it finished (relative to the time it took to develop it to this point).
I hope you all understand my situation.
An update on the current development progress
It has been a rather quiet month, the reason for this is that I have taken a different development direction than the usual popping in new features and improvements of the game on demand. I have started to get a feeling that we really need to start summing things up and give the game a final version.
Therefore I have started working on a rather detailed to-do list with all the features that are left to add at a minimum before being able to call this game a full game. I have been searching the topics on the Dwelvers forum to see what has been requested and what is possible to add without having to modify the games development direction to much. I am not that naive that I think that I can foresee all the obstacles that may arise during the development, neither do I want to decide what specific feature, creatures or building should enter the game in half a year from now, but I should be able to say what it will be like in general and how long it should take to implement it.
I will have a prototype of the to-do list ready by the end of the month which I would love some suggestions on, what you do like and what you don't like. Before the end of the year we shall have an finished to-do list with a plan where Dwelvers is finished at the end of 2016. Then after Dwelvers is finished we will keep on adding DLC:s to the game.
Right now (besides from working on the to-do list) I am working on optimizing the code in the game. I want to move as much code from the game into xml files as possible, this is already done with the creatures, the items, the particles and parts of other stuffs as well. Now I want to get as much of the buildings code (mousetraps, rock, metalworks room etc.) into XML files as possible as well. This is so that the game will be easier to mod and also make it easier for me as a coder to keep on adding more content to the game without making the game more complex.
I do have more things planned for December than working on the to-do list, the game will keep being developed as usual, it is just that I sat the date for the to-do list to be finished a bit into the future so that it isn't rushed. It is very important that we get it right and that we don't take water over our heads, therefore your opinions will be extremely valuable for us when planning the future of Dwelvers!
Let me know what you think here below, I would love to hear your opinions on this letter :)
Dwelvers Alpha v0.9f-3 released
Dwelvers alpha v0.9f-3 has now been released and is available for download at the Dwelvers Website and on Steam.
In this version I was supposed to only focus on adding an endless flow option to give the player the option to not having endless waves of stronger and stronger enemies attacking the players dungeon. But I got a little sidetracked (big surprise :)), With the enemies rushing through the portals I noticed that the current squad system was really bad. It was hard to create and send out squads over the dungeon in an efficient way. So I spent two - three days improving the squad system to make it easier for the player to organize his or hers troops. Besides from that a lot of energy has also been put down on getting the creatures to interact better with the rally flags, and make them avoid clumping together as they usually do in larger packs. Have fun playing, and don't forget to let me know if you find any bugs or have any ideas on how to make this game even better.
See what was changed & fixed in previous versions here...
Dwelvers Alpha v0.9f-2 released
Dwelvers alpha v0.9f2 has now been released and is available for download at the Dwelvers Website and on Steam.
This last version is a real step upwards for Dwelvers, we have new creatures, better battle mechanics, skills, new buildings, new foods, favourite foods and much much more. One of the most fun new features IMO is the new creature skills, they makes it much more fun to level up creatures as they get much better at defending your dungeon at certain levels. The new battle wave timer at the evil meter will also make it much more challenging to keep your dungeon intact. It will show you how long it will take until the next attack and it will show how hard it will hit you, so you better get prepared and start barbecuing some mice, because you may just have to barricade your self with traps for a long time. Have fun playing and don't forget to come with suggestions to us on how you would like to see the development of the game progress. As you can see in the change log below the top news a lot of player suggested game mechanics and features has been included in this version.
