I am happy to say we can achieve a level of productivity again that almost puts us back into full production.
Just a quick update for the community
- We have on-boarded a couple of new Devs, and they are in the process of getting up to speed and in line with the new master plan.
- They team in general is starting to materialize and a lot of new faces are coming on as we set up
What does this mean for me?
Well, we re-stabilizing this release, and I think we are weeks away from a properly playable release. Keep in mind that this may seem slow but restarting, and rebuilding takes time, and once everyone is all trained up we will be able to move a decent pace again. We just need a little more time and tangible results you will start to see
So what is the plan? It has been so damn long now!
This information is coming soon, we are not promising anything until its close or near done this time. We are not going to do any interviews or big releases until its done. We will not re-enable sales until its ready.
Upcoming Patch Notes - Fixed massive graphical lag issue for older video cards
- Fixed Jolah Male animations for sprinting
- Implemented a new matchmaking system
- Removed steam session server architecture to make way for private hosted servers and other platforms (This has taken a little time)
- We have rebuilt lighting themes
- Optimized shadow map performance
*** The game is NOT currently playable really right now, just an FYI ****
Thank you for being patient, we are getting there very slowly but surely.
Cheers,
TK
State of Development - Mid January
Good Day,
We are currently recruiting and rebuilding the team right now and this process can be fast and time-consuming. We continue to make NO promises in the short term until we get up to proper speed and productivity.
General Notes - We have added some new members and they are being trained
- We have (4) new NPC's that are in the pipeline
- We have completed our assessments of the Siege map to add new gameplay
- Engine upgrades
- Linux and OSX testing continues
Bugs - We been pushing some builds to fix some of the issues with action bar, today's build should solve that issue
- Lots of other bugs but we are slowly getting out processes sorted
We are looking to make some announcements soon but only when we are ready. We are far from dead folks its just taking its time.
Cheers,
TK
Updates - Dec 2016
Good evening,
We have finally got development back under with the team; we will be pushing some updated builds out over the next couple of weeks. Our plan is to target every Wednesday evening while we get things back up to spec. We are not going to make any promises or big announcements until our work is done. The point of this update to set expectations back in line as you see builds being updated.
This is what we can say: - The engine is back to UE4; Bigworld remains out of our price range
- The app will continue un-purchasable until we are ready to release our news with detailed plans (over the next couple of months)
- We remain that the people who stuck with us will be highly rewarded with looks of goodies
December 22 Patch Notes - New login screen and user management system
- Fixed action bar bugs
- Engine upgraded to 4.11.2
- Art updates
- Lighting Enhancements on siege
It's been painful road folks but we are not dead and going forward I will do my best to update you every Wednesday.
Merry Xmas and all that,
TK
Servers Down - Moving Datacenter's
Hey there,
To keep things running lean, we are moving servers to another datacenter right now, and servers are down for a couple of days.
Cheers,
TK
BG - Testing
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be fixing some major bugs while we work on the re-release of factions. It may be live right now but we will up and down while we resolve some major upgrade issues. We have been quiet for awhile and once we have completed some house cleaning and resolve some issues we will announce what our plans are.
Cheers,
TK
PS, An update will come in about one week from now.
* Currently build has game breaking issues right now.
Changes and Announcements Coming Soon
We have some announcements coming soon. Stay tuned far from dead folks just been working on the back end.
Stay tuned.
New Patch in the works - Battlegrounds
So, we putting this together and trying to do this as fast as we can here. Here are some facts:
- We did not run out of money, we just never had any
- We are going to bring the BG back (UE4)
- We are testing this right now
- Except a massive price drop (it will only be the BG going forward but we have some plans to make it unique)
- The store will be changing to reflect the next game
- Once we are complete we will enable sales again
- All things are very fluid right now
- MMO develop is on-hold while we look at funding options.
We did not give up.
TK
Just a quick update
We are looking at options right now, we may put the UE4 battleground back up to play. Remember this is NOT an MMO and the MMO is on hold.
Just a little update while we sort things out on the backend.
Tk
Statement of Development - April & Beyond
The Second Sunset
Greetings everyone. You may have heard already, or will hear directly the details soon regarding Burning Dog's suspension of the development on Origins of Malu. I'll be leaving the specifics of that announcement to the big boss man and instead will go over something of a summary and postmortem on our development on Malu, attempting to explain and frame our decision and path as best I can. I'll start by covering what progress we've made, then go into the major barriers in our path and wrap up with what is in store for the future.
So to begin, despite this suspension, we have had a long and fruitful journey in the development of Malu. We survived three engine changes, we developed a wealth of lore, a robust library of art, assets and code, and did so on a negative budget. We have much to be proud of in our development. We were invited to one of the main floors at PAX 2012, people enjoyed the sample demo we arranged, we had a small partnership with Dell and Alienware, and made good friends and contacts with representatives of several other companies whilst stumping for our game. We developed an active combat system, a player housing system and built a large world that had it reached it's end, would have been vast and instance-less, with territory fought over and staked out by our players. We got greenlit on Steam, made an Early Access build and kept improving and adding to it as best we could. Much was done and in complete honesty, Origins was nearly finished as a complete system, mostly requiring just additional content in bulk. This is a lot accomplished. With pride, I am glad to say I was a part of it and everyone on the Burning Dog team feels much the same way. What we managed to do without a publisher, without investors, without much system support of any kind was an amazing feat. In a brutal industry, that grinds up indies and projects by the dozens and hundreds every day, we managed to push forward past all adversity to this point. So, if we had accomplished all of this, why is Origins being suspended?
Boiling down our troubles, in my opinion, it comes to a head on three major points: funding, scope, and time. Long time readers (or those trawling through the archives) of my dissertations will note that I mention funding, money and the lack of it a lot. Even to me, it sounds like I'm beating a dead horse. However, its still the number one factor and issue with our progress. Our boss man has been self-funding the Origins development out of his own pocket for the better part of a decade. A decent chunk of his paycheck from another job went towards servers, licenses, websites and other overhead during the long development of Origins. Basically all of us developers and artists working on Origins were doing so without pay of any kind. We continued to work on Origins because we believed so strongly in it, and with the hope that once 'it made it' that we would be compensated for all our years of work and labor we've poured into it. However, this lack of money was a huge hindrance in every sense imaginable. Without money we were less important to software companies whos support would have been crucial to Origin's development, and thus were often not given the time of day, or were given cursory promises that never panned out because they ignored or dismissed us. Without money to pay all of us developers, we had an atrocious turnover which resulted in loss of work, loss of experience, loss of time and the loss of professional or veteran labor help. People need to pay rent, and people need to eat. Being a developer on Origins would help with neither of those in the short term, sad as that may be. Even some of our most stringent and diehard coworkers who in better times would've stayed on and continued their work had to walk away because they needed to dedicate themselves fully to a paying job. Acquiring investors was a huge hurdle, because while most were very enthused and supportive of our goals, vision and work, they would not commit to investing capital into us until we were further progressed. The ironic thing is that we needed the funding to be further progressed. Crowdfunding was an option, and one we were openly exploring for a long time, but with some of the formats being a zero-sum setup – requiring you to meet your funding goal or no funds at all, and with all of our efforts to court investors directly, we lost out on our attempts at that path. The few investors who were actually willing to put money down, wanted to do so with draconian contract terms and stipulations. Smaller amounts than what we needed, for a massive controlling stake and nullification of the shares that us developers accrued over our time working on Origins up to that point. A devils bargain by any definition methinks, and one we had to refuse.
The scope was another major point of consternation. An MMORPG is an audacious undertaking by any imagination. A first-time indie developer studio made MMORPG was downright Sisyphean in scope. All of our major pillars added to that challenge: massive open world with no instances and tens if not hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. An active combat system with projectiles, spells, dodging and quick fluid movement. A level-less character progression system. A player building system for structures of all sorts. An elaborate crafting system integrated into all of the above. All of these pillars, and the game genre itself was a massive challenge. We were put to the task and did the best that we could but as of right now, it has the best of us. Tying back to my first point, funding would go a long way to blasting through this roadblock, but again, the size of the scope makes gaining that funding a challenge all on its own. Additionally, though we are something like 70-80% complete on those pillars, the last bits would be fairly tough all on their own and as I've said before, generating all of the additional content within the world supported by those pillars would take just as much time and labor as creating the systems did. Were Burning Dog an already established studio, with a revenue stream, a full time team of developers and several titles under their collective belts, such a scope would be much more feasible and could have been accomplished in a much shorter timeframe.
Time has also played a huge factor in why we've decided to suspend our development. Origins of Malu was first conceptualized and pre-produced about a decade ago. Looking back to that time, roughly 2006ish, it would have been a novel and groundbreaking game. All the pillars of the development I described above hadn't really been put together that much in the gaming scene. Had it dropped into the market right then and there I imagine it would have done quite well, even with some faults. Every delay, every lost labor, every change wrought by our other problems and issues though, added to the clock of development. As time progressed other studios and companies realized the potential of the pillars (not from us, but just from seeing the gaming trends in general) and started development on their own versions. The open world survival games, the bulk of the sandbox genre, the active combat MMORPGs, they've all been produced on a large scale and there is a glut of them in the market. What would have been new or unique 10 years ago is old hat now. What could have attracted additional support and funds had we been where we are now, 5 years ago, is trite and mundane. What we could put out a few years ago would have been enough, but as time goes on, you have to develop more perfectly and flawlessly a game, otherwise you are just running with the pack and have nothing to stand out with. I still feel our combination of these game mechanics, aesthetics and IP would have been unique enough to warrant a decent go of it, but business ventures feel otherwise.
Not all is doom and gloom, however. Origins may be on ice, but it is not yet dead. The work, assets and labor poured into it are still there. Technically we do have a working game, as evidenced by the players of our Early Access, but it is not the game we want to bring to the world, nor would it be at that level in the near foreseeable future. On the subject of Burning Dog, we will still exist as a studio and will still be doing game development. We just have to change tactics and scope way down. Produce smaller, more limited games, get some revenue, get a solid paid workforce, get some heft to the studio and in time, revisit Origins and see what we can do. We've attempted something like this in the past, but we never stopped our Origins development. This was another mistake. By working on Origins and on side projects our attention and limited resources were further strained and diffused, made far less effective if directed towards a singular goal and project. We didn't have it in our hearts to stop developing for Origins. We've reached a point where it just simply has to happen though, and so we'll being going after these newer smaller scope projects with the same fervor we had for Origins. We have assets, code and experience with development behind us, and with a far narrower development, I feel we can put out some decent, enjoyable, quality games that can help get us on solid footing. Additionally we do have some investment potential on the horizon, though ironically or not, it isn't for developing a game, but a piece of software. You take what you can get though, especially when it can lead to paycheck and continued development on your passion piece.
I and the rest of the Burning Dog team are deeply and sincerely grateful for all the support we've had from fans and players over the years of development. It is my hope that we can be as quick in developing other titles and as successful as we can in those endeavors to get back to Origins as fast as possible, for us and for you. The status of our current Early Access will be addressed by our boss in his own statement, as will any further details on our future work. Thank you all again for your love and support, through all of our adversity and trials, with luck and hard work, I hope to have better news very soon.
Respectfully,
Virgil Davis &
Origins of Malu Team
TK Update
We have a couple things we are working on in the backend, we also conferring with Steam to get some details sorted. The servers will remain up for now.
A couple options - back to crowd funding
- Go F2P right now as is (not ready yet)
- Wait for talks with investors
Since things are as stated above we felt it best to suspend sales in the short term.
if you purchased this game in the last 6 month, you can contact myself at support@burningdog.com.
More to come,
TK
March 3rd,2016 Patch Notes
Greetings everyone, below you'll find a short list of some of the changes and improvements we have made to Malu in today's patch. It isn't as much or as extensive as we would hope, but that is almost always the case right? Without further adieu lets get into it:
Build improvements
Shaders and lighting caches were rebuilt and regenerated, this should mean less odd shadows or baked-on dark patches where things were altered in the environment.
Worldspaces updated and improved. Worldspaces are the actual 'tiles' of terrain and they are all stitched together like a quilt. We just went through and fixed a bunch of bad tiles and metadata associated with them, given the size of the world of Malu, its not likely that you have run across a bad WSpace, but it could still have affected performance, no longer.
Merchant system upgrades and populating. We are now building race and type specific merchants and their inventories. This will mean that you won't have Qulinta armors being sold on a Toljon encampment's potion merchant, for example. Each merchant as a table of item codes for what they carry, how much, the cost and when it is replenished, we are now in the process of making new merchants and giving them these unique tables of items.
Various errors fixed or noted. There were and are a lot of general and random errors within the build its self and as with every patch we try to find, understand, and solve as many faults, errors and bugs as possible. This patch has those fixes as well, and in cases where we couldn't figure out a fix just yet, we've noted errors for later fixing. Keep reporting anything you find though, its always good to have more eyes on a system.
In-game systems and functionality
Quest system upgrades and improvements. Still very much a work in progress, but nearly every aspect of questing has been targeted for overhaul and expansion. Quest givers, quest building, quest components and even quest logs have been looked at and an initial pass has been completed in this patch for those systems. Expect further enhancements and increased functionality as we bring more manpower and time to bear on this very important system.
Malu coin system prototyping. Malu coin is the placeholder for our in-game currency as a free-to-play system for real money transactions (RMT). We're in the middle of initial testing and implementation of them, and setting up the back-end to support them. Things like making sure each transaction is logged, currency exchanged properly, content delivered to the customer as ordered and safety measures put into place to protect both us, and our players from any problems, hiccups or malfeasance. Given how important this system is, it will likely see extensive testing and validation (which means further patch updates for a long-term period) before we make it a full-on live feature.
Mini-map and GUI improvements. Regarding the mini-map we are bringing to bear quality of life improvements in terms of information feedback. Things like differing colors and symbols to denote the various entities and landmarks in the world around you the player. The GUI improvements are more generalized, and encompass things such as better button shapes, colors, placement and information feedback like showing what is selected or not, moving through lists, and tooltips or item descriptions. This transits nicely into the next improvement which is the inventory system, which involves a lot of the GUI improvements, as well as scripting fixes and optimizations to make inventory and inventory management an easier and smoother experience.
In-game assets
We've created from scratch, improved, or transplanted from our UE4 build various assets into our BW build. These include the Boba, Thorn and Twisted trees as well as several revamped grass textures for the flora generation system. A few particle FX were also added and enhanced and several static assets already placed in the world have received some minor tweaking of shape, polycount, texture or material to generally improve them.
Finally we've had some world building passes. Specifically the Jolah areas got some extra attention to beautification with additional meshes, NPCs, spawners and terrain formations. At the same time the Swamp area continues to be populated with a similar list of assets as we build it up to the same level as our starter areas. Expect further swamp updates as that work continues on.
Thats about it for this patch, again, not as much as we'd like, but given the amount of things to do keeps growing, its good to get patches out often, and get feedback on what you have, than to wait too long and change too much at once, in my opinion. News of the next patch will be along presently, as it becomes available, it will be pushed to the forums as soon as possible. For now, enjoy the changes we have now, and please give us feedback as you go out into the world of Malu! We strive for constant improvement and your input is invaluable to that improvement process! Have fun out there people!
Respecfully,
Stormtempter
--- BEGIN TK ---
We are working on release dates on fourms, this information should be fairly soon. We are not moving as fast as we would like but we have brought new people back on the team and we are slowly speeding up production as well.
