Qorena has went through a lot of trial and error in the span of 4 years (+1 year of post-game support). From its original debut in 2018, to it's final release in 2022, and post-release support this year in 2023. Now, I finally announce my post-mortem for this game.
Progress Timeline
2018
Maze Qore Arena released commercially into early access on Itch - to an audience of crickets.
The game has later switched to a non-commercial early access model.
2019
The multi-player build begins development.
Single player build is updated and improved.
2020
The game releases in early access on Steam, for free - to an audience of crickets.
Multi-player build is completed and released via the Version 0.5 update.
Never waste time working on a multi-player game unless you have a confirmed audience that gives a damn.
Bots barely help matters.
Try to garner an audience before the game is developed beyond the serious phase. Prototype first.
Focus on single player games most often instead (if not exclusively).
Marketplace Developers Beware
If you make a marketplace template, ensure it does not share the same style and prototype scheme as the true game. Either make the game extremely different from the template, or just avoid making either that or the game entirely and let one of them sell on its own instead. I got a few complains some have mistook it for an asset flip. I wanted to kill two birds with one stone by using the template I created myself to speed development time and focus on expanding further the gameplay and improving the art, rather than do all of that from scratch. Little did I suspect many would accuse one's own creation of being an asset flip from the marketplace template they created themselves. I still made nearly this entire game by myself, with almost no outside aid, and it was all for naught. Developers use to fear using the marketplace under the pressure that gamers would accuse their game of being an asset flip. Suffice to say, I think this is partially true.
If you use marketplace assets such as art or environ packs, it may not be too much of a problem so long as you make a large effort to originate your game or at least turn it into a signature game.
Once you make a marketplace template however AND it is selling even decently, you may was well forfeit any plans to make a game out of it. Your task to originate because extraordinarily difficult.
In a way, the 2D Top Down Shooter Template unwittingly further sealed any chances of Qorena getting anywhere. Ironically I have created this template to raise funds to help me develop this very game. It helped to some degree at first, then little more beyond a year.
We planned user-mod support using Modularity's Mod.io, but that ultimately fell through for two reasons:
No audience means no point in wasting time. I already made that mistake thrice.
Mod community went to utter shit since 2021, causing me to lose faith and interest in modding. I will not explain why here. I will instead make a video on my personal YouTube channel about the decline of the modding community at a later time.
I am honestly tired of working on Qorena.
Mobile Port
I considered making use of the competitive MP build and transforming it into an Android port of the game. I underestimated the difficulty and feasibility of mobile builds in Unreal Engine as well as trying to get it signed for Google Play, and ultimately gave up. I might consider a much simpler, yet fun version of the game for Android using Godot in the future, focusing solely on survival and infinite waves, however no promises that will ever happen.
Game Over?
Yes. I am done with this game. The 2nd developer that helped me with this game has given up on the project and left. The non-dev members of the team have also left the gaming industry for greener pastures. I am all that is left now, and much like a previous project I worked on, I have lost all motivation to work on this game anymore as well.
This project is cursed. It was cursed from the beginning. It is still cursed to the end.
If you want to see any other projects I am working on, you can check out this one instead. Hopefully it will fair better.
Qorena available for Free on SHMUP Fest!
Qorena is currently available for FREE even after SHMUP Fest!
5 action-packed campaign missions.
More than a dozen survival levels.
Upgrades that turn your classic pea-shooters into powerful obliterators!
Various enemies to slay and pray!
Customize your mannequin!
We will also be hosting playthroughs of the game on YouTube throughout this week! Subscribe to our YouTube channel and keep an eye on this playlist for updates.
Join our Discord server and pair up with other players for a match.
We hope you will enjoy playing Qorena! Bring friends and enter the arena!
Qorena Update - Version 0.9.3
Last update, we released the Campaign Update, introducing the new game mode for mission scenario action with friends and/or bots. Now we brought 4 more missions into the fray!
Aquamarine - Infiltrate the docks to steal plans for an experimental submarine.
Scorch - Storm the beach, fight your way through an airfield, and liberate a suburban village.
Valheim - March through a cold blizzard, destroy artillery, find an obscure base, and steal docs from a winter village town.
Veritas - Storm through a moving train (be it from floor or top), slaughter your way to the engine room to hijack the train. Slog through a wet jungle marsh and rescue pinned down allies. Assault a castle with your comrades.
IMPROVEMENTS:
Campaign: 4 new missions.
Grenade perk icon now changes according to the perk collected.
The Customizer now has background music and ambiance.
The Score Streaker has been improved, allowing for multiple simulatenous streaks displayed on screen.
The Navigation Marker system has been improved, allowing for multiple nav markers displayed on screen.
The player's customizer sprites are now positioned properly even during online matches.
The player's customizer sprites are now fully bright and almost fully colorable (sans weapons).
Screen-space reflections and Global illumination are now being utilized.
New Customer Headwear: Conical Hat
New Customer Headwear: Imperial Helmet
The original "Helmet" has been renamed to "Knight's Helmet".
COMING SOON:
Level Editor - Create your own custom levels for survival mode, or mission packs for campaign mode!
IMPORTANT NOTE:
The settings, map cycle, and customizer storage system has been updated. You may have to resave your respective content in order for the effects to properly apply. For instance, and as a result, chances are your mannequins will look brighter or paler than usual. ___
We hope you will enjoy playing Qorena with this bountiful update.
The Honest Truth About The Current State of Qorena
TIME FOR THE TRUTH:
We will be bluntly honest.
There was a sale planned in the Fall of this year for the SHMUP Fest, however due to recent turn of events regarding Evil Epic Games, that will not be happening anymore as the game is now free to play - that and we honestly had no more faith that players were willing to buy the game. The purchase of this game is no longer as important as our primary objective to provide an intuitive reason that will convince you to care enough to give this game a chance by playing it and inspiring others to play it with you. All we truly want is to see servers with many players playing the game (preferably in the hundreds).
if we can at least 50 concurrent players, then we can consider this game a minimal success.
100 players is a minor success.
500 players is a moderate success.
1K players is a major success.
2K+ players is a phenomenal accomplishment and a dream come true.
While we still intend on releasing mod tools for the game, the only thing we can focus on without your support is the just level editor, before discontinuing post-support for the game, writing it off as a colossal failure, and moving on to other projects. In order for us to go further with more tools such as:
Ability to create new monsters, items, or weapons, import music.
Customize the game's UI theme - color schemes, new fonts, change BGM.
Upload/download UGC (user-generated content) via Mod IO.
We truly need YOUR support to ensure that happens. We need to see that enough players truly care for this game and our vision. Far as we are concerned, there are practically crickets playing our game - practically, as in just 1 or 2 players (that may likely have been our playtesters) chime in on their own volition to play the game once in a blue moon. We know Qorena is not the best game in the world, nothing compared to the likes of BattleBit Remastered, Teardown, Door Kickers, or even the top-down Battle Royale IO games, but we do try our best to make this top-down bullet-hell game fun, enjoyable, and worthwhile. Since the original launch in 2018 as Maze Qore Arena, much has changed tremendously under the new title Qorena.
For starters, we introduced upgrades and powerful weapon levels, making the weapons like the assault rifle and machine gun turn from standard-fare to powerful gatling blasters; rocket launcher turns into a missile barrage cannon; sniper rifle can penetrate through walls, and the flamethrower is augmented with minerals harvested from the Warp, to become the Voidthrower.
Enemies now have dialog and music plays in an event-based fashion. Each survival level has their own unique preset of enemies that spawn. For instance, prison arena levels feature special enemies from Maze Qore prison (save for the Yellow Sector spawning exclusively hornets, and Red Sector spawning predominantly Psykers and their possessed victims), whereas outdoor levels feature enemies working for the Imperium - an evil tyrannical government set on imperializing and conquering the entire planet of Asterisk.
What more can we honestly do with this game without transforming it too far beyond its original design and goals (again)? Call it an identity crisis if you wish, however it is a problem we have been trying to resolve for roughly 5 years - seemingly to no avail, and still are trying. We hired playtesters to play our game, find bugs and glitches, and help us improve the game to be fun and more available for anyone willing to play it for at least an hour, not 9 minutes at best. We tried to seek funding and marketing support for this game as well - to no avail.
We have honestly ran out of ideas, so Version 0.9.X will very likely be our final update milestone for the game. We no longer have any motivation to complete the game enough to leave the Beta stage by reaching Version 1.0. Until a miracle is made, there is no point wasting anymore of our time if our audience simply does not exist outside of 'personal associates'. In fact, we're probably talking to ghosts here at this point.
To anyone that did read this far into this post, thank you for paying attention I guess...
Qorena Update - Version 0.9.2
The Campaign game mode is finally here with Version 0.9.2! You can now fight against enemy forces in campaign mission packs alone or with bots offline, or with friends and strangers online. For now, only one mission pack exists - Operation Desert Storm. This will change in the future with 4 more mission packs.
The level editor will have to arrive later (likely in 0.9.4 earliest).
IMPROVEMENTS:
Campaign Update - Play a series of mission packs alone or with friends in the new Campaign mode!
The map cycle feature now switches to the appropriate game mode to accommodate for the selection accordingly.
Cloud storage saves have been updated to save screenshots of your mannequins from the Customizer.
COMING SOON:
Level Editor - Create your own custom levels for survival mode, or mission packs for campaign mode!
WE ARE DONE WITH EPIC GAMES: ALL Unreal Engine games will become FREE FOREVER.
We have made an important announcement regarding all of our products actively being sold on all digital storefronts. Any that use Unreal Engine it are extremely affected.
For those of you who are too busy or too lazy to read a two-page long sermon on what is happening, here is the TL:DR version:
We have decided to do what many developers may consider "the unthinkable", or even "the utterly insane". From this day forth, we will begin the process to convert ALL of our projects using any of the Unreal Engines into NON-COMMERCIAL ones or switch engines.
ALL games using UE currently on storefronts will become FREE.
ALL games using UE we have currently in development that meets or exceeds 50% of progress will also be released for FREE.
ALL games using UE we have currently in development that exceeds below 50% of progress will be RESTARTED using a DIFFERENT engine. Depending on the project type, platforms, and the scope, it will either use Godot or O3DE. For instance, Mobile games will likely restart on Godot; Higher quality PC games will likely restart on O3DE.
ANY new games we have planned on lineup but not yet started will be using a DIFFERENT engine (Godot or O3DE).
We are MOVING FAR AWAY from Unreal Engine and abandoning Epic Games. We are moving on to greener pastures.
The 2023 Steam Spring Sale is here!
The 2022 Steam Winter Sale is here! Qorena is 10% off from now until March 23!
Slaughter waves of Imperials with your friends or with bots (offline and online), upgrading on supplies each peacetime wave interval!
Qorena Update - Version 0.9.1
It has been a while since this game was updated. Important fixes to the game has been applied along with a major graphical revamp.
IMPROVEMENTS:
The map cycle feature has been fixed completely. You can now add any maps you desire into the cycle and they will be played in the order of top to bottom (and rinse and repeat).
You can now play levels in rotating fashion in Instant Action just as you can in online Multiplayer. Initially, you could only play the 1st level from the cycle which would restart that same level after each match.
Restore Upgrades on Death finally works.
Cloud storage saves are now properly functional for Qorena. The old Maze Qore Arena cloud storage is deprecated from this game.
COMING SOON:
Campaign Update - Play a series of mission packs alone or with friends in the new Campaign mode!
Level Editor - Create your own custom levels for survival mode, or mission packs for campaign mode!
We hope you will enjoy playing Qorena more than we did working on it. There will be a sale coming soon in the Summer. Wishlist us on Steam for updates on sales and more updates like this.
The 2022 Steam Winter Sale is here!
The 2022 Steam Winter Sale is here! Qorena is 25% off for the rest of this month until January 5th!
Slaughter waves of Imperials with your friends or with bots (offline and online), upgrading on supplies each peacetime wave interval!
Qorena Released out of Early Access!
After 4 years, Qorena is finally out of Early Access and onto full release! Those of you who downloaded the game during the EA already got to keep it free. Others will have to buy it now at standard price.
NEW FEATURES
Improved Spectator Menu
Players can now access spectator mode at the pause menu. This will undeploy the player. If you wish to join the fray again, click Play on the spectator panel. Assuming "Allow Late Join" is enabled in settings, the player will deploy instantly, otherwise they will be deployed in the next peacetime interval.
Map Cycle List
You can now add levels into the map cycle list. This list will also be used to switch to a new map from the Spectator Menu, so add the ones you wish to switch between in your server.
Music
The game now features sequential music, relative to certain levels.
Config Presets
You can find this in the game's installation directory >> Config >> Presets. Make a backup, adjust your parameters, and update configurations in your App Data directory. Instructions are in the presets folder.
PLANNED FEATURES: POST-RELEASE
Mod Support
This was originally planned in this release, however that proved to be too ambitious to work on, especially when we are still not convinced enough players will care for the game enough to justify it, so we moved it to post-release. We will only work on it, if and when we can see reasonable player activity in the game. A good (but not the sole) indicator for us if the game unlocks the ability to use trading cards.
IMPORTANT: FOR EARLY-ACCESS OWNERS
A LOT has changed since the overhaul. You will have to reinstall your game for the latest changes to take effect. The new installation folder changed from "Maze Qore Arena" to "Qorena". Mannequin saves may also break so be sure to back those up before you uninstall and reinstall. _______________
That is all. Hope you all enjoy playing this game.
