No, I don’t think so. That’s been in the pipeline for some time now and Rhis has been working on that. Not sure if anyone else has been helping him except for the other programmers.
As for commuication on future games well, that did get discussed in another thread a while back.
I for one hope Crate will continue this with their other games. We haven’t heard much about the new town builder and I can understand the team wanting to concentrate on that and not be issuing updates all the time, but I would love it if for another project Crate would consider letting us in on the early development as we’ve had with GD. For me, following the game as it’s been developed has been as much fun as playing the game itself.
As to the question someone asked about the “new project” - well, part of why we haven’t shown much of it is due to team size restraints. When you announce / begin to show a game, you want to have some marketing art, a website or whatever set up so people interested can start following the game after that initial buzz… We have none of that yet. So far it’s just seemed too painful try to take someone off development to put in the time for that peripheral stuff - yet, until we do that, it doesn’t really make sense to announce / show the game.
We do need to get to it pretty soon though as it’s nigh time we announced it.
In terms of early community involvement / showing development, there is also some hesitation since, now that we’re more known as a company and more eyes are watching, there is some fear that if we show early, really rough-looking stuff like we did in the past, the wider audience may not get it. Early on with GD, it was a pretty small group of mostly TQ fans, so I think people were more accepting of where things were at, although we did get shit on to an increasing degree as word got out, until after the KS, when the current artists managed to redo a lot of the cruder early art.
Been thinking over what you said Medierra. I totally see your point re team time constraints. Re the early developement yes, the initial followers of the game were mostly TQ fans and tolerant of progress. The community’s grown since the Kickstarter, but they’ve also come to know how Crate works (at least for this game) in communicating with the fan base.
So it could work both ways. Yes, you got flack as development went on for GD, but there’ll probably be some flack anyway when the new game is revealed. Few people here on the forum seem to know about the new project, never mind the greater potential audience out there and when it hits some will be saying “Wtf why are Crate making this instead of another ARPG?” because that’s what your reputation’s been built on so far. Maybe if they’d been in on the development earlier it could have generated interest and got people hyped. We’ll never know.
Whenever I tell people who’ve just bought the game or are thinking of buying it that Crate communicate regularly with the fan base via the GM’s and live dev streams the reaction is always positive. They like the fact that Crate does tell people what’s going on. To nick a comment from Zantai (mistress of quotations that I am ;)), it’s working well for you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard aren’t kinda wishing they’d done the same.
Will we hear more during development of future projects? We can only wait and hope so.
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