Dragon Commander - Last Minute Changes and Media

Myrthos

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Swen has created a new blog on enduring pain, Dragon Commander boxes, the changes they are still making to Dragon Commander and what a good moment in time is to send out review code.

All of the changes that we agreed on were implemented or being implemented, and a number of new crashes had been found and solved. If you’re wondering why we are still changing things, well, you needn’t look further than our forums, youtube, the steam community hub, facebook , twitter and what have you. There’s a continuous feedback loop going on there and we’re seeing some very well formed opinions appearing.

Our code of conduct is that whenever somebody posts a bright idea it gets on our list, and then put it in, as long as it remains feasible for us.

I can guarantee you that there’s a lot of people in the development trade (that actually includes guys in my office
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) that will tell you that this is the way to ruin, but my experience has been such that you’re better of with a game that’s fun and maybe not polished than you are with a game that’s polished but not fun. Fixing the polish is an easy enough thing and almost always a matter of money. Fixing the fun otoh is still somewhat of an arcane art coveted by many but mastered by few and money will not necessarily make the difference. Because my interest and joy in making games comes from stumbling upon ways of making them fun, I tend to sin more than often against the rules of maintaining the outwards production values that are so important these days, preferring a message box if need be over not putting something in that clearly improves the game mechanics
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I joke, but I really do believe that whenever you realize a certain change will make your game more fun, you should do it, no matter how late in the development process you are. You should actually count yourself lucky that you had the insight prior to release. The only reason I can see why you shouldn’t embark on making the change is when you can’t implement the change properly for whatever reason. But you shouldn’t let that be an excuse for not making the change.
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More information.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
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As always Swen's blog is a pretty good read.

I haven't run into any bugs from the few games I played yet, I'm sure there are some but they just haven't popped up in the games I played. In any case, I prefer that they try various things and improve the gameplay as much as they can with the time they have left.

Even if it involves day 0-1-2-3 patches heh. I'd rather have a fun game to play with a few bugs at launch, than a flawlessly coded but boring game. With some studios / publishers I would have cause for worry…but we're talking about Larian here and a Self-published game. I have no fear that they'll provide support and fix anything that arises.

….

Speaking of the game itself, I've played 4-5 games so far and while I suck at RTS now and the fact that there is no "pause" where you can give order function in the game…I realized that by pressing - /+ you can adjust game speed a lot.

That allowed me to slow down my first 2-3 games to a level even a slow player like me can handle. Now for the last two since Im a little more used to it, I've been able to crank it up a little.
 
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