Wave of Darkness - On Early Access

Hey all,

First, thanks to RPGWatch for publishing the news article.

Regarding our previous project, Legends of Dawn, again, we are not hiding from our previous mistakes. I'm aware you guys love to make fun of devs who had unfortunate projects behind them, but that's life. You fall, you get up, and you get up stronger.

We have a completely different approach with Wave of Darkness production. We do everything with the community. We listen to each and every suggestion, bug report and constructive criticism, and we apply each and every one of them to our game.

Since the Kickstarter backers exclusive closed beta release, which was 16 days ago, we have released five major patches and applied over 30 major bug fixes, with over 40 still pending fixes, reported suggestions and optimizations. The state of the development can be seen on this link.

During this summer we intend to apply several major improvements to Legends of Dawn, too.

All in all, we are a small team, we had our fair share of mistakes, but we also move forward and we don't abandon our fans and customers.

That's fair enough Iggy, but I think this is a bit rich:

I'm aware you guys love to make fun of devs who had unfortunate projects behind them

That makes it sound like we're the assholes - like we're mocking the afflicted. I'm glad that you're taking ownership of the previous failings, but if you are, you must accept the consequences without portraying your critics as the problem.

Originally Posted by Ripper
That's fair enough Iggy, but I think this is a bit rich:


That makes it sound like we're the assholes - like we're mocking the afflicted. I'm glad that you're taking ownership of the previous failings, but if you are, you must accept the consequences without portraying your critics as the problem.

Nah man, I'm not trying to make you assholes. I have never said that, nor I have that stance against you folks. I'm just saying that I do notice, not only on this forum, but in general that people love to make fun of devs who didn't have much luck with some of their previous project.
And that's perfectly fine because we do take (constructive) criticism and we learn from it.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Dreamatrix
Nah man, I'm not trying to make you assholes. I have never said that, nor I have that stance against you folks. I'm just saying that I do notice, not only on this forum, but in general that people love to make fun of devs who didn't have much luck with some of their previous project.
And that's perfectly fine because we do take (constructive) criticism and we learn from it.

Most people tend to tear apart publishers while leaving the developers as unsung heros. Its only when a developer really screws something up that they get tossed in the same pile.

Dreamatrix did earn a lot of this by bare minimum communication on KS and their forums. Even bad news updates are better than two month stretches with not even a hello on your own forums.

I think you will find gamers very forgiving (to the point of stupidity often) when it comes to developers trying another project. Other developers in your position could have slapped another map on top of LoD engine, renamed it, and pretended it was a different project. Its nice to see you didn't do that.

Honestly we wish you the best of luck.

Now with all seriousness, the game does look interesting and like an improvement was made from Legends of Dawn. I'm not sorry for making fun of the video since the first thing that came to mind after watching it was "What the hell were they thinking?!". What were you thinking? It's always sketchy when these videos try to appeal to sexuality, and it looks even more sketchy when the previous title was so poorly received. This video wasn't that bad, but it was bad enough for a lot of us to notice. You noticed that we talked about the lady in the video more than about the actual game. Similar thing is happening on YouTube. Do you really want that? Remember Evony?

Since I'm from Serbia, it's always nice to see games developed in the neighborhood. For this alone you will always have my support. But please, try to be as professional as possible with your promotional videos.

Iggy

I must admit that your answers and presence here is always a good one. I truly hope the new game is good. You have my money if it is. I like the over the top b movie vibe of the video sales pitch and hey it worked but I still LOL when I see it. Good luck w game.

Thanks guys for your comments, i hvala ti Ivanwah, uvijek je lijepo vidjeti da nas i susjedi prate :-)

Regarding the video, our goal wasn't to make it "sexual", but rather intentionally cheesy and funny. It's all about the matter of taste, either you like it or not :-)

Iggy's presence is the only reason I backed Wave of Darkness. I still pick on Legends of Dawn and will compare Wave to it until I see all the lockpick runes disappear, the inventory not have 6 different copies of the same item, but with different values and unstackable, etc. I'm not sure if those changes have been implemented. I only backed at $15 so I may not have beta access.

That said, I put 162 hours into Legends of Dawn; mostly trying to figure out the crafting bug. I even tried to replay it, though the need for 60 different runes to pick locks killed my attempt. I do know that there are now alternative keys that can be used. If I have beta access, I'll give the new game a look and write up a what's changed article.

I've played a tiny bit of the early access and it looks pretty good.

It's interesting with the narrator as it is clear English is her second language….a few words didn't come as they were intended. Pretty enough to look at though.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Dreamatrix
Thanks guys for your comments, i hvala ti Ivanwah, uvijek je lijepo vidjeti da nas i susjedi prate :-)

Regarding the video, our goal wasn't to make it "sexual", but rather intentionally cheesy and funny. It's all about the matter of taste, either you like it or not :-)

I thought the video was great. The gal isn't a classic beauty, but since she was game to do it, she must be a hoot to work with. I thought it was pretty amusing. Sex sells though, so it might have been effective; especially for the basement dwelling gamers

Originally Posted by rune_74
It's interesting with the narrator as it is clear English is her second language….a few words didn't come as they were intended.

This would be a great area to get our help, Iggy. If you've got some text/dialogue that you're not sure about in English, post it here and you'll get a team of native English speakers and also a ton of people who have it as their 2nd language. You could put it in a spoiler subject so that people who want to play the game and not have it ruined for them could avoid it.

Originally Posted by crpgnut
This would be a great area to get our help, Iggy. If you've got some text/dialogue that you're not sure about in English, post it here and you'll get a team of native English speakers and also a ton of people who have it as their 2nd language. You could put it in a spoiler subject so that people who want to play the game and not have it ruined for them could avoid it.

Wow - I'm out of words! I really didn't expect that kind of support! RPGWatch community is really amazing!

Well, sure, we will definitely consider your proposition for the future videos. I guess it could be a lot of fun :-)

Originally Posted by Iggy_Dreamatrix
Thanks guys for your comments, i hvala ti Ivanwah, uvijek je lijepo vidjeti da nas i susjedi prate :-)

Regarding the video, our goal wasn't to make it "sexual", but rather intentionally cheesy and funny. It's all about the matter of taste, either you like it or not :-)

Fair points. Maybe sexual was a bit strong word to use. I understand what you were going after, but sometimes audience perceives it differently.

Pozdrav i sve najbolje.

Originally Posted by crpgnut
This would be a great area to get our help, Iggy. If you've got some text/dialogue that you're not sure about in English, post it here and you'll get a team of native English speakers and also a ton of people who have it as their 2nd language. You could put it in a spoiler subject so that people who want to play the game and not have it ruined for them could avoid it.

I was about to offer the same, most of what I have read so far is more than serviceable, there is a lot of cleanup / tweaking that could be done.

I like these types of games a lot so I kicked in to the Steam Early Access for $20. There is definitely some potential here but it is still pretty rough.

Oh, and while the lady in the video is certainly pleasing to the eye, I didn't get the impression that they were trying to use her in that manner to sell copies of Early Access.

The kickstarter video was fun

A sub-forum here where we could help clean up the English translation would be neat. Maybe even suggestions for other things but, probably, the Steam forum has that covered. Well, okay, no it doesn't but it would be nice to have an area to provide some input. I went to their website to see if they had a board there for WoD yet but they don't.

Originally Posted by Cthulhufan
A sub-forum here where we could help clean up the English translation would be neat. Maybe even suggestions for other things but, probably, the Steam forum has that covered. Well, okay, no it doesn't but it would be nice to have an area to provide some input. I went to their website to see if they had a board there for WoD yet but they don't.

Thanks Cthulhufan, a good idea. Our community is mostly concentrated at Steam at this time, and we believe it will stay that way.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Dreamatrix
Thanks Cthulhufan, a good idea. Our community is mostly concentrated at Steam at this time, and we believe it will stay that way.

I, certainly, wouldn't mind helping out cleaning up the English. I know that is probably the least of your worries right now but I will post over there with my thoughts. I see others are concerned with Elf Female hair styles and such (and rightly so) but I will provide what useful input, as a player, as I can.

Unless it's not useful to you, in which case I will just sit back and watch how your game evolves.

My Steam ID is [TBC] Kepi al-Duri. I will concentrate on your dialogue and interface tool-tips.

Feel free to tell me to go to Hell, it is your game after all. I do find it refreshing to see a developer genuinely concerned with play feedback. That is my understanding of what Early Access is all about.

Putting text on here for proof reading is a good idea. There wouldn't be comma out of place by the time we've had pedant-off over it!